Toshio Masaku was was dying. He knew this unbreakable conscious certainty. The tension created over the years by incomplete tasks, unmet responsibilities, and forgotten ideals temporarily fettered him to his dying body. He could see the bloody bodies of his assailants and in the distance, the Crystal Mountain. He pushed through the fog in his mind to the story his grandmother told about the jagged shining peak. There was deep cave or maybe an abyss and a ambitious young man who got more than he bargained for. He was not heard of for many years until he reappeared not having aged a day, with eyes full of light, saying strange things Toshio could not remember but could somehow feel. Toshio died.
Toshio had abandoned his body once before. He had been sailing...somewhere and had gotten drunk out boredom. There was a terrible storm, and he had drowned. Before he was resuscitated he had a brief, somewhat vague experience of standing or hovering over his own body- and then only darkness. This was an altogether different experience. He was looking down on his slumped form, and for a moment his vision had a clarity and crispness he had never experienced. The thought that he was seeing himself seemed very ominous, and he quickly understood what was happening to him. Then the world became an undulating expanse of sea anemones in a of myriad colors. What was now his body (which wasn’t really a body, but energy that had formerly been contained in his body) began slowly expanding in all directions. He experienced this as a gentle but insistent tugging from the center of his being. This continued until he had encompassed the whole Earth. He was surrounded and coming up against an ethereal yet very real object he intuited to be the Moon. It looked nothing like the Moon-unless you turned the Moon inside out and wrapped it around you like a blanket. From his perspective, his “body”, seemed to surround the earth while simultaneously being inside the Moon. There was an audible pop and suddenly he was looking at stars of blinding brilliance, throbbing with color as if alive. Toshio felt as if innumerable unblinking eyes were staring down at him and peering into every nook and cranny of his soul. As they stared, they moved in patterns that were beautiful yet painful to behold. He felt as if some part of him was being pealed away-like the removal of an old bandage or clothing worn for way too long. At the moment of separation, everything went dark and silent. For a long time there seemed to be nothing, but as he realized the strangeness of experiencing nothing, something happened. It was as if a seed became a tree in an instant. The life recently departed surrounded him now as a panoramic tableau of memories in a vast space. They were not his memories exactly, but more like other’s memories of his life. Many were long forgotten, and the sight of it altogether was a wonder. He found himself drawn to the picture of himself dying. It expanded as he attended to it and pulled him into itself until he was again in the place where he died, but from a different perspective. Someone else’s perspective. He also could see his own former body in front of him, still very much alive. Toshio was seeing through the eyes of his attacker, who just like him, was dead now. He could feel anxiety and anger that were not his own and sensed a dark presence in his periphery. He felt the man’s will waver and return, but was in no way in control of anything the man did. The man was rushing past  another man lying dead on the ground towards...himself. Something sharp, fast, and intrusive planted itself in the chest of the man Toshio was inhabiting. He felt the blade enter between his ribs and puncture his left lung. Toshio remained within the man as the the still living version of himself stumbled over to finish the job. It did not take long, but it was excruciating, and feeling another man’s fear and agony shook him violently. When the man he inhabited (his attacker) finally expired, Toshio found himself in very similar situation in the body of his other assailant. This was the man who had surprised him and gave him the wound that eventually killed him. The experience of feeling this attackers malice from within as he stabbed Toshio while Toshio simultaneously turned and viciously stabbed back at the man he now inhabited was unbearable. The painful and confusing inverted memories continued until he had endured the wounds inflicted on each of his attackers. Always there was a dark figure just out of sight. 
He proceeded backwards through his life experiencing all the good and ill he had inflicted on others. The sense of justice and intuitive knowledge that what was happening him was right was as real to Toshio as the chair I’m sitting in right now. He was a soldier and had killed many, but none with malice save one. While all the pain he had inflicted on others and now felt was excruciatingly accurate, he could see the justice in what was happening, and each experience left his heart a little lighter. This provided a bedrock of peace for him, but when he encountered the betrayer everything changed. This man had done something horrible and Toshio hated him, but now, Toshio could not remember what he had actually done. He knew he had killed the man in his sleep, but fought against the memory now, knowing this would be far worse than any prior pain. He attempted to hide, but the form of dark figure lurking in his periphery was very close now and exerted an unfaltering magnetic pull on his being. The pull became stronger and stronger until all that existed was an eternal violent ripping and burning that started in his heart and extended itself to every edge of his consciousness. He gave in to the presence and the experience. He lay in his enemies sleeping body watching himself do the shameful work in misery with intense hatred for existence. To him it seemed like all that had ever existed was white hot pain and loathing. There was nothing else, and so Toshio knew eternity and wished to forget it. He loathed his own existence, and at last, begging for mercy that he knew was impossible, something hard and jagged deep in his heart crumbled. The sorrow continued to overwhelmed him. He would have paid any price for the ability to shed a tear, but it was too late for tears. He repented anyway. He relinquished his claim on the wrong done to him, accepted the guilt of his murderous reprisal, and acknowledged that he had been the villain.
I am glad to say that Toshio passed through the rest of his memories with humble dignity. Also, I do not wish to give the impression that all Toshio experienced during this time was painful. He lived most of his life as a good and honorable man. He loved and was loved by many and did a great deal for the benefit of others, -much of it in secret as he did not enjoy attention. As he enjoyed the fruits of these secret gifts, a sense of satisfied bliss not attainable in the physical realm engulfed his spirit and bathed him in God’s unwavering love. These experiences were plentiful and acted as a balm for the pain he endured. After enduring his mother’s birth pains, he found himself back in the thought and memory of her womb. He felt another part of him that he supposed wasn’t actually him slide smoothly away and then there was light. He felt like a sword being pulled from its sheath. His thoughts and awareness became sharp and clear again.
It is at this point that the story becomes impossible to tell, or I at least I lack the capacity to tell it due to lack of words describing non-physical objects and entities. However, Toshio had much left to do, many obstacles to overcome, but he eventually found a sort of rest -for a while. If I can find the words and you want to hear it, I will tell you the rest of his story in the future. It is an extraordinary and perhaps impossible thing to accurately relate any non-physical experience, and it can be harmful to people’s minds if you get it wrong, but maybe I’ll try anyhow.

Spring May Rain Sun

​It is all make believe
From the dirt to the trees.
And: 
I am so tired. 

Why should we not be?
Stuck in the middle of 
our perceptions of
this make believe.

The bells synch
and converse again:
talk to the dirt;
talk to the trees;
talk to everyone.

An acquired skill –
to listen. 
We are all make believe. 

A little poem composed by GPT-3 AI. Here's an article with a quick explanation.

Covid-19 triggers microbiome-wokeness through theater’s hygiene -  
​A tactful emulation of security’s profiled theater.
Green marketing’s histrionic amalgamation of “practical” 
And “recommended” both equallying - MORE!). I implore lobotomists to sanitize
Our frontal lobes, a supplantation payout solution - a mitigative scroll. 
Time does not consider us. Time received its human vaccine

Many pandemicies ago. Be careful! Do not conflate vaccine
And cure (a molecular intervention v. an acute Zeitgeist hygiene
Adjustment). And no doubt are these unprecedented times - check your feed - scroll
The day’s highlights(?) for corroborative information confirmation:the super sly media’s theater
Suggests your algorithmic tale - where absolute freedom crossroad’s the need to sanitize
Quotidian American havers, out of context insensitivities, and surrealism’s practical

Feeling filter usage solution feigning remedy - Highly Practical!?!?. 
Covid’s unintended consequence exposed a need for a more complex vaccine: 
​Not an anecdotal systemic Band-Aid for power’s desire to sanitize
Peoples’ thoughts, opinions, feelings, and words. The self-hating PC hygiene
Conspirators have infected Americana’s cellular structure through trumped up media theater.
All the while denial’s denial foresaw the occurrence: evidenced in our 10 year scroll

Log - painting beautifully a present day picture - evidenced in archaic scrolls,
Which outline a spirit driven descent into a hard-cock driven ethos (not a practical 
Mindset for mental health longevity). Oh America! Narcissism’s theater
Effused in the palms’ of our pixelated hands. We need a hug and a vaccine -
From our disconnected connections - an overcorrection boils the frog but hygiene
Education and insight could assist the cause - don’t incinerate the door to sanitize

The knob. And sure, a good boil will sanitize, 
But treating symptoms with no aftercare lacks systemic foresight. Maybe scroll 
Through personality disorder treatment plans prior to a reactive enaction? For hygiene 
Theater masks the realities of denial’s fatalities: distracts practical 
Perceptions from novel needs - a remedy, ie. a psychic change and virus vaccine. 
Lin-Manuel Miranda, please musicalize this tragedy in poignant theater!

Bring modernity into Shakespeare’s insight - the whole world a theater
On The Stage of United States, and its intransigent modality to sanitize
A corrupt veneer while the mentally ill suffer in plain sight. A vaccine
Is no homelessness solution; nor is a faultline rumble in hopes it will scroll
Off encampments into the ocean (Out of sight, out of mind!). To the haves, practical!
But it’s hardly as humanitarian as Hollywood’s humanitarianism claims; their hygiene 

Brands mental health theater as idols to worship through the images we scroll:
Sanitize my eyes from this blinding toxicity. Or has convolution made practical 
Process problem solving inaccessible? Or is the vaccine another layer of theater? 

Durability: a testament to water
(a friend informed me years ago that he had a huge breakthrough in his world when he stopped asking for answers he already knew)
​In this place
We paint the walls
We paint the ceiling
We paint the trim
We paint the floor
We paint our eyes
We paint our toe nails
We paint our souls. 

All of eternity lies within us. We were everything long before everything even became a thing. Nature is violent: space is violent - we are both. A beautiful amalgam of space time and violence. We are born durable with myriad answers residing in our being: beyond thought, beyond word, beyond neurological immediacy and accessibility. Take a breath: you know the right thing to do. Make a decision; it is yours. Stand by your heart and soul: and don't think - do it! And if it does not work out, learn and live the lesson. Bruce Lee says be water: I say be everything, because that is, in fact, exactly what we are. 

Hi folks,
We initially set the goal to put out a post on the first of every month. Although we are in the process of shifting gears regarding the form and content of this endeavor, it feels wrong to renege on our goal. So, here's something to chew on in the meantime. It's an excerpt from the essay "Content and Form" by Wassily Kandinsky set to music by Matthew Bailey. The essay nicely sums up what we are attempting to do at Running to Death.  We hope you find it interesting, enlightening, and inspiring.​

The Void is creative and deadly, sacred and profane.  It is another world, and may be the place from which ideas and material reality manifests.  RTD as a concept and commitment is about two friends exploration of this strange and slippery realm.  For sake of evolution and creative expansion (stagnation is a drag), RTD will shift mediums.  Running to Death, the podcast will launch in early 2021.  Our hope is to capture ideas, sounds, words, and both zeitgeist and historical musings with educational integrity and humor.  Each episode will be an attempt at creation and documentation of that process.