Yes, we speak of things that matter, with words that must be said.
June 29, 2008my life is mosty functional.
that is, i feel purely utilitarian. proletariat.
i find little bits of satisfaction in conversation, in sunlight, in passages of books that others have written that ring true.
but for the most part, i work. i make a little money. i spend a little money.
and i do radio. at which my mumbling and my stuttering render me mediocre. but it doesn’t matter because i can play music without speaking, and say a lot that way.
sitting on my porch (MY porch. my somewhat-very-own porch) tonight, i got an idea of what the next nine or ten months will be like.
new house, new street, new corner store (where i got recognized from work. that’s an entry for another day.) new bus route, new bike ride.
new heartache, new uselessness, new nights spent wandering in circles in my home with a bottle and a romanticized idea of what my life was supposed to be like.
perhaps i was wrong in condemning organized religion. i see the merit- it must be nice to feel like there’s a reason to your existence.
but ignorance gets corrected eventually, and it’s never easy to swallow.
i prefer to deal with what is in front of me, and not what is beyond the last heartbeat.
and, apparently, i will do this in the corniest way possible.
so, i will continue to live on my own first principle:
don’t fuck anyone over.
When I was living in my suicide cave in Monmouth, I had to walk past a church every day on my way to and from class, sometimes more than once, depending on the schedule. I wound up thinking a lot about organized religion, and how it must be so very nice to have that one constant in your life that you can always rely on.
There are still times that I wish I could believe in it; the mere knowledge that there is always someplace you can go for quiet contemplation, always someone you can ask for guidance (the priest, who will actually answer, as apposed to God, who is rather unlikely to), must be deeply comforting indeed.
Alas, and I suspect this is also YOUR problem, considering how alike we tend to be on things like this, I have a single, central issue with religion: faith. I simply cannot have soul-deep faith in something that I intellectually KNOW cannot be true. The simple fact is, I don’t think humans could ever possibly codify whatever higher power is out there; how could we, if, by definition, the power is “higher”? And so, I could never, and most likely will never, get past the knowledge that at some point, a man had to write the tenants of this religion down, and whether he was divinely inspired and acting purely altruistically or not, he was still a man, with his own biases and problems.
And so, when I’m confused or lonely or a wee bit overwhelmed by the speed at which things are changing, I do what I’ve always done: pour a glass of whiskey and lie on the couch, staring at the ceiling and listening to slow sad music and reminding myself that this too shall pass.