You saw all my pieces broken, this darkness that I could never show
I figured I should do the obligatory New Years blog post while I’m still semi drunk. I figure that way, I will at least be more honest. I figure I’d be blowing around a .010 to a .015, so this should be interesting. It is certainly not the first blog post I have done while drinking, but probably the most honest as to the circumstances. If anything, I can come back tomorrow and take out anything bad, and correct the spelling errors, should I make one.
Okay, I’m definitely above a .11, what with the emotional swings and all.
I’m honestly not this used to being this coherent after drinking. I’m used to drinking so much that I wake up and wonder when I passed out, and wondering what all these bruises are from. There is also the vague remembrance of falling over. I guess here’s to knowing one’s limits. Sort of.
Fuck it, I’m supposed to be talking about the new year, for this is why my brothers and sisters came. First of all, never underestimate the hell that is cheap champagne. Mine tasted so bad that I needed a chaser. What is a chaser? A chaser is drink consumed immediately after a shot of liquor or other other alcoholic beverage to remove the bad taste from one’s mouth (i.e. “chasing a shot”).
Thank you Wikipedia.
It was even Brut, it was supposed to be sweet, and the bottle promised it would show a nose of apples and such. FALSE. It had little nose, and a taste of dried fermented moose mucous. It tasted way more alcoholic than it actually was (about 12%). This is coming from a person who drinks hard liquor and would have killed for a Jack and Coke. It was skunky sparkling wine. I should have listened to fucking Gary Vaynerchuk and gotten some growers champagne, but nooo, I’m the poor college student looking for a buzz.
Bah.
Focus.
Right, let’s talk about 2007. 2007 was a shitty year. The second half was okay, but ended shitty, and the first half was just plain shitty. I failed out of one college, made it in another, but at the same time discovered that I was all alone at the same time I thought I was someone. It was a rebound year, which was semi successful, yet that didn’t work out either.
Compared to 2005 and 2006, it was a good year. It was no 2004 though. 2004 was the last good year I remember. I’d go into why, but I’m trying not to depress myself.
What do I want to happen in 2008? I don’t want anything to happen. I expect it to be a very busy year. I may even graduate college this year, which would be absolutely amazing. I do have a better basis on what I believe will happen, but this is limited to my own drunken perception. Will I end up in another stable relationship? Probably. Will it work out? Probably not. I don’t expect to ever maintain a relationship for long anymore. I’m a person who doesn’t want kids, or to get married.
Will I graduate college? Probably not. I’ll come damn close though. Will this mean anything? Probably not. I expect to find myself engulfed in another crisis, as it is how I thrive. I crave stability, yet I thrive on crisis. Let’s called it learn’ed behavior.
Will I die in 2008? Always a chance, probably a pretty decent one. Everyone has always told me how I am going to die young, and all signs point to that being the case. I only hope I go out in a blaze of glory. I don’t want to die silently. I want people to remember my death as an esoteric exercise in the sublime. If I should die, my one regret would be not appreciating those moments when I truly had everything, because I took for granted how quickly they could slip away. It’s fair to say I took life for granted, and I took a lot of people for granted, and I would be forever sorry for that, and it still brings a tear to my eye to think of the life I have squandered.
I suppose that is the key to a resolution. Identify what would be your dying words, and manipulate them into ways you can change yourself. I can resolve to get into shape, I can resolve to change the world. Only when I realize what I would regret in life can I begin to untangle the massive web I have woven for myself. Will I ever find rest? I know not. Will I ever stop wondering? Probably not.
I think the ultimate lesson is that no matter what you plan for, things will always exude themselves from your plan, leaving you feeling helpless and alone. I, for one, am tired of feeling helpless and alone. I am tired…shit, the phone rang and I lost my train of thought. Let the drunk dialing begin, and not on my end.
I guess in 2008, I want to truly live. Again. Or for the first time. I don’t really know, but I want to find out.
End drunken transmission.
Happy 2008. only five more years until the end of the world. Or maybe that is just the drunken Mayan in me speaking.
We apologize for the inconvenience
It is weird to not to believe in “god”.
Every so often, you’re placed in situations where a bunch of people start talking about their beliefs, how they pray or worship or attribute every success in their life to a higher power. Undoubtedly, you’ll find people within this group who will start to nod and share their experiences regarding the same subject matter, and everyone there just “gets” it.
I don’t get it.
This very thing happened to me today. I’m taking a summer class that involves learning leadership and management techniques…basically it’s a required class I need for my degree. Today, we were supposed to come in and talk about a leader, based on our impressions from reading their biography/autobiography. I came across a autobiography of Jack Welch for six bucks, and used it to complete the assignment on the cheap, but today I had to sit there and listen to everyone talk about their leader of choice.
Religious leaders or leaders who were devoutly religious seemed to be the norm for the way the day was going, and person by person, you could just feel the churchie vibe grow, like they understood what it was like when an aforementioned leader led the football team in prayer and bible study, or the Pope upheld the values of the great Catholic church. It was obvious that these people felt something.
I felt nothing.
It gets a bit awkward really, the whole feeling of being the outsider and the knowledge that you’d be the first one to be ostracized from the group if you chose to reveal your position as the evil person who doesn’t believe that everything we do is because of some supernatural being.
I’ve never been truly religious, though I admit I have faked it to gain acceptance into social circles during my childhood. My parents were never ones to go to church, and I wasn’t even aware that there was some weird belief system in place until I walked through the steps of grade school. It was odd, coming across a sea of people that had dedicated their young lives to something I’d never heard of before. I didn’t quite know what to make of it, and treaded cautiously into the future.
As I grew up, the pressures to become one with the lord grew stronger, and for some reason it was an acceptable question to ask each other what church one was attending. I would make up churches, of course, or I would pick a church once obscured to side of the road background blur. The revelation that you didn’t go to church was, of course, an invitation to save one’s soul, but my ten year old soul was just fine.
As I grew up and I started to learn what I believed in, I realized that I couldn’t bring myself to believe in “god”. The logic was just too strong, and since I hadn’t grown up in a strong belief system, I didn’t suffer from the years of brainwashing in my childhood that emphasized religion, so off I went, a clean young boy who didn’t believe. As I continued to grow older, my viewpoint strengthened. After all, I believed in all the things churches didn’t, like LGBT rights and women’s rights. I didn’t believe in fate, nor did I really understand why this Jesus person had so little faith in me that he died for my sins long before I was born, and then used some Houdini shit to escape his tomb.
I just wasn’t god material.
This was all well and good until my brother started dying. My brother, faced with a terminal illness, had begun his descent towards death, and faced with the prospect of death, became very religious in the process. Dually faced with the grief of losing their first born son, my parents also began to walk down the path towards religion, and I guess you could argue that all three became born again Christians.
This left me in a very awkward situation.
For sixteen years up to this point, what I believed in had never been directly questioned, and I was allowed to live my silent life free of religion. This changed very quickly. I think that since they all walked towards the light that they expected me to go too, and to an extent they tried to drag me along with them — albeit kicking and screaming. I never really stood up and quantified what I believed, perhaps knowing it was not the best time to be sharing my religious insight with the masses. Instead, I went along to the events I had to go to, such as the baptism of my brother, and consequently the funeral of my brother.
In between, there was mostly a lot of praying. I don’t think that I ever prayed along with them, failing to see how wishing that things were going to get better would actually impact reality. Perhaps if I had prayed with them, prayed long and hard, my brother would still be alive. Logic and medical science would disagree, though. I remember the Sunday after my brother died, my Dad woke me up to go to church, and finally I made a stand and refused to go. I told him that I refused to be a part of something so horrible that it caused people around the world to kill each other for no reason based on the word of a loosely translated book. My position apparently became upsetting for him, and off he went to meet my mother at church without me, though not without a few comments in passing.
Over the next few years, I would continue to be pushed towards religion by numerous familial calamities, and a girlfriend that I think was uncomfortable with the notion that I didn’t really believe in anything. I continued to push back, though, choosing my battles as they came and supporting others that needed to be supported in light of my viewpoints. I tried to find a happy medium, and I often sacrificed my viewpoints for the well-being of others.
Those times were very hard for me, as I struggled to maintain this delicate balance where I keep the peace between everyone, but don’t compromise my values in the end. It’s never easy to be the agnostic/atheist. The world isn’t supportive nor conducive to us, and the terrain can be filled with land mines.
For instance, one day in the past year, I got into a discussion over religion with my mother. It peaked with her asking the question, “Well, you believe your brother is in heaven, don’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
I had told her the complete and honest truth. I don’t know if my brother is in heaven, and the knowledge either way doesn’t affect how I view what happened to him. A lot of people quantify the loss of others by saying ‘at least they’re in a better place, or they’re with god now’. That doesn’t bring me any solace. Death is death, and I think I do a disservice to my brother by choosing to believe that everything is peachy keen because he’s floating in the stars somewhere with a mystical being that created the world and has the power to control everything in it.
Instead, I choose to use the memories of my brother as a reminder to live, as a reminder that life is short and that we ought to make the best of it, for as far as we know, it’s all we get.
The meaning of life, the universe, and everything
The answer to the meaning of life, the universe and everything is of course forty-two. We’ve been led to believe from our inception that forty-two is in fact a number, but what if it truly isn’t.
Is it not possible that forty-two truly is the answer to the unanswerable questions of life, yet we are merely incapable of understanding what forty-two truly is?
So many wander idlely through life trying to find some empty meaning that describes why we exist. A few of us branch out from the age old solution of an omniscient god with an ulterior motive for his/her people, but after you get past that, where are you? Where do you run? You’re no longer living in ignorant bliss, but isn’t it ignorant bliss we seek?
If you asked individuals who had become enlightened to their surroundings, my guess is that approximately half of them would prefer to sink back into ignorant bliss, and the other half wouldn’t change a thing. There is a distinct divide between knowledge and happiness. There is an even greater distinction between wanting knowledge or wanting happiness.
In my opinion, that is truly the great question of life. Does one decide to be happy, or in the know? There is no such thing as having both. You are either truly happy, or truly knowledgeable. However, to truly be happy, you have to live in an ignorant bliss, and can one define that as truly living?
Alternately, is living with too much information truly living?
What would you choose?
