I realize I will have your full attention only for the time it takes you to read this sentence.
Picture this:
Three women. One has magical powers, the other has the force, and the third has superhero abilities. What’s the difference? There isn’t one. All three situations would prove that the fields of physics and science are wholly incomplete when it comes to our known information and understanding of the supernatural.
And yet I could imagine the reality of any or all of those scenarios before I could ever imagine the continuation of human consciousness after death. Harry Potter could be real and in England right now playing broom soccer or whatever. Darth Vader could have been real in the past and dead now, death by suffocation during an explosion. And I secretly pray at night that Hugh Jackson does, in fact, have an excellent regenerative system that allowed for some military guys to graft adamantium to his bones and that for some unknown reason to give him sweet fucking claws.
What I do not give a shit about is whether there is a god or how much of a nice guy or a dick he might be. That I will die is a certainty. Therefore, the only thing that could possibly matter to my consciousness is whether or not it ceases when I die. And if it stops, then really, try explaining to someone else that things matter*, because they don’t, and there is no logical train of thought backing the notion that they do.
I can foresee the obvious counter arguments to what I said. Bear with me while I preempt this one of a few possible replies.
I realize that what “matters*” or does not matter depends on how I define that particular word. So let’s define it like this. To matter means that something is relatively significant to ANY thing other than a personal, human, relative interest. In other words, what flavor ice cream I am going to eat matters only because I only like a couple flavors of ice cream. The flavor then is relative, to me, and it matters only in the sense that it is a personal, human, relative interest of mine. The flavor does not matter to anything other than to a personal, human interest, relative only to a human consciousness.
Another example is the question…if I murder someone, does that matter to anyone or anything other than to myself and other people? Does it matter to anything beyond those personal, human, relative interests? I don’t think so. Show me if you can, but only if you can do it without resorting to anything based on your imagination.
The album “Somewhere in the Between” by Streetlight Manifesto finishes the discussion this blog entry began. Basically, the lyrics from the entire CD can be summarized like this:
Don’t waste time contemplating anything I wrote above. Instead just live your life like you can and have fun or do a good job while you’re at it. The end.
-Until tomorrow.
The crux of my professor’s story was that it is amazing the things you will tell strangers. We do this because as people we have a strong desire to novelize our own history and to self mythologize. He used the example of a failed relationship where we go back through events and try to order them in such a way that our current circumstances happened for a “reason”. I realized that I too was guilty of such things in my own life. If anyone were to ask me, I’d say I was an atheist. However, given my disposition to the ordering of my past in these neurotic causal strings I feel like a shabby one. If everything I do is somehow in service to a product of an event yet to come what is the point of living each moment? Wouldn’t my philosophical leanings allow me to be simply content with the fact that things just happen? Maybe I am religious after all and rather than worshiping the moon or a zombie, I prefer a cult of personality ¾ my own personality. The upside to this is at least when I’m gone I won’t be leaving behind any followers or monuments to excess. I’m the leader and the follower, the father and the son, Hall AND Oates. Although…I do think I caught this girl giving me eyes the other day in lecture!
Speaking of lectures, I’ve been having a bit of a rough go of it this semester. I’ve been contemplating getting some professional help. Truthfully, I’ve had various people suggest that I do over the years. My own feelings on whether this is needed tends to ebb and flow. It is my opinion that with a healthy diet, sleeping pattern and exercise I can control things and have. The only issue is when something beyond my control triggers my mental problems making them more acute, it can offset one of those safeguards and in turn, all of them. I’ve been researching drugs and quite frankly, it scares me. It isn’t just the side effects, although anal fissures don’t sound like any walk in any park I would like to take. As silly as it sounds, in first year I watched this documentary on how these academics believed depression is linked to creativity and it spooked me. What if I get on meds and I’m cut off from the source of my creativity or what if that source is muted? What if it does manage to kill the leader but leave the follower behind? I don’t want to lose all my thoughts of angels in an aspirin billboard.
Todays blog update comes from Rhode Island musician, and friend of mine, Justin. You can check out his musical out put by clicking this nifty-difty link to Blank Tapes and Empty Bottles. Worth a listen!
So click open another tab, sit back and envelop your auditory and visual senses with Justin-y goodness. You'll be disease free when it's over, and still have the feeling of pure elation.
Enjoy!
-Aaron Hale
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We probably need an intro for this since it isn’t Aaron writing today. This his friend Justin from Rhode Island and all I think about every time I read Days Gone By is the theme song from Family Matters, “Days gone by it’s the jigawuzz of the family”.
So anyways, it’s almost my twenty first birthday and what do I have to say for it? Nothing good. They say you shouldn’t say anything if you have nothing positive to say, but sometimes criticism breeds positivity. I’m almost old enough to drink legally, but the last couple of years I’ve really sucked at it… blacking out, forgetting important things, drunk driving (terrible idea even if I made it home safe) and just overall not doing it enough and getting terrible hangovers. I remember back when I started… I was around fourteen years old, sounds weird but nowadays kids are pregnant at that age or doing hard drugs, so I don’t feel that bad.
I could drink five or six beers or girl drinks (i.e. Smirnoff coolers, mike’s hard lemonade, etc.) whatever the high school kids gave us for free and be carrying a fine buzz and then wake up like nothing happened. Fast forward to a couple nights ago I’m at the bar with my brother and his friends and I’m drinking whiskey cokes. I have five and feel nothing, then on the sixth it all hits me. I feel really great and all of a sudden girls are interested in me, it’s like a dream almost, but it’s really happening.
So I black out and we’re back at my brother’s house and suddenly the chick is mad at me so I go to leave and my brother takes my keys. At this point I’m not that bad… I’m on the verge of it, but I didn’t even have anything else to drink. So someone gives me a water and I start walking home in the twenty degree weather. My brother’s long time friend who is pretty much another brother to me picks me up and agrees that my brother shouldn’t have taken my keys, that it was a dick move. So we go back get my car and he follows me home to make sure I’m safe, like a good brother would do.
So you’re saying, "Well it had the potential to be a good night, but your brother fucked it up."
Yes and no. It was him being a dick that ruined it I would have been fine with my nice buzz and accepted that the girl wasn’t down because she was also kind of young. So the brother comment brings me to another point… my brother recently moved out and in all it’s glory along with it came some great things and some terrible things. I took his room and made it a band space… ace.
However all the shit he used to get living here was subsequently poured on me full time. I was trying to do the right thing and take college classes but one sucked so bad I dropped it and my father flipped out and cut my funding for school, so now after switching to part time at work I’m stuck there, kind of ironic, kind of run on sentence. So now I work at Lowe’s part time, play instruments not nearly enough and thought about quitting drinking only to be taken back by how awesome being drunk correctly is.
On top of all this I haven’t been laid in two years. If I was a married guy that’d be common place but I happen to be twenty years old, so it’s a god damn shame. What to do about it? Well my dad took me out of school so there goes all those options. I work at Lowe’s so all the girls are either pregnant, married, disgusting, taken or have had kids. Interesting huh? My only hope seems to be concerts I haven’t been to since last year and the bar scene. Which brings me back to drinking. It’s good when controlled it gives you a high and makes things overall way better than they normally are.
Think about it, you sit around with your friends and talk. Without booze you do that and constantly complain there’s nothing to do, with booze it’s the greatest thing since the internet. The down side to booze is health concerns and getting out of control. Many people like it use it as an excuse to do retarded things. “If I do that chick I’ll just say I was drunk or I’ll just get drunk and not feel that bad about it” Hilarious? Kind of. Extremely unintelligent? Of course.
So the great debate that’s being going on forever seems to never end. Some of the best people in my life drink and they do it for a good time, as that’s what it’s intended for. Benjamin Franklin said something along the lines of, "You know God wanted us to have fun that’s why he invented the drink." Ben also spread syphilis across our entire country… you get the point. Low and behold I will give into my Irish genes and keep up the drink, however if I continue to fuck it up I’m done.
As for my job everyone says I’m lucky to have it, but really am I? I’ve been demoted since the two years I’ve been there, I make ten dollars an hour which isn’t bad, but I literally stand there for hours and occasionally handle money. Yeah the economy is fucked, thanks to a few thousands people, while millions starve and somehow aren’t murdering the thousands?
Now out of all that was spoken for this far, this boggles me the most. There’s a few thousand people ruining it for everyone and they still have their lives in tact? Not only that, but they continue to fuck it up for all the while somehow benefiting more. I’m really disappointed in you America… but at the same time I just wrote a page about drinking and not getting laid. We need to get our priorities straight before there’s no future. And as terrifying as that sounds you will promptly react by going straight back to work and completely forgetting about it. I can’t say I won’t do the same. What’s changed since the times of revolution? Everything is easily available to everyone now, so nothing seems as bad anymore.
Also people used to do a lot of drugs back when all the hippies protested, so maybe we just need more drugs as motivation. Or maybe you need to witness someone die in front of you. Maybe you need to see someone starve to death, or someone get kicked out of their house that they’ve lived in for thirty years. I don’t know but we need to find it soon because as great as Obama being in the white house is, it isn’t enough at all.
Everyone needs to get off their ass and stop using credit cards because it’s literally fucked our whole economy, and to fix it? Oh we just use more money that doesn’t exist. I’m really proud of you America, like a dad that missed your championship game because he had to work.
-Until tomorrow.
