Merely a speed, not a vector

"We are all going to die screaming, so why would you not fill it with wonderful experiences?'  -Kevin Smith...  abridged.

I am trying to figure out something that has struck me as odd.  I didn't think of it as odd at first but now, as I spend all of this time watching TEDTalks and Kevin Smith Q&As and other miscellanea  that is geared to my intellectual self, I see the oddity.  They talk about passion; they talk about a drive; they talk about a force that pushes those smart folks, and they talk about goals.  I have had goals; oh I have had goals.  I have wanted to be a teacher, a musician, a game designer, a good father, a writer, a transient bum living out of my car.  I lack direction, something that intelligent people seem to have.  I have no direction.

I have had this consistent concept of moving for a long tome.  Since I was a washout C student high school student, up until I am a washout C college student, I have had this concept of moving on, marching though the mire and muck until one day I would be somewhere.  It kept me patient, easy going, and really, it kept my life in perspective that anything I felt was struggle was actually just resistance, a thing to push through until I got what I wanted...  This brings us back to the previous paragraph,  What good is all of this shit wading if I'm not going somewhere?  So here I sit, at my computer at 5 am, trying to figure out my life.  I am tired now, but I cannot sleep.  I need to get these thoughts down to someplace, to someone.  It is unfair to my wife, to my family, to my friends and to my parents that I embark on this quest to make me an adult, only to find I have been walking in a pit of muck and walking in a snazzy pentagram pattern.  Perhaps the problem has always been direction, and I can only think of one time I really had any direction at all.

I can remember being driven by only one thing.  I was a 6th grader and hanging out with a guy with a crush on a girl.  I followed him and his girlfriend, and I met someone else,  a redhead, to be exact, her name was S.  Now S. was an odd duck, an awkward seeming young lady who had a pension for X-files trivia.  She became a friend of mine, nothing too serious, since a friend of mine consisted of someone I talked to about every 3 weeks or so (Really introverted I was in those days.)  The less I saw her, the more I thought about her.  Now compile this against what I can only can describe as teenage angst and depression.  This turned into a full on fixation that I was consumed by.  S. was a stain on my brain, a scorch mark on my psyche, a nagging noise that could not be auto-tuned out of my soundtrack.  I never acted.  I never told her that I liked her.  Not until I was a freshman in highschool, and I left her a note before Spring break.  She shot me down promptly.  This killed me.

Now, when I say killed me, I mean killed me.  I realize that I experienced grief in all 5 cliche steps.    I bartered, got angry, etc. for about 3 years.  I actually had girlfriends during that time, which amounted to just mind games and guilt for a few months.  I could not break this idea, this pattern, but I was passionate about this loss.  I filled notebook upon notebook of poetry; I wrote songs and stories about S. and my pain and anguish.  This is laughable to me now just because I realize most of this navel gazing was my own damn fault, and I should've let it go, but I couldn't. I had to resist the release.  After that, I was careful about anything that required any sort of infatuation.  This lead to the concept of muck walking.  If I pushed on, no passion, only the monotony of every day, I had no space to be lost in something, no space to be passionate, no space to follow things, only the space to plan the next stride and fuck the direction.

So I walk around, but not in a direction.  I push on, but not toward any means.  I will be thirty in less than a year, and I am set up for nothing.  Jesus started his life at thirty, and as we all know, that ended well for everybody but him.  I need to find my passion again, and place it in unattainable things.  I need to find how to give myself over to what I love.  Loving my family is not enough.  Loving my wife is not enough.  I do love those things, but my pushing into nothing is so destructive to myself, that I cannot take care of them, those people to which I have legal, financial and spiritual responsibilities.  Loving them is not enough; I have to find a goal.  I have to find something that I can pursue.  I need something that I can push on with so that I can support my family.  That conclusion I guess can wait, It's 6 am and I have yawned for the first time in 6 hours.  I figure that when I get all of this out, I will sleep like a fuckin' baby.  Until then I intend to contemplate this shit on this blog.

Equals Force Times Distance

Of course I can't sleep.  Apparently I forgot to pay the mental peace bill.  Perhaps they went paperless, but I don't remember it coming in the mail, and not one phone call, not one.  Did I overdraft my account?  Did I not keep it current?  I've lived in the same house for over 6 months now, I should have a constant billing address.  But I'm still awake..  cringing.

I have been unemployed for over a month and a half now.  I have lost 15 or so pounds and I am going to the gym with my wife, something that I am not philosophically aligned with, but participating for the novelty of a 50 dollar a month bill.  It's not that I feel that it is silly, or I am too healthy for the gym, or that I would rather be fat, or that "Da Geem's too hawd... I huwt aw ovew."  It's more on the physics definition of work.   W=F*D that indicates that when I move equipment up and down, back and forth, around and around, and it returns to the same place, D=0 Therefore 0*F=W=0, nullifying any force that I expend at this supposed bastion of health.  In the end, working out in a gym according to physics is an oxymoron.  I am in fact convinced that for every hour spent in a gym, a person gains an hour at the tail end of their life, so spending the cartilage in your joints will ultimately yield a net gain of 0 years.  But I go despite this.  It's something I can do with my wife.   I still have a wife!  Lucky me.

Of course, I am using this formula of work to illustrate other things in my life as well.  I got fired from Wal-Mart over a stupid mistake that I made a few months ago.  It started much like this evening of latenight blogging.  I couldn't sleep.  I was finishing homework for class, reading texts, sorting MTG cards and found myself showing up late for work by a matter of minutes.  I clocked in late a few times, which I was reprimanded for and sent on my merry way.  Now fast forward to a month and a half ago.  I was scared to lose my job.  If I was running late, If my schedule was not perfect, if I wanted a few more minutes of study or a few seconds more with my family, or if someone needed something before I went to work, I was guaranteed to be stopped at every red light to work, and come in late.  If this sounds like an excuse you miss the point completely, in fact this is my mistake.  I seem to have been a push-over in my social life enough to take it upon myself to be a good person and care for my kids, make sure I had things covered, as well as slightly absent minded to not realize what time it ACTUALLY was.  I never wanted to be this guy who was always late, but here it goes, constantly over estimating myself and always finding myself lacking.  It is not the reason I got fired, it is the mistake that lead up to it however.

I started adjusting my hours, by a minute or two.  I did this a couple times, not to get paid for work I didn't do, but to try to keep a job I really needed to provide for my family.  My second sin was fear.  I felt that I could get away with it for a while, and when summer rolled around, I could get my shit together, show up early, work hard, go home and feel good about providing for my wife and children.

They fired me for misconduct.

Completely ineligible for unemployment, completely out of a means to pay for anything, completely back where I started, all of the force I was exerting  was canceled out by the amount of distance I had covered.  W=F*D, D=0 therefore F*0=W=0.

School as well has demonstrated that I am back where I started.  I am out of student loan money.  I had been using that stuff to live off of for the past 7 years, supplementing my shitty job with money that seemed to always disappear into last semesters expenses.  I remember a time in my life where I had 2000 dollars in my savings account, 1000 in my checking, a combined total of 3000 dollars of credit, a good attitude and a credit rating that looked like the record holder's score at a bowling alley after 3 games.  Now, I have nothing.  I have sold everything that I can sell, traded everything I can trade, I literally have no collateral to borrow, no money to use, no income, no force.  I am almost done with my schooling, but I have no foce behind it anymore, F=0, W=F*D Therefore W=0*D=0.

So I can't sleep.  Perhaps it is the lack of work I have done, not for a month and a half, for 7 years, I have expended force until I don't have it, and have gotten nowhere.  The bill collectors for my peace are hassling me now.  If the work was complete, I would have the distance and the momentum to pay them.  The penance of my sin I would figure is the collections department trying to take my stuff and realizing that all I have is shit and stone.  Nothing to pawn, nothing to put up for collateral.  I am out of options. 

10 commandments for a modern audience

     We as Christians have spent a long time trying to make ourselves (rather others) feel bad.  A grand history we belong to of torture, self-flagellism, inquisition, and incineration, and all for the betterment of ourselves and for those who are not in our world of invisible fathers and blood drinking.  It gets fairly extreme when we are in charge of things, but when we are not leaders of our realms, not the pope, not the pentecostal preachers with a large congregation, not the evangelist commanding a crowd of loyal ticket holders, we still try to turn the mood on things that could be enjoyed, and all for the sake of our piety.  For instance, when given the 10 commandments in a modern context, we ran into an interesting predicament.  The first rule of God Club was "No Gods Before Me."  The second was "you can't have their merch either."  (well technically, you could not make their merch, but as we will see shortly, what the words say makes little difference.)
      Now, most of us who were reading or hearing this were being taught about following God.  These tablets came from God himself  in order to make us better people after all, and everything in the bible is "Useful for teaching, instructing... uh... gimme a second... wait, REBUKING!  we have rebuking in that line from Timothy!"  This begins our search for the anti-God in the room.  Well, most of us, if we were learning the 10 commandments belonged to a homogenous group of Christianity who, throughout 2000 years has crystallized the beliefs into the only correct interpretation, and embodied it in our denomination of faith; the other denominations are all going to Hell.  So, we have a good bead on things.  What is our other gods?  We all believe there is one God!  Even if you ask the drunk guy in the bar, he can say that there is one God!  Our God totally kicked the hell out of every other heathen god in our country and is continuing the proud tradition of kicking asses and taking names. 
     This is when we looked at our world and ironically deified things that God could fight.  "Movies are a God" we said, and pitted Sunday morning against Friday night at the multiplex.  "Drinking is a God" and now God could go after everybody's wine, except for the ones that turned into the blood of our savior on Sunday.  "Television is a demon that we have in our very livingroom!"  and so to watch TV became a religious experience.  If you were even thinking about a sitcom or the news, you may as well have roasted a chicken in your living room in honor of the cult of Nielsen and Farnsworth.
     We were molding graven images of False Gods, in violation of God club's second rule, in order to follow the first rule.  No one realized it.  As a result, we became oppressive, hypocritical and elitist, but most of all, we started to condone sin.  Instead of being in the congregation, we began to gossip, which if you didn't realize yet is to bring false witness against ones neighbor.  In reaction we said that gossip was alright so long as it's true because then you aren't lying.  (See, the wording of the commandment is not important, rather the ignorant translation.)  We walked around in our smugness and told people to stop saying "Goddamn, and JESUS" while we called on his name while full of our self-righteous sin.  We never killed anyone (An improvement from our days of burning Muslims) or stole, or committed adultery, (unless of course we did, then we would ask for forgiveness)  We never coveted other peoples things, but we did try to dress in our "Sunday best" in order to inspire the covetous attitude in others.  We honored the Sabbath day very well, including resting our wallets when it came to tip the servers at the restaurants we ate at after church.  She would probably spend it all on her false gods of baby formula or rent.  She isn't honoring the Sabbath today because of her god the power bill, so we are going to be rude.  Then, for compensation for her minimum wage job, we'll leave a tract to save her eternal soul, instead of the 2 dollars on a $60 bill.
     So we went home and repented of our worship of material things, and went to bed with most of the 10 commandments broken.  Of course, we break commandments in the way that Moses broke them, to prove to sinners that God hates them and put their sin in the drinking water (Well, at least rub it in their faces.)
     I do not know why our group wants to put so much suffering in the world.  I don't know why we waste all this time inventing sin when Jesus pointed out that sin is everywhere so long as you care not about your fellow man.  You sin against the other sex not by raping that person, but by treating that person as an object, not as a fellow human being.  The moment you justify a bad situation for a man as being a flaw in his moral fiber, you have in essence ruled on his character before knowing the whole story, effectively baring false witness to yourself against your neighbor.  The moment you invent a god out of innocuous items, you are making images of gods. And finally, by doing all of these things and still walking around with the banner Christian, we take God's name in vein.  We are a destructive bunch for some reason, and for that I've tried to keep a safe distance from those who call themselves Christians, glue fish to the trunks of their cars and tip badly on Sundays.  Those are the ones who crave power, who want inquisitions, who want to beat themselves with whips and convince those who don't that it is fun.  These people are the ones that can't stand sin so much that they refuse to see their own, and, while I am aware of mine, I work my faith out with fear and trembling. 

The Endgame is Absurd(ist)

When my generation was born, we were sat in front
Of a chessboard, the Babyboomers on the opposite
On a preplayed game that the Boomers wanted to finish
In the stead of The Greatest Generation.
And boy were they impatient, We didn’t know how to play
We learned quickly though, But realized that it
Was rigged, despite the fact that The boomers assured us
That it was always a fair situation.

My first observation that
They played white,
Got their turn first and
Controlled 99
Percent of the board,
And the only pieces we had
Were a king, a couple of
pawns, and rooks.
“If you feel jealous,
Maybe you should have
Saved your pieces
Across your line,
And played the game as
Well as I,”  They said.
We retorted “however, we have
Bought some books

In preparation for this game,
They tell me you had
Your daddies’ help you
With your moves,
To make sure you had
A chance of winning, then thanked them by
Cutting his social security,
Until of course you needed it
Yourself, then you said thanks
For the head start, now
I need to collect.
My need behooves.
So you took pieces from me
To secure your old
Age, to continue the game
Perhaps to prolong it.”

And here we were, ill equipped,

going through our lives,

made to suck down Ritalin,

when we spoke up, when we challenged the authority

Drugged up and strung out, 

commiting suicide, and other

atrocities while the doctors said 

our activity was a symptom.

imbalance or disease, opinions 

are the proof of infirmity

ailment, not thought.  You called 

our opinions hyper-activity and

through drugs, guilted our parents 

and into buying them, but perhaps we need return to the game.

 

“Taking pieces is part of the game”
said the babyboomers to my peers
Said us, “but you took our best and brightest,
and took them for your own gain.
Look, my knights are dead
because you disallowed to be used,
a few moves from my most powerful
pieces, the most keen
The ones that could speak Arabic,
that were proficient with their weapons.
And you decreed this,
because in your brain
It was better to keep up
with appearances while escalating war.
Personally our generation
doesn’t care if he was a Queen.”

“That was a moral choice”
blurts the boomer smirking slyly
“you want to talk of morality? 
Let us look at your bishops gyrate
Crookedly across this whole board,
covering each other
With relocation, for they never
cross the same path since
The one in the light prevents
the contraception of rape
While the one on the black squares
exercises his ability to participate
in it, by sneaking up on
the smallest of my pawns from behind
And taking them off of the board,
and with it their innocence.

Is it any wonder then,
Why my generation
Has forgotten its religion,
Sacrificed all of its bishops
In favor of protecting ourselves? 
To decide for ourselves
What is right and wrong and
Not listen to a central fallible
Human?”  We asked rhetorically
To this bloated spoiled opponent
Adjusting in his seat,
Sweating like he was doing push-ups,
Speechless. We continue
To question the game we play,
“I have covered war then morality,
What other things are allowable?”

“Look at our castles, 
We can’t move to them,
We can’t seem to live in a home
That’s not a wreck
With my job we can’t get,
The degree that we were given
To insure that I’m not flipping
Burgers, but that insurance was denounced,
So every time I move
In position with my rooks
To endanger your king,
To put it in check,
You throw a tantrum,
And hand hits the table.”
“Well, far be it from me to concede a castle,
 Can’t you see your checks bounce?”

“Well, that’s pretty funny,
But with all of your money
I can see that you’ve pinned in
My king.  Your mansion,
Your castles, to the left and to my right
Of him; even my king is a pawn,
Moving slowly to
Your side of the board,
But none of my pieces
Come back when he reaches the
Other side, and if he did,
Would he be, pinned down.
Oh there goes my pawn,
My rooks, what fun,
Now my King is in stalemate,
Finally peace from this game.
I cannot move now and
Now the game ceases.

“No, the game doesn’t end” 
They said with a giggle
And gave us a sadistic grin
And leaned back. 
They had control of all the toys
In the playroom, including
The ones for the outside,
Surely even by the balls
They had us.
When we tried to tip the king,
To forfeit and occupy, they said
We had nothing to say,
And into our eyes
With a pepper spray attack.
So we have to wait for the
Babyboomer to die, just so we
 

Can pick of the pieces. 
Then the board will be just,

But in the midst of the
Game we were playin’
They set up another
Board for their spoiled children.