Where’s the Awe

I wake up intermittently through the night because every turn of the body ignites pain in my collarbone. At least by waking I’m able to prevent further damage to myself. Still, sleep is a chore.

I’m at least finding some mobility returning. I’m putting on button-up shirts more easily, flossing, and nearly tying shoelaces. They are all things that I couldn’t do last week.

I’m finishing a book that I decided to revisit: The Damnation Game by Clive Barker. It’s a favorite from college. I was curious whether the book would enrapture me like it did years ago.

Parts of the book were equally as page-turning, such as the wild and macabre introduction. However, I also struggled to find an off-switch for my inner critic.

This section has too much dialogue, and all of the dialogue is exposition, I’d think.

This section’s character motivation is questionable.

Needless to say, some of the magic was lost. Often in place of story immersion was skepticism. A mind searching for flaws replaced a mind that dared to wonder.

I recognized this inner critic and managed to barricade it for the book’s final section. For a few hours, I was again attuned to my inner dreamer.

What is it about age that causes us to increasingly kill the magic around us?

At times, the industrialization of the mind seems as inevitable as the industrialization of the environment.

It’s as though the process of adulting wrought enough grim realities to shock the inner dreamer into submission. Survival and magic are mutually exclusive. Life is work, politics, and a steady and horrifying debilitation of one’s own body. Where is there time for awe?

Sometimes finding that sense of awe can feel like finding a needle in a haystack. It’s there though, if you allow it to be. Just open a book from your youth and make the choice to see it.

Weekly Plunder: Week 24 - Plotting

“You have all the fears of mortals and all the desires of immortals. You will hear many men saying: “After my fiftieth year I shall retire into leisure, my sixtieth year shall release me from public duties.” And what guarantee, pray, have you that your life will last longer? Who will suffer your course to be just as you plan it? Are you not ashamed to reserve for yourself only the remnant of life, and to set apart for wisdom only that time which cannot be devoted to any business? How late it is to begin to live just when we must cease to live! What foolish forgetfulness of mortality to postpone wholesome plans to the fiftieth and sixtieth year, and to intend to begin life a point to which few have attained!” - Seneca

I understand why most relevant religious figures warn about money (and in most cases avoid it like a plague).

Fortune is one of the great paradoxes of humanity. What one gains inevitably becomes the point of anxiety over what one may lose. It will render the brief time you have to live perceptibly briefer, because a simple, miserable, thoughtless, begrudged chase for more will dominate your memory.

Fortune’s woes are timeless. Its ills conquer us now the same as they have conquered our progenitors for thousands of years. Fortune may, as it did to Roman aristocrats, render you paranoid of your usurpers, and it may give your heirs ruthless malevolence in the quest for your inheritance.

Inevitably, what promises utopia, “enough money,” creates strife, collusion, plotting, and fretting.

Money sells us the lie that we “only need more” to finally be “happy”, to “rest” and “enjoy the sunshine.”

“I’m ready to build my empire,” I hear a lot of young people say or suggest these days. To that I say, all empires fall. Build a home, and then build a garden!

At some point, the lie that money will bring you utopia will be shattered. For each stage from birth to death, you will create your own problems from money.

If you live for the chase you will die with regret.

Wrote Seneca on those who waste time planning in his famous letter, On the Shortness of Life: “They form their purposes with a view to the distant future; yet postponement is the greatest waste of life; it deprives them of each day as it comes, it snatches from them the present by promising something hereafter. The greatest hindrance to living is expectancy, which depends upon the morrow and wastes today.”

Money is a major reason why we stave off today for a better tomorrow, though so long as a better tomorrow hinges on money, it will never arrive. Money is why we kneel to the stopwatches of those who do not consider our health or interests, and why we cannot feel adequate with the present breath that escapes us with such tragic haste.

Wealth is a catalyst to our plotting, scheming, and fretting.

For this reason, my unknown friend, I say this, and may you and I both take it to heart: beware of money. Enjoy what it can offer, but don’t fret over it. Don’t let it own you.

What I’m watching: I have two episodes left of All of Us are Dead. What a stellar show.

What I’m reading: On the Shortness of Life by Seneca. The beautiful thing about philosophy is that is spans every era and that it allows one to realize that often, the best wisdom is found by looking back, not by pushing forward.

What I’m listening to: “Dialectic Chaos” by Megadeth. This is a showcase of Mustaine’s and Broderick’s guitar virtuoso.

What I’m doing: I bought a new GPS for my gravel bike (Garmin), not to track my mileage but to route new maps to places I haven’t been. Tomorrow I’m going to take a route I haven’t taken. Exploration is the aim.

Thoughts by a Windowsill

The winter elements bring to my mind the word “desiccated.” With Mother Nature having stripped all green from the maples, oaks, and brush, I mostly see skeletal branches above and beside me. These spindly things are like brown and dried-up arteries running over the pale winter sky.

I look at my windowsill and the plants that rest on it. Exposed to the elements they would die quickly. In the artifice of my apartment, under my control, they are in a constant state of growth and comfort. We like to believe we control the fates of ourselves and the things around us. To helplessly watch the things we see in our day-to-days wither away, more victims of time, reminds us of our own mortality.

We don’t have as strong a concept of mortality as we used to. That’s what I suspect. A disease of yesteryear would wipe out a third of us, and it would scare many of us, but the modern compulsion to control and reign in was not so much a part of the process. Now we’re more prone to believe that immortality is just a matter of politics or “supporting the better science” or “having the best retirement plan.” I suspect that death for the delusional is an especially terrifying matter.

I’m listening to a song I first heard in 2017 and finding myself in a poignant and melancholy mood. I love the song, but I’m not sure if I love the song because of the melody or because of the place and time it takes me to. I wonder if this fusion of memory and melody is what aging does to music. With each passing year we feel a more turbulent maelstrom of emotions from our old songs, not because of the brilliance of the composition, but because of the memories that the songs stir.

I observe that as people get older they tend to stick to the songs from their youth. Maybe this is where their most vivid memories reside. Maybe this is where most change and most significant events occurred.

May the song I seek always be the one I hear tomorrow.

The Weekly Plunder: Week 4 - Message in a Bottle

A blog is not a diary. It’s more like a message in a bottle that you send out to sea. You don’t know who will read it or if anyone ever will. Someone may find it in a day, in a year, or never. And what they think of your thoughts… is anyone’s guess. But they read your thoughts and perhaps they connect on a little of it and think, “Whoa. There’s another person someone out there in the world who’s kinda twisted, like me.”

What I’m doing: I’m selling a lot of my belongings. On reflection I’ve realized that many of them were purchased out of vanity. It’s easy to intellectualize and justify traits such as vanity and narcissism. “I bought the product because it’s sustainable,” we may tell ourselves upon purchasing overpriced pants. But the most sustainable place is a thrift shop. One day I’d like to rid myself of my vanity.

What I’m watching: Dawn of the Dead. It’s a zombie film that’s not actually about zombies. It’s about human nature. Both humans and zombies unconsciously flock to the shopping mall.

What I’m listening to: “One Night in Tokyo” by Beast in Black. It’s just stupid fun.

What I’m reading: Patagonia magazine. My favorite story is about a woman who loses the love of her life from a snow avalanche. She had planned to have kids with him. After his death she manages to freeze his seed and have it transported to a medical facility. After getting permission from her dead lover’s parents she proceeds with in vitro fertilization on herself. The first two attempts fail, but the third attempt is a success. She has her lover’s child 15 months after his death. Now that is a ghost story.

What I’m thinking: Write yourself a message in a bottle and send it out to sea. Maybe a shark will devour it or an otter will use it to club its prey. Or maybe it’ll land on a desert island and someone will read it and think, “Whoa. What a story there is in the life of this person!”