So what have I been up to? In March my life took a drastic change for the greener when I left behind the desk wage-slavery of a corporate hotel and got a job as a Wilderness Therapy Field Instructor with a company in the Blue Ridge mountains. Since then I've spent a total of thirty-two 24-hour days in the wilderness in the company of a handful of other Instructors and a passel of troubled teens, sleeping under the stars, hiking over mountains, cooking on campfires, forsaking shelter, shower, and polite society. I've learned tricks of the trade, the wisdom of simplicity, the language of the woods, but also the secret language of emotion and subtext, the value of introspection, the restorative powers of radical honesty, and the jedi mind-tricks it takes to slowly guide a scared, angry adolescent into becoming a man. In the process I've even managed to make some progress on my own inner adolescent, to soothe out some of the old fears and insecurities that held onto for years. It's strange to have a job where I am actually, inarguably making a difference in people's lives. The years I spent in restaurants and hotels had finally managed to get under my skin, filling my daily existence with the creeping dread of perpetual menial labor. In retrospect, a ridiculous amount of my time was spent decompressing and distracting myself from the fact that I hated the tasks to which I put my hands. Why it took my so long to get out of that manifestation of the Kali Yuga is beyond me. The vast improvement in physical, mental, and spiritual health that a mere three months have brought about is simply staggering. And despite the fact that I am away from my much-beloved city and its denizens for eight days at a time, sixteen days out of the month, I feel much happier than I have in years, and in some ways, than I have ever felt before. The negatives: so much time spent away from my loved ones, missing out on the company of my friends, smelling like a wildebeest for half of the month, and putting up with a bunch of selfish, entitled brats too self-centered to tell when someone is trying to help them. The postives: getting paid more than I ever have before, getting a ridiculous amount of exercise, clean water, fresh veggies, and mountain air, sleeping in the moonlight, standing on mountains, forgetting that I'm getting paid for what I do, working in an industry tailor-made for the integration of my personal spiritual practice, having a d8 hit dice, dual-wielding, an animal companion at level 3, access to spells from the plant and animal spheres, not caring that I smell like a wildebeest, and seeing a bunch of selfish, entitled brats turn into young adults with a great deal more insight and emotional honesty than many of the twenty-somethings I know.
Why don't more geriatrics form 'mutually assured destruction' clubs? I am always tremendously depressed by visits to my one remaining grandmother, and I wonder if a little stimulus wouldn't go a long way towards improving her quality of life. Personally, I think it would be a blast to spend my autumn years attempting to exterminate and avoid extermination by my neighbors in an assisted-living community. Gives you a hobby, keeps you active, alert...
My imagination cannot help but tend towards the baroque, like booby-trapped bags of Werther's Originals, and Rascal-mounted machine guns.
Ignominity is unbecoming of the self-realized human being, and this applies to death as well. I can think of few fates more pathetic than gasping out my last mothball-scented breath as grandchildren I don't remember watch my last teaspoon of lukewarm blood shudder under my translucent skin, the Matlock theme crooning a soft dirge on the hospital television screen. No, this is too cruel a fate, to be carefully nursed until the last drop of vital energy has been depleted, an empty husk so indistinguishable from a corpse (or at best a mummy with a penchant for bridge) that the soul can no longer tell the difference between living and dying, and quietly sneaks out halfway through Wheel of Fortune. That grim veil stands before us all, but the choice remains: slip through on a feeding tube, mute zombie shuffling towards oblivion in flannel slippers; or to leap through, having taken one's Rascal onto the interstate on a journey to burn down the VA office while hopped up on Wild Turkey and continence meds. Yes! To see death coming from a mile away, to make preparations, to be good and ready to make sure the Reaper has something to laugh about on the long ride across the Styx.
I think, unfortunately, that a truly amazing death may not be something I can merely hope for, like those lucky pensioners with faulty parachutes. If I am not crushed by a wayward piano before I am too old to be of further benefit or amusement to society, I fear that I may have to construct a railgun myself, and shoot my instantly-liquified protoplasm three meters into the moon. Or perhaps I will have myself slowly lowered into a plexiglass enclosure filled with a hundred starving howler monkeys. In Times Square. If the good lord sees fit to send an anvil my way beforehand, so be it. But if somebody doesn't ROFL at my gruesome and cartoonish demise, then I will have failed in my final great work.
On my tombstone, I wish my epitaph to read "Did it for the LOLs".
Tristan and Isolte lived in a small two-bedroom apartment off Baxter Street. Both being in school, they didn't have much in the way of belongings when they moved in together, but everything they had was clearly organized as his or hers. His cables and modems and routers and plugs all languished serpentine in his room, and only a single tendril crossed the boundary toward the living room's television, secured against its natural sinusoidal undulations by great strips of duct tape. Her room was a mess of oil paints and overflowing ashtrays, but not one puff of smoke escaped the air purifiers, guardian pylons at the gates of communal living-space. The living room remained a barren waste, and any incursion made by either party was quickly met with dissapproval, argument, or, on one occasion, cigarette burns through a 'Ghost in the Shell' wall-scroll.
The living room was in serious danger of becoming a permanent no-man's land, until one day, walking down Pope Street, the two came upon a small, trembling bird. It's wings had been crushed, but its plumage was strange and iridescent, hinting at a beauty that might be restored. It lifted its tiny head and let forth a hint of a song. At once Tristan and Isolte knew, without a word exchanged between them, that this little thing they had stumbled upon was to be theirs, a thing shared between the both of them.
And so, 'twixt the left and the right, in the space between their lives, there came to be a broken bird in a cage bought at Agora. And everyday they fed it, and everyday it would grow stronger and brighter, and its renewed song became the throbbing chorus of their lives. Many a night they would come out from their separate rooms and sit together beneath the antique cage, and in silence or whispered conversation marvel at what they had found. And for once, together, they knew happiness.
Which can be said to have loved the songbird more, we will never know. But what we know for certain is that, one night, long after Tristan had retired to bed, Isolte sat in contemplation. She sat before the cage, daring for once to bring her oils out into their shared space. For hours she tried to capture the image of the songbird, to frame its contours, to mix the colors that might imply even the beauty of its song. And though she failed to impress its shape upon the canvas, she tried again night after night.
One night, as she crumpled the canvas in a fit of frustration, the bird fell suddenly silent. And she realized at that moment the one thing about the bird that she could not express. She had come to realize that, as time had gone on, she had come to fear the day that its song would no longer ring in their ears. The bird was the one thing that tied her life to Tristan's, the one thing that could unite two utterly different souls. And she feared above all that it might one day die, and their worlds would float apart again.
The very next day, after Tristan shuffled off to work, Isolte took the bird to an old and wise ornithologist.
"Please tell me, if you can: How long will this bird live?"
The ornithologist scratched at his whiskers and mused, "What you have found is no ordinary bird. Many people spend their entire lives waiting to catch just a glimpse of one. It is the most rare and wonderful bird in the world. But I fear I must tell you that it is also the most delicate. Though they have been known to live a hundred years, there is no way to know for sure how long it might last. It might die at any moment."
Weeping, Isolte left the ornithologist, and returned home. That very night, as Tristan slept, she took the bird once more from its cage, and with one quick stomp, crushed it to death with her shoe. She fed it to the neighborhood cat, and enticed it inside. As she pet the purring cat, she thought, "At least I know I can get a good ten years out of this guy."
I guess it's over a month now. I haven't been this unhappy in years. As I disconsolately consume a four-year-old can of Wolf's Chili and pursue electronic distraction for hours on end, I can't shake the pervasive feeling of wrongness that has saturated my life. I keep pouring myself into things, becoming momentarily wrapped up in activities, (some long-overdue, some disastrously misguided), but the moment the world slows down and I'm left with my own thoughts, I keep coming back to this same, dull, infuriating ache. It nibbles at me during the pauses in conversation, bites me out of nowhere as I find myself making plans to hang out with someone that isn't there, falls on me and mauls me as I try to fall asleep. And what it boils down to is this: My best friend said she didn't want to be my best friend anymore. Every night I have to come back to a house with a hole in it where my friend should be.
Strangest cult ever! It's sad that I'm too jaded to think that these fuckers are anything but shysters . Maybe it's the cheezy flash animations and over-the-top presentation, but I smell L. Ron's characteristic stink.
You are most like Prometheus, and you probably knew that before you even took this test. You probably aren't deliberately altruistic, but you still tend to do things that benefit everyone, even at great expense to your health and personal relationships. You aren't ruled by your emotions, but you still have a strong sense of justice. You make good descisions, but they can sometimes backfire (and this isn't due to a flaw in your reasoning, but due to faulty premises instead).
You are very reasonable, you understand systems, you can quickly pinpoint flaws and you know how to correct them. You pride understanding and knowledge above everything else, and your greatest fear is to appear to be incompetent. You tend to be contemptuous of authority, but you don't accept leadership roles yourself until everyone else has demonstrated their own incompetence.
You've built a very specific skill set. You know exactly where your strengths and weaknesses are, and you pride yourself on this kind of self-knowledge. You distrust tradition, which you see as arbitrary, and you rely instead on your own judgements. You also pride yourself on your pragmatism. You're also a very private person.
Most of all, people think you're arrogant, but screw them! They're the ones who benefit from your ideas and discoveries, and if they took the time to understand why it is that you say and think the things you do, they'd realize that you only appear arrogant because you are exactingly precise when it comes to your area of specification, and most of all because, when you don't know something, you don't have an opinion about it (unlike most of the loudmouths that you have to deal with on a day-to-day basis).
Relationships are your kryptonite. It isn't that you don't want them -- in fact, you would very much like a very close relationship with someone who understands you. They're just the one thing in the world that you're naturally bad at.
Famous people like you: Niels Bohr, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Werner Heisenberg, Issac Newton, John Maynard Keynes, Erwin Schrodinger
Thanks to heosphoros for this amazing Swiss gem by DJ Bobo.
Mix two parts Vampire: The Masquerade with one part Kelly Clarkson, give the Backstreet Boys three dots of Celerity and Dementate, stir in a catchy Europop beat, add atrocious CG for flavor. It's meme-tastic!
The Copernican Counterfeit! And you thought Intelligent Design was a farcical mcguffin of an excuse to teach the bible as science? Wait till you see what century these guys want us to go back to!
The man who saved my life from religion, politics, and opinions of all sorts has shuffled of this mortal coil and embarked upon his Ultimate Trip. And although it hits me hard, I would be more deeply saddened if the man himself had not been so encouragingly optimistic with regards to his immanent demise. I hope he likes whatever Great Adventure he's gotten himself into. Though I never got the chance to thank him for the hand he had in shaping my mind into its current twisted configuration, his humor, intelligence, and unabashed raunchiness remain with me and within me. Incubating. Waiting to spread. Unto him the accomplishment of his True Will. YAY! The accomplishment of his True Will. Hail Eris!
Don't ask me how I found this, but here's a gizmo from an Intelligent Design site that should not be missed. I'm not sure what they were trying to accomplish with this little game, but I've fallen hopelessly in love with staunchly Darwinist Pandas.
Additionally, wonder, awe, and curiosity. Enjoy.
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ethernaut7's journal
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