#29 (luck)
"heavenward"
I don't believe in any kind of god (not since the tornado) and I don't understand why anybody else would ever bother with doing so, either.
Theology has never been my strong suit, though the fact that I've never been to church probably doesn't help matters much. I've read the Bible, the King James version anyhow, which I found preachy, repetitive and dull. I've skimmed a bit of the Koran, which was way more entertaining but ultimately just too brutal and foreign. The same with the Bhagavad Gita: the ideas and concepts within far too unconvincing to travel over different cultures and a very big ocean and actually permeate through my thick and stubborn American skull. Instead of God I think the universe has been designed and orchestrated by something akin to an immense and infinitely complicated math equation. This is just one world of many, so many, and even on this world I am just one of six to seven billion. What we attribute as "luck" and "fate" is not knowing what the 100,000,000,000,000th decimal of pi is, whether or not it's a six or a three or an eight, and being surprised when we thought it was a nine when it's actually a two. Right now, someone we know could be dying in a car crash. We might step outside today, decide what the hell I'm gonna play the lottery at the gas station and end up picking the numbers that makes us multi-millionaires. Somewhere past the illusions and concepts of our world which we build up around us, is a pattern to it all that isn't even really a pattern, since it never repeats. This is all very much beyond us. We'll never know. None of us ever will. And there's never been any reason to get all jihad with other people about this bullshit.
There is no such thing as time, but there are such a thing as clocks.
Sometimes it feels like it intervenes in my life, the universe, this massive equation. Accidentally, perhaps, or perhaps not. Like recently.
There's just so much I haven't written about here. The circumstances behind the universe's intervention aren't worth getting into very much: somebody hurt me in a way that I thought I was either too wise, too cynical or just plain too old to get screwed up like that over anyone ever again. It had been years since someone had burdened themselves to work as hard as they did to disable my assorted little personal tripwires and alarms and get under my skin, only to turn around once their hard work was finished to trash everything within reach. The curious thing is, and something I still don't fully understand, I totally let it happen. I told her how to do it. Of course it was a woman. And I don't mean that it's only women who are capable of being so heartless. Absolutely not. Men can be worse, if anything. It's just that the only group of people I've ever wanted to sleep with were women. That's all I'm saying.
I was very upset about this for a couple of days or so after I knew it was over, so upset that I just kind of wandered around aimlessly, and bumped into things, and lost the ability to make complete sentences. Otherwise I think, at least I want to, that I took the high road with all this. It's rare that I actually do that in any situation. Only one other friend of mine knows maybe 50% of everything that happened, and the only reason I told her was because she was pestering me about it over several days until I finally gave in. And once I heard the words that were coming out of my mouth, they became that much more real, and what occurred to me before my story was even finished was that this person who hurt me didn't even matter anymore.
Way too much can bottle themselves up in our minds and our hearts, nuances of situations we regret ever having lived through replayed over and over again until we accidentally assign way more meaning than what they ever deserve. I don't hate this person, and I don't mean her any ill will, but she's awful: self-centered, dishonest, gold-digging, materialistic, self-loathing without giving a damn who else might end up going down in flames with her. Over a lot of thinking and cigarettes and diet soda, underneath a flagpole on a warm April afternoon, I realized that I'm glad she hurt me. I'm a very fortunate man. If it hadn't happened she would have ended up ruining my life. Without that day I learned just how little respect for me she actually had, eventually finding that out would have been stretched over a period of months or even years while repeating life's lessons that I had, admittedly, already learned before. Whatever benefits there may have been to the situation aren't worth taking such a huge step backward to have them, especially at this point in my life. It's the universe's work. It's the only thing I can attribute it all to.
Fucking A. You know?
So I've found other things to get me upset, instead. Like maybe I've grown too eccentric to ever have a happy relationship in the first place, and how this could prove itself irreversible. Like how I feel trapped in my job but without a bachelor's degree this may be the best I'm capable of, the Catch-22 of needing more money than I make just so I can make more money. Or how I've seen so many beautiful people, both inside and out, waste away to nothing (or even worse) because they ultimately couldn't deal with their shit and I'm still seeing this happen right in front of my eyes and although the times are different and the soundtracks are different now and the fashions change with every passing year, nothing ever truly changes.
You can find me at the office between 8am to 5pm, Monday through Friday, sometimes doing actual work but mostly just wisecracking with other folks and maybe only eluding to what bothers me here and there. And then I go home and do things like learn how to speak French, or read up about why yeast is used for baking bread, going for a run in hopes of successfully scaling the hill known only to be as "Big Bertha", building furniture out of strange things, trying to talk to my cat. I've removed her phone numbers from my directory and deleted the couple of pictures I took of her when she was riding a horse a few months ago, in a small-town parade, on a bitterly cold day for no other reason than to just support her and all the great things I really loved that she did. I tried to make a pissaladiere the other day using whole-wheat flour and now I wonder what would happen if I replaced the carmelized onions with sweet red pepper, and the anchovies with cold smoked salmon, but keep the black olives because black olives are awesome. I'd probably be dead if it weren't for black olives. I only ate a quarter of the original pie and threw the rest away.
The crust is the most difficult part to make successfully and the easiest to ruin. To start out I emptied the baker's yeast into a bowl of warm water to see if it was still alive and therefore, able to be used for baking or rather, maybe not to see if they were alive but whether or not they could be killed. After a few minutes the yeast was foaming up and clotting the water, dying, and that's how I knew it would be okay to add the flour and work with it to form a pizza dough.
I looked at it for a little while longer, though, before I did that. I wondered how the yeast must have felt about all this, and for a moment I felt a small regret. Not for very long, but just enough.
I don't believe in any kind of god (not since the tornado) and I don't understand why anybody else would ever bother with doing so, either.
Theology has never been my strong suit, though the fact that I've never been to church probably doesn't help matters much. I've read the Bible, the King James version anyhow, which I found preachy, repetitive and dull. I've skimmed a bit of the Koran, which was way more entertaining but ultimately just too brutal and foreign. The same with the Bhagavad Gita: the ideas and concepts within far too unconvincing to travel over different cultures and a very big ocean and actually permeate through my thick and stubborn American skull. Instead of God I think the universe has been designed and orchestrated by something akin to an immense and infinitely complicated math equation. This is just one world of many, so many, and even on this world I am just one of six to seven billion. What we attribute as "luck" and "fate" is not knowing what the 100,000,000,000,000th decimal of pi is, whether or not it's a six or a three or an eight, and being surprised when we thought it was a nine when it's actually a two. Right now, someone we know could be dying in a car crash. We might step outside today, decide what the hell I'm gonna play the lottery at the gas station and end up picking the numbers that makes us multi-millionaires. Somewhere past the illusions and concepts of our world which we build up around us, is a pattern to it all that isn't even really a pattern, since it never repeats. This is all very much beyond us. We'll never know. None of us ever will. And there's never been any reason to get all jihad with other people about this bullshit.
There is no such thing as time, but there are such a thing as clocks.
Sometimes it feels like it intervenes in my life, the universe, this massive equation. Accidentally, perhaps, or perhaps not. Like recently.
There's just so much I haven't written about here. The circumstances behind the universe's intervention aren't worth getting into very much: somebody hurt me in a way that I thought I was either too wise, too cynical or just plain too old to get screwed up like that over anyone ever again. It had been years since someone had burdened themselves to work as hard as they did to disable my assorted little personal tripwires and alarms and get under my skin, only to turn around once their hard work was finished to trash everything within reach. The curious thing is, and something I still don't fully understand, I totally let it happen. I told her how to do it. Of course it was a woman. And I don't mean that it's only women who are capable of being so heartless. Absolutely not. Men can be worse, if anything. It's just that the only group of people I've ever wanted to sleep with were women. That's all I'm saying.
I was very upset about this for a couple of days or so after I knew it was over, so upset that I just kind of wandered around aimlessly, and bumped into things, and lost the ability to make complete sentences. Otherwise I think, at least I want to, that I took the high road with all this. It's rare that I actually do that in any situation. Only one other friend of mine knows maybe 50% of everything that happened, and the only reason I told her was because she was pestering me about it over several days until I finally gave in. And once I heard the words that were coming out of my mouth, they became that much more real, and what occurred to me before my story was even finished was that this person who hurt me didn't even matter anymore.
Way too much can bottle themselves up in our minds and our hearts, nuances of situations we regret ever having lived through replayed over and over again until we accidentally assign way more meaning than what they ever deserve. I don't hate this person, and I don't mean her any ill will, but she's awful: self-centered, dishonest, gold-digging, materialistic, self-loathing without giving a damn who else might end up going down in flames with her. Over a lot of thinking and cigarettes and diet soda, underneath a flagpole on a warm April afternoon, I realized that I'm glad she hurt me. I'm a very fortunate man. If it hadn't happened she would have ended up ruining my life. Without that day I learned just how little respect for me she actually had, eventually finding that out would have been stretched over a period of months or even years while repeating life's lessons that I had, admittedly, already learned before. Whatever benefits there may have been to the situation aren't worth taking such a huge step backward to have them, especially at this point in my life. It's the universe's work. It's the only thing I can attribute it all to.
Fucking A. You know?
So I've found other things to get me upset, instead. Like maybe I've grown too eccentric to ever have a happy relationship in the first place, and how this could prove itself irreversible. Like how I feel trapped in my job but without a bachelor's degree this may be the best I'm capable of, the Catch-22 of needing more money than I make just so I can make more money. Or how I've seen so many beautiful people, both inside and out, waste away to nothing (or even worse) because they ultimately couldn't deal with their shit and I'm still seeing this happen right in front of my eyes and although the times are different and the soundtracks are different now and the fashions change with every passing year, nothing ever truly changes.
You can find me at the office between 8am to 5pm, Monday through Friday, sometimes doing actual work but mostly just wisecracking with other folks and maybe only eluding to what bothers me here and there. And then I go home and do things like learn how to speak French, or read up about why yeast is used for baking bread, going for a run in hopes of successfully scaling the hill known only to be as "Big Bertha", building furniture out of strange things, trying to talk to my cat. I've removed her phone numbers from my directory and deleted the couple of pictures I took of her when she was riding a horse a few months ago, in a small-town parade, on a bitterly cold day for no other reason than to just support her and all the great things I really loved that she did. I tried to make a pissaladiere the other day using whole-wheat flour and now I wonder what would happen if I replaced the carmelized onions with sweet red pepper, and the anchovies with cold smoked salmon, but keep the black olives because black olives are awesome. I'd probably be dead if it weren't for black olives. I only ate a quarter of the original pie and threw the rest away.
The crust is the most difficult part to make successfully and the easiest to ruin. To start out I emptied the baker's yeast into a bowl of warm water to see if it was still alive and therefore, able to be used for baking or rather, maybe not to see if they were alive but whether or not they could be killed. After a few minutes the yeast was foaming up and clotting the water, dying, and that's how I knew it would be okay to add the flour and work with it to form a pizza dough.
I looked at it for a little while longer, though, before I did that. I wondered how the yeast must have felt about all this, and for a moment I felt a small regret. Not for very long, but just enough.