As a writer with a PR side (i.e. I want people to like me) I find I am constantly having to edit the truth.
Telling the truth, as the adage goes, has its cost. The cost is total. Totally decimating, to yourself, that is…
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©️2019 Veekwriter All Rights Reserved
The existentialists were right. From King Solomon to Kierkegaard to Camus and arguably Dawkins, there is no real meaning to life. We’re all a bunch of sentient life forms who are organically intelligent enough to build tall buildings, to bring out beauty in the dullest of sunflowers, and to speak rhetorically enough about things that most apes wouldn’t understand.
So what are we to glean from this “mid-life crisis”? Other than that death levels us all alike to dust, rich and poor, celebrities and peons, academics and workers, it is this: Everything we do, no matter how good or great, will be insignificant 80 years from now. Sure we remember Sir Winston Churchill’s and Martin Luther King Jr.’s awe-inspiring speeches as they reverberate through the millennia, but they’re dead. And so shall we be, given time, war, famine, pestilence, or accident.
The fact is, there is nothing left for us to do, regardless of how inspired or delusional we may be, but to realize that everything we do do is a distraction from this boring existence where nothing happens unless we make it so. In short, we are entertaining ourselves until we die. It’s that simple. Old or young, no one is exempt. Some of us may have a better grasp of verbal skills useful for public speaking, or bigger hands for musical instruments, or more insight than the average person. Ultimately, none of that matters. If nothing matters, how do we take into account what we do every day? Well, it had better be fun or helpful, other than the obligatory dues to collect a paycheque and pay our bills and taxes, or else, it’s a waste of a life.
Wait a minute, then, isn’t living itself a waste of a life? So what shall we say then? Without acknowledging a Higher Guide, we flounder. We might as well succumb to hedonism or, if suffering–stoicism. But make no mistake, for those of us who remain unguided, everything we go through daily adds up to a lifetime collection of meaningless events. So, if we are able, why not enjoy ourselves after a day’s work and having paid off our daily dues? It seems there is not much else anyway.
No, don’t stick your head in a gas oven. This essay is a little divertimento meant to encourage you to not to be afraid of enjoying life as you see fit and as long as it doesn’t impinge on someone else’s rights. There is no formula, but there are opportunities. At the risk of sounding Salinger-like (which I wouldn’t mind at all), be prepared to grab that brass ring. It piques one’s enjoyment of that merry-go-round life to a sense of euphoria—and euphoria is probably the best distraction of all. It comes like a rare, blue moon and some people never really experience it, but when it comes, go for it. As long as it is free of self-sabotage, it is a free gift from Life’s randomness.
©️2019 Veekwriter All Rights Reserved
Hello Readers,
Thank you for stopping by to take a look at my blog. I’ve moved away from political op ed to a failed literary writing style, and onto social commentary.
I hope I can entertain you, if only for a few minutes, while I discuss some rather serious topics with as much humour as I can muster in my blinding rage.
Unfortunately for some of my adversaries, I am not blind enough. Enjoy.
Put it this way: Nobody likes the crazies. People hate what they see as weakness and fear what they cannot understand. THAT is the human condition. Every book that is written, every sermon given, every enterprising idea or gainful employment excludes the psychos whom they berate for being lazy and, at the same time, will not hire, embrace, or address because psychotics are too dysfunctional to be competent.
So began my wretched descent, unprepared for the depths to which I would plummet, and for the rejection from which I would suffer with the constancy of Paul Simon’s deepest lamentations. In essence, we crazies are invariably lonely.
The criminals figured that out long before the merchants and politicians had. Once in a halfway house, they seek mentally ill females who serve both as moneybags with their dependable disability cheques, and as comfort women who will be sex slaves without even being self-aware enough to realize they’re being taken for a ride.
Merchants like to penetrate and push the envelope of this market. Banks are included in this, being the quintessential merchant class. Commercial merchants are testing the market knowing full well we live below the poverty line. Banks simply shamelessly and aggressively push credit cards with $10,000 limits–knowing even better than full well that we live below the poverty line. Way below the poverty line.
Pastors usually try to appeal to the masses, and when coming to a conflicting part of their otherwise smooth and harmonious sermon, they make the disclaimer that “of course, this doesn’t apply to those who have a physiological or brain chemistry problem”. And they just carry on addressing their sermon, more distinctly then, to the “well” members of the congregation.
This would be all fine and good, except during refreshments these good religious people come up to you to engage in conversation, inevitably asking you “And what do you do for work?” You decide to be honest as any good religious person would, and say you don’t work (because nobody wants to hire a psychotic) because of a disability. They edge away a little bit and say you don’t look disabled. No, it’s a mental disability. Oh. And then, they make an excuse to wash their hands from the sticky bun they had just gorged on, naught to return.
It makes you want to bury your head in the sands of the LoTR trilogy, or rather, if more intense than usual, the HGttG trilogy in four parts. Nothing beats a new digitial watch than a friendly and comedic social commentary.
Even the local crisis line people don’t want to deal with you. Though knowing full well your psychiatrist ditched you and you’re obviously suffering, you’re limited to one 14-minute call a day. Second calls are cut short in the first two minutes with the condescending reminder you have already used up your daily quota.
The more they marginalize you the more they isolate you. The more isolated you are, the weirder you get—only proving their point that you should be shunned in the first place. So, TV is your only faithful friend. It’s almost always friendly (or you change the channel); it can’t reject you; and in the event it is discriminatory, you write in to the omnibus-people. Canada has standards after all, eh?
Or so we like to pose as for.
©️Vic Young 2019 All Rights Reserved
Sometimes, there are no happy endings. Just unravelled tassels that Time simply tosses aside and forgets. It’s as if this universe were a child’s toy, and whomever is in control is making child’s play. The cosmos is his finger painting, the Child is playing, indifferent to the trillions of life forms in its grasp. He is remorseless and unfeeling, not because he is psychopathic, but because he hasn’t learned to be considerate. That is our life. Tossed about at the mercy of a Cosmic Toddler. We hurt when he pulls our leg off, and he, mystified with how in heaven’s name it goes back on, throws it into yet another bin. Bins of broken toys, toys that don’t matter. Toys that don’t feel because the Toddler isn’t aware of those feelings. Hence, in his reality, no harm has been done. The toy has been rendered into trash.
Meanwhile, on Earth, our existence is understatedly fragile. Feelings, the blessing and bane of our lives, are all some people have, whether they have all their worldly possessions in a 8,000 square foot mansion, or in a rusty shopping cart.
Along the way, we meet people who inspire us with their compassion and unaffected manners. It is not easy to hold on to them. They slip away, they grow old, they lose their minds, they die. This whole exposé of life is, “You’re born; you eat shit; you die,” and, yet…
These other people, so beautiful and alive, so transient in our lives. We want to embrace them, tell them our appreciation—strangers, two ships who pass by in the night kind of deal, make our lives hopeful, worth living, worth dreaming about. Sometimes they are viewed six million times on YouTube, to which you have contributed thirty-seven views in the first week. Sometimes, they are people who open the door for a you as you struggle with a baby tram and two toddlers, one on each side. These ordinary souls are our heroes and heroines. But they don’t stick around. They are shy, reserved, afraid. They want connection, but are only able to express it through gorgeous moments and good deeds that they soon forget as they quickly walk off in another direction, wholly unassociated and alone in their world.
What makes us this way? What makes us tick? Why do we continue punishing ourselves? If it were fathomable, even shrinks admit they’d be made redundant. The whole job of a shrink is to help you distract and entertain yourself until you die. The problems of the mind, and the knots of the heart, are, at best, creative. It seems that troubled people must go through a kind of growing through, not growing up, but through, the tunnel of ageing and the world going on, maturing, making money, having children, being bogged down by the worries of this world, while Time has broken your Watch, and you literally watch the world go by as you tinker with the hobbies you had at 18, incapacitated from being unable to let go. Sometimes, Life is haphazardly indifferent. I am grateful, though I don’t know to Whom, that we are made of better mettle.
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©️2018-2020 Vic Young All Rights Reserved
