serenity now

 It's weird to be home, as it is always weird to be home after leaving adventism. My reaction is usually just to shut down and get through it and this extra medical stuff with my mom (she's recovering well so far) provokes a baseline anxiety level which also shuts me down, so I guess the net effect is I am doing the necessary to help my mom and stay positive and otherwise my mind is just anxiety static white noise.

Which is unfortunate, because living in neutral with a smooth brain broadcasting static has been the solution to my problems, a tactic that has not worked out well for me. To fully mix the metaphor, I left Adventism's orbit and shot out into space, apparently hoping I'd fall within the gravitational pull of another belief system or identity in another million years or so, without doing a quick double-check on the average human lifespan.

So here i am, dealing with very real shit, completely unprepared, having made a point of not preparing myself for anything the last couple decades realizing that maybe this is why people end up finding communities and partners so that they have someone's hand to squeeze when things get scarier.

The adventist community is and is not my community. I will always understand it, it will always be a part of me, but I don't share the belief system and feel an active urge to run when the convo turns religious (for a wide variety of very good reasons), so even here I am mostly facilitating my mom's community as they reach out to help or support her, but I am not directly participating myself. I am skimming the top of the adventist bubble, helping where i can. 

And the only person really appropriate to talk to about a lot of this would be a partner, which I don't have and have not even tried to have for the greater part of a decade, and i have slowly withdrawn from a lot of my social circles, catastrophically so during covid, and as it turns out I need my space but I don't need or like to be in another solar system.* 

Anyway, I need to change if I don't want it to be this way any time shit gets real. I don't like this society much but I need to find some kind of identity and purpose regardless, and hopefully a community, and hopefully a partner (or, less likely but still within the realm of possibility) partners. 

When I was younger and on the smart kid track I thought I was destined for great things, but frankly I'm not sure great things are something I'm ever going to be interested in doing. As I get older, the simple life seems more than fine and I realize, very much to my surprise, that really what I care about is being part of a community where I feel comfortable and where I belong, and the real issue here is I just haven't found that yet. And while I do have good friends whom I love dearly, modern day life has scattered us to the four winds and I don't think my "hey, let's all live on a commune" pitch is going to go over too well.

Meanwhile, I am sitting here thinking while my mother naps and recovers from her surgery and I realize I need to do more but all I hear is this anxiety static. So I tell myself I can't really do anything about it at the moment, (I am not really going out too much to reduce potential disease vectoring for a post-op patient), but hasn't that been what I've been telling myself for 8 years? I give myself too many excuses for doing a lot more nothing.

Anyway, my brain is static, but what I AM doing is getting on the exercise bike in the garage and some basic exercises (it's far too hot to go outside much) and slowly cranking back the sleep schedule. I have come to the truly regrettable conclusion that if I start exercising I will probably think and feel better. Although, I am still prone to staying up late as a way of avoiding adventism I am finding, so that's a work in progress.

Anyway, something's stirring. This sucks, and I don't like what I made of my life or myself, but it's nothing anyone else can change. I keep hoping I'll have some kind of epiphany that clears away the static, but I don't think it works like that. the culmination of a series of choices is only going to be corrected by a series of different choices.

I think I'm just going to try and keep writing until either there's less static or the ideas get more coherent. So, you know, business as usual for this blog.** I'm sorry and you're welcome.

*I think we're up to four half-assed metaphors.

** should all this be done in an offline journal? Probably!

An unbiased chronicle of complicated matters

In the beginning, God hovered over the surface of the water. Well, not THE beginning, if you want to get all technical about it. For quite some time matter had been spinning, orbiting, condensing, expanding, and shooting truly offensive nocturnal emissions of noise and light into the void where anyone could see it. Except there wasn't anyone to see it, it just kind of happened and that was that. It had begun, but so what?

After several billion years of this, the measurement of one orbit of one planet of one star out of countless gazillions, something peered in from just outside space, with curious and envious eyes. Had a being been there and attuned to the right wavelengths and vibrations and other woo woo bullshit, they might have seen the Breach. The sense of something nearby but infinitely far away suddenly pressed up against the universal membrane and then something like a tiny pink tentacle poking through above one planet orbiting one star in one galaxy.

Had this neutral observer continued to look, they would have seen it rapidly expand downward until it hovered just over the face of the water. Ever so gently drifting down into this filthy amino soup until contact was made and something was imparted. Exchanged. Tiny tendrils of life seeping outwards from the God appendage, until eventually oceans were covered in a luminous net of information streaming back and forth to and from the Great Tentacle in the Sky.

Matter, caught in this net of foreign influence, began to jiggle and wiggle and recombine and interact in increasingly  complicated and filthy ways, which led to more matter and more complicated matter and quickly spiraled well beyond the limits of good taste and sportsmanship. But they did and so they could and they could and so they did and the web of of tendrils connecting matter to the God Appendage, which  someone with an obsessive need to label everything might call "the Web of Life",  effortlessly kept pace, spinning from one to two and from two to more and then later to a whole hell of a lot more. And while there wasn't anything resembling thought happening the general vibe was that what happened in the primordial ocean STAYED in the primordial ocean, except for the bits the Great Tentacle sucked greedily in into the Breach.

Of course, it wasn't all fun and games. The wiggling would eventually stop and the information the tendril would withdraw and return to the network that fed the Great Tentacle, returning what had passed down back up the chain, back through the Breach and outside of what would eventually come to be known as spacetime. But matter wiggled against matter, creating more matter, and they all got a bit fatter and the party wiggled on.

As matter found new shapes to wiggle into it gained a impression, and then over quite a long time a sense, a sort of general vibe, an awareness, and eventually what you might finally call a sort of consciousness, at least sometimes. Kinda. I guess. 

As luck would have it, over the same period of time it had refined the wiggling appendages through trial and error, first as tendrils in homage to the Great Web and then fins, and flippers, and so on. In a truly shocking coincidence, the first bit of complicated matter, a creature you might say, to develop legs also happened to be the first to develop a sense of shame.

Disgusted with the absolutely depraved nature of life in those swinging seas, the first creature took its first tentative steps on land. Unfortunately, it had not had the good sense to develop lungs first, so back into those wretched waves it went. But still the proof of concept was sound, and eventually the wet little hedonists wiggled onto the rocks and sand, late to the party more sedate forms of life with a stronger sense of propriety had started several millennia earlier. It didn't matter, a party's a party.

And so the tendrils of the Great Tentacle in the Sky covered the earth, sending increasingly complicated and steady streams of information to and from the Breach. A vast consciousness had enmeshed itself in an active but sterile universe and established a beachhead. And it was good. If you were the kind of pervert who was into that kind of thing.

Crunch, Crunch, Crunch

 One of my earliest memories is mortal terror. Lying in my bed, in the dark, in Phoenix, Arizona, listening to the thump, thump, thump of my pulse as my ear lay against my pillow. It came with a clear mental image or a feeling of walking in the dark in the snow. Each pulse beat a crunch, crunch, crunch as I walked.  I couldn't bear to hear it.

This must have been shortly after I learned about mortality because I was consumed with anxiety to listen to it (and if I am being honest, other nights since). This was me, this was my life, this fragile thing, this crunch, crunch, crunch through the snow, alone in the dark, walking towards nothing. That big nothing.

I called for my mother, who assured me it would be a long time from now and prayed with me, as good mothers do.

Five nights ago, I hugged my mother good night and told her I loved her and felt her sob quietly, in mortal terror of surgery the next day. And I have every night since sat with her in the ICU, as she faces her own walk through the snow.

I don't know what we walk towards, but we don't walk alone.