Further Down the Hole

So, seeing as how I paved the way for “posts I told myself I shouldn’t do anymore,” here I am about to post the first things off the top of my head when I’m in a mood and have consumed objectively too many substances to be making rational decisions. The anxiety has gotten to the point that needing to write and post something outweighs the hesitation of posting something crappy and desperate.

I’m not in a good place. This is not necessarily a new or unfamiliar situation for me… but on a larger scale, I feel I am running out of alternative options to try in some areas of stagnation. Things I was depending on as a part of my future appear to be rather features of my past… and I find myself trying to get motivated to move in… some direction I can’t name or point to, anymore. I don’t see anywhere that my desires mesh with those of someone outside myself. I feel more alone than I have ever been… and it is those with whom I have the most invested that I have come to feel most alienated from.

The life evaluation system I’ve been developing places an important focus on the actions we take, the actual differences we make in the real world: the plans we move forward, the goals we achieve, the joy and meaning we find, all arise from our interactions with the world outside of us. It’s getting harder for me to see the world outside of me, which makes me more unsure of and less confident in my decisions, which leads to hesitancy and lack of motivation in action. I seem to have discovered the first epic flaw in this method: you have to have some idea where you are going in order to aim towards it.

There’s an aspect of development that has revealed itself through my system… I realize I have not done a good job of relating this concept yet, but getting it out here, now, in whatever crudeness of form might be positive. The tl;dr for prerequisites of this paragraph goes like this: A person must be judged based on an understanding of the three A’s: Aspirations, Actions, and Archive; we do not create our Aspirations, we develop them in response to our upbringing and environment; religion and politics are the two main factors contributing to our Aspirations; we all have a religion that arises when we understand and confront the reality that we are tiny and insignificant in an infinite and resolute universe and we must have an ideology concerning our place in that vastness; we all have a politics that arises when we understand an confront the reality that we are individuals in a composite universe, that there are as many other religions we must deal with as there are humans we encounter… and that we are issued, informed, and often indoctrinated in both a religion and a politics before we have developed to the point of recognizing and asking the underlying questions these institutions were created to address.

We got put on a team, we were taught the plays, we had the “bad guys” identified for us… before we knew the rules, or, really, even understood the ramifications of what we were agreeing to play.

Apologies if this all seems like rambling. It comes down to this for me, at this point: I have found myself, in the name of supporting a religion or a politics that I have been associated with as long as I can remember, on no more perceptible foundation than one might support a favorite sports team, supporting actions and/or ideas that clearly have no place within the recognized framework of that religion or politics.

In case this is hard to relate to, I’ll touch on a story I’ve mentioned before. As a member of a church with an aging-to-the-point-of-extinction congregation located across the street from an elementary school, it felt a little weird when the pastor decided that we should hold our Sunday service on the lawn in front of the church… and in front of that elementary school that, even on the weekend, attracted students and parents to the lovely and well-equipped campus. This… was not a theology-based decision. This was advertising, plain and simple. I clearly remember the family driving to the first “special outdoor” service… with no organ on the lawn, it was my guitar providing the musical aspect of worship, so we were cramped in the car with the PA equipment I was toting… and my younger son completely innocently asked why we were going to the trouble of having church outside, this summer. I perhaps had not realized the depth of my own reaction to the circumstances until I heard myself reply: “Because Jesus said ‘when you worship, you should yell LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME as loudly as you can.'”

I mean, we all “know” and “understand” what marketing means to business… but somewhere along the line a lot of people missed the fact that the question religion was supposed to answer does not concern popular acceptance or financial success. Religion is simply not a business, and it can’t possibly be… but American Capitalism requires that, if American Religion is to exist, it shall exist as a business.

And we wonder why religion seems to fuck up so many people’s brains. We are looking to it for the answer to a question… that is simply not addressed in the popular religions offered and consumed… which must be profitable businesses to even exist as an option.

But the thing that makes me so hopeless… the reality that ensures that my dreams will never take form outside my head… is that people do seem to understand, at some level, the importance of religion and politics, even if they seem willing to sacrifice a concept of WHAT is right for the comfort of WHO is right, and fighting under the flag of a popular leader rather than a learned or wizened or reasonable leader.

There are absolutely good-hearted, well-meaning, positively-intentioned people… that run roughshod over the heart and soul of their historical teachings… because it is currently popular, currently encouraged, currently SOP, in this dollar driven world… to do those things, to find a way to classify what Christ would have called “your brothers” as outsiders, infidels, and the enemy… so as to deny them rights, success, life, humanity.

How do you even talk to these people?

“Look, the things you are doing fly in the face of the things you are saying are important to you” has not worked, for me. There is a disconnect. “Can’t we look at ourselves objectively to be better,” has never once failed to elicit the response “if you don’t like it, go be the other guy.” Republicans hate me when I go this route. Democrats despise me when I take this tack. No one, absolutely no one in America, wants to look at themselves and ask “what can I do better,” there is only the Religious Political drive to win, to make our one opinion the correct one, and to punish anyone who failed to be born and raised in the ways we were.

Just so you know, I hate all of you, at this point. I mean, I hate myself, too, but at least I seem to be making some allowance that I am the on who could be wrong, that I might need to be the one to question my background, that I might have to change some revered learnings in order to Get Along With The World.

Seriously, I haven’t seen even one of you fuckers ask yourselves these questions. Moreover, I haven’t met a single one of you who will even acknowledge that this is a reasonable question to be considered. I have not voted Republican or Democrat for more than a decade, yet I have managed to alienate both my Republican and Democrat friends… merely by imagining myself one of them and asking how we make ourselves better.

No one seems to want to consider “how can I make myself better?” There’s a whole shitload of people saying “you have to treat me better,” or “you have to think better,” unilaterally, and using legislation and capital to try to enforce their Aspirations on others… everyone thinks the solution is too force everyone else to think like they do.

It’s broken. It’s hopeless. There is no one pursuing the goal of a politics that acknowledges and appreciates the infinity of religions represented by the human race… only the pursuit of destroying every other viewpoint, every other background, every other opinion, but your own… and only for the reason that it is the one you are familiar with, not through any study, comparison, or thoughtfulness.

I am ready to leave this existence because I feel totally alone in confronting the world and its inhabitants this way. I have found no aligned souls, no copacetic thought processes, with which to share this journey… and among those that this life has brought closest to me, friends, family, my spouse… I feel distinctly unwelcome and unwanted for the questions I consider.

Does anyone feel this? Is anyone else fighting this fight? Am I the only one… am I the crazy one, the wrong one… the one that needs to leave for the good for everyone else?