God's corner

There's a quote that I heard that I would open with if I could remember it. But I can't. Sorry, 3rd grade writing class.

The gist of it is this: religion readjusts its doctrine constantly to account for new scientific discoveries. The opposite process has never happened and never will.

So what we end up with is a one-way street that allegedly leads to the disproving of all religion. We will keep making new scientific discoveries that will improve our understanding of the universe. Maybe even beyond our universe, if that's a thing that turns out to actually mean anything. The more we learn, the less we have to explain with "Well, a wizard God did it."

How did the human race come to be, you ask? A couple hundred years ago we might have said God was bored and wanted some people to chill with. Now we understand evolution. We push religion a little farther into its corner.

So you might be inclined to extrapolate. You might say "well clearly that's going to keep happening and one day we'll understand everything and the corner where God is sitting getting lonelier and lonelier will eventually be completely overtaken by scientific progress and the corner will be gone and we'll all be very happy to finally be completely sure there's no heaven and no God. Thank Science!"

Oof, bad news, though. Or, in my opinion, good news. The universe won't live forever. You certainly won't. Do we really have time to Solve science? Do you really think so? Or will there always be something elusive that we simply cannot solve with the limited capacity of our minds? I'm gonna go with the latter.

Wanna know why? Because it would be SUPER shitty if there was no God. I'm not asking for an omnipotent being interacting with me. I don't want some dude on a cloud judging me. That would be the actual worst. Honestly, we don't need to understand what God is. We don't need to understand shit.

But somewhere in that little corner, I don't think God is going anywhere. There will always be something we don't understand, and it's kind of nice to be able to believe that there's some force that will always be beyond our understanding. Something that leaves a little mystery and wonder in our lives.

Don't give that up. Somewhere smaller than the molecules that make up the keyboard I'm typing this on; smaller than the atoms that make up those molecules; beyond electrons and gluons and bosons and charm quarks there's a little teeny tiny banana applying for a job as a telephone repairman.

And you know what? He got the job. You got the job, buddy.

Dr. Fakedoktor Episode 1

DF: We've performed a CBC
Patient: A complete blood count?
DF: [beat] Uh, sure
P: How does it look?
DF: Well, there's simply not enough bloods
P: Not enough?
DF: Not nearly enough. You'll have to get several more bloods. At least a dozen.
P: Do you do that here?
DF: [considers]...Nurse Patsy how are we doing on bloods?
Nurse Patsy: Fresh out, sir
DF: I'm afraid we're fresh out of the stuff.
P: I see. Well I'll show myself out.
DF: Let Patsy walk with you. The freight elevator is a little difficult to operate alone. Pasty?
NP: Yes, doctor.

Commercial Script First Draft for my Campaign for Governor

Hi, my name is Kevin Barboro, and I'm a regular guy just like you. I like to pretend I care about politics when it's convenient, but mostly I'm just trying to get by. But probably unlike you, I also have a superiority complex and an insatiable lust for influence and status in high society.

So no, I can't promise you I'll do everything I can with the good of this great state in mind. However, I CAN promise you I'll do everything I can do be reelected. And the way the system works, most of that stuff will help or at least not COMPLETELY screw over the state and its people. If you vote for a candidate who is only interested in doing the right thing, he won't be willing to get his hands dirty or sacrifice your well-being! I know that I'm your best choice for Governor because unlike my opponent, I'm handsome and white so you'll feel comfortable putting me in a position of power.

So I hope you'll write in Kevin D. Barboro at the polls. Because a vote for me is a vote for putting my kids through Stanford.

A BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO: Death

Hello, and welcome to being dead! We hope you enjoy your stay at death. We here at death are aware that most people have some common concerns regarding mortality throughout their lives, so here's a brief FAQ to clear some of those things up for you.

Q: When will die?
A: Right now; or very recently.

Q: What happens when you die?
A: This happens. What's happening right now happens.

Q: When I die, will I be in the state that I was when I died, or will I be younger and healthier?
A: You look alright.

Q: Where is heaven/the afterlife
A: Right here.

Q: Will I find love before I die?
A: Well, did you?

Faith

Faith in passion
Faith in motivation
Faith in existence

Believe that even when you can't feel it there is a reason for what you do

Fight

Faith is knowing that someday you'll find what you're looking for

When you don't know what you're looking for, Faith is knowing one day you will

Faith is a muscle. Hone it.

Know that nothing is easy and all satisfaction is earned

Suffering is not comprehensible. It simply is

Faith is looking beyond suffering and wondering

Wonder is the seed of Faith

There's more to say. More ideas to uncover. Dust to be blown away.

Alas

Another day 

an introduction

Let's switch gears for a moment and talk about me.

As I'm writing this, it's 12:25. No, it's 12:22. I don't know, it depends which device you ask among the sea of things I'm surrounded by in this room and in this nice three bedroom house that are all powered by some kind of magical energy that I more or less understand in some useless abstract language some guy created a long time ago. Some other people thought it might be a good idea to pretend they knew what he was talking about so now allegedly we all know this magical invisible shit works that makes tiny tiny little things do other things to other tiny, tiny little things.

Now it's 12:28. My first instinct is to calculate what percentage of a human life 3 minutes is and talk about how I wasted it or some stupid hacky played-out pseudo-nihilistic existential garbage like that. I want to be honest right now, that's why I told you that.

That was a stupid fucking idea.

This whole thing is stupid.

I'm writing this because I was lying in bed waiting for the Klonopin to kick in and wish the Zoloft was doing a better job... you know, Zolofting. I feel two things for the most part, which are anxiety and depression. The ol' Wombo-Combo as I call it. They're the perfect team.

See, when you have an anxiety disorder, you don't, like, get really worried you're gonna be late to stuff.

That's not true at all. I'm lying to you. I said I wanted to be honest and now I'm lying. I guess it wasn't a lie to say I wanted to be honest. I never promised anything.

Yeah, you get worried when you're gonna be late to stuff. Because everybody does. Except Germans. They're always on time for stuff.

CULTURAL HUMORRRRRRR BASED ON VAGUE IMPRESSIONS OF THOSE CULTURES I'VE GOTTEN FROM THE ZEITGEIST (a German word which, like most German words, I do not know the definition for) EDGY STUFF OH MAN

Sorry, that was uncalled for. I do get anxious when I'm gonna be late for stuff. But I also sometimes get anxious when I'm gonna be on time for stuff. Or when there is no stuff. Sometimes I feel anxiety and have to poke around my brain trying to find something to be anxious about. So sometimes I wake up and I feel anxious and I think "I must be anxious because I'm scared of how the day is gonna go" or "I must be anxious because of my lack of other emotions that I should be experiencing." That of course, doesn't make any sense, but emotions are inherently illogical. They're the opposite of logic. Their causation, the chemical processes that "are" them, everything about them is—like the rest of the universe—entirely logical. But when we feel emotion, we lose our grip on logic. This is pretty well-trodden territory. Yes, I'm aware Spock exists. I never said I made any of this shit up.

I'm not gonna expound (hang on I have to google "expound"; I think I'm using it right but I really am not sure) (okay yeah close enough) on that thought any further. It doesn't matter.

The other emotion thing I feel is depression. Depression is not sadness. Again, this is information that already exists. You could and should already know this. If you don't, now you do. That sentence doesn't help you understand much of anything, but it's in your brain now and you can't change that. You have relinquished control of the contents of your mindspace to me and continue to. I know this because you are still reading this. Butt stuff. Now you're thinking about butt stuff. Or at least the words butt stuff. That's close enough.

Depression is, in my experience, emptiness. In many senses of the word. When you're not depressed, you do things. You do these things for reasons. Those reasons are why you do the things you do. It's great.

When you are depressed, you don't do things. You really go out of you way to find some things you can do and you don't do them. You meet girls and get their numbers and you text them and then you stop texting them. You forget why you wanted to text them and you forget what it was like to want to establish a new relationship with another human being and you just can't quite put your finger on why it was that you ever cared about having sex or being in a rock band or writing a book or eating.

Depressed people are the people who ask questions like "why are we here". Healthily-minded (is that how English works?) do not ask these questions because they are too busy feeling satisfaction for having done things and desire to do other things which they intend to derive satisfaction from (don't tell me not to end sentences with prepositions. Do NOT do that). The people who are not depressed are, in a word, right. They are functioning as intended.

Dude, intended by whom? There is no God who had any intention in mind while creating us with intelligent design.

SHUT UP SHUT THE FUCK UP JESUS CHRIST

dude jesus didn't exist religion causes wars

Okay so what do I do about the fact that I don't want to do anything? I still feel happiness sometimes. A woman bought a Diet Pepsi and didn't notice the vending machine (from which she purchased the Diet Pepsi) was going to give her change. I did, so I walked up to her a few feet down the hall and gave it to her. She was overjoyed and incredibly thankful for such a small gesture of thought for the well-being of other people that it made me happy. My chest felt kind of nice and I smiled as I kept walking down the hall. That was nice.

Oftentimes these emotional experiences I have weigh me down more than anything else. That happiness is gone now. I can trace it's memory like a little indent on a page some 20 pages farther down than the one I'm writing on now (in my METAPHORICAL diary of EMOTION) but that will go away and be replaced with other memories of emotions. And for the most part I won't feel any of them and instead be kinda like "whatever".

The reason I'm writing this is because I want to twist these feelings of emptiness and blind anxiety into some kind of meaningful, productive emotion. I want to poke around my brain and find things that make me very angry or very excited or happy and I want to keep those things on my mind more so I can settle into a pattern of feeling instead of just being. I want those feelings to inspire art and to give me something to say on the platform I'm standing on for some stupid reason.

I don't want to be. I want to feel. I want to be inspired and I want that little tiny blurry dream-world at the deepest recesses of my imagination to come into focus and show me what it is I want out of my finite life in this finite universe. Its light shines around a hill like a sunset but I want it to become a sunrise.

Tonight I heard someone tell a roomful of people that he told an internet full of people a long time ago that nothing he accomplished in his career really mattered but that in the process of accomplishing things in his career he had done something that was actually good, which was bringing together people who liked each other and making people happy.

That guy wrote a TV show that really made me happy and feel important, but that's not what mattered to him. That's too abstract, he's too many degrees removed from it for it to make an emotional impact on his psyche. Even if I told him, he would say thanks and try to wrap his brain around me and the other millions of people who he's made happy and he would fail.

If you're a good person and you have people's best intentions at heart, you will make some people's lives better in some visceral, observable way. That's the feeling that keeps me going and it's the only one that really affects me. I wish I could be angry about injustice in the world and I wish I could feel true, true love or infatuation or adoration or attraction or mild interest in a person. I wish I could be sad and I wish I could feel self-actualized or accomplished or competent or able in any way to do anything good. But if I had to pick one emotional reaction to be the only one I felt while interacting with the world, I guess it would be the good feeling I get when other people feel good. That's how we make a society that doesn't need laws or money or crime or poverty.

I suppose, given my nature, that will happen no matter what I do. The mantra of overprivileged white people in their 50's is "do what makes you happy". This has never been the slightest bit comforting to me, as I don't know what makes me happy or what will make me happy in 30 years. So this question of "what the fuck do I do with myself for this pseudo-random allotment of time I've been given" has a pretty simple answer: it just doesn't fucking matter. Do anything, do nothing, no matter what your career path or your literal physical path is you will always do what occurs to you in the moment to be a good idea. Don't do anything you don't want to do and eventually you'll want to do things that will improve your life because your life will be really shitty.

So I've decided here and now that I'm just gonna do whatever the fuck I want and it'll work out because my parents have a lot of money and I'm a reasonably attractive tall-but-not-too-tall heterosexual unusually intelligent twenty-two-year-old man and everything just kind of works out for people like that. Even the ones who are so riddled with depression that they say things like:

"I don't even want to be alive right now, so being awake is a stretch"

Fuck that guy. Fuck him because he's gonna be just fine and he's not gonna get AIDS or die of starvation or be sent to a labor camp for disagreeing with the North Korean government.

But, you know, also give him a break. None of that is his fault. It's not his fault that he isn't spending all his time "giving back" (implying some sentient force "gave" to him in the first place such that he could "give back" to the world which for some ungodly reason handed him a life completely devoid of warlords abducting his children). He can't, though he has tried, wrap his brain around the fact that there are people who are pretty bummed out for very legitimate reasons elsewhere in the world and right down his street. It doesn't register as a real thing in his brain and that's just the way things are.

So I've answered some questions that nobody asked. But although I told you why I'm writing this, I haven't told you why I'm putting it on the internet.

The reason is I'm a narcissist.

HONESTY.