[754] Cough

I don't think there is an amount of “civilizing” that I could go through that would ever erase my underlying need to lose my shit.

I guess that's a topic to start with.

I like obstruction. I like absurdity. I like random. I want whatever you expect to be something of a left turn and force you to sit on the kind of precarious edge that I do with regard to my expectations. I'm well aware the world absolutely can and does operate in predictable ways for years if not lifetimes for some people. I want to be prepared for shit to pop off any moment.

I told my friend not too long ago that with every passing day, I'm not just an atheist, but I believe in a god less and less. Each moment seems to insist on the absolute absurdity of existence in and of itself, and the relative freedom I have to respond to it as I please doesn't for a second endear me to some supernatural being grading my behavior on some ethereal scale.

This seems like the point.

Think about it. I work in a field where I get to hear daily about how family members fuck about with their children. God doesn't chime in on their paperwork. They know, like you know, somewhere in the back of your head there's a reminder that God isn't watching and you're probably going to get away with it. That's, of course, the conversation I'm interested in. What happens and why do you make the decision otherwise when there are no rules? That's my, and seemingly every other atheist's reality, so why not society at large? I don't need eternal damnation to prevent me from touching up a child, nor do I ignore that for the vast majority of human history we were perfectly fine with marrying off adolescents like a business transaction. How do you think that history should go forward but with honest conversation exposing details that feel “icky?”

Maybe I just feel old. I don't want to do obscene “stand out” things, but I'm hard-pressed to pretend my nature isn't contrarian. Something or another of my identity is involved in “the shit” and poor good story but bad otherwise decision making. But god forbid I force it. Obscene for obscenity's sake looks bad at any age. Even as I adopt the pace and tone of my domesticators, I can't help but believe in my capacity to burn it all down on a whim. I need to know that, worry about that, and believe that about myself. I'm never along for the ride.

Even tonight, I'm not as drunk as I thought I “should” be. I'm not as belligerent and angry in some incoherent blog as I thought I was gearing up for. I'm just annoyed I have the hiccups and have run out of anti-inflammatories that are going to speak to my budding headache in the morning. I'm not excited or amped up. I didn't have a conversation worth telling you about. I'm not even in some “escape” from the drudgery of my “training” for the new job. I'm probably as arbitrary a variable as I was a sixth grader in February. I have no memories of that time, and you have no reason to regard me now for the same reasons.

I started writing though because I still maintain an indignant posture. I'm not the one to be surprised by some cliché mid-life crisis. I don't cry over friends I simply haven't bothered to call but we arguably would have nothing to say to each other for months or years at a time anyway. I think it's just that I'm too smart and I figured it all out a long time ago. You have to be all about it right now. You have to be honest. You have to insist and try and sacrifice and get it all for the memories and moments as they come, because it's all right now, and it's all over as soon as it comes. I'm here, where I always am, right now, floating through memories and trying to be more let down by the bar scene than I even care to invest, perpetually looking for what I've already had in abundance. If you don't recognize and retain, it only gets worse.