Tuesday, April 20, 2010

April 20th is NOT a "holiday"...

I know I'm in the minority, but I tend to take the word "holiday" in its literal interpretation, as a "holy day."  There is something special about that day that separates it from the rest of the regular calendar.  We give it a higher estimation in our reckoning of our time here in these bodies.  Also, "holidays" are always celebrations of something Good.  The Bad things we commemorate with "memorials" or "rememberances", but never with holy days.

And because of my peculiarly literal take on the concept, I have always had a hard time celebrating 4/20 as a holy day, even when I was regularly meditating at the altar of The Bowl, The Bong, and The Cannabinoid.  It just seems so...base, to me.  It'd be like having an "Eat Junk Food and Jerk Off" day and calling it "holy" or "special".  Just seems wrong, somehow.  Admittedly, of all the different ways of poisoning ourselves for pleasure, that really is the only one that could even come close to deserving it's own holiday.  (Can you imagine a Smack, Crack & Crystal holiday?  How about a Nicotine day?  Though I do tend to always be sure to have a drink on Repellation Day.)  ;-)  It's definitely the least of all of those evils, but it's still technically an evil, so why would we want to celebrate it?

But I still do celebrate it.  (Though I celebrate in a different way now than I used to.)  I celebrate it because a "hippie holiday" of getting stoned and laughing your tits off is SO MUCH BETTER than all of the other things this day represents to so many people.

Hitler was born on April 20th, and so this is a holy day, indeed, to thousands and thousands of monsters with human faces who poison our species with violence and hatred.  Taking their holiday away from them, as the catholics took xmas from the heathens, can only be a Goodness.

Two of those monsters in particular chose this day eleven years ago to stage a massacre at a Colorado high school.  They brutally murdered children, and they had fun doing it.  And they were just children themselves.  And they chose this day specifically because it was Hitler's birthday AND because it was the "hippie holiday;" they wanted to attack the "peace & Love" crowd that they despised so much, and they wanted to re-brand the day and turn it into something horrifying.  And, unfortunately, they succeeded in doing just that for hundreds of families.  I don't want to give them the satisfaction of doing it to me, too.

So, no, it's not a true "holiday."  But I don't think that matters much, in the end.  Taking a day of tragedy and horror and turning it into a celebration of joy, even self-destructive joy, is still a Goodness, and one that I will continue to take part in, for as long as I can.

Friday, April 16, 2010

"Sicilians are great liars..."

Oddly enough, "Drug addict" and "President of the United States" share one thing in common. Both titles, once earned, are yours forever, and can never be disowned.

I am a drug addict. Whether I use or not, I will always be a drug addict. The only difference between me and the sad sacks you see on shows like Intervention, is that I'm good at it. I am a smart, and successful drug addict. Those unfortunate people are ignorant, and weak, and they just seem to run headlong off the deep-end as quickly as possible. They don't have the knowledge or the will to keep from being completely consumed by their addiction, so they just go straight up in flames. It's not their fault (usually); it's just how things turned out for them. But I'm smart, and strong. And I have the intuitive understanding of addiction that can only come from being raised by a family of drug addicts. I am a GREAT fucking drug addict.

I'm still killing myself. Obviously. No different from those pathetic zombies on the TV; not in the end. But see, I know what I'm doing. I know how to make it laaaast. I know how to keep it from killing me too quickly, so that I can continue to use. Make it take as long as possible so that I can suck every single molecule of meaningless, masturbatory bio-pharmacological bliss out of it before it inevitably kills me.

THAT is the mark of a great addict. Exerting only just enough control to keep it going, to make it last, but not enough to stop. "We called him 'Mother Superior' on account of the length of his habit." Too much control and you quit, and the fun's over, and you live a long, boring life of wishing you could get high; too little, and you end up dying of the DT's in the gutter before you ever even get to live.

I want to live as long as possible. But I also want to feel good as much of that life as I possibly can. I know, in the end, that I'll die screaming. But will I regret the choices that brought me there? I mean, honestly - doesn't everyone scream when they die? Still, the greatest addict who ever lived, was still just a fucking junkie when you get right down to it. How am I any different?

We're defined by how we live, not how we die. (Unless you end up winning a Darwin award.) I never felt a need to be great. Never had any desire to change the world, or "leave my mark" for future generations. I just want to live my life with as little pain, and as much pleasure, as I possibly can. And so, every day, I get up and walk that line between living well and dying young.

I'm not sure where it's leading me, but the view is breath-taking. On both sides.

Thursday, April 1, 2010

If it doesn't hurt, it isn't Love...

If someone cannot devastate you, then you don't Love them.

Ok, you might love them a little, as in liking-them-more-than-anyone-else, but you don't really *Love* them. Not reflexively-die-for-them Love. Not opening-yourself-completely or trusting-absolutely Love. That kind of Love, what all the poets call "true" Love, can only exist along with the possibility of extreme emotional distress.

Once you lay yourself open like that, losing yourself completely in someone else, then you have handed that person the power to completely devastate you. That's a huge part of what Love is: laying your heart in someone else's hands and trusting that they won't hurt it. And when they give you their heart in return? Well then you can begin to understand how a bunch of balding monkeys rutting in the dirt could come up with an idea like "Heaven."

Or, less poetically, Loving someone is, in large part, about giving them a portion of the responsibility for your emotional well-being, and trusting that they won't abuse that power or otherwise fuck it up and hurt you. And the totally absurd thing is, THEY ALWAYS DO.

It's inevitable. There's no way to avoid it. Once we fall in Love, that person IS, inevitably, at some point, going to torture us in ways that we could never have imagined before. It's not necessarily intentional. (Sometimes it is. Some people are assholes. Hell, some fish are assholes. Just simply a fact of life as sure as the turning of worlds.) It's just that, as with pretty much everything other than "food good" and "pain bad", we aren't born knowing what to do. If we're lucky, by the time we fall in Love we've managed to figure out how to basically work our own hearts without too much difficulty. But how the fuck can we know how to handle someone else's safely? We've never done it before. And everyone's heart is different! There's no way we can get it right on the first shot. We have to learn how to take care of that heart, specifically. And we can't do that without learning what's Right and what's Wrong for that heart. We've got to make mistakes in order to figure out how to NOT make mistakes.

And those learning-mistakes to us, are emotional traumas to the ones we Love; leaving life-long emotional scars in the person we cherish more than any other human being alive. And by Loving them in return, by opening ourselves up to them and making ourselves completely vulnerable and open as only truly-Loving another person absolutely can, we allow them to scar us in the same way. Sometimes worse.

But funny enough, we don't seem to care. We keep putting ourselves in the same situation over-and-over-again, anyways. Ever since we invented the word "Love", we have sought it out obsessively and without reason, and regardless of consequence. Is it just biology? Are we just crazy? Is it something more? Or less? Is it some basic make-up in our psychology that demands to be expressed, or is it simply that the chemicals in our brains that shape our bodies into a particular binary form somehow demand to be exercised? (I.e., testosterone + estrogen = orgasm.) Fuck, I don't know, maybe it's just me. I've been slit-my-wrists, suck-a-gun-barrel miserable for about 80% of the last month because of Her. (If we go back 3-6 months, up that to 90%.) But that other 20%? Oh, gods, what a 20%! There's never been a greater fifth of a whole in all of man's experience! And I would die a tortuous death a thousand times before I let you take that 20% away from me. Just the memory of the seemingly endless joys Her Love brings me makes it feel as though any amount of pain is more than a fair price to pay.

And I think that's what it comes down to. At least for me, anyways.

In the end, 20% of Heaven, is worth 80% of Hell.

And then some.