Pushing the Boulder

I've gone through a lot of shit.

"Who fucking cares?" you might say. "Who hasn't gone through a lot of shit?" And I hear you. It is difficult being alive. "So stop complaining."

That's the part where folks lose me. Stop complaining. It's not very helpful. Then again, neither is complaining.

Over the last fifteen years, I've tried to achieve one of two things: either inject meaning into my life to overcome its challenges or embrace meaninglessness to make them easier to bear. You'll appreciate the first path if you've ever gone deep into a spiritual or religious practice. You'll understand the second if you're familiar with Albert Camus and The Myth of Sisyphus. They are perfect opposites of each other.

Embracing absurdity is difficult. At a point, it becomes indistinguishable from voluntary madness. As a kind-of-sort-of atheistic agnostic, becoming insane in this way seems the more sustainable of the two paths. 

I'm a big fan of Eddie Blake, the Comedian from Watchmen. He's got the right idea: The world is a terrible joke. When I'm struggling, I whisper it again and again, drawing a smiley face in the air or on my wrist. Sometimes it makes me laugh the bitter cackle you'd expect to hear burst from the throat of a DC villain. More often, it doesn't do much of anything.

While absurdism is, in theory, the more sustainable of the two paths, it is much more challenging to practice. The practitioners I'm aware of spiraled into drugs and alcohol, and I'm not about that. I did it once. I teeter on it every now and again.

The next best thing is to commit what Camus called "philosophical suicide." You ignore the evidence against God/Zeus/Allah/Buddha and just, like, go for it.

I did this once and it was great. I lost sixty-plus pounds, quit smoking, stopped cramming drugs into my brain, and got a lot of writing done. I found the love of my life and learned how to do what the hippies call "cultivating peace."

"Cool story, bro. Can't wait for the self-help book."

But no, come on, stay with me here, because I don't know what happened next. I moved to another state, got plunked into an impossible job, started having seizures, was falsely accused of atrocities I'd never dream of, and everything fell apart. They say there are no atheists in foxholes, but I lost all the faith I'd managed to scrape up and came out worse than before.

So I got into that woo-woo hippie shit you've probably heard about; tarot cards, rocks that cute boho girls call crystals, candles, designing abstract symbols out of my intentions and jacking off onto them. Full moon shit. A lot of incense.

And, you know, so far, that works probably better than anything else because when I slip on the precipice of doubt whether any of this stuff is real, I can always fall back on the idea of placebo. Who cares if it's real? It's not woo if it works, and anyway, truth is irrelevant in the 21st century.

Even armed with cynical postmodernism, playing Coyote on yourself is much harder than I thought.

The added challenge comes with the smooth commercialization of woo-woo hippie shit. It's easy to feel low one day and pull a Charles Marlow—things aren't going well now, but if I just get the Garbage Pail Kids tarot deck and a red phantom quartz to use in shadow work, then I'll figure out why I'm messed up and everything will be okay.

I have so many fucking rocks. I keep most of my tarot decks in a repurposed ammo case; the ones that don't fit go into my desk. I got into making candles. I leave gallons of water out in the moonlight. It all helps, but only as triage.

Compound this meaningless rivet-seeking with the isolation of male audiences and their struggles by woo-woo influencers, bloggers, yoga studios, et al., as they cater almost exclusively to women. It's a recipe for another dissatisfying spiritual endeavor, but that's another story.

"Oh my god, bro, get over it."

I'm trying. That's what this is about. For anyone who will listen or can relate, this space is meant for reflection as I try to figure it all out. Feel free to join the conversation, help me, or roast me. As a pudgy maniac once said, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."