I Just Dropped In To See What Condition My Condition Was In. 

Therapy

Second therapy session today. 

I don’t really give a fuck what anyone says. You are only going to be so comfortable telling a stranger that you’re paying about your life. 

It’s a weird thing to say, “This is the type of childhood that I had, this is what school was like for me and this is where I ended up as a result.” 

I get asked the question, “You like to write yet you work in IT. How does that happen?”

Yeah man. It just kinda fucking happened and I don’t know how to get paid to do anything else. 

We’ve all been traumatized by the society we find ourselves in. Some of us get traumatized more than others but most all of us have had pain heaped upon us by a society that is profoundly fucked up.

If ya get a chance to talk to people. Like, really talk. This shit is gonna come up. 

Sorry I can’t come to the phone right now 

I’m stuck at the precise moment 

where I realize 

she ain’t comin’ back 

when it hits me that it’s gonna be one of those days 

where somebody gonna tell you Job had it harder 

and that does as much for you 

as thoughts and prayers do 

when they’re pickin’ up the shell casings 

after somebody got done with one of those lives. 

Stuck at the exact moment 

I realize that maybe what I did 

is re-write a shitty U2 song. 

Please leave a detailed message after the tone 

and maybe I’ll call you back. 

I’m slipping a little. I feel laziness starting to grip me. I ain’t been as conscientious with this endeavor. I missed two days this week. I did not write a single word. Whatever. Like many a baby boomer says, it is what it is. I’m gonna pick up. I’m gonna continue. I’m gonna live on. I will survive. Aight. I’m gonna put on that song. The Cake version. 

I sit in this room that was my bedroom back in the day. I grew up in this room. I came to be in this room. I prayed in this room. I had my first orgasm in this room at the age of 16. I dreamed in this room. I woke up on summer days that were full of nothing but possibilities in this motherfucking room. I sat in the dark and listened to Art Bell in this room. I don’t have my own space anymore. I haven’t since some time in November, I think. I miss it. I’ve always felt like I didn’t belong anywhere. I don’t really have a space right now where I can just be. That’s traumatic, man. It really is. I express this and nobody really seems to give a fuck. 

Fuck. Fuck. Part of me thinks this shit is about on the same level as some angsty, hormonal teenager who is failing English and is brilliant but lazy according to themselves and who writes on a blog with a background that is as black as their nail polish.

I need to challenge myself. I’m not quite sure how though.

I finished reading two books this week. For a man that has been struggling with his attention span for years or at least feels like he has, that is an accomplishment. I finished the The Great Derangement by Matt Taibbi and The End of Policing by Alex Vitale. 

Taibbi is just an excellent writer with a good eye and a keen social conscience. He’s a minor hero of mine. I will pretty much read anything he writes. 

The End of Policing made me think a lot. I can’t say that it challenged me too much but it made me think about the why of a lot of things. In recent years, I’ve become really concerned about the militarization of police forces and the violence that more often than not victimizes the poor and people of color. It keeps me up at night. It makes me angry. It makes me want to give the finger to every cop I see. Blue Lives Matter flags make me fighting mad. I really cannot watch cop shows any longer because they play like insidious propaganda to me. The book is a bit dry but it’s quite readable. It is written by an activist academic who traces a lot of the problems heavy handed policing is thrown at to cruel austerity measures. If you’re reading this, you should read that book. I kinda wish everybody in this rotting empire would. Maybe some time soon I will write about some of the things I actually learned from the book. 

How I Learned to Love the Lord

What follows will be the most honest attempt to date to explore a particular period in my religious history, specifically the period of time where I could be described as an Evangelical Christian.

At the current time, I am a sincere agnostic. I have no idea whether God or any gods or goddesses or supernatural beings exist. Like many people do, when the chips are down and shit is looking bad, I might beseech whatever gods may be out of desperation. I do however have a lingering suspicion that our ultimate reality is spiritual rather than material.

I was raised to be a Catholic. I’ve been to confession. I’ve taken communion. I often got tapped to read from the scriptures at Mass because my voice was clear and deep. I was never confirmed though. On paper, I’m still Catholic. I went through school with largely the same group of kids from kindergarten through about the 9th grade. See, in the 9th grade, shit got a little crazy. I did something I should not have done. To this very day, I don’t really know why the fuck I did it. The best answer I can give you is boredom. You also don’t think too deeply about the consequences of your actions when you’re a teenager. I mean, how the hell can you? I’m told the brain is still developing at that age. Anyway, I wrote up a few bomb threats and emailed them to various students and the principal of the school. I got in a world of trouble. I was suspended and then basically expelled from my school and my teenaged ass ended up getting charged with a Class B felony. This was back in 1999. This pretty much ruined my freshman year of high school. No Catholic institution would let me enroll because of this incident. They did not want to take the chance that I was the next school shooter. You also have to keep in mind that the infamous Columbine High School massacre occurred while my case was making its way through the juvenile court system.

So, there I was. I was a scrawny 16 year old kid who had just been exiled from everyone I’d pretty much ever known. It felt like my fucking world had ended. I was pretty sure I had ruined my fucking life forever because I was a dumb teenage kid who had no perspective. When the time came for my parents to stick me in another school, they found me a small, private school that was run by a local Baptist church. I wanted no part of it. I had seen TBN. I had a pretty good idea of what went on there. This type of religion seemed utterly brain dead to me.

I went. I barely fit in. This was a strange place, man. Nobody ever used profanity. There was no social dancing. Every single textbook was published by a company called Abeka which meant theology snuck into pretty much every subject. The theory of evolution was an Anti-Christian hoax inspired by Satan and man clung to it out of sinful pride. When other regions of the world were discussed, it had to be spelled out in black and white that the dominant religions there were false if that religion happened to be anything other than so-called biblical Christianity. There was also a really right-wing bent to the history we studied. Nelson Mandela was a terrorist and a communist. The Great Depression was greatly exaggerated by communist propagandists like John Steinbeck. It was like going to school in an alternate universe.

I looked around and it seemed like there was a lot of genuine love between people. These people seemed to care about one another.

I’d been in Catholic school my entire life and I saw so much cruelty there. I didn’t see much of that at all among these people. They had something and I wanted it. Holy shit. This seems like the narration for an episode of The 700 Club where a former stripper is about to convert but it’s accurate.

I was a kid. I had made the biggest mistake of my life. It was a mistake that had sent me away from every friend I’d ever made. I hated myself. It was easy for me to accept that there was a darkness inside of me that had driven my actions. Maybe it was my sinful nature. Yeah, it was my sinful nature. I gradually came to believe that Jesus Christ was the answer.

I can recall getting on my knees one night in my bedroom. I asked God for forgiveness and accepted Jesus. I can remember feeling my eyeballs heat up and being aware of a really bright light. I can also recall my ears buzzing. It scared me shitless. I believed I had been saved.

Skip forward in time to today. I’ve had a lot of time to reflect upon what happened. My conversion happened during a personal crisis. The thing about crises is that they eventually pass. What “saves” you in a crisis might not be what you need after it’s all over. Truths that seem iron clad in a crisis might not be so iron clad when you have time to catch your breath and think a little.

Not interesting

I need to get the fuck outta here. 

These roommates really are not working out. 

Like, being here irritates me. 

I need to be alone. Truly alone sometimes. 

I cannot be hearing the bickering and arguing that is the byproduct of your fucked up, sad marriage. 

I can’t come “home” at the end of my 9 to 5 what a way to make a living day to scary cable news propaganda. That shit gets to me on a deep level. Like, maybe it’s the holy spirit helping me recognize with banal evil is. Seriously. 

I probably need to be sitting down and talking to someone. I don’t want to take medication cuz it does nothing. The only drugs I’ll be taking are for the fun of it. Seriously. I’m only going to alter my mind with drugs if I feel like it. Not doing it on doctor’s orders if I can help it. Fuck that. Real talk though. I need to be talking to a professional probably. Don’t worry too much. I just need the perspective of someone with a more level-head than I’ve got. 

Aight. Back to our regular scheduled programming. 

I suspect that I’m getting better at this. What is this? That would be writing. Pause. Scratch chin. Take sip of water. Get up and close the door. I sit with my feet up on the desk. My keyboard sits in my lap and I type away. 

It was one of those angry drives home. It was one of those drives home where I just got murder in my heart. I just got weaponized hate up in me. Anything I might possibly say is gonna be barely coherent. I’m gonna shout. I’m gonna keep shouting til I can’t anymore. I’ll be out of breath and none of it will be cathartic. I won’t feel better. I hate that kinda anger. I’m glad I didn’t do that today. It’s anger at the world and the people who run it. People talk about evil. They talk about people who do monstrous things. They talk about ‘em like they got glowing red eyes and how you can smell sulfur when they walk by. I believe it was Hannah Arendt who talked about the banality of evil. It’s these utterly unremarkable dudes like Scott Pruitt and Jeff Sessions who fuck up the world. They don’t look like monsters but what they do is monstrous. They get to manufacture a hellish reality for millions of people and then they probably go home and watch Blue Bloods or Chicago PD or something and then maybe their wife gives them a half-hearted hand job and then they are back at it the next day. That’s how they do. 

It’s good that I’m diligent at putting words to the page almost every single day but maybe I need to strive for more than that. I don’t know what exactly. I think the paragraph above had its moments. I fantasize about poetry and literary journalism. 

Making a living distracts me. Takes too much time, ya dig? Shit. That fucking game has us all by the nuts. 

I think to myself, “Where the fuck you going with this? Do you just want to stop? Chill the rest of the night?” 

I really do. 

I will actually. 

Someone will always think you’re full of shit. That’s okay. 

I wanna lick everywhere you'll let me.

Okay.

I’ve dabbled in Buddhism. The Buddha talked about subduing your own mind. You need to subdue it because it’s powerful. I guess maybe you can let it play a little but sometimes you’ve got to subdue it and make it do something. 

What I’ve just described would be seen as problematic as fuck by actual Buddhists. Can you imagine how insufferable a Buddhist fundamentalist would probably be? Imagine a self-styled western Buddhist fundamentalist. God. Think about how annoying Calvinists are. When I was in my late 20s, I saw a fair amount of the people I came up with go all Neo-Calvinist. They start wearing black. They grew beards. They listened to this funeral folk music shit that I felt guilty for not liking cuz maybe that meant I was going to Hell. It was all such a drag. It was really fatalistic and mournful and had this twisted conception of God as this holy serial killer who gonna fuck some people up with tornadoes and STIs. 

Part of me still fears going to Hell. 

Part of me wonders if they’re right. 

If they were right, that would be one hell of a plot twist, right? 

Imagine you go through a year of Hell. Imagine losing everything you love. Imagine losing your mind. You stumble upon the truth and it’s the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints or it’s The Church of Scientology. Sometimes I imagine what it’s like to actually believe the truth is in one of those places and to fear that you’re turning away from it if you forsake it. Forget the Job shit. Maybe it’s not that dramatic. Imagine that hole inside you is filled up by what you get in those places. It’s hard for me to conceive but I think about it. 

I’ll tell you what though. I don’t really want to fake it till I make it just because I’m deathly afraid of Hell. No. That does not seem like a very good idea at this juncture.