Tag: suffering

Your God is Poison, Cuz.

In the arena of the intellect, there are undoubtedly a great many reasons not to believe in the existence of a god, so far as I have found, and no good reasons to believe — particularly with respect to the Biblically-based concepts. But why stop there?

After all, there are damn good moral or ethical reasons to think it’s all bullshit, too.

Someone who I care about very much once told me that she should’ve died in that car crash she’d been in, and that someone was clearly watching over her, and when I asked her who specifically that someone she referred to was, her answer was: god.

(Relax. Stay calm. Take a deep, deep breath. Now exhale: completely).

So let me get this straight, I wanted to say.

All of those dehumanized and oppressed under slavery? All the victims of the Holocaust? Each and every child dying from cancer or AIDS? All the African girls who have had to endure female genital mutilation between infancy and their teens?

All the casualties of war? Torture of every fucked up form and flavor? Kids raped and physically abused and neglected and utterly abandoned by their parents?

Starvation and suffering and disease and devastation and agonizing death in a quadrillion-plus different ways all throughout human history?

And that’s just our species. That’s only on our Island Earth. Pains beyond our imagining may be hidden from us, horrors we could barely conceive of, histories of terror spread throughout the cosmos.

In any case, you mean to tell me that your god — your omniscient, omnipotent, all-loving, Jesus’s-mother-fucking god — he sleeps through all these local and universal alarms on his cosmic fucking cell phone, snoozing away peacefully, but you, you get in a car wreck, and he jumps into action immediately, in an abrupt sense of urgency, without so much as a stretch and a yawn and a sip from his morning coffee, and saves you from corporeal expiration?

Really? Fucking really?

Do you realize how arrogant one has to be to swallow that line of self-aggrandizing bullshit and believe you rank as so insanely special in his infinite, all-seeing eye? The eye of the supposed creator of this goddamn universe?

If your god exists, fuck him. He’s an asshole of truly epic proportions.

And furthermore, fuck you for pledging allegiance to such a cosmic-scale monster. For reals.

And anyway, if what you believe is true, wasn’t it your god that made you get in that car wreck in the first place? Wasn’t it your god who orchestrated the whole shit-show to begin with?

Given “his” only limitations would necessarily be self-imposed, couldn’t that blessed being that spared you from the tragedy “he” created have simply not created that tragic fucking circumstance to begin with?

Look, I know you told me this between three and four decades ago, but your insipid belief bothers me as much now as it did then, and perhaps even more so.

After all, I’m an avid people-watcher. People-listener, people-feeler. My involuntary empathy is not badge of honor, either, please understand; to be honest is sucks big, floppy, dirty donkey dick, because I’m nearly always left hopelessly caring, worrying too much and being utterly powerless to do anything to actually help matters but can only listen like a useless fucking ear and draw it all in and stew over it like an incompetent fucking fool.

Having said that, I’ve met some good fucking people in my time. Good people who, like you, have had hard lives they didn’t deserve. Negligent and/or abusive parents which ultimately lead – coincidence? I think not – to negligent and/or abusive relationships later in life, on towards their deaths.

Some crumble beneath the weight of their lives. Others grow strong, yet still have to constantly bear the weight of their past and at the same time endure the relentless onslaught of tragedy after tragedy, horror after horror, misfortune after misfortune, no matter how strong they remain, no matter how hard they try, no matter how determined they are to overcome.

I can’t imagine what they could have done in this life or a past one – and I know you don’t believe in past lives, but I remember at least three of my own (fragmented, puzzle-piece memories, but they’re there nonetheless), so you can spare me your fucking bullshit religious Christian garbage – that could have earned them this heartache, this emotional torture, this ongoing circumstantial and physical trauma.

So spare me. Knock it off. Fuck the fuck off.

Just today, a young, teenage girl I know who has a negligent and addicted mother, and a father addicted to the aforementioned negligent and addicted mother, she spoke to me again. Recently, she had her tax refund stolen – her identity stolen – from what, I gather, is most likely “family friends” (from her mothers side), possibly the mother herself, and to top it all off this wonderful, strong girl now has a disturbing cough and a pain in her chest that I (and her, at some level) fears may be serious.

I worry for her at multiple angles. Its fucking killing me.

Just today, a manager at work and friend of mine I’ve called Marjie, she had a great outing with her father, they went to the bars in town and had a great time, but her father got black-out drunk and started insulting her for liking men who bear a particular skin pigmentation, and using a historically emotionally-charged word to express that prejudice of his, which prompted her to fling at him some aggressive words, which in turn inspired his drunk, blackout self to start swinging at her face, leading to a wound just above her eye that she came in to work today, on her day off, just to see if she could find butterfly stitches in our first aid kit because there wasn’t any at the local fucking dollar store.

Evidently, when he saw her face after he sobered up, he realized what he had done, cried, and hugged her, which at least at some surface level she accepted as a sincere and heartfelt apology, but still.

Really? This is your god’s plan, cuz?

I love you. I truly do. But fuck your god.

Fuck that fictitious bastard hard, in the ass, without lube, and into the depths of your mythological hell, with a hearty slap on the ass for good measure.

By using this illusion to make yourself feel special, your implying so many others are less so, and I can’t accept that.

Your insipid fucking belief is poison.

Your god is poison.

Need Me Some Body Knobs.

Today, I thought to myself: I wish I had four knobs on my body somewhere, or perhaps a remote control, all for adjusting the volume on seemingly hardwired aspects of this meat sheath, this flesh vessel, this corporeal container that my consciousness is temporarily housed in.

One knob would enable me to turn the volume up and down on my senses. That way I wouldn’t have to hear the machines beeping at work, or the ghastly country music playing on the store radio, or the current Christmas music. Or the jackass that pulls into the space beside me while I’m on break, trying to read a book, with his bass cranked to the max so it sounds like a goddamn T-Rex is tap-dancing right beside me.

So I wouldn’t have to bear the smell when I clean the restrooms. Or stand close to Gus.

So I wouldn’t have to feel the texture of the new rags when I’m cleaning something like the tables in the dining room, or the sound that results when the tag on a new mop head rubs against the tiles, or the bitter fucking cold when I mosey on into the walk-in freezer for something.

I could even turn down my senses to a reality-canceling zero in toto, thereby escaping into my mind completely whenever I desired.

Another knob would enable me to control the volume of my thoughts, though there appear to be multiple layers of thoughts, so maybe I need multiple knobs. At least two: the fully conscious and seemingly deliberate ones and the involuntary and automatic ones, and I’d mostly aim at the second set with respect to conscious adjustments. Specifically, the target would be what are known as Automatic Negative Thoughts (ANTs), the intrusive “Flashback Bitchslap” memories (unless they constitute ANTs themselves; I am a bit perplexed on that point), and that bad music that plays on repeat.

When alone and prepared, I’d turn up the volume and in so doing hopefully banish their spell, take away their semiconscious and no doubt subliminal influence on not only my conscious thoughts, but my emotions (though it could function the other way around, too — or perhaps both, in a feedback loop. I’m not at all clear on that point, either).

I would write them down like a stenographer of the self so that I’d know all the shit I’m saying to myself, whispering to mysekf, and then practice on defeating them. Not through “thought stopping,” as that infernal technique just results in an emotionally intensified and painfully loud rebound, but rather via techniques that actually seem to work, like objectifying the thoughts and bathing in the realization that you are, after all, not at all synonymous with them — like in mindfulness meditation.

Don’t push them away, don’t grab a hold of them, just witness them dispassionately. Let them arise and pass away.

Until I got the hang of it, I’d spend the rest of my time with the semiconscious and subliminal automatic thoughts cranked down to zero. Life is bad enough without exacerbating the issue by compulsively, obsessively kicking myself in the ass from the inside and sucker-punching myself within the confines of my own sacred psyche.

Still another knob would enable me to control the volume of my emotions — and, if I’m not bat-shit insane, the emotions I absorb like a fucking sponge when around other people and sometimes mistake for my own.

Much as I just said about the thought-knob, two knobs might be a better fit here, too. Not because that some emotions are liminal and others semiconscious or subliminal, however, but because some emotions are my own and other emotions seem to come from other people, and I’m sick of feeling them and reacting to them as if they were my own. Empathy is by no means horrible, its just that my empathy is lacking discipline, healthy boundaries, and doesn’t often if ever submit itself to voluntary control. I’d work on this shit like the ANTs — put aside some window of time to practice managing them and effectively mute them when they become overwhelming in the day-two-day and night-to-night.

Last but not least, I’d like a knob for instinctual drives — at least the drive to have sex, as that desire can be quite distracting, particularly when you’ve gone a considerable length of time without scratching that itch.

The consequences are ridiculous. Truly. Everything is sexualized. You feel like you’ve come to share the humor of Beavis and Butthead, as sex becomes your default context for everything. You hear someone say something superficially innocent and giggle like an idiot because in your deprived mind it sounds sexual, like a “that’s what she said” joke, and next to orgasm, laughter spawned from comments twisted into naughty things is the best transient fix available.

While I don’t mind that too much, and for all I know I might have a perverted sense of humor even if I regularly got my rocks off with a preferable member of the opposite sex, the intensity of the drive is agonizing, the need to take matters into my own hands bare minimum once or twice a day lest I be incredibly tense and likely an asshole is frustrating, irritating and, when intixucated, often time-consuming — and needlessly so: why hold off until I can find that “perfect” porn to unload to when it could be done and over with in record time if I wished?

No, having the capacity to turn it off when it’s not seving me or when I can’t manage to serve and/or get served would be wonderful.

Its not too much to ask, either. I mean, why has evolution not granted us this blessed reprieve? After all, there’s even a point where, after you’ve starved for some time, you no longer desire food. Its like your body realizes that you’re at the end, that you cannot acquire the required sustenence, and seeing as the body is probably going to die, it has some mercy on the inhabiting consciousness. But when it comes to fucking, for some reason, the body evidently feels the need to conjure up its capacity for ruthless persistence.

It holds the species above itself, sky-high above the individual organism. It holds the herd above the individual. The troop over the singular, sexually frustrated, domesticated ape caught in the grips of circumstantial abstinence — the circumstance involving fear, lack of confidence, and so on.

Fuck that. I’m starving.

So give me a knob I can turn to take away the pointless agony.