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Friday, July 24, 2009

Shakespeare called it a Seven Day Wonder.

I was parked outside a convenience store around 11:30pm texting when a tattooed body with a shaved head appeared out of nowhere, and asked if there was any amount of money that would get me to drive him across town. 

I told him to hop in, and he was reluctant at first, unsure why I would be willing to do it for free.  I introduced myself first with a handshake and he then told me his name is Michael, a gang banger from East L.A.  Judging by the conversation we had and our respective reactions to the occurrence, we will likely spend the next seven days, if not the rest of our lives, wondering if the other one was an angel.

Sunday, July 19, 2009

Life Won't Wait

I will sleep well tonight comforted by the realization that the Big Picture is relatively big and I am relatively small.  From these two relatives comes absolute peace and absolute joy.  This is greater than any minor stresses I have about money, career, relationships, etc.  

I am a flash in the pan, a random genetic occurrence, a sputter and flicker of a wavelength, a speck on a mote of dust.  Everything under the sun is meaningless.

Chances are, 100 years after I die, it will not matter that I lived.  What a relief.  However, if Einstein was right, there is no was, there is no will be; there only is is.  Everything in history happens at the same time.  Every rise, every fall, every heartbreak, every triumph.  All the sin and joy and love and pain.  

Based on this premise, the only thing I should do is the only thing I can do, and that is to be.  I need not worry about the mistakes I have made, and I need not fabricate an action plan to retrieve myself from any so-called rut.  The only way to fully be is to be fully.

It is time to die to the stale notion that a certain set of criteria must be met before I can live.  Ex: "Before I can live, I must_______"  (Insert:  pay off debt, earn my degree, move to L.A., lose some weight, do my laundry, etc. etc. etc.)  

Suppose it took x years to get into said rut, and y years to get out of the rut.  We've already wasted so much time-- why waste any more trying to climb out of the bottomless pit.  In a life rich with irony, imagine paying off that last pesky credit card of bondage only to get hit by a bus the next day while walking across the street to buy a pita sandwich-- right when your new life was supposed to begin.

George Carlin observed that life will never begin any time soon; it began millions of years ago.  The wheel is already in motion; the best we can hope to do is to learn to roll with it.  

Maybe this is what scripture means when it says we must first die to ourselves. 

"Life Won't Wait," boasts the title track from an album by the punk bank Rancid, released in 1998.  If life won't wait, why should we?  

Let's do some living after we die.
- The Rolling Stones, "Wild Horses," 1971.