What practices, rituals, observances help you open to something greater, to fellow beings, and to how we’re inextricably connected?
I like to attend AA meetings. In there, I find my fellow lunatics who won’t judge me. Each meeting is like an asylum for the weirdos and freaks who couldn’t handle their alcohol, and were crazy enough to realize it in the end. Often people mutter irrational nonsense that makes sense to me, like, “When I admitted that my life was completely out of my control and I was powerless, then I found the power I needed.” Only around the tea parties of the Madhatter, and AA, do I find the wisdom I need in complete cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance is healthy. To be without it, and to have a rational philosophy, is to be puritanical. Ideologues scare me, because they have it all figured out. Every subject ties in at the philosophical roots to me. While I see a great importance for math and logic, and see an objective truth in how they function, I am confidently too stupid to know I don’t understand the complex intricacies of how life works, especially in relation between myself and society, let alone the universe or inner most depths of my very deluded mind. It’s not that I am crazy, I suppose, but that have gone down the rabbit hole and come back fully aware I can’t trust my own mind. With the outside input of others, I stand a much better chance at acting with some semblance of actual selfless compassion, that oddly works out for me much better than even before I went down the rabbit hole and lost everything. I’ve been locked up in a few psychiatric wards over the years. I still go to a psychiatric hospital every two weeks or so to lead AA groups for inpatients. It’s one of those things where I pretend I am doing altruistic good, but clearly I don’t know my motives, because there is little doubt my attendance is far more beneficial for myself than those not guilty by reason of insanity. In their own words, they often aren’t alcoholic. Then again, we discuss the various herbs, elixirs, and specialties of the street apothecaries beyond alcohol. Many claim just to struggle with nicotine. I know I do.
Then again I struggled straight edged, when I was a kid and teenager. I got real depressed when I was in third grade, and we moved school districts, my proto-girlfriend died, and my dog died in about a two week span. I didn’t have good coping skills for death. I had religion instead. It made no sense to me. I just figured that all the Christian authority figures all around me in agreement couldn’t be wrong about their esoteric beliefs they assured me meant I was immortal and Carrie was watching down from heaven. It was sort of uncomfortable though. The death of my proto-girlfriend kicked started some extremely strong urges I never really felt before. I just wanted to marry her because I liked playing house with her every day when I was a kid. It was pure innocence back then. Now I no longer felt that way, especially towards the cute little asian preacher’s kid in my class, Jodi. There was the quixotic feelings I had including ample shame during autoerotic secluded sessions. I was pretty sure Carrie was watching from heaven. She was also a preacher’s kid and probably would not approve of my fantasy with the new girl. It’s not that she was jealous. She wasn’t allowed to listen to rock’n’roll. Her dad liked to burn records like Bread, America and Simon & Garfunkel. She wasn’t allowed to watch TV and her radio was pragmatically broken off on the dial to the Christian station. She would not approve. Certainly Jody would not approve, and never did this.
By high school, I was rather fond of every pretty girl, and pretty sure none would want the likes of me. I wasn’t worthy of life, based on what I could grasp of Darwinianism taught at a high school level. “The strong survive and get laid, and the weak perish into permanent annihilation.” (Obviously, biology wasn’t my best subject.) If there was one thing I was confident of, it was that I was a wimp. It never occurred to me that other girls couldn’t see how pretty they were or that I might be dysmorphic in my entire self-perception. I couldn’t take a meaningless life where science taught me I should die in stride. By 10th grade I had this plan forming where I would jump off the parking ramp soon, instead of going to the police explorers meetings. Luckily my crazy friends kept tagging along to the meetings, and the cops were always eager to see me for some reason. It never really occurred to me that most people weren’t plotting their suicide, until I started doing sketch comedy with friends during this time. We had a rather formally organized troop considering we were autonomous from the school and adult leadership in general. Not that we didn’t have any heroes mind you. There was Montey Python, Kids in the Hall, and Mr. Barney the school’s musical savant and a huge supporter of teenage performing arts. There was also Mr. Working our main band director, who we were fond of and drove beyond nervous every time we performed at his variety show, because we ‘wouldn’t stick to the script.’ He was not a fan of hormonal kids improvising boyish humor in front of a live audience. I believe he referred to us as having ‘toilet humor,’ though our antics outside his domain were far, far worse. Getting to the point, all the comedic socialization made me realize normal people don’t have a suicide plan. Of course, I was fully aware I was abnormal, but not that my plan was abnormal to test gravity 10 stories up with additional theories about inertia and how great differences in mass and density between my body and the earth would could me to go splat and no longer suffering the crushing nihilism of reality. My chums laughing around me, and for some reason, and rather large clique of girls who loved to be around us, did cause me to reconsider killing myself as an unusual and rather insane thought.
I increasingly started to focus on being a cop, so I could play cops and robbers with delinquents I’m pretending to train in my off time. I even joined the Army straight out of high school. I became a NATO-led Peace Keeper, where we policed the genocidal Serbian police, and protected Interpol from getting killed, because 2 of them with pistols would sometimes find themselves surrounded by a couple hundred Serbian police with AK’s. The Serbian Police didn’t respect their authority. In fact, the US even armed the Muslim Bosnian victims, which helped found, or at least arm, ISIS according to my sources. Yes, the world was completely mad and I lost my sense of humor. I was still a funny soldier. I was a vegetarian who signed up to do reconnaissance as an Army Cavalry Scout, which has an odd lack do do with anything equestrian. I did find when I got back that I could obliterate my mind with alcohol until my consciousness went away and I didn’t care about women. It was like who I was said, “I see we’re about to do something insanely stupid. I’m out of here until you sober up.” Socially, I had a phase where I hung out with ALOT of lesbians during college while we drunk for some reason. I see now in my wiser years how things could have gotten much more awkward between us as friends with some of them if I had read in between the lines a little more. Some just wanted to be a dude and liked the fact that I called them, ‘man’ in the 90’s as a veteran who should have been far more bigoted in their mind. Honestly, I was just too high and drunk to remember their name. Often I didn’t even grasp they were gay, and they really seemed to enjoy that. I was rather sensitive, but oblivious, and quickly turning into a bipolar pothead alcoholic, to which I would eventually spend time in the mental hospital misdiagnosed as schizoaffective.
This is why I find a great sense of social connection at AA meetings. I find similar social connections as a mental patient at the VA, as well as with an unusual number of black people who are unemployed or underemployed because of the color of their skin. I get it to some degree, I suppose. I’ve had a variety of honors bestowed upon me over the years, but am working for just a couple dollars more than minimum wage at a plastics factory. The only recruiters after me at this moment are from McDonald’s and Burger King. My life would have been a fantastic failure if I didn’t turn out to be a decent father once I quit drinking. I’m even a rather good husband, according to my current wife. She’s eager for my step kids to immigrate from Kenya so I can be their father figure. It’s kind of insane. Then again, more than nihilistic, life turned out to be absurd. I have a sense of humor again. Of course, it may just be brain damage from the plastics fumes I inhale all day making me high, but I doubt it. Wait, what was I writing about?
Joker's Wild 