Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Look Out You're Dead - By Jimmy Petrol

I know a guy who figured the world was headed for meltdown way back in the early Seventies; he's been smoking dope, snorting crank and doing as little as possible ever since. Last I heard, he still lives out back of his Mom's in a little trailer. The way he saw it, there was no point in busting any butt to get anything or build anything up if the world was going to hell anyway.

He'll be dead soon, I am sure, from one of a dozen things that get you if you use needles, have sex so rarely that anything will do and exercise only the mouth. So I guess he loses. The world still turns, the banks are still solvent and there is plenty of work to be done.

The danger that lurks for the intellectually courageous is that the end becomes too clear, too certain. With mankind all of the same nasty cut, what hope for the future?

The guy in the first paragraph fell for this bit of big thinking....and lost his whole life to it. Where he thought he was the smart guy, the guy that could see it coming and not get taken in, he lost it all to despair. And soon he will not even be alive, so there can be no hope for him. He was, all in all, a suicide from the very first moment he started to try to figure things out.

The thing people like him miss is that there was never any way for this world to last forever. The “meltdown” would come even in a perfect, Utopian world; we die.

That's it. We fall down dead one day, whether there is war or peace, feast or famine, whether Bush is driving us into the brink or Nero Fiddles as Rome burns...it is all just a diversion, a trick. The real deal is our own, little, precious, personal life.

That's it. Nobody need worry about the end of the world, or about the politics of the planet; the end has always come as personal death and the politics are the same as they were when Caesar led Roman troops to battle; them that can, gets.

For my former buddy, that little world he inhabits is all there is. He can pontificate and rant against the insanity of the social and economic order, but all his world really is can be seen from his Mom's back door.

Being really big-brained, people tend to get caught up in the enormity of the socio-political-military machine and forget to live their own lives. Silly people mourn celebrity deaths and celebrate celebrity lives while letting their own slip away into dust just like my buddy. It doesn't matter is you don't live in a trailer in the corral behind Mom's house; if you aren't doing much more than working for a living, you might as well be.

All of this is not to indict, but excite.

Since our own reality was never forever, it can not matter very much where humans are taking the world. Not to any one of us personally.

What does matter is what we do with the time we have.

It is an election year. The social-system would have us all spending lots of our precious time paying attention to the inanity of lying politicians and all that. I suggest it is a ruse.

Instead of spending our brain-power trying to figure out who is lying the least, I suggest we spend it doing something.

Anything.

Take your Mom out to lunch; somewhere away from the corral.

Wash your car, clean your house, do your job....get a second one that you like.

Volunteer a teeny, tiny bit of your time doing something for anybody...hell, do something for yourself, even....take a class, read a book, learn something, build something, screw something, seduce your neighbor or the whole neighborhood.

Just do it.

Who knows? Maybe you'll find out you can do quite a bit and end up making a change, a difference, a life for yourself you can be happy to have lived.

Do it even if you do it badly at first. There is a learning curve to everything.

Do it before the end of the world becomes moot for you, as it has for my buddy. I know for certain that he spent more time watching television than he ever did doing anything. He's been dead a long time and his mom never even noticed.

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