fall in love in 45 minutes
Hey! I hope you have all been doing alright. As said in my last entry, these will sadly be less frequent now that the semester has started. I will still try and send out at least two a month, but don’t hold me to it.
This entry contains graphic details of violent things and talks about death.
Recently I’ve been having trouble sleeping. I live the kind of lifestyle that makes it easy to pick basically any aspect of my daily routine and point to that as the reason for my poor sleep. It could be the coffee at 2:00pm, it could be the long, drunk weekends, it could be the nonstop action of my day-to-day life. It could be any of these things, but my hypothesis has little to do with any of it. I think my brain is filled with broken glass.
After my brother left for college I started looking into pharmaceutical drug trials in China. I found one to treat OCD that consisted of a paid eleven month isolation in Shanghai. I submitted an application, but they never got back to me. I think it’s because I was barely 17.
I used to think that I wanted my body to be “donated to science” when I die. Now, I’m surrounded by science and I think I’d rather be buried.
It’s the start of the semester. I’m taking mostly religious studies courses, so they are understandably concept-heavy. Every class has involved a discussion on defining “religion”. Two classes started with defining “definition”. In one class, my professor had us read fifty pages about the nature of “man” and only then could we define “definition” or “religion”
I met a girl. Her name is not Amélie, but that is what we will call her. We met at a party and I liked the way she laughed and then she said “Hi, I’m Amélie” and I liked the way she talked too. She said she’s from rural Quebec, a town I couldn’t have even acted like I had heard of. We talked about something and eventually I asked if she wanted to kiss and she said yes so we kissed. I was her first hookup and that made me feel both honored and dirty, imposter syndrome of sorts. We made out and it was really nice. I could tell she had never done it before and that was neither good nor bad. We got better with time.
About a week later she invited me over to her apartment. I went up the elevator and knocked on the door and she opened it smiling, wearing a floral dress with her hair in perfect curls. I have always found it hard to pick an outfit you know you are going to take off. She said something and I said something and pretty soon we were kissing. It was amazing how easy it all felt, our bodies together like that. She had never done much of anything, but she was excited and I let her lead the way.
After we had sex we laid in her twin bed for hours. Her body within mine. My body within her’s. Our bodies fit together like they were made for one another.
In one of my classes, we learned about the first humans and the earliest forms of religion. We traced back religious practices all the way to the Paleolithic Age thanks to hundreds of discovered cave paintings. The prevailing theory amongst religious scholars, historians, and anthropologists is that early humans would, through various methods, cause themselves to enter a state of altered consciousness. Some evidence points to use of hallucinogenic drugs, sensory deprivation or overload, intense rhythms, or prolonged solitude. The first religious leaders, possibly the first leaders of any group, were Shamans, the chosen people who entered these altered states of consciousness and acted as the bridge between the physical and the metaphysical worlds.
In some cultures Shamans would pick young members of their tribe and send them to the cave to have what we would call a “religious experience”. These children would be left alone in the dark cave, often tripping on peyote, mushrooms, or ayahuasca. There, they would meet their tribe’s deities, connect with a spirit animal, or convene with shamanic ancestors. They were raised without skepticism. These deities existed. They affected the everyday lives of the tribespeople. These forces were real and the shamans-to-be went into caves and convened with gods and dead people and animals and spirits. It’s amazing, really, to think of the first humans, walking around in dark caves shouting and touching the walls. We call it crazy, but it’s who we are.
What I am saying is that I do not believe Amélie’s body was made to fit within mine. I don’t believe in that kind of love. We made it up just a moment ago. I believe in the cave. I believe in the symbols, in the repetition. Thirty thousand years ago we were the same as we are now. I was the same as I am now. I don’t think I’m in love with Amélie, but our bodies were made to be together. Belief is separate from thought. Biology is, in a way, faith. Invisible hand. Power of God. Post-Darwinian times are lonely. It’s hard having answers. We do not feel beauty the way we used to. It’s a competition now. That is beautiful. Why?
I do not mean to sound like I am anti-rationalism. I think rationalism has its place, but I don’t think that this world is rational. Intelligent design or not, this world is undoubtedly, remarkably irrational. There are no laws, just theories, some good and some bad. We’re grabbing at water. We’re guessing the amount of grains of sand on the beach. Who is going to count? A trillion. Why not? Deeper into the cave. Further from answers.
I remember watching LiveLeak as a kid. My middle school friends would show me videos of cartel decapitations, suicides, lynchings, car crashes. I grew up on the most morbid shit. My brain is filled with grease. I can’t sleep because I keep thinking about this video I saw recently of a man trying to break into someone’s house and getting shot. He seemed fine after the first shot, but by the third he was dead. You could barely see him around the corner of the house, but the shitty security camera footage showed enough. I think about feeling my dog’s heart stop beating. I remember when my friend died from cancer when I was younger. I remember screaming in the kitchen until my throat bled and then screaming more. My dog died a few months later. My life is no more tragic than anyone else’s. All things considered, my life has been perfect. Sometimes I think it’s all in my head and really it is all in my head. Every loved one I’ve lost, someone else has felt it worse than me. There’s no use in comparing bullet holes, but it’s hard to notice when there’s not much left but hole. I remember watching a video of a Filipino woman hanging herself in front of her two children. They screamed and cried and grabbed at her legs. “MAMA! MAMA!” Who was filming?
I think terrible things. I think awful, awful things. I’m going to make a claim:
I don’t think suffering is an inherently bad thing. I don’t think any emotional response is categorically negative. Sure, it may feel “bad”, but what is so bad about that? Sensitivity is not inherently bad, nor is insensitivity. We all develop differently, what matters is how we develop together. I take that back. Forget I said that.
Every step we take a new reality is created because we make a decision. Blink, decision made. Breathe, decision made. Bodies make decisions. Minds make decisions. Everything we do, we are doing for the first time. Everything we say, we are saying for the last time. We are here and now we are not.
Thirty thousand years ago we were the exact same as we are now. We had the same issue: what’s next?
In the Werner Herzog documentary, The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, the filmmaker and his crew go on an expedition into the Chauvet Cave in Southern France, a cave with walls covered in paintings, some dating back 32,000 years. At the center of the cave, the crew finds a massive bear skull on a make-shift stone pedestal. Signs of worship. The crew were not allowed to touch anything in the cave. In fact, they were confined to a two-foot-wide walkway and had to assemble their equipment within the cave. If I had been there, I would not have been able to resist the temptation to place my hand on the idolic bear skull. Skin to skull. Thousands of years of existence.
Realize that there is no difference between touching a 32,000 year old bear skull and touching your own face. Atoms are forever. Atoms have been forever. We don’t have a choice: we are always the same.
Thank you for reading. My apologies for the sporadic writing style. If I edited these, they would not exist. It is a compromise I am willing to make. Have a nice day.