Daily Archives: September 21, 2015

A sense of deflation

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Here I am, at the bus stop, right on time, but I am not on the way to class.

That’s because the prof is sick, so class is canceled. I found out via email when I was almost ready to head off to class, and the moment I read it, I felt all the air go out of me.

And since then, I have been really depressed.

Just totally dragged out. I have never handled disappointment well and I hate sudden changes of plans and this was both. I was building up my energies towards going to class et al when somebody pulled the plug. Now I have a whole day’s worth of hours to fill and the thought of it sickens me.

Not that I have nothing to do. I have at least three homework assignments to work on. I have let them sneak up on me… Something yo avoid in the future.I will return to my intelligent habit of doing my honework as soon as I can, so it’s done and I don’t have to think about it any more, and I can take my time doing it without feeling rushed.

Procrastination is a disease. It makes life pointlessly worse. Better nip that in the bud.

So I know how I will fill all those hours. That is not really the problem.nbsp; The problem is that my day lost it’s tentpole, and left me in the dark under all this tent. To have my purposeful focus taken from me when I was almost ready to launch really hurts a guy like me.

But I’ll get over it. I am already beginning to feel excited about tackling all that homework. Let me at it, I’ll pulverize it.

I wish I could afford to drown (smother?) my sorrows with a meal at White Spot, but I can’t, quite. I only have around thirteen bucks, and even a consevatively ordered meal at White Spot costs fifteen.

And that doesn’t include the tip.

I suppose I could lower my sights and just get an order of fries and a drink. But meh.

Or I could stop in at the little sandwich shop in the Chinese mini mall near here. But also meh.

So I will just head on home and sit meself down in front of the computer with a giant cup of Diet Cokenbsp; and finish this blog entry then get cracking on all that homework I need to do.

Oh that’s right…. I haven’t told you why I am out and about yet, have I?

The boring story goes like this : in my seemingly endless quest to get government ID and hence be able to actually get on with my fucking life, I got Felicity to print off the requisite form for me to fill out and fax to the appropriate minister back home in the Island of Edward the Prince.

Then I figured out that you could actually do the whole thing online. They had just hidden that capacity three or four screens down on their “online services” page, hence my previous inability to find the fucking thing.

So, yippie, I don’t have to get Felicity to see if she can fax anything, and I can pay with my credit card, and everything is hunky dory. I borrowed $100 from Joe (this shit is expensive), put it on my card, then filled out the online form last Saturday, and submitted it.

Aaand the transaction didn’t go through. I had been worried that would happen. The total of my order was very close to the balance of the card, as I remembered it So I was nor surprised it was not quite enough.

I swear, though, I wasn’t off by more than a dollar.

So today, despite my having no class (ha), I had to go out and put a little more money on the card. It would have been no big deal if I had not been depressed. But depression classically makes everything harder. So it was not an easy thing to do, to go out and wait for the bus, go there, and make the deposit.

That’s why I made my way back slowly. I walked part of the way, but I made frequent stops. Basically, I would walk a block, find a place to sit, blog till I got my strength back, and then go on to the next block.

The last two blocks I covered by bus. What the hell, I have a bus pass, it’s not like it costs me anything.

The good news is that I just finished doing the whole online form for birth certificate thing and it went through just fine. Some time this week I should get that freaking birth certificate, and be able to get my BC Services With Photo (or whatever) card, and then be able to get a bank account, and then be able to receive my student loan, and get my student ID, and be able to use the printers at school, and all that good stuff.

So much time and effort and MONEY just to prove I am who I say I am. Where’s the trust? Where’s the… love?

Oh well, at least I got the process moving again today. By the this time next week, God willin’ and the crick don’t rise, I will have all that shit sorted and all this dreary drudgery will be behind me.

And hopefully, my math re the amount over tuition that I am getting is right, so I can pay Joe back, get myself a nice new tablet isn’t of the clunky and inadequate current model.

I mean, that thing came out in 2011. I didn’t know they even HAD computers way back then! (kidding, folks, relax!)

And maybe, just maybe, I will get some shoes that actually work for my big ol’ feet and my gravity-defying weight.

I might even order some of those really expensive ones made just for fat people.

Imagine a fat person actually being able to walk without pain! In the feet, anyhow.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My favorite songs, Spirituality Edition

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Thought I would share some more of my favorite songs of all time with you lovely people, and today, I have a theme. The songs I am sharing with you today are all songs which speak to the spirit of this rudderless atheist who was raised without religion and hence has to find his inspiration where he can.

And nothing inspires me more than music. Music can slip past all my mental defenses and stir my lonely, icy heart. Most of the moments in my life where I came closest to feeling what I assume would be the presence of the divine in another sort of person have been through music.

I hope to share a few of those moments with you today.

One last thing : trigger warning, some of these do mention God and other Christian concepts.

The first song I will share today is “Demons” by Fatboy Slim.

This song really speaks to me, especially the chorus. It speaks of a kind of salvation that I can understand and accept, if not explain or justify. And that gives me a clue as to how religion works for the people who have it. It doesn’t matter if you can’t prove that these deeply moving personal emotional experiences can’t be proven to represent anything in external reality. To you, the believer, they are completely real, realer than real life in some cases. For some atheist to come along and say your experiences with God (or whatever) aren’t real is both offensive and absurd.

Take music, for example, seeing as we are on the subject already. Imagine telling a hardcore Led Zeppelin fan that the joy they felt when they first heard Stairway to Heaven was a delusion and they were crazy for thinking it was anything special.

We’d understand if the Zep fan was offended and got mad, right?

Of course, not all spirituality is about joy. Some is about justice.

Aw yeah. This is also a side of Christianity that I can grok. The Christian Left. The Christian Right makes no sense to me. So much of what they believe seems to me to be the exact opposite of what I see to be Christ’s message of universal love.

I mean, Jesus was a long haired bearded hippie and a hooligan who had no respect for his elders and who caused trouble for everybody with his gang of fellow unemployed misfits.

That’s not just a little different than the version the Christian Right worships. That’s their worst nightmare. That’s the sort of person they are terrified their daughters will date.

Of course, the divine retribution at the end of War Pigs doesn’t jive with Jesus’ message either. It’s just fun.

Inspiration sometimes comes from unexpected places that defy our prejudices and make us rethink a lot of things. That’s what happened when I first heard this song.

By the time I came along and started to develop my cultural consciousness, disco was dead and so was folk music, and John Denver represented all that was wimpy and pathetic about the Seventies and its phony back to nature bullshit. He had been the spiritual leader of that movement, and when the Boomers turned into Yuppies, he became the punchline of their “what were we thinking? ” jokes. That’s the version of him I received through pop culture.

And that version was not updated for a long time. As my cultural consciousness blossomed, I got into punk rock, heavy metal, and industrial. In other words, I was part of the pendulum swinging back from the John Denver’s sunshiney outdoorsy optimism into the dark, brutal, and raw world of depression and rage.

John Denver, in my mind, represented the exact opposite of everything I liked. So imagine my surprise when, relatively recently. I found out that I actually like some of his music.

And then I heard the song I linked above, The Eagle And The Hawk, and it both inspired me spiritually and rocked me the fuck out. To me, that song kicks ass.

Maybe those Seventies hippies had a point after all. Or maybe I have simply reached the point in my life where everything from one’s childhood acquires a halo of nostalgia.

And finally, there is this song, from my main man MC 900 Foot Jesus and some lady with a lovely motherly kind voice.

I feel so strongly about this song that when I discovered it wasn’t on YouTube any more, I decided I would make it so. So here it is, my first time being one of those people who puts songs on YouTube ever!

I had to restrain myself from making the thing a slideshow of pictures of electric organs. Under other circumstances, I would have done that gladly, but I have time restrictions today.

Anyhow, I have never heard anything that made more sense to me. It is religion for the dreamers and visionaries of the world, and I am certainly both. People losing their faith, or becoming angry and bitter because they are trying to cling to the faith of a child while having the mind of an adult, seems about right to me.

Their problem is not one, then, of being oppressed on all sides by the sins of the world. That is merely a projection of the gulf between their understanding of God and their understanding of the world.

The problem is their lack of imagination. Their conception of their God has not grown to keep pace with their perceptions of the world. I have always suspected that a certain type of religion fell all too easily into the trap of encouraging permanent childhood, and this theory would be consistent with that.

The cure, it would seem to me (outsider though I am), would be to tell kids right from the beginning that their understanding of God’s world will grow and change throughout their lives not because God has changed, but because God is infinite and we are finite and thus can only understand the tiny fraction of His being that we can see from where we are.

It is we who change, not Him.

But what do I know? I don’t believe in Him!

I will see you nice people again tomorrow.