Today, I discussed my relationship with the waters of the world.

In other words, I talked about how I pee a lot.

Look, they can’t all be brilliant political analysis or mediocre original songs, okay?

Here it is :

I talk about whatever is on my mind when I sit down to write or record. That’s how I make sure I am never at a loss for what to write or talk about.

There’s always something there for me to capture and record. Sometimes it takes a non-trivial amount of pre-recording skullduggery to find it, but there’s always something floating around in the primodial soup of my fertile mind waiting to be born.

I truly have had those thoughts about the water cycle while peeing before. It annoys me how many people don’t know about the water cycle and therefore think stupid hippie thoughts about limited amount of fresh water, oh no.

IT FALLS FROM THE FUCKING SKY. It literally rains it. And the world is covered in oceans. Water is the second least limited resource on Earth, just behind silicon.

Which, for those who dunno, what most of the Earth’s crust is made of.

To me, science has always been kind of spiritual, or at least, it occupies some (but not all) of the space a religious or mystical spirituality would take in my mind.

Science can never fully replace religion because it can’t perform religion’s emotional tasks. It can totally provide you with a cosmology and understanding of the literal, non-personal ways the world works and it can even give you a sense of awe and wonder and being part of something much bigger than yourself.

I mean, you are life. You are that which reverses entropy. As far as we know, that makes you unique in the entire universe.

Though I hope we find out we’re wrong about that.

But science can’t comfort you when you lose a loved one. It can’t shore you up when you feel like you’re falling apart. It can’t give you someone to blame for your troubles and thank for your boons.

The fact that these emotional needs are neither rational or logical in no way obviates them or makes them disappear. They are a crucial part of what it means to be human, and all the evolutionary psychology in the world can’t change that.

And yet, there are millions of us hapless humans trying to pretend like those things don’t exist or don’t matter as we struggle through life and wonder why life seems so damned hard and the world seems so hostile and cold.

Because you’re not drawing on all the resources you need because those resources, as literal explanations of the world, are irrational and not “real”.

Well here are the opening words of my Gospel : God is as real as love is. Both exist only in the hearts, minds, and souls of human beings and are therefore not “real” in the way a chair or the planet Venus are real.

But we share that world where love exists. It might not be something you can point to in the world and say, “Look, there it is!”, but nobody would deny its reality.

God, as an idea, as a force, and as a mythological figure, can be the same. You can believe in an imaginary God, knowing you made Him up, and He can, at all times, be exactly what you need Him to be, and nobody can tell you different.

After all, He is your imaginary friend, and He works however you need Him to.

I am not sure if I can ever make that journey myself. I am too “practical”, too “pragmatic”, too “logical” to invest my emotions in something like that.

Maybe I will get there someday. I sure hope I do. I have been a wounded idealist suffering on the altar of “truth” and “logic” for far too long.

Maybe in order to heal, I need to stop being so god damned literal about everything.

Maybe I need to stop fighting it and finally admit that all that post hippie crap about the power of imagination might have actually had a point.

Maybe I have been starving at the feast this whole time.

Or maybe not.

More after the break.

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Still broken after all these years

Remember this song?

It’s become quite de rigeur in mental health circles then days in mental health circles to tell people like me that we are not broken, and I totally get why and I am sure being told that helps a lot of people, but for me that just ain’t gonna cut it.

Because if how I feel doesn’t qualify as broken, shoot me in the fucking head, because that means I can’t ever get better.

So this can’t be what normal feels like. It just can’t.

And I can feel how broken I am. I am intimately familiar with the ragged edges of my massive mental wounds. I can tell that parts of my mind just plain don’t work. I can feel them hanging there like paralyzed limbs in my mind.

And I can barely even conceive of what it would be like to be otherwise. I can only imagine it as a purely theoretical state, like imagining being able to fly, but
my brain breaks when I try to imagine it as as a day to day, moment to moment reality,

Still, I am doing what I can to get better. It’s difficult because of just how ingrained this rotten little rut of mine has become and how emotionally dependent I am on it and how impossible it feels to escape it.

But I will do it one day. One day I will finally be so sick of this bullshit that I am ready to gnaw my goddamned arm off to get out of this trap.

Until then, I will muddle through like always, all my phantom limbs intact.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.