As patient readers know. for a long time I thought myself immune to the quest for the meaning of life (or my life, anyhow) mere because I saw through it.

I understood it. Knew where it came from. We seek this grand “meaning of life” because we are still basically tribal creatures who need someone or something to tell us what our job in the tribe is so we can do it and feel like we are doing what we are supposed to do.

A simple thing if you’re a hunter-gatherer. Relatively easy if you’re a villager and your father was the village smith as was his father and his father and so on.

But above that level and things get tricky. And once you get to the cosmic level of consciousness and start wondering about your role in the universe, forget about it.

See? I totally got this shit sussed. Check me, super genius guy, solving the meaning of life without even trying.

Except no, I didn’t.

I didn’t solve it, I just explained it. I didn’t provide any answers. Nobody is going away satisfied that they now know the purpose of their existence. I made nobody happier.

Least of all me.

All I really did was demonstrate how clever I am, and while that certainly is fun, and something I seem deeply driven to do, it solves nothing.

What it does is give me the feeling of mastery over the subject. Like by coming up with an explanation, I have asserted my dominance over the subject and therefore it is now my bitch and I don’t have to worry about it any more.

And that makes no sense whatsoever.

No logical sense, anyhow. It makes plenty of emotional sense, and reptile-brain sense.

But the problem still remains.

I still don’t know what I’m here for. I am plagued by a powerful sense that I am not doing what I am supposed to be doing and that in turn causes me a great deal of stress, self-loathing, and avoidant behaviour. It’s one of the big issues in my life.

Yet I went around for literal decades thinking I was somehow immune to the whole thing just because I had figured it all out.

Ah, such folly.

Like I’ve said before, part of the problem is the feeling of detachment. By summarizing and solving the question so precisely, neatly, and thoroughly, I gave myself the feeling of having detached from the problem and put it away in a neat little box.

But once again, I hadn’t actually solved anything. I just made myself feel better about it.

And I keep harping on this because I feel there’s something very important I am not quite seeing yet here. Something very deep and meaningful about how intellectualism operates and how it trips people like me up with these kinds of traps.

Oh well, I am sure I will figure it out sooner or later.

After all, I’m the guy who figured out the deal with the meaning of life.

So how hard could it be?

More after the break,

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I don’t like Tuesdays

Tell me why!

No really…. why?

For me, Tuesdays have always been my Mondays. They are my “worst day of the week’. On Monday, I still have some of the weekend’s momentum left and that makes things seem brighter and I don’t really think about the week ahead.

But then Tuesday morning hits and all that weekend feeling is gone and the four days till the next weekend seem like an eternity and life freaking sucks. ^[1]

And today’s been no exception. It’s kinda sucked too. Though not till near the end.

As far as I knew, as of when I went to bed last night, the plan for tonight was that we would take advantage of Joe’s being on Xmas vacation to go out to Denny’s tonight.

This would have made up for missing Denny’s last Sunday, for me at least.

So I sort of plotted my day assuming we would be heading out around 7:45 pm to meet Felicity at Denny’s at 8.

But then 8 pm rolls around, and I decide it’s time to stick my head out of my gopher hole and see what’s up.

Well it turns out that when Julian went to drive home after his dog walking job today, the car, she would not start. Poor dear had to bus home.

That must have been a most upsetting experience.

Without a working car, Denny’s was out, and the decision was made that Felicity would pick up Joe and give him a ride to his car and then a jump start at 10 pm.

Then, they would meet on Zoom at 11 pm and I would join them at midnight, which is what we usually do on Sundays.

I need the extra hour so I can blog and catch a nap.

Of course, nobody bothered telling ME any of this. I was only a knock on the door away, but once more, people just don’t want to deal with me, so I stay out of the loop.

But I get it. Joe says he was really depressed today, and I sure as hell know what that is like,. Depression can make even the smallest of tasks, like knocking on your fun but at times trying roomie’s door, seem impossible.

To top it all off, one of my precious few pairs of functional, can be worn in public without leading to my arrest pairs of jeans has come undone all along the upper inner left thigh.

My inseam came unseamed.

And for reasons I have explained here before, that kind of thing always sends me down a dark depressive spiral.

So yeah. Fuck Tuesdays. They are always the worst.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.