Today I want to talk about a couple of our favorite things as human beings; sex and violence. One is good, the other is bad, yet the taboos associated with the two seem to be skewed. We are programmed from childhood to be ashamed of our sexuality, whether straight or gay. We learn to feel embarrassed if we are caught watching sexually explicit material, yet we gather on the couch to watch portrayals of gratuitous violence. People have street fights, but I have personally never seen a street fuck. A penis penetrating a vagina gets a "XXX" rating while an axe penetrating a human cranium gets and "R" rating. It all just seems a little backwards.
The first time I realized this fact, I was making a transaction at my old job at a video game store. There was a child of about 10 with his mother. She was buying him a copy of Manhunt. Yes, this was a few years back. It was company policy that we informed the parent of a game's content if the game had a "mature" rating (for those of you not savvy to the video game culture, "rated mature" is the video game equivalent of "rated R.") I proceeded to explain to her that, in this particular game, you play the role of a convict that is released from prison in order to take part in a gritty snuff film in which you are audibly encouraged by the director to murder your victims in the most gruesome manner possible using things like plastic bags, shards of glass, baseball bats and whatever else you can find around the environment. The game was almost barred from release due to the graphic and sadistic nature of its content. Her response was priceless. After a slight hesitation and a quick glance at her angelic and impressionable offspring she ask me the more important question; "Okay, but there's no, like, nudity or anything, right?"
I nearly shit myself.
How the fuck did we arrive at the conclusion that mutilation and murder are more acceptable than a naked human body?! A human body in literally its most natural and uninhibited state is unacceptable in our culture. I'm trying to remain articulate here, but what the fucking fuck? Are you kidding me? If you are more offended by an exposed nipple than you are by someone being cleaved in half with a chainsaw, don't worry, I guess that's totally normal.
Now before you start to think that I'm saying that there should be less violence in our entertainment, I'm not. I am just as entertained watching Leatherface chase down and hack up some teenager as the next guy. I am equally entertained watching a UFC fight or an action flick to which you can play drinking games that coincide with the body count. Violence and sex are both in our nature as human beings, but for some reason we have decided to suppress the more natural and peaceful of the two.
Let's go back to penetration.
If you are reading this and you have a penis, you have probably used it to penetrate another human body by this point in your life. If you are reading this and you have a knife, the same is probably not true. So why then are we more comfortable to sit together and watch heads roll than we are to sit and watch uglies bump? The obvious answer is that a Saturday afternoon circle-jerk is not very appealing to most of us. I think that it may also have something to do with the removal from reality that comes with violent entertainment. Sex hits close to home for almost everyone, while horrifically violent scenarios don't. Also, most of us are not sexually aroused by horrific violence, and sexual arousal has a tendency to breed nervousness. To be repulsed or afraid is less personal than to be aroused.
I still find it funny, though, that if you flip on CSI or NCIS or any of those cornball cop dramas, they will open the show with the image of some mutilated hooker followed by a detailed description of how she ate shit; but when a vibrant and healthy woman removes her top later in the show, they'll come up with any angle or visual obstacle they can to protect you from the sight of those ghastly and offensive bare breasts. It's comforting to know that I can be sure there will be no filth to ruin my enjoyment of mutilated hookers. Thank you, TNT.
The dichotomy of what we find acceptable in entertainment and what we find acceptable in real life is interesting. For instance, you would probably prefer walking into a room to find your friend fucking his roommate over walking into that room to find him murdering his roommate; but that guy would much prefer your walking in on him while he watches a slasher flick over your walking in on him while he watches a skin flick. (I know the term "skin-flick" is corny, it just seemed to work well right there. Whatever. Fuck you.)
I guess that it helps in some ways that things are the way they are. For some people, porn can become an addiction, and many people that fall victim to this problem become desensitized to real sex. Maybe if we were shown too much sex in our entertainment, we would all become desensitized to it. Though I doubt that would happen. On the other side of the coin, no horror movie in this world can desensitize you to real-life violence. I had seen quite a few violent movies before the first time I ever got into a fist fight, and even something as simple as punching someone in the face feels slightly evil the first time you do it. To actually look at another person in front of you and inflict damage on that person's body takes something out of a good person, regardless of his or her taste in entertainment. I'm talking of course about hostile encounters in the real world, not combat sports in which there is a mutual face-punching understanding between combatants.
I'm not trying to start a protest here, I'm simply pointing out another ridiculous aspect of our society and the way we think about things. I realize that sex is usually a very private thing in real life, which is fine; but the fact that nudity is taboo is absolutely asinine when paired with the fact that a huge percentage of our entertainment is reliant on violent imagery. Add it to the list of ass-backwards things we all ignore every day, I guess. Goooo boobies!
Monday, November 26, 2012
Sunday, November 18, 2012
You TOTALLY Deserve Better
We are witnessing the death of social experience. It spans every generation and it permeates even the youngest and most innocent among us. My heart breaks each time I see another kid sitting across the table from his parents and siblings at a restaurant, and rather than discussing life and all of the things that are out there in the world, their noses are all stuck in their Androids and iPhones; and what are they doing? They are checking up on everybody else, most of whom are in turn checking up on them. We are people doing nothing but watching other people do nothing; all the while wondering why everyone is so boring.
Every time I'm part of a social gathering of any kind, I can invariably find members of the group sitting and scrolling through their Facebook newsfeeds. How stale and stunted the personalities in the room must be if the daily motions of mere acquaintances can pull you out of an actual experience. People like to talk about living in the moment, but I'm starting to doubt that many people can even recognize a moment as it occurs. The need to find what else is going on in the lives of others perpetually destroys your appreciation for what is going on in front of you. The extent to which we have allowed our lives to be digitized is disturbing. There is a whole world full of interesting people and events around us and we can't see beyond our touch-screens. We are like babies in a photo session who have finally lost interest in visually exploring the room and are focused only on the dancing puppet beside the camera.
Human interaction has been diluted to the point where anything not accompanied by a comment box is almost alien. People seem to prefer poorly punctuated and misspelled text to a human voice. The ability to converse in real-time is suffering. Our conversations, which used to be limited only by the extent of our knowledge or by our depth of opinion, are now limited by character-count and data usage. We also no longer need reasons for blowing people off. "I didn't get ur txt" works wonders. We almost don't need to be real people anymore. Our social network profiles and text-based relationships have become like our great wizards; all-knowing, powerful and overall bad-ass. The problem is that the people behind the curtains are also fooled by their own smoke and mirrors.
How much of an identity can you really have if your most consuming curiosity is the minutiae of the lives of others? Whenever we check our newsfeeds, I'm pretty sure we all do the same thing: we log in, we hope to see something interesting, we begin scrolling, we continue scrolling, we realize that we are wasting time, we scroll some more, we wonder how we ended up "friends" with many of the people we see, we feel better about our own intellect, we refresh the page and hope that somebody has posted something interesting in the time it took to learn that nobody has posted anything interesting, we sigh and scroll...
As a side note, I love how a hot girl can post any type of dog-shit drivel she wants and immediately have 36 "likes" and 28 comments. Guys, keep on "liking" those pseudo-artsy self pics of girls lying on their beds and throwing up peace signs. She will fuck you eventually. You're doing great. She totally knows you exist. Oh, and when she posts an angsty status about men, don't forget to respond with a comment about how she deserves better and that some guys just don't understand or appreciate when they've found the perfect girl. If you are not a hot chick, stop posting things. Nobody gives a shit. That goes for me and for this blog as well, but as a man I will never know any better, so here it is.
In the age of smartphones and social-networking it seems we have finally found the ultimate way to bullshit each other and ourselves while also finding a perfect way to ignore each other. You can mentally check-out of any situation while at the same time digitally "checking-in" to the same situation. You can be in two places at once without necessitating full intellectual or emotional attendance in either place. It's the ultimate armor for your ego. Only through this relatively new medium of communication has such a cold concept given us such a warm and fuzzy feeling.
Every time I'm part of a social gathering of any kind, I can invariably find members of the group sitting and scrolling through their Facebook newsfeeds. How stale and stunted the personalities in the room must be if the daily motions of mere acquaintances can pull you out of an actual experience. People like to talk about living in the moment, but I'm starting to doubt that many people can even recognize a moment as it occurs. The need to find what else is going on in the lives of others perpetually destroys your appreciation for what is going on in front of you. The extent to which we have allowed our lives to be digitized is disturbing. There is a whole world full of interesting people and events around us and we can't see beyond our touch-screens. We are like babies in a photo session who have finally lost interest in visually exploring the room and are focused only on the dancing puppet beside the camera.
Human interaction has been diluted to the point where anything not accompanied by a comment box is almost alien. People seem to prefer poorly punctuated and misspelled text to a human voice. The ability to converse in real-time is suffering. Our conversations, which used to be limited only by the extent of our knowledge or by our depth of opinion, are now limited by character-count and data usage. We also no longer need reasons for blowing people off. "I didn't get ur txt" works wonders. We almost don't need to be real people anymore. Our social network profiles and text-based relationships have become like our great wizards; all-knowing, powerful and overall bad-ass. The problem is that the people behind the curtains are also fooled by their own smoke and mirrors.
How much of an identity can you really have if your most consuming curiosity is the minutiae of the lives of others? Whenever we check our newsfeeds, I'm pretty sure we all do the same thing: we log in, we hope to see something interesting, we begin scrolling, we continue scrolling, we realize that we are wasting time, we scroll some more, we wonder how we ended up "friends" with many of the people we see, we feel better about our own intellect, we refresh the page and hope that somebody has posted something interesting in the time it took to learn that nobody has posted anything interesting, we sigh and scroll...
As a side note, I love how a hot girl can post any type of dog-shit drivel she wants and immediately have 36 "likes" and 28 comments. Guys, keep on "liking" those pseudo-artsy self pics of girls lying on their beds and throwing up peace signs. She will fuck you eventually. You're doing great. She totally knows you exist. Oh, and when she posts an angsty status about men, don't forget to respond with a comment about how she deserves better and that some guys just don't understand or appreciate when they've found the perfect girl. If you are not a hot chick, stop posting things. Nobody gives a shit. That goes for me and for this blog as well, but as a man I will never know any better, so here it is.
In the age of smartphones and social-networking it seems we have finally found the ultimate way to bullshit each other and ourselves while also finding a perfect way to ignore each other. You can mentally check-out of any situation while at the same time digitally "checking-in" to the same situation. You can be in two places at once without necessitating full intellectual or emotional attendance in either place. It's the ultimate armor for your ego. Only through this relatively new medium of communication has such a cold concept given us such a warm and fuzzy feeling.
Sunday, November 11, 2012
Maintenance and Missionary
There is a common sentiment that life is too short. I don't know where it started or why so many people seem to agree, but as I age and meet more people I am finding that life may be just long enough. Even by the age that we consider mid-life, most people seem to have had enough. There are very few people I know that have reached the crest of the hill and still look ahead with excitement. At a certain point, people stop looking at the road ahead and begin to gaze longingly into the rear-view. I would be more inclined to agree with a statement like, "youth is too short."
We spend our early years waiting for the day that we can call ourselves adults, and when the day finally comes that we can, we begin to forget what it was to be young. Simple pleasures become guilty pleasures, intimate encounters become stale routine, and the quest for fulfillment becomes the struggle for maintenance. None of this has to happen, but it does more often than not. There is a stigma attached to striving for goals that are unlikely to be attained once you have reached a certain age. There comes a time at which you are expected to give up the ghost and plant your roots.
Routine is the greatest enemy of endeavor. (Yes, I just made that one up and I hope it's catchy. Put it in a fortune cookie.) I have found that my life stagnates horribly any time that I fall into a day-to-day routine. A repeating pattern of behaviors disguises the passage of time. When each day is nearly identical to the last, all days that pass might as well have only been one single day. Go to work, come home, have dinner, watch Everybody Loves Raymond, have missionary sex with your spouse and fall asleep on your left side. While this may be an ideal day for somebody, and while there is nothing wrong with missionary sex, it's the repetition of this sequence five times a week that makes life seem too short.
Having such a routine actually works as a crutch for many people. It is an effective distraction from the things that you are NOT doing. It is easy to fool yourself into thinking that your life is complete if you can lull yourself into contentment through a hypnotic sequence of actions that are committed to your emotional muscle-memory. Just know that ten years of this will pass just as quickly as a day.
You can't really make your life any longer than it's going to be. What you can do, though, is to fill it more effectively. One day, instead of watching Everybody Loves Raymond, watch something funny. Whisk your spouse off to the nearest public bathroom and do her from behind over the sink. Go cliff diving. Go trick-or-treating on Christmas morning. Do something to throw a monkey wrench into the gears of the machine you have created. Some of the best experiences and fondest memories in your life have probably occurred immediately following the thought, I can't believe I'm doing this.
As we progress through adulthood, those moments become less frequent to the point that we forget that we can still live them. Life becomes about maintaining the things we have already attained and not about chasing personal fulfillment. We often forget that we can do things just because they are pleasurable and not just because they are part of the daily agenda. Slow the clock down by allowing yourself to experience things that are out of the ordinary and life will not seem so short. If you keep on depriving yourself, it's already over.
We spend our early years waiting for the day that we can call ourselves adults, and when the day finally comes that we can, we begin to forget what it was to be young. Simple pleasures become guilty pleasures, intimate encounters become stale routine, and the quest for fulfillment becomes the struggle for maintenance. None of this has to happen, but it does more often than not. There is a stigma attached to striving for goals that are unlikely to be attained once you have reached a certain age. There comes a time at which you are expected to give up the ghost and plant your roots.
Routine is the greatest enemy of endeavor. (Yes, I just made that one up and I hope it's catchy. Put it in a fortune cookie.) I have found that my life stagnates horribly any time that I fall into a day-to-day routine. A repeating pattern of behaviors disguises the passage of time. When each day is nearly identical to the last, all days that pass might as well have only been one single day. Go to work, come home, have dinner, watch Everybody Loves Raymond, have missionary sex with your spouse and fall asleep on your left side. While this may be an ideal day for somebody, and while there is nothing wrong with missionary sex, it's the repetition of this sequence five times a week that makes life seem too short.
Having such a routine actually works as a crutch for many people. It is an effective distraction from the things that you are NOT doing. It is easy to fool yourself into thinking that your life is complete if you can lull yourself into contentment through a hypnotic sequence of actions that are committed to your emotional muscle-memory. Just know that ten years of this will pass just as quickly as a day.
You can't really make your life any longer than it's going to be. What you can do, though, is to fill it more effectively. One day, instead of watching Everybody Loves Raymond, watch something funny. Whisk your spouse off to the nearest public bathroom and do her from behind over the sink. Go cliff diving. Go trick-or-treating on Christmas morning. Do something to throw a monkey wrench into the gears of the machine you have created. Some of the best experiences and fondest memories in your life have probably occurred immediately following the thought, I can't believe I'm doing this.
As we progress through adulthood, those moments become less frequent to the point that we forget that we can still live them. Life becomes about maintaining the things we have already attained and not about chasing personal fulfillment. We often forget that we can do things just because they are pleasurable and not just because they are part of the daily agenda. Slow the clock down by allowing yourself to experience things that are out of the ordinary and life will not seem so short. If you keep on depriving yourself, it's already over.
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Lucifer
This is the story of how I got arrested for being an associate of the Devil.
I was walking home from the gym through Providence on a perfect Saturday afternoon. I would have been hard pressed to think of anything to complain about. The birds were singing and so were the homeless. I somehow had the day off from work, I had had a good workout, and I was going home to enjoy the rest of my free Saturday. I was about 200 yards from my apartment building when I heard him speak. It was a voice that was somewhere between Buffalo Bill and Marlon Brando.
"Hey buddy," the voice said from about thirty feet behind me. I had no reason to believe that "Buddy" was me, but for some reason I assumed that I was indeed the buddy that this guy was looking for. I stopped and turned to face my new friend. I expected someone a little out of the ordinary, and prepared myself to tell him that I was just walking home from the gym so I didn't have any money on me. Even with my expectation of an odd man, what I saw approaching me still caught me off guard.
He was about 6'2" and large framed with a bit of a beer gut, about 50 years old, white, with a beard and a large tear drop tattoo on one cheek. This was all fine. What threw me off was the fact that all he was wearing were a pair of filthy white boxer shorts and running shoes with no socks. I held firm on my plan to tell him that I had no money until he spoke again, this time making solid eye contact with me as if he had finally found his lost soul brother.
"Did you see it?" He asked. I was about to ask him to clarify when he continued. "Did you see the angel?"
Oh fuck.
Any part of my brain telling me that maybe this guy wasn't batshit crazy fell silent, but by that point he was only feet away from me. I began walking and he took his place beside me. He continued. "Yeaaaa you saw it. They didn't see nothin' though." At this point he must have realized that it was rude not to have introduced himself, so he did.
"Hello, my name is Lucifer," he said as he kept pace beside me. "You saw it right? That fucking bastard, I gave him the beating of his life."
At this point I had no fucking idea what he was talking about. I know I hadn't seen this guy beat anyone up, and I sure as fuck hadn't seen an angel. I assumed that he was living out some fantasy and that the best thing to do would be to keep him from getting excited or offended. I played along by nodding my agreement while watching for any sudden movements.
Now kids, as a quick aside: if a big, scary, dirty, nearly naked white man with facial tattoos finds you on the street, asks you if you saw a supernatural being of any kind, and then introduces himself as a deity, it is best not to continue the conversation. Nothing good will come of it.
He went on. "That bastard, he called me a fucking diddler," he huffed, clearly upset by the presumption.
Not to be a dick here, but to that other bastard's defense, the first thing I thought when I laid eyes on Lucifer was that he looked a lot like a fucking diddler. What do I know anyway? I did my best to make it clear that my belief is that people can't just walk around calling other people diddlers. Lucifer agreed.
"I'm no fucking diddler," he continued. "My father, Satan, HE was a diddler."
I have always been under the impression that Lucifer and Satan were different names for the same guy, but I was corrected by the man in the flesh so again, what do I know? He went on to tell me that he had sent his father, Satan, to hell before becoming the babysitter for Adam and Eve. It had only been a matter of time before he had deemed it necessary that they be sent to hell as well. I was learning a lot as we approached a 3-way intersection with a set of lights near Finnegan's bar. That was when the cruisers showed up.
There were five of them; four marked and one undercover. They came in from every possible direction, surrounding us completely; the Devil and his minion, both modestly dressed. We were immediately tossed against the nearest cruiser and patted down. They took my cell phone and house key. I kept my mouth shut, not because I was afraid to speak but because I was actually glad that I wasn't going to have to figure out a way to ditch Lucifer and I knew that I would be cleared as soon as somebody asked me a question.
I was then cuffed and thrown into the back of another cruiser. If you have never been cuffed and thrown into a cruiser, I will say this: it's a bit like being cuffed and thrown into a cruiser. Try it if you really want to know. For a second, part of me thought that it would be hilarious to shout at the other officers, "DON'T ARREST MY FRIEND!" but I thought better of it knowing that I would probably have been the only one laughing. Also, based on the scene, it wouldn't have been crazy to think that maybe this guy had just killed someone.
We were then driven in separate cars to the scene of the crime. This is where I found out that Lucifer actually had given some guy the beating of his life. There were three more cruisers and an ambulance at the scene, Kennedy Square. Through my window I saw Fucking Bastard surrounded by people. His face was not in good shape. Lucifer hadn't been lying about the beating. I was then released from custody and received and apology from the arresting officers. They offered me a ride home which I refused.
On the way back home I couldn't help but think; if he wasn't lying about the beating, maybe he wasn't lying about any of it... That's actually not true, it just sounds kind of cool.
I was walking home from the gym through Providence on a perfect Saturday afternoon. I would have been hard pressed to think of anything to complain about. The birds were singing and so were the homeless. I somehow had the day off from work, I had had a good workout, and I was going home to enjoy the rest of my free Saturday. I was about 200 yards from my apartment building when I heard him speak. It was a voice that was somewhere between Buffalo Bill and Marlon Brando.
"Hey buddy," the voice said from about thirty feet behind me. I had no reason to believe that "Buddy" was me, but for some reason I assumed that I was indeed the buddy that this guy was looking for. I stopped and turned to face my new friend. I expected someone a little out of the ordinary, and prepared myself to tell him that I was just walking home from the gym so I didn't have any money on me. Even with my expectation of an odd man, what I saw approaching me still caught me off guard.
He was about 6'2" and large framed with a bit of a beer gut, about 50 years old, white, with a beard and a large tear drop tattoo on one cheek. This was all fine. What threw me off was the fact that all he was wearing were a pair of filthy white boxer shorts and running shoes with no socks. I held firm on my plan to tell him that I had no money until he spoke again, this time making solid eye contact with me as if he had finally found his lost soul brother.
"Did you see it?" He asked. I was about to ask him to clarify when he continued. "Did you see the angel?"
Oh fuck.
Any part of my brain telling me that maybe this guy wasn't batshit crazy fell silent, but by that point he was only feet away from me. I began walking and he took his place beside me. He continued. "Yeaaaa you saw it. They didn't see nothin' though." At this point he must have realized that it was rude not to have introduced himself, so he did.
"Hello, my name is Lucifer," he said as he kept pace beside me. "You saw it right? That fucking bastard, I gave him the beating of his life."
At this point I had no fucking idea what he was talking about. I know I hadn't seen this guy beat anyone up, and I sure as fuck hadn't seen an angel. I assumed that he was living out some fantasy and that the best thing to do would be to keep him from getting excited or offended. I played along by nodding my agreement while watching for any sudden movements.
Now kids, as a quick aside: if a big, scary, dirty, nearly naked white man with facial tattoos finds you on the street, asks you if you saw a supernatural being of any kind, and then introduces himself as a deity, it is best not to continue the conversation. Nothing good will come of it.
He went on. "That bastard, he called me a fucking diddler," he huffed, clearly upset by the presumption.
Not to be a dick here, but to that other bastard's defense, the first thing I thought when I laid eyes on Lucifer was that he looked a lot like a fucking diddler. What do I know anyway? I did my best to make it clear that my belief is that people can't just walk around calling other people diddlers. Lucifer agreed.
"I'm no fucking diddler," he continued. "My father, Satan, HE was a diddler."
I have always been under the impression that Lucifer and Satan were different names for the same guy, but I was corrected by the man in the flesh so again, what do I know? He went on to tell me that he had sent his father, Satan, to hell before becoming the babysitter for Adam and Eve. It had only been a matter of time before he had deemed it necessary that they be sent to hell as well. I was learning a lot as we approached a 3-way intersection with a set of lights near Finnegan's bar. That was when the cruisers showed up.
There were five of them; four marked and one undercover. They came in from every possible direction, surrounding us completely; the Devil and his minion, both modestly dressed. We were immediately tossed against the nearest cruiser and patted down. They took my cell phone and house key. I kept my mouth shut, not because I was afraid to speak but because I was actually glad that I wasn't going to have to figure out a way to ditch Lucifer and I knew that I would be cleared as soon as somebody asked me a question.
I was then cuffed and thrown into the back of another cruiser. If you have never been cuffed and thrown into a cruiser, I will say this: it's a bit like being cuffed and thrown into a cruiser. Try it if you really want to know. For a second, part of me thought that it would be hilarious to shout at the other officers, "DON'T ARREST MY FRIEND!" but I thought better of it knowing that I would probably have been the only one laughing. Also, based on the scene, it wouldn't have been crazy to think that maybe this guy had just killed someone.
We were then driven in separate cars to the scene of the crime. This is where I found out that Lucifer actually had given some guy the beating of his life. There were three more cruisers and an ambulance at the scene, Kennedy Square. Through my window I saw Fucking Bastard surrounded by people. His face was not in good shape. Lucifer hadn't been lying about the beating. I was then released from custody and received and apology from the arresting officers. They offered me a ride home which I refused.
On the way back home I couldn't help but think; if he wasn't lying about the beating, maybe he wasn't lying about any of it... That's actually not true, it just sounds kind of cool.
Sunday, November 4, 2012
Life in Reverse
There are too many canned phrases being thrown around out there, and I hate almost all of them. Among some classics of our day are; Really??, Cool story bro, Awkwaaaard and That's why we can't have nice things. These are generally used in a piss-poor attempt at humor by those who have difficulty formulating legitimate jokes in a given situation, and are generally harmless. Given their harmlessness and the good intentions of the people who use them regularly, these phrases probably shouldn't piss me off the way they do, but facts are facts and I'm not one to lie to myself. In another category of canned phrases are the ones we use in situations in which you want to say some helpful words to someone who is dealing with a troublesome situation. These are things like; Well, what are you gonna do?, It is what it is, What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, and my all time fucking favorite, Everything happens for a reason. There are few phrases uttered in the English language that go up my ass further than, "everything happens for a reason."
The short and simple reason that I hate that particular saying is that it's a complete cop-out and almost everyone uses it. Usually, it's used as a last resort when a situation sucks to the point of no reconciliation and the best thing to do is to look it in the face and say, "well this sucks, but I didn't die, so I guess I have to get over it eventually." I'm not saying that grieving is not necessary in some cases because it most definitely is. What I am saying is that whatever happened sure as fuck didn't happen as a means to an end. When a kid dies in a car accident because of a drunk driver or a couple is killed when their bucket falls off the Ferris wheel, what divine reason can you offer to those who have lost them?
Here's a stupid example, but even something as simple as locking your keys in your car can be twisted and manipulated to the point where you could say that there was a reason for it; maybe because the AAA guy that shows up happens to be your high school crush and you finally get to tell him. Or maybe the only person you can get a hold of is your ex and she drives straight down to the parking lot (the one where your stupid ass locked itself outside) and tells you that she cries every night knowing that she can never have you back. I don't know. I can guarantee you though; you probably just had a lapse in brilliance and shut the car door before taking the keys out. Anything that happens after that is because you locked the keys in the car; you didn't lock them in there so that the chain of events that follows could take place.
Other than the fact that "everything happens for a reason" implies that life occurs in reverse, it also implies that we are FAR more important than we really are. Human beings and our super-sized egos need a reason or an explanation for everything. Also, each person on earth is the main character in his or her own story, so it can be damaging to realize that most of the events in your life are unrelated and inconsequential to the happenings outside of your home or office. The fact is that the world generally turns as if you as an individual are not even on it.
We each live in a microcosm in which everything is of the utmost importance. People who have trouble coping with the things inside these microcosms turn to coping mechanisms such as therapy, drugs, alcohol and in extreme cases suicide or violence. When these things occur, any person's little world can be rocked; but when you pan out enough so that you can see the big world, you can see that nothing has really changed. To think that things happen to you in order to forward the world's big plan for you borders on arrogance.
I might have gone off on a bit of a tangent there. Anyway, cut the shit with the canned phrases and say something new. Say something that you are actually thinking. The human population is starting to resemble an assembly line of pull-string dolls that are released from the factory with predetermined phrase-banks. We are fed rapid-fire bullshit almost every second of the day. The least we can do is to stop bullshitting each other, but that's some perfect-world talk right there.
The short and simple reason that I hate that particular saying is that it's a complete cop-out and almost everyone uses it. Usually, it's used as a last resort when a situation sucks to the point of no reconciliation and the best thing to do is to look it in the face and say, "well this sucks, but I didn't die, so I guess I have to get over it eventually." I'm not saying that grieving is not necessary in some cases because it most definitely is. What I am saying is that whatever happened sure as fuck didn't happen as a means to an end. When a kid dies in a car accident because of a drunk driver or a couple is killed when their bucket falls off the Ferris wheel, what divine reason can you offer to those who have lost them?
Here's a stupid example, but even something as simple as locking your keys in your car can be twisted and manipulated to the point where you could say that there was a reason for it; maybe because the AAA guy that shows up happens to be your high school crush and you finally get to tell him. Or maybe the only person you can get a hold of is your ex and she drives straight down to the parking lot (the one where your stupid ass locked itself outside) and tells you that she cries every night knowing that she can never have you back. I don't know. I can guarantee you though; you probably just had a lapse in brilliance and shut the car door before taking the keys out. Anything that happens after that is because you locked the keys in the car; you didn't lock them in there so that the chain of events that follows could take place.
Other than the fact that "everything happens for a reason" implies that life occurs in reverse, it also implies that we are FAR more important than we really are. Human beings and our super-sized egos need a reason or an explanation for everything. Also, each person on earth is the main character in his or her own story, so it can be damaging to realize that most of the events in your life are unrelated and inconsequential to the happenings outside of your home or office. The fact is that the world generally turns as if you as an individual are not even on it.
We each live in a microcosm in which everything is of the utmost importance. People who have trouble coping with the things inside these microcosms turn to coping mechanisms such as therapy, drugs, alcohol and in extreme cases suicide or violence. When these things occur, any person's little world can be rocked; but when you pan out enough so that you can see the big world, you can see that nothing has really changed. To think that things happen to you in order to forward the world's big plan for you borders on arrogance.
I might have gone off on a bit of a tangent there. Anyway, cut the shit with the canned phrases and say something new. Say something that you are actually thinking. The human population is starting to resemble an assembly line of pull-string dolls that are released from the factory with predetermined phrase-banks. We are fed rapid-fire bullshit almost every second of the day. The least we can do is to stop bullshitting each other, but that's some perfect-world talk right there.
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