“You don’t need to know what you’re looking for. You need to discover it.”
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“You don’t need to know what you’re looking for. You need to discover it.”
You come home to a house you’ve kept clean for a week solid after spring cleaning, but today you are tired. You drop your stuff on the floor and go to the kitchen to grab some snacks. You’ve worked hard this week. You decide you deserve a treat. You can’t remember the last time you had a milkshake. You scoop out the ice cream, Oreos, chocolate syrup, and some more ice cream, and hold the “blend” button. The blender decides that now is a good time to commit suicide and grind its gears, and not your milkshake, until you hear a pop and see a little wisp of smoke trail away from your newly departed appliance. You now understand the phrase ‘giving up the ghost,’ but you still don’t have a milkshake. You find yourself on the couch minutes later with a long spoon and the top half of the blender in your hand, scraping out the last bites of your milkstir, and realizing that the top half of the blender actually isn’t a bad way to eat a snack. It even has a handle and a spout. Over the next few weeks you keep using the top half of the blender to eat while the bottom half still sits plugged in on your counter top. No, it still doesn’t work. And now you’ve gotten used to it being there that it has just become part of the kitchen counter; a fixture, a statue, a memorial even. A few months later you invite friends over and one of them gets really drunk and asks you why you couldn’t just make margaritas from scratch when the blender is sitting right there. You tell him, “oh, it doesn’t work.” Like it’s supposed to not work. And he just stares at you for a little while because he’s obviously drunk, and nothing is wrong with you, or the blender.
I never really understood Friday the 13th. Is everyone on the planet supposed to have horribly bad luck on this day? Is there some sort of luck-karma built up that is all released on one day so every other day can be pleasant? It’s just a day, and I happen to like fridays, so why does it have to be bad luck all of a sudden? Why can’t it be a day of good luck? Like all of a sudden everyone wins the lottery, or all the lights turn green, or your boss says to take the day off? That’s not really even what I wonder about though; it’s superstitions in general. My theory is that superstitions just prevent us from doing stupid things that are really just common sense in the first place, and “bad luck” is just all of the pins you knock down while bowling down the ‘stupid lane’ with bumpers one. You hear people say “Don’t walk under a ladder, it’s bad luck.” “If a black cat walks across your path, it’s bad luck.” “If you open an umbrella inside, it’s bad luck.” “If you break a mirror…” etc.
Really, this is what I think happens:
Don’t walk under a ladder because that’s stupid. Something could fall on you, or you could knock it over.
If a black cat, probably a stray if it’s out alone, walks across your path then you’re probably in a bad neighborhood, so stay away from ‘black cats.’
If you open an umbrella inside you’ll just look stupid because it never rains inside.
And don’t break mirrors! Why would you break a mirror? It makes a huge mess and it sucks to replace. Furthermore you or someone else could end up stepping on glass. Be careful!
So just use some common sense… or else it’ll be bad luck.
I think as a culture we’re so fascinated and scared by zombies because besides not having a heartbeat, there’s not much difference between having a crappy 9-5 job and being a zombie. They’re like the embodiment of the worst version of ourselves. A shell of a human. Basically dead already, but still walking around and going through the motions like we need to keep pushing papers and sending emails because the survival of the species depends on whether or not those quarterly reports that no one reads were formatted correctly.
…I am Jack’s sense of humor.
What’s on your mind?
Every living creature dies alone. That sort of thing.
That’s not always true. I’ve heard sometimes big groups of people, like in cults, come together and have mass suicides, like a big suicide party–oh and don’t forget about natural disasters. Lots of people die together in those.
Thanks. I feel way better now.
Well don’t drag your shit onto me. I’m feeling pretty good right now and I don’t want to deal with your existential crisis. I’ll deal with it when I get depressed on my own accord.
You could have just said that first. You don’t have to be such a jerk about it.
I was starting to feel bad, so I had to knock you down a few pegs, which made me feel better I gotta say.
Haven’t you heard of sharing the load to make it lighter?
Haven’t you heard about turds in punch bowls? I don’t want your shit in my mouth.
But we never talk about this kind of stuff. No one does.
And for a reason. People want to feel good. Yeah, we all know we’re all going to die, but we’d rather just distract ourselves from it than spend time thinking about it and dealing with it. Why do you think people are always on their phones doing dumb shit when they could have a quiet moment to reflect? Why do you think we distract ourselves from thought in general?
Yeah. I guess we’ve kind of gotten soft. No one wants to do the hard mental work to find true satisfaction; they just want to play fucking candy crush and feel happy for beating the next level or watch some fucking cats doing cute cat things.
Well yeah, that’s just the way it is, so deal with it.
I’m trying.
Well you’re sucking at it. Try harder.
But if I just distract myself it won’t actually change anything.
…I’ll give you some advice that my great grandpa gave me before he died, as long as you promise to shut up.
Ok. Sure.
When you feel like you are going to die — don’t die; and you will survive.
He said that?
Well, I’m translating, but that’s the gist.
Bullshit.
Well it’s what he said. Now shut the fuck up and eat some ice cream.
There’s no way he said that.
He was on the forefront of wisdom, what do you want me to say?
How about what he actually said?
But that is what he said.
I object! You expect me to believe this ill-conceived hearsay?
Why not? Everything is hearsay anyways. You wouldn’t even know how old you are if someone didn’t tell you. Everything can be true or false; it just matters if you believe it. You see, there’s a certain point in life when you realize that you’re not the judge. You don’t decide what happens, so you try to be the lawyer for a while, arguing about why it happens and all the time-consuming, convoluted questions that go along with that. But then you realize that you’re a crappy lawyer and are only confusing yourself, so you take another step back. Your real job is to be the jury, and decide what you want to believe. Because believing is the only choice we have, and the only decision worth giving a damn about. So don’t tell me you’re going to die, and don’t ask me why it will happen; just tell me what you’re going to do about it.
“Sometimes you can’t let yourself be distracted by the little flaws, and need to look at the pig bicture.”
After a devastating earthquake in a destitute third world country, many first world organizations sent ‘short-term missionary teams’ to help the devastated population return to their lives.
There was rubble and wreckage and people collecting their broken lives in a wheelbarrow and hauling them away by the side of the road. Without homes, the people were openly on display as cars drove by, however no one seemed to notice in the same way you don’t notice every breath you take.
The short term missionaries then rolled through with their shiny rented cars and took pictures like it was a zoo. Normally in these circumstances those inside the car would be afraid, but the glass windows of the car served as a barrier that detached and removed these short-term missionaries from the world; but from the outside it was clear that those in the air conditioned cars were the ones on display.
One thing that I will fail to understand is how there is always that one extra sock left after doing laundry. Where do they go? Is there a Neverland for lost socks, or does the machine purposely guzzle the most frustrating item of clothing to lose as a fee for drying? Maybe they just hate being crammed into a dark drawer, awakened rudely, stuffed into shoes, and then stepped on all day. It’s a rough life being a sock, and I can see why they might want to escape.
Even though you’re only missing one sock, somehow every pair of socks you own end up being mismatched and nothing is the same, and you just don’t know what to do with that one extra sock. Should you put it in the drawer and forget about it, should you keep it as some sort of memorial, or should you just throw it away? There’s no good way to fold a single sock.
allmostrelevant 