i love you, let's light ourselves on fire.

things i love thursday

“When you let go of the need for any & all outcomes, life becomes a creative, magical adventure.” — Deepak Chopra

I’ve been reading Gala Darling’s iCiNG for a long time. She is brilliant, and I absolutely adore everything about her. And every Thursday, she posts about Things [She] Loves. So, in the spirit of Trying To Make My Life Better, I’ve decided to follow suit. Here’s what’s making life livable this week:

♥ Tropical Punch Rockstars. I have been a Rockstar afficianado since my high school soccer days, but I just tried the Tropical Punch flavor today. It is delish, and tastes like energy-filled Hawaiian Punch. My only wish is that they made a sugar-free version!

♥ Mexican Ranch Market! Walking in to the Ranch Market on Roosevelt is like crossing the border into Mexico. Today, I walked in the doors with Steve and Travis and the first thing I saw was the woman at the counter frosting a cake with frosting skillz I only wish I had. And at the meat counter, they had a sculpture of a pig made out of—you guessed it—ground beef. How fucking awesome is that? Really awesome. Plus, we got two HUGE turkeys for T-day for TEN DOLLARS. Crazy.

♥ All of Phoenix, Arizona, for that matter. It’s taken some time, but I’ve really grown to love this place. The mountains are gorgeous, there’s always something going on, and, to quote Eric Cartman, “having Mexicans around totally kicks fuckin’ ass.” Considering that four months ago I wanted nothing more in the world than to move back to Michigan, this is an incredible thing. Woo, PHX!

♥ My new bff, Casey J. We met on the internet, then we met in real life, and now we are to-ge-ther for-ev-er. I love her to death. In fact, we’re hanging out in like two hours! Rad.

♥ My new job! I started working last week doing video editing for a certain up-and-coming-tech-company-who-shall-not-be-named (they Had A Talk with me for mentioning them by name on Twitter), and it’s a pretty sweet gig. I get to start working third shift tonight, which should be a trip—I’ve never worked third shift before, but I’m naturally pretty nocturnal, so hopefully it’ll be a good fit. Also, it’s nice to finally have a job where the time seems to fly, instead of crawl. Yes!

♥ HARVEEEEEYYYY! My pitbull puppy, Harvey D, is the Best Dog Ever. He is adorable, and I know that pitbulls get a bad rap as being mean, aggressive dogs, but he is just a total little sweetheart fairy princess oh my gosh. I love him. He got Parvo a few weeks ago (and anyone who owns a dog knows how terrifying that is) but we got him to the vet in the super-early stages and he was completely better in like two days. Thank god. A part of me would have died with him. But he is all better! Hooray! Love my puppy.

♥ Honorable Mentions: Spraygraphic; History Channel specials; a new Universal Remote! We can pause movies now!; Marlboro Menthols; bright blue sneakers; 73 degrees and sunny in November; brainstorming ideas for starting a zine and getting the whole crew in on the action; my awesome asshole friends (I really do love them, and they really are assholes); not having to work until 11 pm (leaving the hours from two to ten-thirty as Shannontime); pink and turquoise together; planning lots of Big Projects; cute lighters; smoking bowls; hot showers; Julioberto’s chimichangas; hoodie weather!; awesome sunglasses year round; orange leather jackets with secret pockets; old Nintendo games; FLANNEL FLANNEL FLANNEL!

What’s rocking your week, world?

hail to whatever you found

I sat down to the computer just now because I have some downtime, a little bit of time between the rush of self-upkeep, the constant battle to be who everyone else wants to see, between making plans and enacting them, between celery and peanut butter and and soda and vodka. Just a few sparse minutes. Really, I don’t even have that much time—I’ve got cleaning to do and a website to tweak, and I really ought to be finding a job.

But fuck all that, because I’ve got something to say.

I want to talk for a minute about “home.” Not “home” as a place or as an idea, but a sort of weird mix of the two. I moved across the country six months and one day ago, over two thousand miles (but not quite three.) And a few weeks ago I went back to the green, cold place I grew up, and it wasn’t home anymore. Or at least, it didn’t feel like home. The bedroom I’d once called my own was vacant, a guest room, like a hotel room with less amenities. No one had slept in that bed since I left, but I felt like a stranger. Less than three days after I’d arrived, I was ready to leave—ready to go back to my palm trees, my air pollution, the best Mexican food north of the border. I was ready to go home.

And now I’m back. I’ve been back for a week. And it’s not home. Don’t get me wrong, it’ll probably feel like home someday, eventually, but right now, it’s still just the place where I live. I don’t know my way around. I don’t know where the nearest mall is. I still, despite many attempts, have not found a decent Chinese restaurant at all, let alone one who delivers.

But I’m getting closer. I’ve made friends. I’ve been on a date. I know where the best pizza in Central Phoenix is, along with the best pizza on the North Side. I can tell you where the worst kareoke bar is, and every employee of the AM/PM down the street knows me by name. One of them told the new trainee the other day that I was like a sister to them. (What can I say? I buy a lot of soda and cigarettes.)

What makes home, home? Is it having someone you can call at any hour of the night, someone who will come to your rescue? Is it knowing exactly how much, to the penny, a pack of Marlboro Menthols will cost you? Or a slice of cheese pizza?

Is it just being happy where you are?

Man, fuck if I know.

I know nothing of any importance, and neither does anybody else.

The meaning of life, as far as we humans can comprehend, is that there is no meaning. Like some cosmic science project left in a dark, forgotten closet, we carry on with the mundanity of the day-to-day and are never any the wiser.

We really are “creatures of habit”—doing what is expected, but never really questioning why it is that we do what we do. I go to sleep, I wake, I smoke a cigarette, I eat, I shower, I fool around on the internet. I do all of this, day in and day out, and to what end? I make art, if only because it is what is expected of me—I was, for whatever reason, born with the ability to to visually interpret the world around me, and because I have, it’s expected of me that I will put these skills to use, whether in private or for a greater community purpose, much like it would be expected that someone especially good with numbers would use their mathematical skills in their life—whether that be doing their own accounting or becoming Henry Paulson.

People are born, they grow, they become adults. As such, they get jobs, sometimes marry, have families. And then they die. And their children will go through the same cycle. For what? We live. We grow old. We die. Over and over and over, and in a million years, no one will ever know we existed. We don’t matter. And if we won’t matter a million years from now, who are we to say that we matter now? Do we matter now? In the long run, no. Nothing we do, in the hypothetical “big picture,” actually makes any difference.

And yet even in knowing and recognizing our own lack of purpose, we continue in our patterns. I will finish writing this, smoke a cigarette, go to bed, and wake up to do it all over again. And were I to change my patterns, the universe would still continue it’s path toward its inevitable end, and what I do will continue to not matter. Look at your own life. Will it matter in a million years, when you and everything you know no longer exists? No.

What’s the point? There is no point. Life is one big fucking joke—we all take ourselves so seriously, fretting over little things like how our hair looks and our jobs and if he loves you or if you’re going to get laid anytime in the near future or maybe ever again, and none of it fucking matters. We’re so busy living our self-involved little lives that we never take the time to question our own existence, to ask why exactly any of this bullshit matters—and when we do ask, there’s the punchline. It doesn’t matter, and there is absolutely nothing that we can do to change or escape that fact.

How long does the average person live? Seventy, eighty years? That’s nothing in the grand scheme of the universe. Ninety-nine percent of the world’s population right now will have been forgotten a mere two-hundred years from now, let alone a thousand, and in a million the human race as we know it is unlikely to exist. And for that brief seventy-to-eighty-year period, the realization that it’s pointless will always be there, coloring our perceptions of the world around us. There are only two proposed means of escape. The first is forgetting—and one cannot willfully forget anything, except perhaps through hard drugs, which is not a path I suggest. The second is death, and even that is meaningless, for while it will effect those around you for a brief period, in a hundred years you’ll likely have been forgotten except perhaps as a footnote in family histories. And as before, if something won’t matter in a million years, who’s to say it matters now? If one tries to create a grand scale of things mattering, all things end up not mattering at all. So even in death, it’s impossible to escape the absurd futility of life. (That sounded way too emo.)

It is kind of funny, when thought about at length and when not examining one’s own life too closely. And while I can’t escape the meaninglessness of life, I can accept it. The absurdity of life itself can’t be changed by me or anyone else; even if it could, what would it be changed to? If questioned long enough and thoroughly enough, nothing in the world means anything. Even those with the delusion of a higher power can, if they’re open-minded enough, be brought to this realization: question any god long enough, or any other belief, and it will inevitably collapse in upon itself. Why are we alive? It’s God’s will. But why does God will it so? No answer. “Humans cannot understand the will of God,” my ass. God is an excuse for what we don’t know, and what we are afraid to question—because the answers are not necessarily pleasant.

When looked at objectively through progressively broader scopes, nothing holds up, nothing produces answers. I look at my own life and find no great meaning. I look at the lives of myself and everyone I know, collectively, and still, none of it has any great consequence to the universe. I can look at the country, the world, and every human who has ever walked this earth, but still, none of it will matter in a million years, or several million. The planet is several billion years old. Think about that. In the scope of existence, what we do, our lives, mean nothing.

So why be alive? Why continue the patterns? No reason. No real choice, either. Thomas Nagel compared it to a mouse, who, somehow, has been given the ability to comprehend his own mousey existence. He sees the reasoning and patterns behind his frantic mouse habits and patterns, to realize that he is just a mouse, but still runs about in fear, nibbles at scraps of food, and has no other option but to continue being a mouse. The absurdity of one’s own existence.