So I was hanging out last weekend. At a dark bar, playing some drum and base tract, and just chilling. I started looking around, mostly out of boredom. And I didn’t like what I saw. I felt sick. So much bullshit. So much. Time seemed to slow, and I felt a waive of
nausea crash over me in my stomach. And that hollow place
we all know filled with a dull ache, that I can only describe as grief for the would ofs, could ofs, and should ofs. In a very real way nothing made sense. I had a
moment.
I began to doubt. So many assumptions and aspirations. So much. I knew there was danger here, but I also had opened this Pandora’s box before. And you can’t let it spook you, you have to roll with it. After all, when your wrestling with yourself- all the victories are pyrrhic.
It became very important for me to break it all down. To cut it into littler and littler pieces. Till I found one small enough to eat – to make the whole thing palatable. Understandable. So I doubted. I doubted everything. I doubted my very connection to everything.
I doubted myself. I started to look at the looker. And I was revealed as a little boy with out his blanky. Which is the worst fear. The lost confused incommunicable first fear. I was in free fall by now, and I wanted, no needed something to hang on to.
I lit a cigarette.
Sometimes, the motion of our lives distracts us from the big picture, and sometimes the reverse is true. I inhaled, and I exhaled. And I started to think so much has changed. In the last five years alone. So much. But cigarettes, there was a thing. A constant. Every mourning when I rose up, and every evening when I lay down. Like bookends on my day. Different cigarettes, yet always the same: a cigarette.
And so I thought could cigarettes be the thing? The base unit. For its true that cigarettes for me hold value. Monetarily, a $3.75 a pack, that’s like 13 hundred dollars a year. That’s round fare air to Paris, or 13 dinners and movie for two, or two months rent. A year of my life.
But I was uncertain, would any given cigarette be the time that I took to smoke it, or a mark of the things I had done, or not gotten done. And that very uncertainty was in a strange way symmetrical within the metaphor, and that pleased me.
By this time I had finished my butt, and the moment had passed. Sanity returned. And I had one lingering thought:
I have just shortened my life expectancy. The idea that thousands of would ofs, and could ofs, and should ofs, and infinite probabilities and possibilities had just been changed. And somewhere, where the reckoning would take place, in the great actuarial table in the sky, something had been written. And that pleased me.
So you see this node hasn’t been about cigarettes or physics really, but about change, and accountability, and facing impending mortality, and blankies. CAN YOU DIG IT?