Monthly Archives: November 2014

And So On

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Whether it was beautiful or morbid was all a matter of perspective. The idea that life goes on. For us human beings on earth. For the seasons and the trees. Summer becomes fall, fall becomes winter, winter becomes spring, spring becomes summer, and so on. The leaves bud, the leaves flourish, the leaves die, they fertilize the ground, the ground lives. Death-birth-rebirth. It’s comforting. It’s maddening. Sure, we’re getting pretty close to fucking it up for good, but we’ve been here for millions of years, we in some form, and life continues to be. Life goes on. It expands outward. Even when you think it shouldn’t. When the people around you, like the leaves, also die, when you can’t stop your own head from exploding—we continue to rotate in space, the markets continuing, the sun rising, the sun setting. The rich getting richer, the poor continuing to exist no matter how much money or food our gods of technology and capitalism bring into the world. It goes on.

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NPR

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In the mornings I like to listen to NPR. I drag my half-dead self out of bed (never as early as I want to, thinking foolishly that somehow I’ll have the energy to write or run before work) and stumble my way through making a Chemex. Coffee being one of the few things that has the ability to rouse me from the covers. My thoughts switching from: Who am I? What am I? Is there meaning to any of this? To: I would like some coffee. I then collect few Tupperware’s full of food from the fridge and throw it in my bag. I get in the car and turn on the radio.

Good morning. It’s 8:45. Today is Monday, October 27th. The temperature is a high of 75 with lows in the 40’s. Currently it’s 60 degrees in Salt Lake City. You’re listening to KUER. You’re listening to morning edition. You’re listening to NPR.

I like the sound, the comforting, though generally dismal topics of conversation. The radio grounds one in the present space-time continuum.

Ah, I think. It’s October. It’s Monday. I am in Salt Lake City. The weather still happens. And I’m not dead yet. It’s almost meditative. To stop the spinning in my head, the daily chores ahead of me, and the existential/theological thought experiments I torture myself with.

I drive to work and I think. How do people do it? Work more than eight hours in a day? Keep getting up and doing their jobs day in and day out? And if you do work eight hours a day, where do you get the energy for exercise, for art, for social activities?

I work a conservative fifty hours a week now. Some of that has to do with running a business. Some of it is just normal work stuff. And in America, I am the lazy one. We have many gods in America. One is work or specifically, the power and money work brings. We have other gods. Family and Sex. Which funny enough, are on the opposite sides of the spectrum.

Anyways, there’s a moment each morning when I’m sipping coffee and taking a bite out of an asiago bagel that I’m no longer thinking. I no longer worry. I am listening.

For five minutes, I just am.

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