I have writing, I have music, I have the books on tape I listen to rather than read the thousand books in my apartment (does anybody want them?); I have the thousands of stories I tell, funny and sad - hopefully both together, and such is my life. That, so I tell myself at least, is the purpose for which I was put upon this earth; where others have love, children, tangible things to work at, responsibilities for walking their outline of this planet upon the days of their lives. For all the too much I unwisely write on myself to a public of acquaintances whom by all rights should be nauseated by my pomposity and self-conceit in thinking the world wants to read about me, I was put here not to tell my story: I was put here to tell yours, and tell myself I will that one day wean this brain from the narcissism of continual self-exploration through words to a public that either bores of it or keeps reading, compelled by voyeuristic curiosity.
My selfish prayer, every High Holy Day, is to be allotted the time to tell a story other than my own, and through endless observation and speculation, leave a fair and loving record of what life was like for everyone I've watched, everyone I remember, everyone I've ever read about. I don't doubt it will suck. Whether anyone of the future reads it is their own affair, but I will know that I tried to leave some stenograph of what it means for others than me to live in the world, and for that egotistical act to serve as my repentance. My poor gut tells me the time for it grows shorter, my brain tells me that no matter what the body feels, war may cause wholesale locations of us to live past others. But by those of us capable of it telling a larger story, we all might live on, and future generations will understand how mightily we struggled, how terribly hard we tried, how good was our unconscious faith even when our faith was lost or bad.
It is that overwhelming, egotistical compulsion to create something you all can recognize yourselves in rather than me, that keeps me going day by day, and feels eternally to my mania like a promise handed down by divine mandate. Surely He did not cause the imbalanced to see so much darkness, and then leave no record of how their compensatory abilities might benefit others.
Long term irrationality is its own sort of blessing, because it forms you into an advance scout for those convinced they are rational to hold a mirror to their irrationalities, so that others of the future just might learn how to suffer less - even if they don't, we'll have tried. Just as the mentally balanced watch the atypical and realize their irrational reactions to rational situations are irrational, the mentally imbalanced watch the neurotypical and realize that their rational reactions to the irrational are irrational - a negative times a positive is still a negative, the root of negativity is imaginary, and yet the imaginary number still exists.
Humans are so astonishingly predictable in their unpredictability, history is so rational in its predisposition to irrationality; the most rational response to the world is to expect that a full half the world is irrational in all its manifestations. The only rational response to life is to believe that all things we experience happen entirely by accident, and believe even so that a Divine Hand guides things.
Whether or not we all live on through whatever comes next in this world, the world continues, life is born even as life dies, every solution creates its own new problems; and even the deaths hold out promise that this world is not the real world. I believe we pass through to another world that may at least be realer than this artificial simulation where so much seems made of dirty plastic. We will be reunited with those who love us, and even as we explore the divine mysteries of the universe together, we, family and friends, will yell at each other and simmer in our resentments as though we were on any other vacation, and for all eternity as we live through the same infinity of regrettable words and apologies that comprise all life.
We are all here on earth to live our lives together, but those of us who live our lives alone still do not live to be islands. We all have a purpose here, and even at 40, I can't let go of the thought that I already know my purpose, and intend to live many more years to achieve something resembling its fulfillment. Writing is how I live, how I pray, the way I know that life is not an accident and worth enduring the slings and piles of outrageous bullshit that make us all stink. Every adult of the world is both guilty and innocent of crime, deserving of both love and hatred, justice and retribution, prisoners in a world not of their choosing and presidents powerful enough to create it.
All this bullshit is my selfish creed, the divine electricity that gets me up every day, and when it's time to write your story, may it read more coherently than all this.
Amen.
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