LIFE IS PAIN

LIFE IS PAIN

Each generation takes its slings and arrows and wants to claim ownership
This is a unique trauma, it has Happened to Me
As a young person, you begin to internalize the future, externalize yourself in that place
And inevitably, something scuds it into termination dust
The world kicks back hard, stubborn, a cruel mule. Cruel Mule is the name of my new band.

This baited-breath current events trauma is the gloss in the eyes of a blue-eyed poet. Behind every cynic is a wounded dreamer, right?
Jung said no one finds conciousness without pain

Trauma of a second birth, almost. The world is not what we imagined it would be, coming from childhood and seeing possibilities ascending. Then the engine rattles, chokes, and a lot of the reassuring make believe of childhood falls off and you say simply “What happened?” “Whuh happeh?”

And at the top of the hill, we see ruination, simple, stupid, selfish, scattered arrays of tiny people made of money and fat and brain death. And constellations of these confident idiots ring the planet, and this has been so for generations. And you suspect that a human life is just a little bit too short to transmit this information to a new generation and change the thing. Life is pain.

Easy to reach a point in your life where you lie in bed all day, depressed. Dreaming commercial jingles, about your father, about walking up to a sheer cliff. Don’t know if it’s day or night. Death can take me or not, I don’t know I’d notice the difference.

I say this not with a fake smile, with whimsy or unearned positivity, but there is a better way. You are only captured by this world if you allow it. We are immutable ripples upon eternity, and if you capitulate to the suffering, you have lost sight of something True.

It’s very easy to do, it’s constant bombardment over all of your senses. It’s torturous media and culture shoving this selfish, ignoble message into your eyes and ears and mouth. Old times are quaint, funny. The future is unknowable, we can’t make anything happen. Buy shit. Become your own brand. The things you like and consume are you. Eat it. Take things. This is you. You are just a collection of keywords. Buy shit.
The Cruel Mule would love to kick you into believing you are alone. Fear, anxiety. Whatever. Gotta make something of yourself. Don’t be a loser. Make money. Buy shit. Eat it.

The last two days, I was outside, and it was hot as hell. I was sitting on the concrete steps leading up to the house I share with my future wife and our pets. Each day, a tiny little bee flew up to me and buzzed around my elbow. Watching me, she bobbed around. I looked back at her. The grass is vibrant green in the yard. We have a streak of unmowed lawn that has blossomed into little yellow and purple flowers. The bee investigated me. She was smaller than one of my fingernails. She left. I was happy. I am happy.

A woman is born with all of the eggs she will have in her lifetime. This necessarily means that whatever ova came out to be me was extant in the world in 1967, when my mother was born. She was a physical thing in the world back in the 1930s, when her mother was born. And on and on back in time until we went from monkeys to people, from when we went from fish to shrews, from when we went from one cell to two. The physical matter that I am can never be destroyed, it will be reconstituted into time immemorial. This existence is not a block of concrete. Life is a wave, and the threads of eternity are woven through you. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be small. You’re made from better stuff.