Crossroads

I don’t know whether or not to be depressed or excited, and most likely I am a little of both.

I am at a crossroads in my life and there are so many things that I want to hold on to, but in order to move on, I may have to let them go, at least temporarily. I dont even know why it’s so hard to let go, because almost everything other than my beautiful wife and pup dog reminds me of a period of my life that, in retrospect was the worst I could’ve had.

At the same time I am both directionless and as convicted as ever. It’s not even about change anymore, but more that the new path being explored is the one I should’ve always been on in the first place.

Why did I work for people who had nothing but greed and selfishness in their hearts?
Did I gain those attributes myself?
Am I capable of a modest lifestyle characterized by those with whom I share it and not the things I own?

I think I am, but the coolest part about being happily married is that decisions are not made in a singular vacuum. Much of the last few years has been Justin-centric, and perhaps I was so “myopic” that I couldn’t see it clearly. But it all makes perfect sense now, and I want nothing more than for my wife to wake up every morning feeling like we are in a good place. And while we sit and enjoy our path, the pup-nut sleeps next to us.

I want to have a child, and the fact that other people have taken that flexibility away from me is very difficult, and it’s not fair for my wife to feel the residual stress. But I’m done letting other people direct my life, and if that means a drastic change in either location or inner circle, so be it. It may be that some of the very few genuine people fall by the wayside as a result.

But I don’t care.

I am tired of being reminded in any way of the last 7 years of my life. I look forward to the day that I wake up in Austin, Palo Alto, New York, London, or wherever and nothing in my field of vision (literally or figuratively) reeks of the last phase of my life. It was a worthless, sinister, selfish pursuit designed to suck as much life out of talented people as possible and use their talents for the benefit of some of the most ignorant, evil and hypocritical people on the planet.

But I don’t care.

I don’t believe in the doctrine of ‘sowing and reaping’ as it relates to our lives on this Earth, but when I hear of the struggles and the difficulties that those evil people are going through, I can’t help but shrug my shoulders and say, ‘life get’s alot tougher when you don’t tell the truth, doesn’t it?’

Screw them. Instead of feeling sorry for myself that the last 7 years of my life are a complete disaster (with the very important exceptions of my wife and pup dog), as I sit here typing tonight, I truly believe I have a new perspective…perhaps hyperopia?

Thank God that I didn’t waste 30 years of my life unwittingly pursuing evil. In the grand scheme, 7 years isn’t all that long of a time. It only feels that way when it’s presented as 100% of this phase of life.

I love you wife and I love you pup. Wherever we find ourselves in a year, as long as we make those decisions with our own happiness in mind, we will be fine.

A True Friend

I am reading the latest biography of President Andrew Jackson. The main purpose is to learn more about his interactions as President with the newly created Federal banking system, and his attempts and successes at putting the bank down. But along that path I uncovered an interesting passage. In Jackson’s mother’s last days she said,

“You can make friends by being honest, and you can keep them by being steadfast. You must keep in mind that any friend worth having will in the long run expect as much from you as they give to you.”

I have many character flaws, but one of them is that I give too much to my friendships. Almost without exception (my wonderful wife being that exception), I put more into my friendships than I get out. I have high standards for people and, however it may come off to them, truly want the best for them. But I do ask for some level of reciprocation on their part. And that is where things seem to get stuck…the proverbial ceiling on the friendship that I have bloodied my head on more times than I care to remember.

Many of my childhood friends were from church groups. In today’s social networking-savvy world, I can say that I am “e-friends” with a few of them, but have not received any sort of communication initiated by them. I guess we are friendly enough to take the time to “accept” such “friendship” but nothing more. I am torn because a part of me really wants to know how they are doing, but I am exhausted from caring without any care in return.

Someone that I thought was my best friend in high school went off the radar for years, despite attempts from me and others to connect. We would call or write, but none ever got a response. One day some years later I was enduring my 4th straight day in the hospital as my mother was battling breast cancer and recovering from a few days of successful, though trying, surgery. A one-off attempt to contact this friend actually resulted in an answer. The exchange between my former friend and a true friend who was with me at the hospital went something like this…

Real friend- “Wow…what are you up to?”
Fuckface- “I’m helping my brother with his college applications.”
Real friend- “Oh. I meant like what are you doing in life these days…I’m up at the hospital with Justin.”
FF- “Wow I havent seen him in a long time.”

There was no mention of me, not even a request to hand the phone over so that two alleged “friends” could touch base after 5+ years of zero communication. Not even a half-assed expression of concern as to why I might have been in the hospital waiting room.

Am I wrong to not give a second thought to anything that happens to him in the future? I realize I should care, but how long can someone put up a facade when the person on the other end of the relationship blatantly doesnt care? Is it enough to not actively cause someone personal pain or grief, or to not wish such conditions, to constitute a friendship? If so, I have billions of friends, and each one is worth about that proportion of my efforts. 

Now…on the subject of alleged “friends” actually going out of their way to make conscious decisions to inflict harm on me and my family…there will be a day when I can put that into words, but even the most skeptical among you would not give much credence to that “friendship.”

In the end I suppose I can thank my wife for being a friend, and a few others who have been there for me. To those people I say thank you. And to the rest of you, a similarly concise 2-word phrase ending in “you”. The first word starts with an “F”. I’ll let you figure it out.

“I could’ve been Anyone…

…but could I have been anyone other than me?”

For those who know me, it won’t take long to decipher from where I borrowed the above quote. For as long as I can remember I have been interested/obsessed with topics like determinism and the abstraction of time. Even a simple analysis of the idea of determinism leads down endless rabbit holes, leaving the subject wondering if anything is worth stressing over. What difference does it make what I do or say? If everything has been predetermined, and the laws of physics are truly behaving in predictable (if however convoluted and microscopically mysterious) ways, then we are left with two logical and contradictory responses:

1- There is no reason to stress out about anything. (+)
2- All of my life’s achievement’s are not my own doing (-)

Or at least I thought that was the only way to logically respond, until I read the book God and the New Physics. In it there is a very compelling description of the difference between determinism and fatalism. The Cliff’s Notes version is that a Fatalist sees all human action as inconsequential and futile, whereas the Determinist still places value on things like consciousness and free will. There will be many more posts about these subjects in much greater depth, but for now I think I’ve reached a conclusion:

Ben Franklin’s initial thoughts notwithstanding, consciousness is not a coincidence. What we do does matter. And no construction of a Multiverse (again, more on this later) will change the fact that God has bestowed upon human beings (at a minimum) the ability to collapse the quantum chaos into the observable reality that we all collectively experience. It’s highly unlikely that many people have explored the strange mystery of quantum uncertainty but to ask the question of “where is x,” when distilled down to a sufficiently small scale, becomes meaningless. It is empirically and fundamentally impossible to know where a piece of quantum mass exists until someone actually tries to observe it. Until then, it exists (whatever THAT means), in a variety of possible states of being, some more likely than others.

But to try and bring some unity to all of the above random thoughts, all of this has profound ramifications for the concept of free will and human consciousness. What we do matters, and in some sense (at least microscopically) reality does not take its current form until we look at it. Perhaps God has imposed upon our world a set of rules and in some sense things are deterministic, but He also bestowed upon us the ability to shape things (or perhaps His will is collapsed by us being made in His image).

It’s a hyper-complicated Power of Positive Thinking. I could have been anyone, and yes, I think I could’ve been someone other than me.

Genesis

 

Myopic

1.	Ophthalmology. pertaining to or having myopia; nearsighted.

2.	unable or unwilling to act prudently; shortsighted.

3.	lacking tolerance or understanding; narrow-minded.

Skeptic

1.	a person who questions the validity or authenticity of something purporting to be factual.

2.	a person who maintains a doubting attitude, as toward values, plans, statements, or the character of others.

I am one of the above, and not the other. It wont take too long to see which is which.

This blog is going to be a free-flowing discussion of any and all topics that cross my mind, and I plan on it having some sort of residual cathartic benefit. I hope it will offer some diversion from the “real world.” It will be painfully obvious the disdain I have for mainstream explanations and their insistence on being called “Truth.”

The first post is entitled “Genesis” because I hope it will be the beginning of a legitimate endeavor, but the inner skeptic in me is already in doubt as to the authenticity of such a title, for the word itself implies a sort of temporal arrangement of past–>present–>future that I don’t quite believe exists. Of course, the reasons for such an alternative mindset are beyond the scope of an introduction, and I highly doubt that many of my non-existent readers are up for something so dense at the outset.

The Crackberry iPhone Twitter generation would often assume to live life in a series of informational quanta with as little mass as possible. But even adult-onset ADD can be made to propagate like a wave, and my goal is to force upon it a spectral shift orders of magnitude larger than any mainstream source could even attempt. 

In short…don’t believe everything you think.