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There’s
no such thing as the perfect life.
I’ve
taken to saying that to be human is to be flawed and without those flaws
humanity would be worthless (I probably stole it from somebody better than
me, but it wasn’t on purpose… oh yeah—to err is human—fuck). I seriously
buy into that premise though. There isn’t a single person out there that
hasn’t made mistakes. As humans we are defined by our mistakes. Animals
are instinctual, rocks are inanimate, trees are dormant and rely on ecology
to provide them with what they need and humans fuck things up as bad as they
possibly can half the time, then devote the other time to fixing the shit
they just fucked up.
It’s
not a vicious cycle any more than it’s a beautiful cycle, but it does go
round and round. Wrrrrrrrr-wrrrrrrrr-wrrrrrr. Do you hear it? That’s the
fat kid vomiting when he gets off the ride.
I’m
not saying that people aren’t good. People are good. They’re damn good.
That is to say, people can be damn good. People are also shitty and
irrational and jealous and afraid and you know what else? Sometimes they
are all those things at the same fucking time they’re being damn good.
You
want predestined paradox then look at a newborn child. It’s funny,
philosophers are always looking for the Pandora’s Box in everything and it’s
so obvious that it’s the womb of an expecting mother.
I
look at my niece sometimes and I think, “Someday she’s going to die, but
chances are it’ll be after me, but right now she doesn’t have any clue, all
she knows is that she wants chocolate milk and to watch Elmo on TV and I
used to be just like her… and why can’t I be that way again?” Of course the
reason is simple. I do have a clue. I know what’s going to happen to me.
I could give a fuck about Elmo.
There’s the box. You let a child be born and you get all this joy on one
end and all this sadness on the other. Hell, all the way through. Extra
bills, extra worry, the responsibility for another life and another death on
this earth, the knowledge that someday when your child dies it will have
been because you ever conceived that child to begin with. When we search
for the meaning to life sometimes we find none and think, “Sometimes I wish
I had never been born.” Jimmy Stewart certainly went over that bridge. The
problem with that is that if you don’t open the box the answers aren’t any
easier.
If
you take away the life you take away the pain, but you also take away the
opportunity. “No pain, no gain,” is a flowery cliché, but it got there by
being tried and true. You have to give to get, you have to risk to win.
Anything worth having is worth fighting for. You know… all that mess. Life
is that fight. So maybe the Pandora’s Box is existence at all. For all we
know God opened it himself and has since been recovering for it.
I’m
a firm believer (at least for the purpose of this piece) that each one of
God’s Ten Commandments was really just his version of the New Year’s
Resolution. He told us that there are ten things that he did that we had
better not fucking do, and he knew we had to be told because we were made in
his image.
Vanity anyone?
Speaking of our almighty deity, God knows that I’ve sat up in the middle of
the night on more than one occasion, totally clueless about where I am or
what I’m doing and said to myself in a panicked voice, “I don’t want to
die.”
I
often wander the hallway for a few minutes afterwards, take a deep breath
and go back to sleep trying to coo into my own ear that there is no control
and that I have to live the life I have while I have it. It doesn’t help me
much, but the human mind loves to try and get all logical on its ass.
Isn’t it funny that the human mind and the human existence is based on and
powered by choice? It’s all about free will. We only get 50-100 years to
do whatever it is we were sent to do, but in those years we get to make any
number of infinite choices. Pick my nose? Kill a child? Make a taco?
That’s what we get to decide. I can do anything I want pretty much as long
as I’m willing to suffer or accept the consequences of my choices. The
thing is though, no matter which choices I make the end result is always the
same.
That’s the other thing about existence and choice is that we have no control
over the endgame. The final result is the same for the winner as it is for
the dude taking home the consolation prize.
-Nothing-
…Nothingness to be more specific. Death—a pit to store what’s left of you
when there are no more choices to make—at least no more for you to make.
It’s supposed to be a harsh reality, but it’s not really harsh, it’s just
annoying to deal with.
You’re telling me that no matter how nice I am, how mean I am, how much I
give to charity, how much I succeed in life, how many people I rape, how
many people I rescue from pain… it’s all the same when my body is done
supporting my box of egos?
That’s a hard pill to swallow.
Then
again, that’s also what’s so fucking great about humanity.
We
have choice, we have knowledge of our ultimate end and yet somewhere along
the line we decided that it was worth living good lives while we have them,
rather than throwing them away just because we might not have them in the
future. Hell, unless there really is a Lazarus, we almost certainly
won’t have them.
Yes, despite what we know, for the most part, people are good.
Even
when they’re angry, or bitter, or mean, or confused or rude… they’re mostly
good.
They
are human.
They
go about living their lives the only way they know how. They sometimes get
overwhelmed by the fact that they really don’t have the control they pretend
to have, but for the most part they always come back to the part of them
that’s good.
To
live imperfect makes us human. To live a perfect life would take either a
miracle or a tragedy and me, and my collection of mistakes, regrets and
successes would prefer the imperfect.
Even
God didn’t get everything right. He made the world and saw that it was
good, but he flooded that world and pretty much saw that act as bad. He
made man in his image and we’ve not exactly turned out to be as wise as the
being that made us. Is that because we’re a flawed creation, or because he
was a flawed creator?
It’s
all the sort of thing I sit up and think about while I try to fall back to
sleep—you know… when I don’t want to die.
Let’s not even talk about the possibility that there is no God. That one
keeps me up even longer for even more terrifying reasons.
It
means that this entire life we live is built on a set of extraordinary
coincidences that led to the formation of earth, life and sentience. Then
it also means that there is no big plan and that the idea of some higher
purpose is erased by the sheer happenstance of existence itself. That also
means that death really is just cells no longer able to support themselves,
rather than that grand evolution into a higher form.
Who
needs to think about that?
Now,
with all that darkness out of the way, I’d like to mention that this is
being written out of respect for this group of writers here at TAC and I’m
happy to contribute my verse to this Christmas reunion (even if my voice is
hardly one of holiday cheer).
When
Larson suggested we get this thing going I was way onboard with it. I hope
it’s at least a moderate success. I credit this site with a lot of my
motivation to write these days. It got me used to writing things every week
and I miss doing it. Still—like life, all things that are of the world must
end. This site was successful beyond its actual level of worth early on and
then became less successful even when the quality of the work had improved.
In a
perfect world this site would be highly trafficked and loved, Sports Night
wouldn’t have been cancelled and I’d be having sex with a beautiful woman
right now. But we already know that life isn’t perfect.
Here’s to the best imperfect life I’ll ever live. |
