Eighth Confession

I've never believed in the Loch Ness Monster, or Bigfoot, or the Bermuda Triangle.  I find it difficult to believe in anything that the Weekly World News reports as factual, simply because they were Photoshopping things before Photoshop became mainstream.  Truth is something so rare these days, that any source of it must be kept as pure as possible.  Which leads almost directly into...

I have no problems believing six impossible things before breakfast.  I find it a useful exercise in keeping my mind active, limber, and in perspective.  I also believe in creating moments of small social awkwardness, at mostly appropriate times, just to keep oneself - and the general public - from sleepwalking through life.  I recall the phrase from "Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money in My Pocket," from the one hit wonders Primitive Radio Gods: "If I die before I learn to speak/Can money pay for all the days I lived awake/But half asleep?"  The particular phrase "awake but half asleep" resonated within me from the very first time I heard it fourteen years ago.  Looking around at the world, I see so many people like that: numbly walking through life, keeping their head down, surviving from day to day.  There are so few that want to celebrate their lives, let alone enjoy the mess that life is.

Because that's exactly what life is: messy.  It's not neat.  No nice little containers, no labels that are truly accurate.  Magritte illustrated this point brilliantly in his painting The Treachery of Images: nothing is what you call it.  No matter what you define, there is going to be someone who sees it differently.  (Give me your trolls, your huddled masses yearning to speak freely....)  And yet, we humans keep on making order, attempting to communicate with each other, urgently trying to make the world make sense.

But yet, in this order we create, we must guard against becoming prejudiced against those things that don't fit into our nice, neat little existence.  Tragedy, new experiences, unexpected happenstances, even God Himself - these are just a few of the people and instances which people can't deal with because they don't have a frame of reference for such things.  And this lack of reference becomes a box through which creativity becomes stifled. Creativity block is another term for inability to see through one's own short-falling blindness: while I understand what it is, I dismiss it as casually as I do Bigfoot.  It's something that can be overcome, simply by opening up a little more.

I suppose that, were I to sum up, I'd say three things:
1)   You do not talk about Fight Club. (My blog - and I prefer three talking points to two).
2)  Trolls are welcome here.  I respect your right to remain anonymous; flames are welcome, but spam never is.  However, if you troll often enough, I reserve the right to ask more about you.
3)  Just because you can't define it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.  Just because you can define it, it doesn't mean it exists.