SOS or CU L8R?
Our collective reality of late has been very weird. But existence as a human being has always been weird. I first became aware of this when I was a very small child of perhaps four. I remember playing on the floor in the living room of my home, busying myself with some plastic toy or other, when I suddenly had a moment of extreme self-realization.
I remember thinking, what am I? Am I this thing I am living in (my body) or am I something that is from somewhere else, living in this body temporarily? Are my thoughts separate from my body or coming from inside my head? Have I ever been anywhere before this? Reincarnation was not a concept that I’d heard of or that occurred to me. I was thinking more about having been somewhere other than earth and I had a distinct feeling that that may have been.
That sounds like a lot for a four-year-old to think and here I am certainly putting adult words and concepts to what I was feeling, but the description of those feelings is accurate. I have had that same ethereal sense of myself regularly ever since.
As a teenager, I struggled with those concepts and questions often and my underlying quest for the answers led me to an evangelical Christian youth group. After a few years of that, I remained unsatisfied and left that belief system. I have read a lot about religion and philosophy in the subsequent years and now, at the age of 61, after a lifetime of wondering, I am no closer to the truth.
Other animals don’t have powerful enough brains to consider these questions. (None that we know of; whales, dolphins, octopuses, and squids might.) For decades, I was satisfied to think that our creation was the result of accidental forces of chemistry, time, evolution, and space and that there is nothing more to it than that. Our brains happened to become intelligent enough to ask these questions but that does not mean the answers are accessible to us, beyond understanding how evolution works. I was comfortable with that for a long time and to be honest, I still am. If that’s what it is, fine. Who am I to argue with the universe?
But I still wonder if there is more. I’ve not had “mystical” experiences I cannot explain and am not quick to believe those of others; the mind tends to perceive/believe what it wants to or expects to and can be easily deceived into thinking it has experienced something it hasn’t. Ask any good magician. But I have had many creative moments that seem to come from outside my head; as though I’m the receiver of something rather than the creator of it. True, sometimes I think very hard and create something out of my head. (Or so it would seem.) But other times, something drops into my head and I’ve no idea where it came from, and I am amazed by it.
This has happened with paintings many times but has happened remarkably frequently as I worked on the story of Peyote Cowboy, the graphic novel I’ve been working on. More times than I can remember, something would happen in a scene I was writing that dovetailed perfectly into previous and future events that I had NO IDEA was going to happen, and yet it was perfect. Many times, what I was typing surprised me to the degree that it made me laugh or cry or simply get chills. It was humbling and not something I can explain.
So I still wonder every day what the hell I am, why I’m here, what this is for, and where, if anywhere, this is going. Maybe when I die, my thoughts and personality will go away as though I was knocked unconscious and I’ll never have them again. That’s okay. It won’t be painful or uncomfortable, at least, it will just be nothing; identical to what I had before I was born. But I’m equally open to the idea that I might not go away. I might find myself in some other dimension. Physicists have said there is almost no chance there are not multiple other dimensions. Whatever that means.
The only thing I’m really certain of anymore is that it won’t be anything humans have dreamt up before. It won’t be a holy man sitting in front of pearly gates reviewing my behavior before hitting the buzzer to let me in. It won’t be 40 virgins. It won’t be fire and brimstone. It won’t be my own planet with all of my relatives there waiting for me. Myths are great for helping us put a frame around the things we don’t understand and attach some meaning to life, but they aren’t very good at being true. I think, for now, I’ll have to be happy with the idea that I am no more capable of understanding the nature of my existence and what’s outside of it than a goldfish in a bowl in a penthouse in Tokyo has of understanding the ocean from which it came or the complex sewer system through which it will travel after it dies.
I hadn’t meant to be so serious in this post, but Olive Oyl and I had a quiet weekend of reflection about the things we are grateful for during this inconvenient and anxious time and I wanted to share a few of my thoughts on mortality and its inevitability. If you’d like to share your thoughts on existence in the comments section, I’d be interested to read them. I routinely moderate all comments before posting, so if you don’t want me to post your thoughts in the comments section, I’ll just read it and delete. Just let me know.
As I’ve been saying lately, “stay well and stay well back.”
Let’s look at the Wayno’s Bizarro cartoons from last week and find out what he’s been thinking about during self-isolation…
I’ll take Ivan the Constantly Stoned. I like a monarch who is chill, philosophical, and sleepy.
Did he declare that immediately or did he waste a couple of months pretending there was no clown, then only one very small clown, then a Chinese clown, then appoint his son-in-law to do something about the gigantic clown that he tried to warn everyone about but his enemies wouldn’t let him?
Touring is going to be limited because every member of the band is on the no-fly list.
Hey, one quick thing! A week ago we started donating 50% of our profits from my two shops to an organization that buys meals from local small restaurants to give to frontline medical professionals who are overworked and under-protected. It saves small businesses and helps out frontliners. Here’s our first thankyou note from them, so THANKS TO ALL OF YOU WHO BOUGHT SOMETHING! If you’d like to participate, just buy anything from my Bizarro Shop or my Diego Piraro shop and half the profit will go to this project. (The other half goes to my two daughters who are both out of work during this self-quarantine business.)
The strangest thing about this cartoon is that his mom is actually the one in the white hat with red hair.
Wayno has an interesting story about some readers misunderstanding one of his cartoons. (Not the one above.) Go check out his weekly cartoon blog post and see for yourself. Don’t forget to come back!
The Candy Bar: because kids love nothing more than candy architecture and booze.
That’s the end of this week’s humor snack, Jazz Pickles. Thanks for cleaning up after yourself. If you like what we do and that we do it free, without ads, give our links below a gander and maybe toss us a buck. Every little bit helps us to save up for a ventilator should we need one.
Until next time, be smart, be nice, be happy, and resist ignorance and Trumpism.
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