Epiphany

PARIAHCORE9 — Thu, 01 May 2008 10:22:47 GMT

I once spent a month in a drug treatment facility down south. There were these two guys in there; coke fiends, violent guys. They'd both done pententiary bits and they lived by the jailhouse thug credo. But in this place here they were clean and by all outward appearances making a genuine effort to reform. Thing was these two guys were right out of their heads for Jesus. They talked about him all the time and were keen to mention the word rapture at least once during every conversation. They were fairly knowledgeable on the subject too. Turns out they both came from fundamentalist backgrounds. They'd been washed in the blood and slain in the spirit more times than they could count. At some point in their teens, coming of age in the 80's, they went from cow poke bible boys to Beavis and Butthead. They grew out mullets, wore rock T's, ate alot of amphetamines and started swilling Jack Daniels. Their parents freaked, no doubt blamed it all on the infernal musical stylings of Motley Crue and swiftly ejected them from their homes (I can't help but imagine that this is how it went down for alot of kids who came up in Pentecostal families in the 1980's. Too much shouting at the devil and barking at the moon I'm guessing). Before you know it they've quit school and they're on the pipe. Obviously they were in frequent scrapes with the law, the both of them thoroughly institutionalised by their 21st birthdays. They haven't an education and no legitimate earning potential. They're out on the street and they're perpetually boosting, burglarizing and fucking people over to support their habits. In no time at all they've burned up every last bridge, wish and promise on hard drugs. And what do they do when the going gets tough and the shit finally hits the fan? They sign up for the next available bed in a treatment facility and fall upon their knees, asking Jesus to forgive them and deliver them from their sin. But what really staggered my imagination was that these guys actually believed, just as they've believed a hundred times before, that Jesus would finally show up on the scene for real this time and heal their miserable lives. Provided they work their programs of course, provided they change their hearts. And that's when it finally crystallized for me, listening to these born again motorheads rave on about Jesus. Addiction and obsession must surely come from the same place that nurtures blind faith and an adherence to the unnatural and wholly unreasonable doctrines that a man might live his life by. Delusion is delusion, by day or by night, and invariably, inevitably it must fall in on itself. Whether you're shooting heroin today or doing back flips for Jesus Christ tomorrow you're still a deluded person. I later discovered this is the real reason 97% of the people who ever work a 12 step program fail miserably at it. It's a delusional system founded by delusional people. A community of emotionally crippled co-dependents, brought together by the wreckages of their pasts and bound by their faith in a benevolent, higher authority with a vested interest in their personal affairs. Then it occured to me that god was, on a symbolic level at least, the first psychoactive drug I ever experimented with, the gateway if you will. And growing up I relentlessly sought that buzz; I became obsessed with the idea of knowing the very mind of god. Still, it never took me very long to decide that Christianity just didn't make any sense. At around 16 or 17 I systematically began to shed my Judeo-Christian sensibilities and notions in favour of a more esoteric, eastern style approach to spirituality. I began to flirt with magick, mysticism, Buddhism and just about every other 'ism' under the sun. I looked for god in the drugs I took, the books I read, the places I travelled, the music I made and listened to; I looked for god in practically everything and anything I ever did, even sex. It just took me nearly quarter of a century to figure out he wasn't showing up. And I just couldn't handle it. I was caught up in an existential funk that permeated to my core. Long gone were the days of vision quests and truth seeking through psychedelic experience; now all I craved was escape. By 31 years of age I was hooked on cocaine and heroin. I was a full blown junkie. How does a person become this way? What makes a seemingly reasonable and intelligent person believe in things that just don't make any sense? Today, free of hard drugs for just over two years, I lay it all at the feet of the god who never was. My long, strange trip to discover the truth about god had left me angry, exhausted and emotionally broken. When I had finally decided he never existed in the first place I embarked on a 5 year suicide that thankfully never worked out. I was grieving the death of god, the loss of god and I nearly succeeded at killing myself in the process. But then something remarkable happened. I began to change my way of thinking after that. Eventually, through the sheer power of reasoning and persistently applying flawless logic in every thought and action, I would come to transform my entire way of being. And ever since that time my blog, I have been a relatively clean, productive and self satisfied individual who has regained the respect and trust of his family and friends.

Blogging?

PARIAHCORE9 — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:27:26 GMT

I'm actually supposed to be blogging right now? A blogger blogging? It's a funny word. Certainly no one mistakes it for being a word that might even remotely suggest a productive or useful activity. It falls off the tongue with a phonetic frivolity that conjures up images of nose picking and chronic masturbation. Blogging. To blog. It really is just a stupid fucking word. Yet look at me. Here I am, blogging away. Being a blogger. I'll say this much: it's a thousand times more preferable to being a bloater. Had I died just before the world went and found itself living in the future, I might of been a bloater who was never meant to be a blogger. But I'm not a bloater. Or a floater. Right now I'm a blogger goddamn it. I'm signed up, confirmed and currently a member of 0 tribes and I have 0 friends. In a cyber sea of bloggers I am but a lowly minnow in murky water. But that's of no consequence to me. After all, I used to be much, much worse off. I almost never made it this far. Yet somehow I did make it this far. And I'm alive. Alive and blogging. Just blogging away. Blogging away in the Digital Age and thinking ... of a time just prior to the present day future in which we now live. A time when life was a hell of a lot more unpredictable than it is these days that's for sure. And so fucking precarious too. When I think about the drugs and all the madness that went along with it, it's a wonder I ever made it out with my life, let alone my faculties and a heart still pumping out clean blood. Those were insane years. Not all bad and I certainly learned a thing or two, but it really was all just a bit too crazy. Even for a guy like myself, a guy who at one time actually believed he had absolutely nothing to lose.

My Blog

Epiphany

Blogging?