In Praise of the Boring

04/02/2007 8:41 AM – 9:03 AM

And if you don’t have something to look forward to, you might as well throw yourself under that train and finish the joke and find out if God is as cruel as the Evangelicals tell us he is. Other than that, optimism is the best option. Even simple optimism has its selling points.

The reason being that, in optimism, even this is just a part of the whole, which is good. So this is good. Make it so. Even the odd shakings grow to a distant memory, even if they occurred less than a day ago. Ahh, fuck it, Dude. Let’s go bowling. And so, remember, you’ve got to be doing something that adds up to something or you won’t see the point to your existence, imaginary or otherwise. And the They that say it’s a crutch haven’t noticed the crutch in their own eye. It’s all a crutch. It’s just being and being needs all the crutches it can get. It doesn’t need any at all, I’m saying. So you tell yourself a story and you write it down. You read a story and you change it to suit your whimsy. The Whimsy is the thing. It’s not the only thing. To say that delight is the only thing is as eyeblocked as to say that the only hole that needs filling is the God-shaped one. There’s also cooches. Nooch.

To be a part of the pageant, that is a good thing. It’s been going on for two-thousand years and it changes, but the Essence never does. Like the self, that there is no stable core does not negate the fact that it is and will continue to be. We are ourselves. Lift up your heads, oh yea gates. Be lifted up, everlasting door. And the what? And the where? And the why? And all these things obtain in accepting that they are there and that we cannot shovel free the hole from the earth that creates it. Open up your eyes. And perhaps the thing that is there and shaking is the thought that the Pirate You that you were depending upon turned out to be fiction and it was the Accountant You that saved you. And it isn’t the Beautiful Mind that saves the world; it’s the IRS agent that threw Capone in jail. That thing that we call the sad, boring, little man is the one that grabs us by the collar when we walk toward the glass and yanks us back and tells us to grow up. And that is perhaps the great disappointment. Our parents became our parents and we become someone else’s parents. And though I, crazy uncle that I am, wish that existence was cooler. It’s the boring ones that save the world. God bless ‘em and may their existence never weigh too much. And may the Dude abide.