Thoughts on Pain (from a Wizard)

I’ve been binging paperbacks hard this year, and a fair amount of those have been The Dresden Files series. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s a series of novels by Jim Butcher centering around a private investigator in Chicago who’s a wizard. Or it might be more appropriate to say he’s a wizard who works as a private investigator. Either way, it’s great. I had friends recommending the series to me for years until one of them just bought me the first five (there are seventeen so far) and I’ve been cramming them almost constantly ever since.

They’re fun reads.

But you ever have one of those moments with a book that sits you down? That can either mean sits you down on your ass because it took you off your metaphorical feet, or it could mean that it sits you down, puts a hand on your shoulder, and has a talk with you. It’s one of those moments where, for a brief minute, you set aside the story the book is telling you and audibly thank the author by their first name like you’re on that kind of basis with them.

This was one of those.

It was a perspective on life that I realized I’m going to be loosely quoting, paraphrasing, and otherwise referencing in deep talks with others for a while, if not the rest of my days on this earth. And I won’t lie, I had expected something like that to come out of ‘The Art of War,’ or ‘The Book of Five Rings,’ or ‘The Alchemist’ (which is also good), or something. Not necessarily a novel about wizards, zombies, vampires, angels, warlocks, and all the rest.

I’m going to put the excerpt here, in all its glory. It’s out of the ninth book in the series, ‘White Night,’ pg. 307-309 if you nab the edition published by ROC. (I don’t know if there are other “editions,” it just sounded fancier to say that way.)

“The wisdom, maybe, was still in process, as evidenced by her choice of first lovers, but even as an adult, I was hardly in a position to cast stones, as evidenced by my pretty much everything.

What we hadn’t known about, back then, was pain.

Sure, we’d faced some things as children that a lot of kids don’t. Sure, Justin had qualified for his Junior de Sade badge in his teaching methods for dealing with pain. We still hadn’t learned, though, that growing up is all about getting hurt. And then getting over it. You hurt. You recover. You move on. Odds are pretty good you’re just going to get hurt again. But each time, you learn something.

Each time, you come out of it a little stronger, and at some point you realize that there are more flavors of pain than coffee. There’s the little empty pain of leaving something behind – graduating, taking the next step forward, walking out of something familiar and safe into the unknown. There’s the big, whirling pain of life upending all of your plans and expectations. There’s the sharp little pains of failure, and the more obscure aches of successes that didn’t give you what you thought they would. There are the vicious, stabbing pains of hopes being torn up. The sweet little pains of finding others, giving them your love, and taking joy in their life as they grow and learn. There’s the steady pain of empathy that you shrug off so you can stand beside a wounded friend and help them bear their burdens.

And if you’re very, very lucky, there are the very few blazing hot little pains you feel when you realize that you are standing in a moment of utter perfection, an instant of triumph, or happiness, or mirth which at the same time cannot possibly last – and yet will remain with you for life.

Everyone is down on pain, because they forget something important about it: Pain is for the living. Only the dead don’t feel it.

Pain is a part of life. Sometimes it’s a big part, and sometimes it isn’t, but either way, it’s part of the big puzzle, the deep music, the great game. Pain does two things: It teaches you, tells you that you’re alive. Then it passes away and leaves you changed. It leaves you wiser, sometimes. Sometimes it leaves you stronger. Either way, pain leaves its mark, and everything important that will ever happen to you in life is going to involve it in one degree or another.”

God. Damn.

Thanks, Jim.

What Gorilla Nipples Have to Teach us About Consciousness

Yeah, another one of these, but I’ll keep it brief as I can.

If you’re reading this, then you’re on the internet; and if you’re on the internet, that probably means you can find a clip of two gorillas in a zoo enclosure hanging out together for the pleasure of onlookers. In this particular video, the gorillas are sitting there, minding their own business, chewing on stuff, when one of them suddenly reaches over and tweaks the other’s nipples. The assaulted gorilla briefly snarls, baring his teeth, and smacks the other gorilla’s hands away.

Then, the most beautiful thing happened: they started laughing hysterically.

These two massive, primitive jungle beasts were slapping their knees, laughing maniacally at the joke one had just played on the other. For one thing, obviously, it’s hilarious. Nipple jokes, stuff about butts, or pranks about peens will and should always be funny. But for another thing, it was- okay, a quick aside:

At the top, this will be a bit weird, but bear with me. We are, all of us, regardless of rank, station, occupation, status, wealth, or otherwise, human. We forget that a LOT of the time, but by and large we all come into this world the same way, and we’ll all leave it the same way too. I used to have a trick to remembering that where I would – God, please, again, bear with me for a moment – collect people’s farts.

And not in some weird way (*nervous laughter*) like in jars or something. It was at a company I worked for, basically an office job, and I started to notice some things. I’d go to the bathroom, be sitting in a stall doin’ business (Christ, I feel like I’ve mentioned bowel movements a lot lately. Sorry everyone.) and someone would walk in to step up to the urinal. I wouldn’t know who it was, but at that point in my life I was a nervous pooper, so I put a pause on my own business until the realm was wholly mine again. But it would be while looking down at the person’s shoes hearing the tinkle they were taking, that usually a heel would leave the ground and I’d hear them toot. Of course then they’d finish up and leave, but I found myself on the hunt the rest of the day trying to identify who it’d been that I’d just heard fart.

They weren’t those on the manufacturing floor, or working store rooms, or other factory folks. They were department heads, executives, Inner Circle types. And it was there in those moments of tooting in the social sanctuary of the men’s room that those barriers dissolved and we were just humans. Humans that both passed gas.

Which brings me back to the gorillas. In the same way that, once you strip away the titles, status, manufactured authority, and whatever else, we’re all just people who fart, the same logic applies to those gorillas. When someone’s nipples get tweaked, it’s funny as hell, and here I’m confronted by the fact that gorillas are the same way. It’s like finding out that the big hard-drinking biker guy standing next to you also really likes Hamilton, and you’re able to bond over that with him. If you’re similar in that way, how many others ways might you be kin?

“There but for the grace of God go I,” is supposed to elicit the humble realization that someone else in an unfortunate circumstance is the same as you, the only dividing factor being luck, basically. You…the conscious awareness behind your eyes, your thoughts…you could have been a gorilla. Could have been a dog, or a locust, or anything, but you wound up as a person. We just…we need to stop thinking we’re all so different. It’s dumb.

I don’t know what consciousness is. None of us really do. It’s somehow, simultaneously, the least understood and most mysterious force we have to observe in this life, while also being the most innate, familiar experience there is to be. It’s just…<groan> be it a gorilla, a songbird, or another person walking down the street, it’s a worthy reminder that we’re all just – for all our accomplishments, complications, and manufactured status – creatures trying to get by in our own jungles.

Anyway, all for now. Peace, y’all.

Pros and Cons – an analysis

The good thing about leaving a banana peel in your backpack over the weekend: Your backpack smells like banana.

The bad thing about leaving a banana peel in your backpack over the weekend: You have a banana peel in your backpack you forgot was there.

The ugly truth: This is how you learn lessons.

Keep being excellent to each other, everybody.

Random Thought

Mmm, yeah, we have time for this- oh! And to clarify, not “random” to me, exactly. What I’m about to thought-vomit on is a topic I’ve spent a weird amount of time fixating on every now and again; but I should be random to you.

If it’s not, then, well, that has certain…I guess, existential implications to it. Or we’re just on the same psychic wavelength, which I guess is always possible given how many people there are in the world- Anyway!

Do me a favor and look at your hands. Palms flat, fingers extended and straight. First off, take a moment to note any scars, callouses, wrinkles, and so forth. They’re all kind of a cool road map of your history, what you’ve done with these two little collections of meat tentacles.

But the reason we’re here today, look at your fingerprints. Not even actually caring about how unique they are to every person, have you ever noticed how, if you stare at them long enough, you can start to see the ways in which those tiny grooves are almost runic? Just, the texture of the skin on your palm and fingers has a pattern like stylish filigree. And to the smart guy out there who’s maybe googled “where fingerprints come from” or whatever: 1) I haven’t, and 2) that’s not the point, really.

At the end of the day, I like to think of the pattern’s presence as a little reminder that we’re all works of art, and that’s a trait we all share.

I guess, unless you’re a spy or something and have had your fingerprints smoothed over for work. But I think we should agree that’s pretty unique.

Anyway, something to chew on. Happy weekend, y’all.

Ciao.

Lady Death

Did you know there’s a saying that goes a person’s fate can be read on the wings of a butterfly? That’s what makes fate so hard to know, because the little creatures that carry it rarely stop fluttering long enough to read their wings. I’m sure that’s also what makes them so naturally mystifying, what we don’t realize draws our eye whenever they pass us by, bobbing through the air just out of reach.

They’re with me wherever I go. And wherever I might be, they find me. They are beautiful little things. Gentle, innocent, fragile, small.

Something else not many people know is that butterflies love salt, and a common place they find it is the remains of a dead animal. Flesh, devoid of life and giving way to nature and time – they love it.

I think that’s why they follow me. Like cats that know what doors leave out bowls of water or scraps of food, they’ve caught on to where they can get their salt fix. It’s invisible to us, but maybe their eyes see power over death like a color in the air, a magenta dust on the wind.

It’s a tale as old as time, really; and always the same motivation. A loved one who’s died, their memory growing more distant with each passing day, or one who’s sick and will know death shortly. I was different. I just…wanted to know.

Is it like everyone seems to think, something to be scared of and staved off? Is it “just a part of life,” or is that something we tell ourselves to assuage the anxiety of uncertainty? Is it sleep, or is it just…nothing? Are we just our bodies, our minds, or is there really a spark that drives the whole thing that remains eternal? After all, everyone in history has done it, so it can’t be that hard. It’s the biggest mystery of our time, and always has been.

Anyway, yeah, I think that’s why they follow me. And maybe I misspoke earlier. It isn’t a power over death, because everything that lives dies. That’s an immutable law of existence: everything that is, once was not; and everything that is, will not be again. So, not over death, but a power with it.

And the little buggers can’t get enough.

FIN

(Hey guys.
The astute among us might note the date on this post, that on the one prior, and the distance between the two. Like with all of us, life has had a lot of moving parts lately. Plus, I just haven’t had a lot to say, I guess. But this little ditty came to mind while on a walk earlier today, and it seemed like a good time to post again.
I haven’t been quiet that this is just a place to work out for me: run thought experiments, shout into the void, practice, blah, blah, blah. Feeling now, though, that there might be a good time of creative productivity on the way; a breath of air amidst all the chaos, if you will.
So, yeah, get ready to see more o’ me. This’ll be cool.
Peace, everybody.)