Everybody's Free

You know what's strange? Most people come out of a life altering situation and come out changed, sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse, but always a change of some kind...and some of us come out of them with a little bit of both. Myself, I came out of mine (and you regular readers will probably know what I'm talking about) much more open about some things, and much more cynical of others. True, I am a different person now, or maybe just a little bit more of the person I was before all the shit hit the fan, but there are many things I've come to terms with about myself in the past couple of years.

A fun term that has been bantered around lately with some of the crew I hang with is the thought of being sociopathic. Now, as horrible of a thought as it is, I think most of us harbor a certain amount of our closet sociopath in our everyday lives, and I think that it is becoming more and more prevalent as the years go by. The $50,000 question is why? We could point our fingers at society, our jobs, our interaction with the public, the constant brainwashing we are all subjected to by the mass media on an hourly basis, but the truth of the matter is we are all allowing ourselves to become that closet sociopath that we secretly all desire to be. I mean, how much easier of a life is it when we are completely egocentric and apathetic to the world around us? When you can sign society off as a lost cause and hope that it will be better the next time around, it relieves us all of the stress of making the world a better place for everyone on it. It's a justification of self preservation, but it is a mighty slippery slope once you start up it. Everyday we look around and put on blinders to everything that is around us that we don't want to see. The real trick here is to truly look around as see everything, good and bad, for what it is. I'm not going to go down the path of how we all walk around like ghosts, as I believe I've already whipped that dead horse, but it's time for us all to open our eyes a little bit wider and absorb more of everything that is around us.

I don't believe in karma, destiny, or fate, but there comes a time when you have to open your eyes a little bit wider to what's around us. Tonight was a prime example. I'm not going to go into nitty-gritty detail, but a few things came through that made me question those belief's I've always so readily contested. Was it destiny, or fate that these things fell into my lap, or just some great cosmic coincidence? I have always thought that life was shaped by fortunate (or unfortunate) coincidence. We can do some things to try and convince the outcome to swaying over to what you want it to be, but ultimately, if the coin flips to the side you don't want coming up, you better hold on tight, and hope the next flip is better.

I really wish I knew where I was going with all this, as I sit here and smoke the cigar that I know is poisoning me, but I really don't know. It appears the train has gone by and took whatever point I was going to make with it, but I will leave you with this. The one thing that everyone should read, and the one thing that everyone should listen to. The first is All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Google for it. It's everywhere. And the second, which stared life in a newspaper editorial by Mary Schmich called Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young and then was turned into a video which took on a life all its own. I'll leave everyone with that for tonight. Everybody's Free(to wear sunscreen)