Without going back to actually read it, I believe I wrote an entry on chaos and then edited with a personal note on needing to ride the chaos instead of hide it. I don’t think it rhymed. I didn’t put it in context and I don’t plan on rectifying that. Context isn’t important, it’s how I personally do things in any context.
Sort of. I have a different way of doing it too. I left the church I belonged to when I was eight years old because of their blatant hypocrisy. Wait, no, it wasn’t blatant to me until I asked. The short version is I was told the collection was for fat little starving babies in Biafra and it turns out it was for a new church. This is not an indictment on faith if anything it’s an indictment on what a self righteous and arrogant asshole of a kid I was. Then it’s an indictment on the church because I’m still kind of self righteous asshole of a kid, just older.
I digress. Wow, that’s a surprise. Not only will the following be a typical movie or TV plot but you’ve heard it in real life, something along the lines of; How can there be a god when bad things happen to good people? Which sort of translates into; There is no god and I hate the son of a bitch. If you’ve said the former and think it was more complicated than the latter, take a moment to compose yourself, and then slap yourself for me.
I will not make an argument for god. My entire life experience suggests there is no such thing as moral absolutes. Wait, no, it suggests human beings aren’t inherently driven by moral absolutes, not in an objective sense. In a subjective sense, yes, they most certainly are. I’m not making an argument against god either. Most religious folks can’t wrap their head around a concept of a god that’s not the embodiment of all that’s good and most atheists get all wrapped up in the silliness of white bearded gent in the sky who knows everything and is everywhere. I’m not going to speak to any of that, and again, someone on one side of the fence or the other thinks I just oversimplified their entire philosophy as a personal insult.
I just wanted to get god out of the equation before I introduce my other way of doing shit, the way that doesn’t need to wade into chaos. We are pretty fucking lucky to get this life and it’s a pretty fucking beautiful planet and there are a lot of pretty fucking cool things to play with here. I call this a blessing. Like Choas there are all sorts of connotations to the word Blessing, and with both words people have cause to argue that I am either minimizing or dramatizing by chosing those particular words. Blessing has more of a stigma attached, I think. I’ve never heard anyone say they didn’t believe in chaos, blessing seems to automatically default to god and whether the ear of the beholder believes or loves or hates god.
The only other word I can think of is miracle and that’s got even more problems and I like the word blessing, I like how it tastes, how it feels, how it’s almost melodic in English which is not a melodic language, it’s harsh and blunt, if you didn’t know the words you’d think English speakers were angry most of the time, sort of how most americans feel about Japanese or Russian (um, if a woman speaks it slowly we American males think Japanese and Russian is sexy, if a stoic man speaks it, the intonation seems harsh and angry. In both instances it’s important to remember we haven’t a clue what is being said, unless you speak either language in which case you probably have even stronger opinions on linguistic bias than I do. I could use this example as it pertains to God, or lack thereof, but I won’t.).
It’s important to sometimes take stock of where you are without judgement (e.g. I’m divorced, unemployed, fat, ugly, broke, stupid …) and it’s pretty fucking amazing. It’s pretty fucking amazing that we are on a rock in space and this rock shields us from the entire universe which would kill us just by taking a breath. It’s amazing we don’t fall off. It’s amazing how very pleasing to the eye it is. That the smell of baking bread can fill us with joy. That though we are always in heat and able to get ourselves off that we find at least one person among seven billion that gets us off even better, makes us sweat pheromones and sing stupid songs about flowers and girls. It’s a fucking blessing. And some smart ass is already clicking off the scientific explanation for each of those things, and it’s fine, with the exception of one I chose all of those because we can explain em. I am not making an argument for intelligent design. I’m making an argument for gratitude. No matter how shitty you feel or may actually be, you are living dead center in a blessing and it does you good to recognize that from time to time. Shit. It does me good to recognize it from time to time and other times I have to wade right through the middle of the chaos.
Oh, the thing that can’t be explained by science; joy at the smell of baking bread. I don’t know if it’s universal, I’ve met less than a billion people, probably less than seven hundred thousand (1 percent). I’ve never met anyone who didn’t love the smell of baking bread. The theory is smell is the strongest sensory memory and baking bread reminds you of being a kid and … c’mon. I know of the less than seven hundred thousand people I’ve met there has been a disproportionate number of people who didn’t have moms and the moms they didn’t have didn’t bake bread, but not a grossly exaggerated disproportionate number. Bread doesn’t occur in nature so it’s not an evolutionary thing the way that we instinctually turn away from bitter tastes — no, we can abstract that stuff, we can only distinguish five groups of tastes and from an evolutionary standpoint they range from stuff that tastes like poison to stuff that tastes like food.
Let’s, for the sake of argument, say modern man is 100 thousand years old. Bread isn’t. You need fire and pottery (I don’t know how to cook dough on a bonfire) and if it’s going to be a staple you need agriculture. Let’s be generous and say bread as a sure thing is maybe ten thousand years old. Yeah, you can’t make an evolutionary case or sensory memory case for the smell of bread, I mean you can make the latter in some people. My son had this friend from pretty much birth who was like allergic to everything, so many ingredients in regular bread that the only bread he could really eat was his moms homemade whole wheat and, I don’t know, shellack, tortillas. I smelled them cooking; nothing at all like the smell of baking bread. Even before he could talk when I drove him and my son past this bakery in NE Portland both of those kids would break out smiling. My sons mom could cook bread, she just didn’t, not then.
Now I’m just babbling. I don’t think of chaos and blessing(s) as opposable. They are two extreme ways of viewing the world when I need to view the world in extreme ways and I use both and I’m not telling you to be didactic or instructive. I’m just writing it down to keep track. It’s not the first time. We live in the middle of outrageous chaos and blessings. It’s important to note from time to time.
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