# 38
Brian McTear to me
Feb 22, 2009
Hey man,
I HEAR YOU!
Admittedly, I’m a little older than you, so I might be a little more okay with settling down….had my share of craziness, and it just doesn’t turn me on the way it once did. I also can’t help but wonder every now and then how much my own little party life (which was mild at best) and all the time spent in smokey bars (a good year or two straight, if you add it up I’m sure) is responsible for the issues I face with my lungs these days. But I really don’t have regrets.
Still though, nothing sucks more than taking an invite to someone else’s environment, then realizing they don’t have a concern in the world, yet their shit could make your really sick! It’s been happening to me more and more.
The weird thing about life, and I think your conversation with your friend points to this, is that I don’t think it can be understood until it’s in danger. I really think that most people contemplate life and death when they are young in moments where they are drunk or high. The conversation doesn’t yield quality results, I think, as you’ve seen. Nothing against anyone: but you and I, and people faced with the concept of mortality when we wake up, when we eat lunch and when we go to sleep have a much richer sense of life. Your average healthy person can have religious or “pop” senses of life and death at best, but I just don’t think that is very real. I mean, he’s right about what happens to the matter part of your being, but you probably were meaning to talk about more than that.
Here’s a nice way to think of life and death…. I am not sure I BELIEVE IT, but that’s a whole other conversation….I can definitely imagine something like this, so I like it:
Outside of physical reality, where there is no time, we just ARE. Physical life is like a travel package, a vacation into the world where all things are experienced along a time line, allowing concentrated experience and understanding. It’s your own creation and it’s probably super trippy and surreal, by the standards of timelessness. And there’s probably an awareness that physical life has all sorts of details that are simply illusion, but you go for it, anyway. It’s intense. You can choose to live anywhere along the time line, ie. historical setting, and you can even do it with a friend as well… Or you can split off into several “lives” and experience all different things in all different settings and walks of life, which is probably most common. You can be a good guy, a bad guy… It’s your choice (and consequently, I think “good” and “bad” are simple terms related to physical reality. Probably don’t mean much outside of it).
Anyway, when a life runs up, your physical awareness shifts back in the eternal present, and probably for what seems like a few seconds (because you are still on “physical time” kinda like jetlag) you go, “whoa… Wait… Oh shit! That was crazy!”. You were never cheated, you chose that package for a reason. Life is the ultimate expression of creativity, and every life is an achievement.
That probably sounds like a speech in a Lifetime movie! Or from the rad cool kid in an After School Special!
Take care, man! Do you have a blog? My girlfriend Amy likes to say, “If you have problems, blog it out!” She’ll tell the cats to “blog it out” if a scuffle occurs. (It’s silly, and of course she doesn’t blog, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have problems). I’ve been wanting to find a place to write about time and reality and all this fun stuff, and maybe a blog is the way to go. Maybe we can co-author a blog about life!
B