I realized today on the bus ride to work that the everyday thoughts that cross my mind have become freakishly polarized. I either see everything as shape, negative space, abstraction, in other words devoid of associations and indexicals, or I see everything as an unwieldy metaphor for something bigger. Which sort of leads me to conclude that I am neurotic. At least more neurotic than "before", whenever that was.
Anyways one of these unfortunately heavy things I can't help but to think about at least every couple of days is where people go when they die. I've fabricated many, many theories that are a lot more detailed than the average existential theories that you have when you're a sullen little bitch of a teenager. I wish I could draw a diagram of my thought process over the past year or so but in any case it would look something like this:
the big bang -->
the Blackout-->
Utter confusion-->
Deeper confusion-->
Even deeper confusion-->
New agey shit-->
hybridized Christianity/Buddhist/monist ontology shit-->
A venomous mix of existentialism + materialism-->
Confusion-->
...and anyways it goes something like this constantly and constantly. Enough to drive me completely crazy sometimes. But anyways instead of coming to one, grand conclusion I've started to negotiate the terms of my personal beliefs with all of the above in a strange way. Besides, in the world we live in today, anything short of complicated seems to be false or corrupt by default. The one lucid addition I've been able to make to the whole life-after-death conundrum is that people don't become spirits, become resurrected like Jesus, or hang out with other dead people in the sky eating lots of junk food, looking young, and wearing white clothes all the time. In fact, forget images altogether because the more I think about it the more they are the mind's nostalgic crutches. Rather, people become forces. Imagine that every thought that crosses your mind, dream you have, decision you make, punch of feeling you have all come from somWHERE, a colossal force field in you that distributes energy through unique, subterranean conduits to produce results to different effects at specific moments. Sort of the way that synapses make connections in your brain when you register an experential or neurological moment. So when someone close to you dies (I prefer not to ever use "passes away", it makes me really angry for some reason) your force field becomes imbued, whether you like it or not, with their presence. This can work in both painful and benign ways. It can serve as a source of depressive modes, for example, that can be as abstract as longing and as concrete as chest spasms. Or conversely it can serve as a source of incredible strength that pushes your own convictions and decisions to have a meaning greater than you can imagine..so you do things and make decisions not only for your personal reasons and sake but for that person and also for all the things that that person represented/s. It changes you forever, this sort of redistribution of your force field. Really, it transforms everything you see and do..and I imagine that by the time I have no teeth, saggy muscles, and all the time in the world, and by the time that I will have lost many people in my life..well. I kind of look forward to it.
