On Pain

Dear Diary: Part 1

If you’ve ever experienced the sound of your alarm clock intruding into dreams and shaping them, that can happen with pain. I was dreaming of being hit by a car. Again. I saw my body mangled, because it was the only explanation my mind could give for the pain I was in. I was lying in the street, bloody and broken from the waist down. My eyes snapped open as I woke, but the pain persisted. It had been with me for over six years, and it wasn’t ready to stop.

I rolled over to face the window. On its sill were all of what I consider my essentials; my pills, my Xbox controller, my television remote, and my cell phone. I had finished my bottle of water the previous night. This isn’t a depressing thought if you aren’t me, but this meant that I had to go downstairs to get water to take my Vicodin. I sighed and rolled onto my back. My wife had already left for work, so I wouldn’t have to endure crawling over her. I untangled myself from the blankets and the cold air of winter morning hit my leg. My muscles tightened and my nerves blazed. Crawling gingerly, I made it to the edge of the bed and sighed, my eyes clearing of dreamy haze. I stood up slowly, groaning like an old man. I took my first steps haltingly, my feet barely leaving the carpet.

When I got to the hardwood floor of the hallway, I was shocked to full wakefulness. The cold wood sent pain shooting from the arch of my foot straight to my knee. My eyes widened as I held back a gasp. I turned around to search for my fuzzy slippers. I slipped them on and braved the hallway again. I got down the stairs without too much trouble. I shuffled to the refrigerator and grabbed a bottle of water. When I got back to the foot of the stairs, I had to steel myself. Fourteen steps is something most people never think about, but that morning, it might as well have been a marathon. I could only lift my body with my good leg, so the trip took twice as long as normal, with pauses taken for pep-talks. I got to my bedroom and fell back into our king-sized bed. I took a deep breath and crawled back over to my side and tried to get as comfortable as possible. I shook a pill out of my bottle and chased it with cold water.

I peeked out the window. Thick, wet snow had covered everything. Cold temperatures and high humidity individually make my pain worse, and the combination is brutal. I checked my cell phone to see the time. I still had an hour or so before class. I resigned myself to playing video games until I needed to get going. There was a ton of other things I could have been doing, but I would need to reserve my stamina for those that I had to accomplish. There was always an opportunity cost associated with everything I did since becoming a cripple, so I couldn’t just do things without weighing the consequences. After about twenty minutes, I looked at my pill bottle again. “Did I just take one? With this pain, it doesn’t feel like I took one. Should I wait a half hour to see if the pain level drops? Can I wait a half hour? If I take an extra one, I might be too fucked up to drive to class.” I took another one.

No Known Solution

My problem has been termed idiopathic neuropathy of the left leg, highly focused in the knee and hip. Neuropathy means nerve-related pain or weakness. Idiopathic means no one has a damned clue what’s causing it. Apparently, around 20% of people who suffer neuropathy also don’t know what causes theirs. My neurologist at Hershey Medical, a bright, kind doctor, tried to minimize not being able to diagnose me, saying “Lots of people have migraines, and we don’t really know what causes them. Some people are just in pain.” I’d wanted to punch her in her bright, kind face. I left the building, only half listening to my wife fuming about the ineptitude of doctors. We left the medical complex and I almost laughed when I saw the street name: Hope Drive.

That was only a year or two into my answerless odyssey. The pain started in February of 2007. I decided I had to go buy a cane, because I just couldn’t take walking around on my own anymore. I started going to every specialist I could get an appointment with. I even went down to John’s Hopkins. Probably the least fun I had in a doctor’s office was when I got my electromyography test. I’d had no idea what I was in for, so I had no way to prepare myself. I walked into the small, sterile office and laid down on the faux-leather table. A short Indian doctor came in and asked me to remove my pants. Then, the sadistic sonofabitch jammed needles into different spots of my lower back and leg and ran an electrical current through me. This was apparently to see how well my nerves conducted electricity – the signals were translated into sound like a Geiger counter. For the first time, I could hear my pain. This awful person then had the audacity to tell me to relax when my muscles were tense. My wife sat by the door, wincing for the entire session. When we were done with my backroom Baghdad torture, I demanded ice cream. Of course, this was all done for nothing. No answer for why some days I couldn’t walk down the frozen food section of a grocery store without almost dropping in pain. No insight as to why I was a cripple at age 26. No answers. No cure.

Dear Diary: Part 2

The pain is often at its worst in the mornings, because it’s usually been eight to ten hours since I last took pills. Once I was able to medicate, movement started getting a little easier, so after a few hours I had the fortitude to face life. It was time to leave for class. Had I taken too much Vicodin to drive safely to campus? Probably not. I set my oversized pants in front of the heating vent to warm for a few minutes while I gathered my books. I have to wear them loose, because when I sit in properly fitting pants for any length of time, the waistline presses into a pressure sensitive area on my hip that will cause immense pain. I put on my pants, squeezing my eyes shut as I lift my bad leg to slip it into my jeans. I made it down the stairs, grabbed my cane, and opened the door. The cold wind cut through my clothing and I contemplated staying home, but school was more important. I had to walk through the snow and cursed all the way to my car. Cold, wet shoes will cause my leg extra pain for hours. I was (thankfully) fine to drive to class.

I sat in the cold plastic chair with my jacket draped over my leg to keep it warm. I kept shifting and fidgeting, self-conscious about the creaks of the chair that accompanied my every movement. I accidentally knocked my cane into one of my classmates and I apologized profusely. Not only was I more than a decade older than most of them, but I had to walk around with a cane. How… alienating.

I finished my classes and drove home quickly. My wife wasn’t home, so I tried to take a nap before my work shift. I couldn’t get into a good position, so I just flopped around for an hour. I decided I needed to call out of work. The last time I had gone in to work with pain this bad, my boss had to have a little chat with me. I’d gotten very terse with a student from Sudan because I didn’t have the patience to hold her hand through her seven page paper, and she got a bit upset. Apparently, she went to my boss in tears. I hoped to avoid this mistake again, and thought it would be best for all involved if I shut myself away for the day.

Pain and Perception

When the pain is greater than average for an extended period of time, I slip into a bad two day cycle with my sleep schedule. My leg will hurt so much that I won’t be able to fall asleep until I finally relent and pour myself a drink and take an extra pill around five or six in the morning. This will leave me with only three hours of sleep or so, leaving me exhausted. When I’m tired, I get emotional, and I don’t have the mental fortitude to deal with the pain as well as I normally do. Thankfully, I’ll be so exhausted that night that I will pass out pretty easily.

When I’m tired or in pain, my fuse shortens dramatically. I used to have one of the slowest tempers of anyone I knew.  Now, not so much. On really bad days, I feel like a dog that’s been hit by a car, snapping at anyone who gets too close, no matter how much they want to help. I find myself hoping that people can relate. It seems like everyone gets touchy when they have a headache or other malady; I feel like I should be allowed the same consideration. However, I’ve been this way for over six years. Do people still give me allowances? Should they?

After so many years of being a cripple, my friends and family started running out of sympathy. For the first year or two, they were caring and understanding. They made sure I didn’t have to carry heavy loads, and they accepted it with grace when I couldn’t follow through on the plans we made together. After a few more years, that well of allowances began drying up. They expected me to be a normal, functioning person and to pull my own weight. Hell, half of my friends never knew me without the cane, so they can’t even know what I was like. The non-handicapped David is dead, and to many people who know me now, he never existed. This is what I’ve got. This is who I am. Still, it’s not so bad. My wife married me as a cripple, telling me “Even as less than the man you were, you’re still better than everyone else.” I don’t care if she’s objectively right or not. The fact that she thinks so is enough for me to keep going.

The Most Potent Poison

A week or so ago, I went to my coordinating doctor. We made the usual small talk about how long it had been since I’d last been in (seven months), what had I been doing with myself (school), and had there been any change in my condition (no). He also made the hollow offer of doing the same tests again to see if there had been any change. “I’d hate to just sit around with my teeth in my mouth” he said, but I murmured that I’d have to think about it. More tests would require two things of which I was in short supply: money and hope. I’m not terribly concerned about the money. What really matters is the hope. I have none.

I don’t often tell  people that, because they tend to get a patronizing look in their eyes that’s equal parts pity and amusement at how dramatic I must sound. They don’t understand. I worked hard to destroy my hope once I knew how deeply it was poisoning me. Hope was what was keeping me from doing anything in the present. For the first few years of being a cripple, I would tell my wife, “When I get my leg sorted out, I’m gonna hit the gym like a fiend. I’ll never take my body for granted again.” I would fantasize about getting back into martial arts, or going hiking. I would totally do all of that stuff, just as soon as I was fixed. As soon as the pain went away.

After four years and no answers, I started realizing that there was no light at the end of the tunnel. The pain wasn’t going away. It continued to wake me up every morning and keep me from sleeping every night. I was also continuing to not do a damned thing. I put on fifty pounds and neglected my friends and family. I lived my life in my bed. I was waiting for my life to return to normal, while refusing to accept that this was my new normal. Somewhere in year five, I started killing my hope. Maybe I was inspired by The Dark Knight Rises. In it, Bane gives a stirring speech to Bruce Wayne, saying “There's a reason why this prison is the worst hell on earth... Hope. Every man who has ventured here over the centuries has looked up to the light and imagined climbing to freedom… I learned here that there can be no true despair without hope.” Those words burned a hole in me. I was waiting to restart my life, watching years pass. And why? Because I was afraid of making my pain worse.

Marcel Proust said “Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.” I was obeying my pain, and my pain wanted me to lie down in my bed and die. I started fighting that urge. I learned when to pick my battles, but I still don’t know if I’m winning the war. There are costs. The pills blunt my mental edge, but my pain is too distracting if left alone. Too much medication keeps me from activity, but so does too much pain. I have to walk a fine line, and I don’t do it very well. Then, there are the other factors of taking narcotics steadily for six years.

Dear Diary: Part 3

That night, I decided that I needed a drink. I ended up sitting in a bar and drinking with a few of my buddies when another knife of pain drove into my hip. We were sitting on high barstools, which inevitably leads to a flare up. I winced and pulled out my pill bottle. I shook it vigorously and my friend looked at me quizzically. Anticipating his question, I launched into my pat explanation. “When you shake a pill bottle, the pills rub against each other, which creates a fine powder coating on each pill. When you take one, there’s a bit of narcotics ready to jump into your bloodstream without having to be eaten away from the body of the pill by your stomach acid. This will, in a perfect world, get the drugs into your system faster.” I have no idea if this actually works, but it doesn’t really matter – the habit is with me and it will never leave. I dumped two Vicodin into my hand, took one after the next, and washed them down with my bourbon and water. A decade earlier, this would have been the start of a great night. At that point, however, I was just hoping to stave off the end of my stamina so that I could spend some more time with the friends that I constantly neglect. My friend looked at me with a mixture of surprise and pity. Maybe it was me, but I could almost hear the question in his head: “Is Dave a drug addict?”

I didn’t have a good answer for him.

Nothing Comes From Nothing

Quote from Jan Morris: “Every sentence we create we have created from nothing, and made real, and every situation has been touched up in our memory.”

Nothing comes from nothing. Every action or item is a reaction to some antecedent. Every sentence we create, whether written or uttered, is created in the immense, complicated structure of our brains. We want to believe that we create spontaneously, but I just don’t buy it. We are products of DNA, manifesting our genetic identity. That genetic trajectory is focused and shaped by the deeply rooted culturing influences that have surrounded us since we came into being. We are, if examined with enough scrutiny, entirely predictable creatures, and once we have been set in motion, will continue to stay in motion along a certain path.

Each idea we hold has a reason behind it, and each sentence we create comes from an idea we hold. To say that every sentence comes from nothing does a disservice to both language and human agency. We are creatures filled with amazing things, and the sentences we build, the thoughts we express, originate in the confluence of the meat and majesty of the human being.

As far as situations being “touched up,” I will agree with that. No one knows their own past; they only know their own personal narrative. We all view the events of our lives subjectively and with immense bias. If we try to cross-reference an event with another person, discrepancies emerge, because we are remembering things how we want to, and they are doing the same. We have to accept that we can never remember past events objectively, because we can never experience *present* events objectively. We are all telling ourselves our own stories as they happen, and we are all unreliable narrators. Thankfully, stories don’t need to be factually accurate to be true.

On How We Learned Nothing Bad Can Never Happen.

“Nothing Bad Can Ever Happen. Proceed With Confidence.”

There is an old Chinese proverb to ponder:

A Chinese farmer has a stallion. One day, the stallion runs away. The village people come to him and say, "Ah, such a bad thing to happen!"
The farmer shrugs, "Good thing, bad thing, who knows?"

A few days later, the stallion returns with three mares. The village people come to him and say, "Ah, such a good thing to happen!"
The farmer shrugs, "Good thing, bad thing, who knows?"

The next week, the farmer's son breaks his leg taming the wild mares. The village people come to him and say, "Ah, such a bad thing to happen!"
The farmer shrugs, "Good thing, bad thing, who knows?"

A month later, the Chinese army comes and demands all the young men of proper age to be a soldier. The farmer's son does not have to go because of his broken leg. The village people come to him and say, "Ah, such a good thing to happen!" 
The farmer shrugs, "Good thing, bad thing, who knows?"

How can it be that nothing bad can ever happen? It seems so alien to us, so contrary to all of our traditions. However, when one takes themselves out of the center of their universe, one begins to see that it is impossible to determine whether an event was good or bad. An individual’s finite understanding of the totality of time and causation prohibit the full appreciation of how an event affects the world around it.

We find it difficult to evaluate an event as good or bad because it is impossible to evaluate an event while being objective. The very act of evaluation is antithetical to objectivity. We are only capable of evaluating an event as preferable, enjoyable, sad, happy, unfortunate, etc. - we can only make subjective evaluations. If we begin to accept that we don’t live in a dyadic universe, tossed between two extremes, and that Good and Bad are concepts constructed by human minds, we begin to understand that there is no Good or Bad.

Things we dislike will happen. However, does the fact that we dislike these things make them bad? I was laid off by my job: I turned it into an opportunity to go to college. I ended a relationship with a woman I moved to another state for: I met the woman I married in this new state. All of the supposedly Bad things that have happened in my life have all led to the enjoyable, agreeable state which I now live in. Nothing Bad has ever happened to me: only things that I could not appreciate at the time. The things that I do not enjoy now? Those are only things I cannot appreciate at this moment. Only at the end of my life could I look back at events in judgment, and even then, only insofar as they affected my own limited life.

These thoughts are incomplete, a start on a meditation to remove ourselves from our lives for a moment, to try to look at the bigger picture. Expand the notion with your own perspective. 

You Keep Using That Word. I Don’t Think It Means What You Think It Means

Have you ever been in an argument with your lover, and you (or your lover) has screamed “I FUCKING LOVE YOU!!!” out of some place of rage or sorrow? If so, have you ever reflected upon this incredibly strange notion? It is an odd cocktail of emotional and conceptual discord. The statement is at such tremendous odds with the emphasis, emotions, and context. How can this even be a sincere utterance?

One better. Have you been in a relationship in which your lover professes to love you – and acts towards you in such a fashion that only one who is in love would act – while simultaneously hating everything you say and do? This can be deeply confusing and emotionally distressing. It can make you question your value without any outside markers to grab on to. It is intensely bizarre to be so passionately loved and so wholly disapproved of.

What is happening is that your lover simply does not love the actual you, but their idealized you. As Rhonda Lee Roberts suggests in “Friendly Lovers,” when we first begin to date someone, we fill in the gaps in our knowledge of them with positive information, or at the very least, the information we want to be there. As we slowly grow to learn a person’s true nature, the actual and the idealized versions come together. The greater the difference between the two, the greater the resulting conflict. This happens in each and every relationship if one is too focused on their own perceptions or goals rather than the person sitting at the table across from them. We focus on wanting a relationship to work from our own motivations – loneliness, dependency, need for validation – and we imbue a person with qualities that we have no way of knowing that they even have. We create our lovers in our own image, building conceptual constructs to love us. How deeply disturbed and egotistical is that? Or perhaps it is an optimistic pattern assumption. Humans are a little crazy about that. We look into the night sky, see five stars, and call it a bull. We see what we want to see, and what we want to see is something we can understand. When we look into the eyes of another, we want to see something perfect. We constellatize others, seeing a few key points and imagine a frog, when sometimes, they are a scorpion.

After time, the realities of our lovers emerge. The character traits or habits we glossed over eventually show themselves to be deeply-set and unavoidable. We see them for who they are, and if our mental constructs deviate strongly from the reality, we begin to hate the person for not being who we created them to be. The pipe-dream meets the reality, and we get angry at ourselves for our delusions, but we take it out on our lovers, nonetheless. We try to force them into the mold we made for them, pissing on their agency and autonomy, their right to be themselves. We do everything we can to make it seem as if the problem is theirs, when it is unequivocally ours. It is our expectations they do not live up to, and that is our problem.

The only way to avoid this is to enter a relationship slowly and without a goal. If a person is goal-oriented (I want to get married, I want to feel safe, etc), they are much more likely to try to force a situation, and make the square peg fit into the round hole. If a person is person-oriented (I want to know this person, he/she seems cool, etc.) they are likely to walk into a relationship slowly and with relatively clear vision. Even better, if one enters into a relationship with no expectations, but with a “hey, I’ll give it a shot” attitude, they are most likely to see a person’s faults and, if their differences are irreconcilable, part ways without rancor or drama.

Authentic love can only exist between two people with agency and humanity. Authentic love cannot exist between a person and a fabrication. 

Something Serious, From a Friend

From one of my best friends and brothers, offered without comment:

My name is Ryan Brogan and I have two moms. They are two little sweet old ladies. At 65 and 75 respectively, they are both devout Buddhists with a dedication to each other that I hold as a model in my own life. They are hard working and are currently enjoying their much deserved retirement. I love them both dearly and view them both as my mother. They listen when I talk, banter when I call, and care for me when I need it. I am not saying this to incite or inflame  I am writing this to hopefully give you  a new perspective. They have been married in spirit for many years, but do not enjoy the same legal protections a man and woman would enjoy. I am not here to discuss the religious implications of gay marriage. I am here to discuss the hate, bigotry, and legal ramifications of the anti-gay and anti-gay marriage movement. 

First let me say that when you stereotype or hate homosexuals, you are talking about my mom and not just the one. When you see people out demonstrating against homosexuals, holding up signs that say “GOD HATES FAGS,” they actually believe god hates my moms. They actually want to do harm to my moms. I cannot stand for that. I would not stand for that against any other culture or group and I will certainly not stand for it when they are talking about my mom. People with this view believe that children raised in a homosexual house hold will grow up to be different, maladjusted, or gay. All of these things might be true, but no more so than in any heterosexual house. The use of “traditional household” is biasing and will not be regarded here. 

I am not going to list statistics or facts on heterosexual households. I am not writing this to tear anyone else down. I am writing this to hopefully raise up the standing of homosexual couples. Religion certainly plays a roll in modern marriage, but there is a larger factor in their legal standing in the state. This is the element of homosexual marriage that must be changed. The current standing is a denial of equal rights on a federal level. My parents should be allowed equal standing in the eyes of the law both for good and bad. They should be allowed the tax relief of marriage. The rights of visitation in hospitals. Rights of spousal power of attorney, inheritance, and asset access. These two people are the most important things in this world and I will do anything to protect them. So the next time you hear some one talking about their hatred of fags, homos, queers, or dykes let them know they are talking about Ryan Brogan’s moms and he will not let that stand. 

PS- I debated politicizing this letter and will not do it as it may cheapen the sentiment. However, I will say that one of the leading candidates is staunchly anti “gay marriage.” Again, he is talking about my mom and I can’t tolerate that.

Feel free to share as this is an important topic to me and to us as a nation.

The Importance of Being Shitty

            In "The I Who Says 'We,'" Stacey Ake touches on a concept that I have long adhered to: never trust someone who proclaims to be a good person. If we see ourselves in a shining light, she says, we are presuming we are perfect in light of another’s imperfections. Only when we can see ourselves as imperfect can we have genuine understanding and realistic acceptance of another’s inevitable moments of shittyness.

            We are, all of us, at least kind of shitty. We’ve all hurt someone, or been rude or demanding, ungrateful or snide. We’ve broken someone’s heart and disappointed someone when they’ve needed us. We’re human. We’re imperfect. We’re kind of shitty. This is fine. It is a realistic, fair assessment of ourselves, which is the first step towards personal authenticity, from which springs the ability for all meaningful, lasting relationships. When we recognize our propensity for shittyness, we become more tolerant of shittyness in others. We are less likely to rush to the fundamental attribution error, the term psychologists give to being a self-righteous dick. This error skews a person’s opinion such that they believe their own failings or missteps are due to circumstances, while perceived failures of others are due to the flaws in their character.

            We’ve all done shitty things, so reasonable people believe themselves to be a bit shitty. People who view themselves as good, on the other hand, have explained away the impact of their negative actions. They feel justified and righteous. They are wrong. They are just as shitty as the rest of us, only less cognizant of that fact, which emboldens them into further acts of shittyness. Their lack of repentance shows a lack of self-realization, one that is dangerous to their relationships and to themselves. To boldly move forward without objective self-reflection is to continue to blunder through life without a genuine understanding of how deeply a person can hurt the people in their sphere. And this necessary, genuine, comprehensive, and objective self-reflection will invariably result in the realization that one is, to at least some degree, kind of shitty.

On Expectations

Last night, and event occurred in my life that I had been waiting for and fantasizing about for over twenty years. I was finally able to see my favorite band play live. Dead Can Dance's last tour was over five years ago, and before that, tours were infrequent and out of my ability to attend as a youth. I couldn't attend the previous tour because of extremely tight finances. If there had been a way, I would have made it happen, but it came down to a choice between the concert and rent. I still deliberated, but, ultimately, reason won out.

Since 1991, at age 11, I had determined that I must see Dead Can Dance play live before I could die. I would go looking stylish in a suit, with a beautiful woman on my arm, and I would watch them play, and joy would overwhelm me, tears spilling down my face.

On August 26, 2012, my wife and I arrived at the Kimmel Center's Verizon Hall. I was looking stylish in my suit, and my wife looked gorgeous. We were sat through a riveting performance by the percussionist touring with DCD, David Kuckhermann. We were skeptical when he said he was going to perform a song on his tambourine, but it was brilliant. He is a true talent.

Then the moment came. The stage lit, and Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard stepped out from behind the curtains and began weaving their magic. It was a two hour and fifteen minute performance that included three encores. The sound was amazing, perfectly balanced to highlight the brilliant array of both the subtle and the dramatic. All of the performers showed intense mastery and genius.

It was a phenomenal concert.

It was not the concert that I wanted to see.

I knew that my expectations would work against me, so I had tried to limit them. However, they did not play a single one of the dozens of their songs that would have reduced me to sobbing. Only two of the songs they played were more than three albums old, and my deepest emotional attachments are to their earlier work. They played material primarily from their new album and their side projects. I have spent too little time with the new album to have it in my heart, and while I enjoy their side projects (Perry's particularly), their song choices were not the ones that would have resonated with me.

I left the theater stunned at my lack of emotion.

For context, I weep easily at concerts. Something about them moves me tremendously, especially when I have loved a band for a long time. It is not sadness, or even joy, but emotional attachment that affects me so deeply. I bawled when I saw The Cure play "Same Deep Water As You," and when Peter Murphy performed "Marlene Dietrich's Favorite Poem." There are even more ridiculous, less manly events that I can remember. However, at this, my most anticipated concert event, I was left feeling, well, very little.

Don't get me wrong, I feel incredibly fortunate to have seen them play, and I will forever be grateful that I had the chance. I suppose it was what I needed, but not what I wanted. I know this is probably whiny, first-world problemy stuff, but I am very sad. I know that, as artists, they want to play the music they are passionate about, which, with any artist, is their most recent material. The music I want to hear is 20+ years old, and is probably worn very thin for them artistically.

I guess what I am most sad about is the fact that I will never see the concert I want to see.

The fact that the girl sitting next to me smelled of Italian dressing and piss didn't help, either.

Pain

Today is one of those mornings that, when I wake up, I immediately have to reach for the pill bottle. I have to force myself to only take one, to wait and see if one pill is good enough. "I'll wait for half an hour before taking the next," I promise myself. My brows furrow slightly as I stare at the ceiling. I check the time every couple of minutes, hoping for the pain to subside.

Waking up is hard enough, but the pain makes it worse. I start surfacing to consciousness, only for my mind to realize the pain I am in. My immediate reaction is to try to retreat back to sleep, so that I can spend another hour with oblivion, rather than the gnawing in my leg. If I'm lucky, I can return to unconsciousness. If I'm not, the pain will take hold and keep me awake, every twist and turn I make to find some comfort only serving to tear ever deeper into my side. I'm sure there is a metaphor in this about the greater experience of life being merely an uncomfortable search for comfort, or being a path of trials to achieve peace.

The half hour passes. I take another pill. I stare out my window, watching the trees sway and people walk down the sidewalk. A fight breaks out. Two men, three women. One of the men and one of the women drove up in a car to confront my neighbors who live across the street. The man from the car is dressed in a nice button up and slacks, everyone else is in pajamas. They all look like fools, wrestling on the ground. Police come after the couple in the car have departed.

The diversion serves as an anesthetic, but only briefly. As the view outside resolves once again into normalcy. My pill bottle catches my eye. It sits on the window sill, about two feet from my head, which rest on my pillow for the vast majority of my day. It's always there. It needs to be.

Paul Ryan explained

Eight years ago, Paul Ryan opened the Lament Configuration and survived. That pallor and pained look on his face is due to the tight weaving of barbed chains crisscrossing his body underneath his ill-fitting suits. He is simultaneously always on the verge of tears or orgasm (or both). His sweatiness and intense, predatory gaze is due to his constant knowledge that he must harvest souls for the Cenobites, lest he himself be taken to Leviathan. 
His every movement, pain.
His every thought, pleasure.
His every desire, oblivion.

Imagine Love

Imagine being in a loving marriage. You and your spouse have been together for years and have two children. Everything is good; life is hard, you fight sometimes, but that’s the way the world works. It’s real love, and you are happy.

One day, you’re lying in bed, and your spouse turns over to look at you very seriously.

“If you ever leave me, I won’t be happy,” they say. You say it will never happen and give them a hug.

“If you ever leave me, I will put a bullet through each of our children’s heads while you watch. I will lock you in a box with them, to breathe in the gas as they decompose, and to live in the slush of their rotting flesh. I will take you out of the box daily to feed you, and then to beat you to unconsciousness. When I see your eyes glaze over, I will switch the form of physical pain so that it is always fresh and new. If you get sick, I will heal you, only to keep the pain going. You will never come to terms with this. You will be in agony for the rest of your life. Your only company will be the corpses of our children, who died for your refusal to love me. Your every moment will be torture, because I cannot handle the possibility of your refusal of my love.”

You look into your spouse’s eyes and know, beyond doubt, that they are fully willing and capable of doing this. How do you feel?

God commanding your love, with punishment of Hell as the alternative, is disgusting and horrifying. What hideous monster could be so petty to condemn one to an eternity of Hell for ANY transgression? Even if Hitler were to spend a million years in Hell for every life his regime was responsible for ending, not just the Jews, but the Russians, English, Americans, and other Germans who died in World War II, his term in Hell would still only be a fraction of a picosecond when compared to all of Eternity. Is that just? Is that equitable? Who or what could fit such hatred in its heart? God is truly the greatest of all conceivable horrors.

So when people ask me “What if you’re wrong?” about being an atheist, I feel it doesn’t matter. I could not love such a loathsome creature as God. An eternity in Hell would be preferable to the forced act of singing the praises of he who would condemn me there.

If there is a Hell, it could be no worse than Heaven.