It was a fugue. It was spectacular. But I was convinced the visions were real. That everything was limpid. The waves from the sky, leading to society’s anomie, that it all was real.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent But slowly, fortunately, for me, and countless others, who might have been slapped or kicked and shot in the face with piss or had seen me running the streets naked, my visions unraveled. And I don’t know how. The ghosts dissipated.
The fog cleared. The floaters vanished. I began to see the satellites as space junk. I began to see my mind as filled, painted with lies. I began to understand my hate for myself and realize that my antipathy towards others was a manifestation of my own demons.
I started to study game theory. Then I began to believe in nothing. Became a nihilist. And for a time, a solipsist. And for a time, an existentialist. Then my hate, my obsession with mass face and head slapping sprees, pissing on people, and baby punting, shooting babies from catapults, that was my own rage displaying itself. And I knew my emerging belief that murder was freedom was because I wanted to be part of something. I wanted to be known. Be part of a cause.
Because I was lost, a lost soul, without meaning, a rebel searching for a cause.
I wanted to believe in conspiracy because it allowed me structure, a lattice, an order, and a reason. I came to realize that this is why conspiracy theory was so popular, because it bestowed reason, provided a scaffold.
9/11 being an inside job, devised by satellites or the CIA, was an easier answer because it had meaning. More meaning than a small crew of crazed assholes armed with boxcutters and divine lunatic ideology.
Sandy Hook had to be a stunt to repossess guns because no one as frail and weird as Adam Lanza could perpetrate such horror. As per one conspiracy video on YouTube, Adam Lanza didn’t even have a Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn profile.
So he couldn’t have really existed!
Kennedy couldn’t have been shot by Oswald, certainly not alone. Oswald? The guy was a putz!
My ideas of satellites, dark actors, floaters and ghosts, were visions, yes, but were figments of my imagination, as are most all conspiracy theories.
I was seeing that there was no absolute truth. There was no order or predetermination.
There was nothing other than randomness and what I created.
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent My failures weren’t failures. They were attempts, and I was happy that I’d made the attempts, rather than been a coward, sitting on the sidelines, snarking on others all day online, snarking on those who did try, feebly trying to scare away those who create!
I could have been a film, music, or literary critic, dammit! Written book reviews, bashing authors on Goodreads! Fucking Goodreads! Thank heavens I didn’t devolve into such depravity!
I had nothing to feel bad about. I lived in a first world country. I was a weirdo with a mohawk, living like a hermit, but at least I wasn’t living on the street. I had a job! I had a place to live! I wasn’t a fucking bum!
I’d pass by homeless, dirty, stinking of piss, sprawled out on sidewalks or begging for change, and I’d wonder why this was. Why this man was smeared in shit and why Jeff Bezos was in a penthouse. How did their paths diverge? If there was a God or satellite control or heavens or meaning, why was there this disparity, this suffering, this waste? Why was this creature allowed to live in torment?
Why did war, rape, natural disaster happen? It made no sense that God or gods or satellites willed such events. Why then would anyone believe in them? Wouldn’t we think of them as malevolent and rise to destroy them, eventually? Could they contain us with Putin and microwave rays and lizard people and vampires, digital ghosts forever?
No. There was nothing but randomness. No such thing as fate. I would write my own script. I would write my own book!
I shaved off my mohawk and snapped out of my visions, began to exercise far more intensively, and set out to embrace the randomness, chaos. I’d be water. I’d be happy that part of me was made up of matter from the Big Bang. That the universe, time, was infinite. That me being a cosmic speck, a blip, was, actually, in its own way, a beautiful, serene thing…
And, really, at the end of the day, I was spending too much time alone, online too much, and needed to make new friends, and get out more, and find a new girlfriend. I aver that possibly countless social media posts and countless tragedies could have been stopped if only some of those guys had a friend or a two and certainly if they had a girlfriend…
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent 58
It’s crazy, how incredibly cosmic and random everything really is. How one day, one chance encounter, can change everything. And I soon had another encounter that would forever alter my life’s trajectory.
At the gym, as I walked by the chest press, a dude, around my age and also squat, with close-cropped hair, had asked me, while I was passing by, if I could spot him on the chest press, and we got to talking; I found that he was a rare local, a fellow Florida boy, actually from the Sarasota area, not a transplant, snowbird, or tourist.
When I asked what line of business he was in, he hesitated for a second, furtively looked away. Then he swung his gaze back to me and, with a deadpan look, told me straightforwardly that he was in the funeral services industry. Was the manager of a funeral home.
“A reliable business, recession proof,” I quipped, and we shared a laugh, which obliterated the tension. I was thinking he probably received strong responses when people heard of his job, and he was visibly relieved that I didn’t have qualms.
When I told him I was a loan officer, he perked up. He’d been thinking of branching out, leveraging, and buying into the franchise of funeral homes that he worked for, he told me. I told him I could possibly set him up. And thus, a business partnership was born.
The franchise he worked for was profitable, highly so. And I decided to take things a step further and join him, use some cash I’d saved to buy in as well, and was able to secure financing, not from my company, but another (mine had passed on the idea, so we went to another bank and were successful in our proposal).
Our leveraged stake in the franchise paid off handsomely for both of us. I was able to quit my job as a loan officer and to work full-time, handling various matters at the funeral homes.
Many might find this line of work icky, morbid. But I don’t. I see death as a part of life. Corpses, caskets, and funerals don’t dismay or scare me. If anything, working
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent with death reminds me how limited our time is, how each one of us, anyone reading this, will be in that box one day. Would our time have the same meaning if it were infinite? I don’t think so… Time is truly the only commodity we can’t replace. Being a coworker of death has clarified this…
Because of my outlook, or for whatever reason, I took to work at the funeral homes easily, naturally. Including speaking with, receiving customers, grief-stricken families, loved ones.
I think that my experience with death, losing my father at a young age, losing my wife, my girlfriend, two babies, that that trauma had given me perspective and ability to feel empathy for those dealing with loss. Rather than cowering or being pedantic, offering advice to those in grief, I listen to them, take on a role of grief counselor, and lend them an empathetic ear during their time of sorrow. I know their pain. I live their pain. I share their pain. And I do what I can to help them along in their grieving process.
Of course, word spreads, with how we take care of people, and, with Florida’s large elderly population, many seek our services.