Hey guys! My wife and I traded days at her store this week, so I completely lost track of the fact that yesterday was Monday. My bad!
Be sure to check out the Roses & Thorns section and hit up the comments with your own!
Without further ado, here are some thoughts based on headlines I’m seeing, the classes I’m taking, the YouTube holes I’m falling down, and the adventures of/with my 3-yr-old son.
Spirituality
This week there was a fair bit of discussion on Notes about people’s religious and spiritual journeys. From Demi Pietchell to Christopher Cook to Coleman to Andrew (Dad Explains) to many others there was a [seemingly] huge outpouring of faith. Often it was faith rekindled, or found again, although many of them were not believers in their youths. What I didn’t see, and it may just be by virtue of whom I follow on Notes and who shows up in my home feed, was a considered or even half-assed attempt to defend Atheism (or materialism, or non-faith). That seems telling to me.
Before I sobered up I would have described myself as an atheist. In truth, I was a full of a virulent resentment, even hatred, toward the idea of ‘God.’ I took numerous classes in philosophy and religion so that I could rip apart the faith of others. My senior [politics] thesis was on Sam Harris’ book The End of Faith. I had felt abandoned by ‘God.’ I felt ‘oppressed’ by the faithful. I was spiteful, hateful, anxious, afraid, and lost, which all culminated in a very selfish husk of a person.
As I was trying to sober up I found faith. I was shown that my faith, my conception of what ‘God’ is, is not and should not be contingent on the faith or ideas of others. I heard a gentleman, regarding the workings of ‘God’ in his own life, say, “I’m the kind of person that needs to know where an idea comes from. I need to know how something works; tear it apart and put it back together again. So I couldn’t figure out how God works in my life. Then one day I realized that I don’t have to know how it works, just that it does.” That saved me. Here was a person who was very similar to me in the way that he spoke about ideas and how he seemingly conceptualized everything around him. And he was able to let go of the need to know how, and just let it work. So knowing that that was possible for someone else, I started to try it for myself.
Now, talking about ‘God’ can be problematic. Most everyone comes to the conversation with a preconceived notion. Most everyone is prejudiced about God, whether for or against, because most everyone has internalized someone else’s [completely inadequate] description. Talking about God is problematic because we’re using finite, structured, language to discuss a concept which is, by definition, infinite, boundary-less, and unstructured [and even all of that is insufficient and sets conditions]. But what helps me most is that my faith, my understanding of God, is not dependent on anyone or anything else. Once I learned that I don’t have to know how It works, just that It does, then I could really listen to other ideas about God. I can learn and grow and develop my own spiritual connection without having to internalize someone else’s conceptions.
I use ‘God’ as a matter of convenience. I don’t care what one refers to It as. (Case-in-point, my wife and I refer to It as Stu [Spirit of The Universe] because it’s easier for her to conceptualize talk about It that way.) What’s important is that one recognizes and understands that one is not, in fact, God; that there is something higher, bigger, more powerful, than oneself. From there we can talk, discuss, and debate good-faith ideas.
Former Friends
Spring-boarding off the above, I saw a post by Demi (
) in which she mentioned that she had lost ‘friends’ when she transitioned from atheist to non-coporealist.1 She writes:a change out of me, because they held me in high esteem, needled at their cognitive dissonance.
What they were thinking but would never say: “If you decided you were wrong, that means I could be wrong too, so I have to make you wrong now to protect my ego.”
According to them, I was not allowed to change my mind.
But I’m growth-focused, received better information, and simply updated my premises.
If they wanted to go, I let them.
If people are willing to drop you over this, let them show their asses and consider it a blessing to see who they really are and how fickle.
This allows room for new people who are in alignment with you to show up. [emphasis mine]
My wife had a lot of ‘friends’ at University. She majored in Acting (received a BFA) and so was amongst a lot of 'Theater Kids.' The problem for her is that she is not a typical Leftist Arts Nerd. She’s never been left of center for most issues. She was raised better than that. (And I’ll note that when we met, I was far more stupidly left than even most of her ‘friends.’) After she graduated she lived with me for a couple years while I was drinking like a fish and pretending to be finishing my degree. She was still close to most of her ‘friends.’
After a couple years we moved back to be closer to her family, separating her from her ‘friends’ by a 10-12 hour drive (across Nebraska, of all hellish landscapes)2. Her best ‘friend’ stayed close to where we went to University, got three shit-paying part-time jobs, and started a long-term (to my knowledge it’s still ongoing, after well over a decade) affair with a married man. Despite my wife asking, begging, her best ‘friend’ to move out here and join her on a business venture and offering a number of practical solutions to her ‘friend’s’ dead-end life trajectory, her ‘friend’ decided to stay in her comfortable bubble.
In the lead-up to 2020, my wife’s best ‘friend’ became more distant and less responsive. During the George Floyd riots, she had a complete identity breakdown. You see, she’s half-black (although she was raised entirely by her white [single] mother and has never been oppressed, let alone singled-out for anything based on her skin color; nor was she race-conscious prior to George Floyd) and when the country split along identity and racial lines she threw her lot in with those celebrating the life of a meth-addict and serial woman-abuser. At roughly the same time my wife got pregnant (and I was trying to get sober), so my wife’s ‘friends’ couldn’t be bothered to be happy for her. There was just too much going on with COVID and rioting to be done. My wife’s best ‘friend’ told her, at one point, that she didn’t have the “emotional bandwidth to deal with this right now.” Meaning, she was too self-involved and infantile that she couldn’t possibly care about what might be going on in the life of a so-called friend, let alone be a shoulder to cry on or person to help comfort.
My wife has spent the last couple of years mourning the loss of her ‘friends.’ They have all (with 1, maybe 2 exceptions) moved on with their self-important lives and have abandoned my wife. It eats at my wife weekly (if not daily) that she lost her best ‘friend.’ I’ve been trying, over the last year and half, that she’s better off for it. That her ‘friend’ was never that close and only used her. I’ve been trying to highlight that if suddenly developing some long-dormant race-consciousness causes her ‘friend’ to start to see her as an oppressor or enemy, then good fucking riddance. And if her former friend can’t see what a complete mess she’s made of her own life, and that of a married man’s family, and has no desire to actually take some responsibility for improving her own situation, then she’s very obviously not prepared to be happy for someone who has been forced to grow and mature.
Which brings me back to Demi’s post. It spoke to me on multiple levels. But over the weekend I realized that it also speaks to my wife’s journey. And probably that of many others. Thank you, Demi, for putting into words something that I’ve been struggling to voice for a long time.
Guitar Gods
Part 1a
Last week, as I was writing about all of the amazing Guitar Gods, I came across this video.
Now, I have always been partial to female vocalists and guitarists. I am, after all, a terrible red-blooded [cis-, white] American male. (Go fuck yourselves, Leftist gender morons.) But what struck me about this video was the fact that they are all young [-er than the other Guitar Gods], meaning they are the next generation of shredding wonders. They all have amazing technical skill. They are from all over the world. And, importantly I think, they were all generally relegated to their own local communities. In that respect, YouTube, Rumble, Vimeo, and other video platforms have done wonders to expose their talent to the world. It’s less important that they are ignored by ‘mainstream’ music, because they have a chance to be amazing and showcase their talent to the world. This is what OnlyFans should be.
Roses & Thorns
To close out the free series this week I’m going to attempt to find three good things (roses) and three bad things (thorns) from the past week. The intent is to both learn to see the good and reward ourselves for the successes as well as learn to objectively see and correct things that need to be corrected.
Roses
Spent a lot of time working on being present while playing with my son. I’m not perfect, and 3-yr-olds are exhausting, but I’m getting better.
My classes are getting close to the end. (Holy shit, January is almost over!)
I’m making efforts to sign up for job fairs and recruitment drives.
Thorns
I still don’t feel ready to take [official] certification exams. Does everyone have to deal with imposter syndrome all the time?
With classes coming to an end, my anxiety about being jobless is ramping up.
My wife’s grandmother has dementia. The family is doing their best to ignore the problem, but it’s been apparent for a long time. (Story behind the paywall.)
As you can tell, Roses & Thorns is unique to you and can run the gamut from small wins (or losses) to big things (in or out of our control).
Share your Roses & Thorns in the comments below.
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