Sunday, November 06, 2005
A Ticker-Tape Parade High
[1/9/08 Note: I never actually finished this. I only put it up now because I was going through the old archives and found a reference to it. I have long since forgotten where I was going with this, since the title seems quite incongruous with the content, but it is what it is.]
After the various revelations described in my last post (which, as I mentioned, took place over the summer), I fell into dark times. I basically became overwhelmed with the various burdens that life has to offer and more or less shut down for awhile. After a couple months of that, I was just looking for a good reason not to go to church anymore.
Some time ago, I would frequent the official website for a certain series of movies. It featured several comics and short stories, several of which contained some kind of scene in which a character would wake up covered in various tubes and encased in a vat of water. They would usually realize in one way or another that this was the real world, and that the "normal life" they were used to was only a dream of sorts.
A few weeks ago, I thought I had an awakening like that. I was in the car, driving back from San Diego late at night. This was something I knew. This was real. Just me, the car, and the darkness outside. I had been here before, and frequently. In fact, maybe I had always been there in the car. All those other things, those bits and pieces of life that seem to happen in between, those were just the dreams of a wandering mind on an endless road trip.
I had become distrustful of memory. How many past events do you actually remember living, and how many are just things that you remember remembering? And what is a dream, if not a memory of a memory?
I fell into a mindset of "There is only 'now.'" The past is over, it's done, it's gone. The future is uncertain, intangible, unreal. There Is Only Now.
After the various revelations described in my last post (which, as I mentioned, took place over the summer), I fell into dark times. I basically became overwhelmed with the various burdens that life has to offer and more or less shut down for awhile. After a couple months of that, I was just looking for a good reason not to go to church anymore.
Some time ago, I would frequent the official website for a certain series of movies. It featured several comics and short stories, several of which contained some kind of scene in which a character would wake up covered in various tubes and encased in a vat of water. They would usually realize in one way or another that this was the real world, and that the "normal life" they were used to was only a dream of sorts.
A few weeks ago, I thought I had an awakening like that. I was in the car, driving back from San Diego late at night. This was something I knew. This was real. Just me, the car, and the darkness outside. I had been here before, and frequently. In fact, maybe I had always been there in the car. All those other things, those bits and pieces of life that seem to happen in between, those were just the dreams of a wandering mind on an endless road trip.
I had become distrustful of memory. How many past events do you actually remember living, and how many are just things that you remember remembering? And what is a dream, if not a memory of a memory?
I fell into a mindset of "There is only 'now.'" The past is over, it's done, it's gone. The future is uncertain, intangible, unreal. There Is Only Now.
