One of the reasons common sense is worthless in the study of pataphysilosophy is that it is based on commonalities that are purely fantastic fabrications in the real world. When Ocean died a few days ago, she took with her all her uniqueness. She will never be replaced. The next cat will eventually also be missed terribly as the pain of the loss of Ocean recedes like the pain of Crescent B. DeNulle, Peabody DeBones, Lucy Juice, Black Jackrack, Wyatt Winghead...
Everything is like that, unique and irreplaceable. There is no order or reason to life or death. Things are or they aren't or they are something else we have no idea of and would not understand if we caught sight of them out of the corner of our eyes because they are so alien to our experience and the shit we spend our lives trying to believe in and measure up to.
I don't believe in anything. I never have believed in anything. I often pretended I did to avoid confrontation. Confrontation never leads anywhere except more confrontation. For me, it has always been preferable to walk or drive away from obviously meaningless situations to set myself up for the next meaningless opportunity to discover more evidence of cosmic and terrestrial horse exhaust that other people choose to live their lives by.
I was born shortly before the Binary Age, which followed World War II, Germany's War to Avenge the Loss of the War to End All Wars. My father was first generation Italian. My mother was part Cherokee and mostly I don't know what blending of white Europeans, and I was actually baptized twice to erase the stigma of having been born a bastard in the eyes of the Catholic Church because my parents were married by a Justice of the Peace. I was told I attended my parents' second wedding, and I sometimes can almost remember the second baptism, so I'm guessing I was two years old at the time. By then I had already grown suspicious of reality and polite society.
Belief makes intelligent conversation impossible. Belief is a wall, and walls do not make good neighbors, which is what Robert Frost was really saying in his famous poem where he stood like a savage, stone-armed.
When I talk of believers, I am not merely pointing at religious morons and ordinary jackasses who wouldn't have anything in common if not for their shared inadequacies and joyous stupidity. Science is as cluttered with dogmatic assholes as any other avocation. The scientific method is faith-based to it core. It does not allow for the very infinite variation it often strives to prove.
Do my fingerprints make me unique? The snowballs I make, are they really compressed from millions of individual snowflakes, no two alike, and is the world really completely random and unknowable, with is what leads many cowards to faith? The old saw that there are no atheists in foxholes implies that cowardice leads to surrender, which is what all good believers want non-believers to do: surrender to God. Surrender to whatever collection of horse exhaust the believers have embraced and built a community upon.
I know some might quibble that fear and cowardice are not the same thing, which is why they view suicide with such a jaundiced eye, equating an individual's assertion of the right to exercise power over one's own life with cowardice, instead of recognizing that no one willingly chooses to jump into the foxhole without first having one's spirit broken by the society supposedly created to make us all safe.
There is no safety, no permanence, no meaning in life. Not in the commonly held definitions. That we are, that anything is, that is meaning enough for me. That it ends? Well, let's say that when I went through detox a decade ago and had to endure the Christian mumbo jumbo that managed health care requires for treatment reimbursement, I found my higher power in compost. I still work to understand compost.
How about you?
