I’m glad to hear you and yours had a pleasant Thanksgiving. Mine served as another crystalline example of the way we make ourselves suffer through forced rituals and tired traditions with people we secretly disdain simply because “it’s what people do”.
Remember that nonsense I recently spewed about embracing kindness to others as a possible fulfillment of my life’s “purpose”? Of course you do, you just referenced it in your last letter. Well, it should come as no surprise that I’ve already analyzed the wisdom right out of that vague plan, and that analysis went a little something like this: “The very crux of my current malaise is my utter distaste for the rest of my own species. I do not wish them well, so why in the hell would I waste my time trying to help them?”
Your son sounds like an interesting and compassionate guy, but I’m probably not the best source to advise how his talents and resources would be best utilized, especially since I found myself involuntarily wincing at the inclusion of the word “spiritual” in your opening greeting. I understand that you used the word (much as I’ve done, ad infinitum) to poetically describe human connection as opposed to religious belief, but it’s a word that has become anathema to me over the course of the past year or so for the simple reason that it implies the existence of a soul or spirit within each of us and that, to me, represents the loftiest heights of human arrogance.
Before you think that this letter is a complete downer, I’ve got some exciting news to report. I’ve found my purpose! Or more accurately, it found me.
The longer I float along without a job, a relationship or even a semblance of a social life, the more my remaining friends and acquaintances react with alarm. Similarly, and even more amusingly, those with whom I used to discuss Eastern philosophy and other pseudo-spiritual topics are reacting to my declaration of life’s lack of meaning with extraordinary alarm. They want to encourage me to find a career I’ll love, a religion I’ll embrace, a philosophy about which I’ll write extensively for the benefit of the world. They want to play matchmaker, get together for coffee to “discuss what’s going on with me”, and it seems that they will be relentless in their collective nagging unless and until I tell them that my life is imbued with purpose. This amuses me more than I can possibly express.
Do you think that they’re reacting this way out of genuine love and concern? I don’t. In fact, I know exactly why I cause such a visceral reaction in my friends these days: those who live their lives “the way they’re supposed to” are slaves to worries, anxieties, disappointments and concerns the likes of which I have washed my hands of and this, frankly, pisses them off. “Why should that little shit be allowed to flout society’s conventions that way? He needs to get with the program!” However, deep down, they all know that I have no such “need”. It is they who need me to play ball with all manner of societal bullshit because people who speak and live the way I do represent an enormous threat to the imprisoning stories they’ve accepted and embraced about life and how to live it.
Tell me more about your son’s platform. Despite everything I just said, I’m sure I’ll have some ideas to throw your way. And while brainstorming these ideas, I promise to pretend that I don’t hate humanity more than life itself.
Tally-Ho,
‘Mudge
Anonymole - apocryphal agitators 
Screwing with people is definitely one of life’s finer purposes.
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One could counter that the supreme human arrogance is to assume we are islands unto ourselves. While the hippie in me agrees that we are not mutually “experienced” the bigger hippie in me would point to an invisible web of “something wherein our thoughts and our various paths are intertwined on a level that we are merely unable to ascertain, or even entertain. That “experience” is what all the soul searching and platitudes and religions and philosophies clamor like temple bells on acid to sell us their version of, when the explanation always comes down to “is just is.” Like cool. Someone once asked how to become cool and was informed that cool is not an off the shelf product. Cool is. The less you are concerned with it, the cooler you become. Like that inexplicable web of “experience.” It just is. We know it, we “feel” it but it lives without definition because – again – is just is. How “cool” is that?
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“Boy, boy, crazy boy, get cool boy!” A sizeable hippie used to reside within my skin, but I think the recently ascendant curmudgeon ate him.
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It is never too late, regardless of the path, to put a little poetry in your life. Trust me.
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“spiritual” pptang! Ricochet Rick Rides Relentless.
We appear to have one well defined area of discussion where nearly everything examined could be classified as “cerebral” or “of the mind.” But, even the greatest thinkers, those most distanced from emotional contemplation—I would think—succumb to some whispers of the heart, don’t you think?
Would the term “non-cerebral” apply then? Or?
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Hello, he lied… I have enjoyed reading your letters from the earth these past weeks, but now I would like to inject something different into the dialog. I feel it gets at what both of you are saying. Thanks. Duke.
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That was great.
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Catch the tune below, sounds like you.
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That was sumtin’ alright.
I used to own this album. One of my favorite set of songs ever. Here’s one that resonates, Dancin’ Wizard:
Monkeys-on-the-Moon, Fazon, Coke-Suede-and-Waterbeds, Astronaut Food and others.
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