"I am what I am, and what I am is who I am . . ."

I was engaged in one of those drunken conversations about god last night. Mostly me and this other guy; who I don't know all that well but am starting to think of as a friend. He's a cool guy, but I saw in him this familiar preconception and recoil when I laid the atheist card on the table. There was a sense of condescension when I began my defense by first discussing the flaws of organized religion's theology. Of course, he doesn't believe in that sort of god. He relied on a notion of god as being the same as what I call 'life' or 'nature' and we both agreed that things called 'miracles' do not occur but that everything plays by the rules (the doubt lying in our ignorance of the 'rules'). My point was, why should we call it 'god' necessarily? I think the answer lies in the societal pressure on the atheist in all of us. You can say you believe in god, and thus be covered from any sort of outrage or admonishment, when in fact you don't believe in anything of the sort. Semantics. A linguistic convenience. The problem is that every dictionary definition (how can we settle linguistic confusions? is the dictionary the best way?) refers to god as being a 'being'. A supreme ruler responsible for the origin of life and the universe. If you do not believe in something like a divine, creative intelligence that controls the universe by force of will then you do not believe in god.

It's an untenable position to be counting days until points on the horizon, twiddling my thumbs until the coming week is over and then the next 3 months and then the next 1.5 years and then whatever else is out there becoming increasingly hazy and indistinct. So you just try to seize whatever the hell has fallen into your lap to at least demarcate this present instant as something. Or you melt into widely-available and patronized videos so you can engage in polite conversation. Or you just try to feverishly hurdle things because in all honesty you've never been able to sleep unless you were terminally exhausted. Or you take one night a week and just drink yourself beyond recognition, until the details of the bacchanal run along associative tributaries over the next days smoking and reading and hygiene.


Resin stains on everything. Walking city-wide to find a few square feet to sing praise in or bleed out the last week of disease in. And now every blinking decision arbitration between the 14 people I am to complete this thing called living. Kicking bones and corroding sophistry across the overgrown factory floor, or spilling drinks on patio tables to punctuation . . .conversations about conversations about something I cannot elucidate. Only that the very air I breath seethes increasingly automated, and my fingertips numb to the touch of everything except your skin limned in fluorescence as you sleep.