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.