Synchronicity

Let's talk about synchronicity.
Synchronicity is a term that comes from one of my favourite thinkers, Carl Jung. I don't know much about Jung or his ideas, but what I do know blows my mind.
Possibly the most well known of his ideas is that of the collective unconscious. This is the idea that every human, by merit of being human, share a common unconscious. This results in archetypes and the such.
I'm not sure if synchronicity is a result of this unconscious, but I suspect that it is.
Synchronicity is when two events happen that are related significantly, but have no causal connection. It's like when your talking about some new car or movie, and a commercial for it comes on TV.
And once you know about synchronicity, you see it everywhere, and you think of incidents in your past that are synchronicity, and it blows your mind.
Just now, something like synchronicity happened to me, though considering the circumstances, it probably wasn't, just a subconscious connection I made.
Ok, so, I read this webcomic, Pictures for Sad Children, and I also read the guy's blog, it's funny and so sad. Now, in the blog, this guy, his name is John Campbell, made a comic about this writer, who I thought he made up. One of the parts of this comic is, "Let's talk about the basic contradiction/mystery of the Christian religion, i.e. original sin vs. grace. Opposing concepts difficult to embrace individually much less simultaneously."
This line, and this concept, stuck in my head, and is one of the reasons why I never really took to Christianity, even when I was curious. I just couldn't reconcile these ideas in my head.
Now, I'm writing this essay for my English class, I guess I was talking about it last post, and it's on Flannery O'Connor's story "A Good Man is Hard to Find", and as I was reading this story, and talking about it, and thinking about it, it all boiled down to this one quote from this comic. The story is about the opposing concepts of original sin and grace.
Now, as I'm writing the essay, I was thinking about this, and I went back to the comic to see the original quote and maybe some commentary that would help me. And as I'm reading the comic again, I skip the title and the little blurb on top, and go straight to the comic, and I notice, after the passage I quoted above, it said, "and so Flannery, upon seeing the absence of original sin from creative academic discourse (agnosticism, communism, etc.), wrote, in part, in response to this."
This fucking blew my mind. I don't think it's quite synchronicity, because I've read this comic a bunch of times and it always said Flannery O'Connor in it, and I guess I just made the connection. Or maybe I made the connection because both me and John Campbell were thinking about this.
I don't really know where I'm going with this, but it kind of blew my mind when this happened.
I mean, who the fuck knows how deep our subconscious goes? Or the unconscious? It could be a fuckin' rabbit hole, if that metaphor hadn't been used to death. Or it could just be a mirror, it could be simply a reflection on ourselves, and perhaps that would mean that we always knew this, and we will always know this, and maybe Flannery O'Connor was simply writing this knowledge that everyone has down, to make us see it, to bring it out of our minds. I guess only what's out there really matters, and the subconscious is only where all this comes from. All I know is that I have, like, 2 pots of coffee in me and I need to write, like, 900 more words about this and I am so fuckin' tired.
You ever been like this? Like you have caffeine, and every part of your body is set on high, is set on let's fucking burn down the parliament buildings and punch a nun, but your eyes are on autopilot, and just want to turn off. I swear, every part of my body wants to go out there and meet someone exciting at 3 in the morning in a back alley but my eyes just want to close and stay closed for at least 8 hours, preferably more. Shit, even my memory's shot right now, i keep on meaning to do things and then get distracted and forget what the fuck is happening, and I guess this is normal with all this caffeine, but all I know is that my eyes cannot follow my hands right now and if I lie down, I'm done, I'm dead, I'm fucking Sleeping Beauty (except prettier).
And you know what? Fuck it. I started out talking about something I don't understand. Well, there's a lot of things I don't understand. I don't understand why I had such a good day today, it's like I decided to after I got 52 cents in change back at the pharmacy. Is it all just choice? Happiness and the like? Am I really the master of my own destiny and everything? I need to stop asking questions, because right now, all I can do is regurgitate information about Flannery O'Connor and think about why my eyes hurt so much already. I've only been up, like, 16 hours and they hurt as bad as they did when I was up for 30. Did I, like, break a seal? Did I unlock this vortex of my own pain?
You know, I don't understand people who claim to be insomniacs. It's like, since fucking Fight Club, it's hip to not sleep. But it's not not sleeping that will drive you mad, it's choosing to not sleep, because you have some fucking essay or party happening. It's the choice that'll kill you, because then you hate yourself for your eyes being on fire and not being conscious to what's happening around you. I mean, I don't hate myself, but I fucked up, and I accept this. I just need sleep.
What was I talking about?

A meditation on violence, and fuck knows what else, I'm basically making this up as I go, I don't even have a mission statement, just a blank space

on the screen. Fuckin' title box has a character limit, what the fuck is that about?

Good evening, and welcome to A Meditation on Violence, by Lee Molnar. Presented by Very Fun Words.

I've been writing an essay on Flannery O'Connor's short story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find". This'll contain spoilers, so if you have any desire whatsoever to read the story, drop whatever your doing right now and find a copy and read it. Of course, the story's still great if you know what's going to happen, hell, I knew what was going to happen and I still loved it. Anyways, in the end, everyone's dead, killed by a fugitive without faith in his life. The ending is incredibly violent, with 6 people, a family, complete with grandma and baby, are shot execution-style in the woods. And the killer takes their cat. The point is that it's incredibly violent, and it makes you feel that violence, but no where is it gratuitous. I guess I'm talking about gratuity here. Because there's so much media that desensitizes violence, make a gunshot a commonplace thing. In so many ways, person-on-person hatred and violence seems like the norm. But there are some media that make a gunshot a gunshot again. I hope I'm not ruining anything in The Departed when I mention that people are shot in it, but it is about gangs in Boston so that's kind of to be expected. The Departed handled gunshots and death really well, and so did this story, and it took me until this story and meditation on this story to realize why. In so much, the gunshot is the exclamation mark, complete with onomatopoeia and capital letters. BANG! That's the gunshot, the gunshot is encapsulated within itself. It doesn't matter who's holding the gun or who it's pointed to or why person A wants to kill person B, all that matters is that the gun is fired. I think that, for violence not to be gratuitous and self-relishing, the gunshot needs to be a period. What I mean by this is that it shouldn't be an end in itself, it should not jump out of the page at you, and the lead up to it should be more important. Also, the death should be more important than the gunshot, the action of the person falling over, and how and where they fall, should be more important in the character's and reader's minds than the gunshot. Non-gratuitous violence should be jarring and disturbing, and if it isn't, then it's either gratuitous or it's not violence.
Sometimes I feel uncomfortable because of violence. That seems obvious, but let me explain. I am a man, or at least I have all the necessary parts to make one. And violence is supposed to be the realm of man. Our muscles are designed to throw punches and spears, our teeth are supposed to tear meat off the bone and drink the blood of the innocent, our minds are designed to make bigger and better weapons to hit each other with. But the thing is, I'm a 140 lb, vegetarian poet. I'm not a warrior, I'm not a fighter, the thought of holding anything above a paintball gun at something living scares the shit out of me. Sure, I sometimes wrestle with my friends, give them punch-buggies and stuff like that, but violence with any real, competitive or malicious intent is out of my ken. And it sucks because when a guy pushes me at a party or whatever, my ingrained muscle memory is telling me to push him back, to punch him in the face, to stake my claim on his woman and his food, but I can't do that, and I don't want to do that. I don't know, it's just frustrating when your genetic code is telling you to do something you just don't want to do. I guess I'm just a pussy, but all I want to do is go cool places with cool people and write a poem about it afterwards.
Peace out, Planet Earth.

I like your activity

Sometimes Facebook is just the silliest thing. You know, sometimes I hate it, all the fuckin' status updates and regrettable photos, but other times, it makes up for all this. I am referring to a notification I got earlier today from a lady whose name will be disclosed due to legal reasons, and it read, "Mary-Ann Blutarsky likes your activity." That is not her name. This is hilarious. It's so vague but the language is so specific. I cannot be alone in thinking this is hilarious. Also, "I like your activity" is likewise hilarious, but adds a veneer of the romantic to the equation, I do believe. It might just be me. This also segues quite nicely into my next point. (Is it still a segue if it is pointed out as one? A segue is to move uninterrupted from one thing to another, and I guess the parentheses interrupt, language is confusing.) Anyways, my point: there are a lot of interesting people. I was walking back from class, and I saw two girls leave a caf, and I don't think they knew each other, but one was wearing a leather jacket with an amazing amount of confidence, and the other had all of her hair hidden in a hat, so it all bulged on top, and I don't know, I just really wanted to talk to them. They seemed incredibly interesting. And the more I walked, the more I saw people wearing things or doing things that are incredibly interesting. Like there was this old dude with a beret and a moustache, or this guy with a bandana tied around his head like a hippie, and I wanted to talk to these people and know them. And then, of course, I wanted to be one of them. I kind of realized that I don't want to be cool, I don't want to be mysterious or aloof, I want to be interesting. I want to wear weird things that have stories. I have a theory that when you wear name brands or jerseys, you're made that much less interesting, at least on a cosmetic level. I mean, I have nothing against people who wear jerseys or whatever, I know a lot of people who do and they're cool guys and gals, but the problem is that there's no character to these things, there's no story behind how you got them. Oh, cool, you like Arsenal... Cool... No, but if you have, like, an interesting hat (I don't really know what I'm talking about) there's a reason why you have that hat, maybe it reminds you of someone or something special, or you got it in a cool place in Halifax, or wearing this stupid hat is just who you are this week. That interests me, brands don't do it for me so much. This ended up a lot more anti-conformist than I expected, man, I'm sorry guys, I try not to be like this, I mean, I had those Olympics Maple Leaf gloves and my favourite shirt is from Aeropostale, if I'm anti-conformist I'm doing a pretty bad job at it, fuck it, I'm tired, and desire sleep, maybe I'll be an interesting person tomorrow.

what.

i kept on thinking today about things i wanted to write down. little anecdotes or observations that i wanted to share with someone or some page or something. but right now, i can't remember any of them. is this scary? i can't even tell anymore. i mean, i spent literally all day thinking about this, i must've been filling up pages in my head of this stuff, this potentially awesome, life-changing writing and now it's all gone. and i really doubt it was that awesome, but it could've been. the potential it had is now gone, because i didn't write it down. i think i wanted to say something about how i like the library, but it's gone now. i think there was something else about memory that's gone. is that ironic? i think that's ironic? i don't even know. i'm really tired. i guess too tired to bother to hit the shit key. There we go. was that worth it? is that brief propulsion of a letter above it's peers really worth the energy i put into it? BECAUSE, REALLY, I COULD DO IT WITH ANY LETTER. IT'S COMPLETELY ARBITRARY. it doesn't matter at all which letters i put above other. i'm not trying to make an allegory here, but i may be accidentally, subconsciously, because i've spent all day reading about communism and capitalism and the cold war and did you know that if there was a stronger intervention in the bolshevik revolution by the west the bolsheviks would've lost and that would mean no lenin or stalin and maybe no hitler and that this little oversight by the western world changed the course of history and i didn't know any of this, because for some reason the bolshevik revolution was always glossed over before when i was studying history, and fuck man, i don't know if i want to know all this. the world is so full of mysteries about what could've happened and what would've happened that after a point you kind of have to accept that what happened happened and what didn't didn't but no matter how often i repeat that to myself, i cannot help but fail to imagine a world where world war 2 and the cold war didn't happen. honestly, do you know what that would mean? no war boom, no baby boom, probably still an a-bomb somewhere down the line, but we might still be fighting the japanese. israel wouldn't be so sympathetic, there might not be a man on the moon, fucking indiana jones wouldn't exist. and it's strange how much is different because some authority figure made a bad call way back in time and fuck man i don't know if it is a good thing or not that mistake was made. i completely forgot what i was talking about. i'm really tired. i still need to write 1800 words about the cold war tonight. i'm not so interested in it that i care.

sun and dirt

Here's something to think about. Almost all the energy on Earth comes from the Sun, except for the geothermal stuff. The Sun, for what it's worth, is a gigantic burning ball of gas, that is unfathomably big and powerful. The explosive output of the Sun is 100 billion tons of dynamite a second. To put that in perspective, the biggest man-made explosion on Earth, the Tsar Bomb, a hydrogen bomb, was the equivalent of 50 million tons. The eruption of Krakatoa, which had a gigantic global impact in terms of weather and climate for years afterwards, was about the equivalent of 200 million tons. That looks pretty unsensationalistic, but check it:
100 000 000 000 = Sun's output
lolo200 000 000 = Krakatoa
lolol50 000 000 = Tsar Bomb
And this is every second. For every second of every day you have lived, you have ever lived, for all of your family to have lived, for all of human history since the very beginning when we were in huts picking berries or even before that to occur 9140 times over, there has been an explosion that is 500 times as powerful as the biggest explosion known to man thus far on Earth.
I personally cannot fathom this, this is crazy for me. But it gets crazier.
I said before how the bulk of the energy on Earth comes from this gigantic explosion 150 million miles away from us. Following this train of thought, every action you have ever taken has been powered by this explosion. When you scratch your head, furrow your brow, eat a piece of celery, when your heart beats, when a bird sings, when you stress over whether or not she likes you, you're doing it because of an explosion. It's happening because of the unreal series of explosions I detailed before. Just by existing, we are harnessing the power four thousand nuclear explosions. Not just four thousand nuclear explosions, four thousand of the biggest nuclear explosions. Just by pulling my hair when I try to grasp this concept, I am harnessing it.
And it really freaks me out when I realize how we are able to do this.
Once upon a time, an organism was created from this insane amount of energy, and this organism mutated, like the X-men, in such a way as to harness this energy, to eat pure energy, and convert it into mass, into something solid and whole and material. And now, 3.7 billion years later, 3.7 billion rotations around a constant intense explosion, we eat plants. Plants, somehow, managed to evolve into objects that take energy and make it into something real. And they began this whole fad of life beyond a microscopic level. And we are also made out of this energy, we eat the plants, or things that eat the plants, or the excretions of things that eat the plants, and we take this energy and we also make it into something real.
And this is happening all around us: the plant on the windowsill is absorbing the biggest explosion in billions and billions of kilometres, the music we listen to is a byproduct of this intense output of energy, fucking kittens are made out of the Sun.
I don't know, my mind is too blown to continue like this for now.
I'm sorry.
I'm gonna go calm down a bit.