Pop Tarts

Brian and I were best friends. I can recall many incidents where I felt inspired by the man, but the one that springs to mind immediately is the following. This happened in the summer of 2011. We had acquired some marijuana after a sojourn to the suburbia of Kelowna, and, as always, the conversations between Brian and myself somehow evolved into a philosophical one.

“What life wants us to do is end it. It doesn’t want us to enjoy it. At every step, all we encounter are obstacles, so either man himself has made life to be a convoluted ass-rape, or life itself, as all beings in nature, wants to end. It needs to”, I said, while rolling Brian and my second joint.

“I’m sorry, it needs to?”, said Brian.

“Yeah, because if nobody dies, then the earth would have either been an overpopulated shit-hole or humans would’ve erased each other, don’t you think so?”

“Well, I consider my life to be a blessing, I don’t think about life as a separate entity like you seem to, I don’t think there’s anything that life ‘wants’ per se. While it may be true that it’s the natural tendency of life to end, I think that is a terrible way to live a life, to live it knowing that it is surely going to end. It either pushes you to work hard and succeed and leave a mark or it totally fucks you up, in most cases, it fucks you up, simply because it gives you a convenient excuse when you fuck up”

Brian took a puff at the joint and gave it to me, and I did the same.

“Life is too short, man”, said Brian, “There is more to life than just smoking weed and feeling bad for yourself. I’ve come to realize that.”

“Really? Enlighten me, oh learned one” I asked quizzically, as I handed back the joint.

“Well, look at it this way, you die eventually. That is an irrefutable fact. Everybody dies. So you may ask, what is the point in living? Well, when you think about it, and you compare the size, the intricacies and the sheer beauty of the universe, we are just like tiny, insignificant specks on a map. It simply doesn’t matter what drink you like, or how you smoke a lot when some girl hurts you. The fact of the matter is that we all die and even if we did something that changed literally everybody’s life on this planet, it is so fucking insignificant when you compare it to how massive everything is”

Helplessness became me, but wait, I have a joint. I sucked at it till my lungs were full and said, “…Actually, you may be right, but still, even considering that death is necessary and the fact that all our existence on this tiny planet is insignificant, I can’t help but feel deep empathy for all those who die every day, I can’t help but feel angry at the fact that we let something as shallow as religion and skin color come between the entire race and peaceful existence. What the fuck is wrong with us?”, I asked expectantly.

“Well, you are a sensitive person. You may not care to admit it, even to yourself, but you are, and so it’s hard for you to accept these facts, but, I maintain that religion is the worst thing that happened to humanity. Don’t get me wrong, when it was established, it was a great success, people were united with a warm sense of belonging, but consider the circumstances under which it was formed. People had no idea of land other than their own and had no knowledge of any science. Consider Plato’s allegory of the cave. Three people are shackled from child birth in a cave with a huge fire behind them and people walking past the flame. They aren’t allowed to move their head, arms, legs, indeed, any part of the body, the shadows on the wall becomes their reality. Now consider that one of the three guys is set loose and is allowed to go outside the cave. He goes outside, and learns the way of the real world and gets back to the cave, Plato, in essence said that when he does come back, he won’t belong to his home, that he might even find it pathetic that his previous reality was just darkness and that if somehow he got the chance to kill the man who let him loose and destroyed his perception of reality, he would do it, because he was, simply put, mind-fucked. We live in the same situation now, more or less. Everybody is living in their own delusional reality that they are doing the right thing by standing true to the writings that somebody delivered thousands of years ago, but the actual reality is that they’re just making life harder for everybody. They are just giving people a reason to be suspicious, to look over their shoulder, to be afraid, they are mind-fucking people” he said, with a smirk.

For a stoner, Brian did have an innate sense of wisdom about him…

“Well, I don’t know how I feel about thinking that my life is insignificant. I guess like any truth, it is hard to swallow”

“That is exactly what I thought when I first read about all of this, but it stuck in my head. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I just feel struck with a never ending malady of helplessness. Eventually, it soothed and liberated me because I am powerless. We are just too deep into this mess. I don’t care if religion is not the only thing that makes people kill each other. Maybe we are hard-wired to kill people who believe in different things because we somehow feel threatened, but at the end of the day, there is nothing we can do about it. So what if Osama died? So what if America has her first black president? There will always be dissent amongst people, and there is nothing we can do about it. All I want to do now is have some pop tarts, so sue me”

All I could do was think deeply about what had just entered my mind, so seemingly harmlessly, and it occurred to me that Brian didn’t utter the word ‘God’, even once during our whole conversation. I smiled to myself and finished off the joint.