Chaos Reigns

Selected thoughts from the list of thousands.

(23)

Remember that movie about the guy or girl in an office job he or she hates, stuck in a rut of orderly existence until that crazy, chaotic other person blows into his or her life by chance and forces him or her to confront the mundanity of existence living within the boundaries of a 9 to 5 gig and taking him or her on an adventure filled with twists and turns and unexpected challenges and they smash the walls of his or her carefully constructed glass house to reveal what truly being alive means?

Yeah. Me, too.

(19)

This is your life and it's ending one minute at a time.

(5)

Ian had played by the rules his whole life. He worked hard in high school and graduated in the top of his class. He got a scholarship to a solid State College and got his degree. He met a woman, fell in love, got married, had a kid. He interviewed and was quickly hired for a prestigious job that paid a bit above the average. He and his wife bought a house, had two cars. Ian was "in control" of things. He paid his taxes on time, he paid his bills on time, he was living the American Dream.

As his son grew, things became a bit more expensive, what with the two cars and health care and school supplies and food for a growing boy so Ian decided to take out a mortgage on his home. He filled out all the paperwork and arranged to make regular payments and the whole family took a vacation to Disney world.

And, then one day, the bank decided to foreclose on his house and evict his family.

"What the fuck?" cried Ian in disbelief.

The bank was obviously wrong but refused to admit it—in the meantime, Ian and his family moved in with his brother who then decided that Ian's wife was a hot piece of ass (the MILF label apparently fit). Ian's wife divorced him and Ian, in his despair, managed to lose his job due to his living on the inside of a glass bottle of Scotch for a month.

As his liver started to fail, he checked himself into a neighborhood clinic (which was all he could afford) and one night, looked up in the darkness and moaned out "Why? I had things under control. I did every right. I was an upstanding citizen and a sound businessman. I played by the rules. Why am I here now?"

"Control is an illusion, buddy. We build houses on fault lines and on beachfronts and then wonder what happened when nature decides to crush them or blow them away. We place our faith in institutions that do not, cannot, have our interest in mind and blow a gasket when it becomes known that we were just grist for their particular profit driven mill. We think that if we fall in line, keep our heads down, and live an orderly life that we'll live forever and then chaos strikes and we can't fathom it.

"Control? Order? Just constructs we create to explain the unexplainable. To ward away the fact that each one of us is fucking tiny in the grand scope of things. Order is abstract; Chaos is concrete. Order exists to help the godless in a world that had to make god up to explain why droughts happen."

"Who are you?"

"I'm the antithesis of everything Hallmark Cards and horseshit optimism. I'm the Truth, baby."

(57)

It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.

(69)

Roy looked down from the cliffs at the man drawing in the sand. The picture that started to emerge startled him. It was an extraordinary face, not realistically rendered, but seemingly viewed from many angles at once. In fact, it looked much like a Picasso.

As soon as the thought entered his mind, his heart stopped. He lifted his binoculars to his eyes, which he then felt compelled to rub. The man on the beach was Picasso.

Roy's pulse raced. He walked this route every day, and he knew that very soon the tide would sweep in and wash away a genuine Picasso original. Somehow, he had to try and save it. But how?

Trying to hold back the sea was futile. Nor was there any way to take a cast of the sand, even if he had had the time he was actually so short of. Perhaps he could run back home for his camera. But that would at best preserve a record of the work, not the picture itself. And if he did try this, by the time he got back, the image would probably have been erased by the ocean.

Perhaps then he should simply enjoy this private view as long as it lasted. As he stood watching, he didn't know whether to smile or cry.

(101)

You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.

(2)

From the beginning of anything—a life, a house, a relationship—everything struggles on in a continual state of slow decay.

Nothing in human experience is designed to be permanent and yet we strive so heroically and so futilely to sustain it indefinitely, as if sheer will will keep the train chugging along and if we really believe, we will never die.

Perhaps, if instead of fighting against this inevitable finality of things we embraced it, then the time spent with them would be brighter, more important. When people have near death experiences, they tend to go on living their days with more meaning. If you knew that today was it, the last day, that the show closes at midnight, would you waste a second on the bullshit? Would you argue about petty things? Would you make excuses for incompetence or laziness or incompleteness of purpose?

(16)

Order is the Blue Pill and the blissful ignorance of illusion
Chaos is the Red Pill and embracing the sometimes painful truth of reality

Order is the missionary position in bed with a box of moist toilettes for the clean up and thinking your sex life is great
Chaos is a random encounter that leads to hot monkey sex in the bathroom, legs up over her head on your shoulders banging so hard it makes the sink shake

Order is Fundamentalist Religion
Chaos is what everybody else believes

Order is David Brooks
Chaos is Hunter S. Thompson

Order is Orwell's 1984, Hitler's Third Reich, the Ivy League, and Indonesian Sweatshops
Chaos is Wallace's Infinite Jest, The Summer of Love, the School of Hard Knocks, and Selling Bags of Weed You Grew in Your Back Yard

(1)

In the late nineties, a Chicago woman was walking down Wabash holding her child's hand. 35 floors above her, on the Wabash side of the CNR building, a loose window gently slid from it's frame and fell, like a heavy feather of glass.

The woman didn't see it coming. She was decapitated in an instant.

I wonder what her thoughts were in her final seconds. Death was instantaneous and she didn't see it coming. I suspect, like most of us, she was worried about bills or petty slights at the office or the dishes that needed to be done. I suspect she was thinking about keeping her life in order. Just like the rest of us.

And I'm reminded that order is a diversion. Order is an attempt to make sense of things that simply defy rationality. While trying to make the world and the billions of people and creatures and nature conform to our own safety bubble is commendable, it is much like commending Sisyphus for continuing to roll that fucking boulder up that fucking hill over and over again.

I'd tell Sisyphus to leave the goddamn boulder and go live his life while the plate glass is still secure.