He Walked

There was a man who walked and walked. He walked so far that he disappeared from the planet. The world ended and he strolled right into space. He strolled into the cosmos. There was just so far to go. He walked past the sun, and he walked past several others.

It turns out that in space you don’t need to eat. This is a phenomenon that humans have not experienced because we have always tried to set space to human conditions. He just walked, no suit, no ship.

Everyone would have thought it was impossible, and in fairness no one else had ever tried. Maybe there was something special about this man. Maybe he was able to be one with space where everyone else was stuck freezing to death or imploding because of the lack of air and atmosphere. I probably said all of that wrong, but I’m not a science guy. I took the classes. I believe in the sausage. I just have no clue how it’s made.

Anyway, he kept walking and he saw other worlds and other beings and he still didn’t fit so he just kept moving on.

His time on earth taught him that he was superfluous and where at a time that felt like freedom to him, he now saw the other side of that coin.

As the brilliant Jenn Wasner wrote and hauntingly sang, “I found out that freedom is empty when it’s all that you have.”

The pain. The regrets. The fear. He had trusted the brainwashing of seeing pain as a gift that informs and educates us. That struggle makes a better future, but after what felt like endless suffering he inevitably asked:

“When exactly does the future arrive? Do we just keep screwing up and suffering and learning so that we can keep celebrating screwing up and suffering and learning, and repeat the screwing up and suffering and learning, until we eventually just die never having learned enough to actually be happy? Is all this learning and growth actually a path to any form of sustainable peace, or just a lie that we tell ourselves to sleep at night, perpetuated by a bunch of delusionals and profiteers and our desperate thirst for a payoff?”

He reflected on a woman he met before his walking, an old coworker, that was clearly a version of this. She would go on and on about how she is always happy and literally never not happy. That God loves her and because of it “every single day is happy-happy, joy-joy and it never ends…”

Literally no one is happy like that and not delusional. Everyone has a bad day, or at least bad moments. No one is exempt, because what does happy even mean without other feelings for contrast? Even the Northern Lights would become pedestrian if they were outside of your window every night. He felt it wasn't even cynical, framing it this way. Just real, and he hated snake-oil salesmen. Even ones who were impossible to take seriously.

“Well, I’m doing awesome today.” He said aloud and chuckled a little, embracing the darkness of that loaded ponderance.

The thing about the man’s story, his walk through space in search of meaning, is it never actually ends and it’s also over. Schrödinger’s Space Adventure!

He wanted purpose and all he found was endless forward motion. This is a form of purpose, but it wasn’t satisfying. That was one truth he discovered, traveling infinitely. Purpose is dissatisfying unless you bring your own satisfaction to it.

If he was supposed to find a home, he didn’t do that. He never felt at peace anywhere because peace has to come from inside and his self-awareness felt to him like it created a mutual exclusivity with the notion of peace. He could never square his wish for peace with his need for self-examination.

Did he find love? Maybe. He traveled long and far. Is there peace in love? The trouble he found with the quest for love was what he saw as an impossible psychological circle. As he saw it, love and peace are generated from a relationship with another person and there is a whole support group for people who try to attain love and peace that way, CODA.

His ponderance of love landed on it being a false flag operation, meant to distract from the fact that we have to feel good from the inside out, not the other way around. He wondered “Isn’t the quest for true, unfiltered self-love only really possible for sociopaths? Aren’t the rest of us fearful and shameful and destined to require comfort and validation by another by our sheer nature?” In love, he saw an unsolvable puzzle box.

He thought he’d find peace in sobriety, but to him it became just not drinking and Twelve Commandments that rang of the same self-help stuff the delusionals tried to sell him. Alcohol was just the activator piece. A catalyst. What was he to excavate when the inner rot had no end? That was the true disease. The alcohol was just the match. Abstinence wasn’t safety from the fumes of the gasoline.

Was it the quest for beauty? There was a bunch of cool stuff to behold in space. Unfortunately, those moments only lingered so long. Even entirely perspective changing beauty would be blunted by time and his inner processing systems. One could try to live in the perspective bending beauty, but then we slowly become inured to its magic, which is almost sadder in a way. Imagine, as above, if even the Aurora Borealis was just another Tuesday and a person may as well just watch another half-hour of ridiculous hackery from Tim Allen on Infini-Stream-A-Go-Go. It never escaped him, even in his deepest, darkest moments, that laugh tracks can come from anywhere and his are surely imported.

The man tried to find something that gave him feelings in his life. He tried pain. Punching himself, banging his head into walls and trees. He tried taking knives to himself, flames from lighters. He tried drinking really heavily. When he combined the pursuits of drinking and cutting himself he almost found a way out once, but it turned out that he didn’t entirely stop believing in peace.

One day in his searching, he met an interesting new friend.

“Who are you, bizarre looking walking man?” An alien who looked like an octopus mounted onto a wooden stick figure, with the head on an arm, and where we would imagine a head to be there was some organic type of laser gun that must have been built into their race’s physiological architecture. Its feet looked like a series of pods on a wheel, and it moved by rolling.

“You know… Just walking into the void.” The man responded, honestly. “Seeing if I can find something worth existing for.”

“Have you considered that the meaning of life is just enduring it and being open to its possibilities?” The octopus creature responded.

“Actually yes, my very cool looking new friend.” The man said. “I worked on that for years. It was the period after ‘living for love.’ That’s a system that only works if you buy into the belief that there is something worth enduring it for. If you’re a wreck and a net-negative person, what’s this possibility that we’re waiting for? A few fleeting moments that are great. I’ve had them and they have made some things worth it, but when I look at life in a bigger picture, I have to imagine that I’m operating well in the red.

“This is not only for myself,” he continued, “but for my impact on the pictures around me. If I were gone, or… I mean, I have no idea how long I’ve been trudging through space, but everyone is fine without me. People grieve. People remember, but ultimately no one is more important than the perpetuation of life, of time, of the rent and the credit cards and that new Wes Anderson movie in a couple of months. Loss is accepted and then the liabilities are forgotten along with the credits and everything just moves forward as it is supposed to. Everyone is fine.

“Do I miss the dead? Sure, but the train is very heavy and very fast. No one can stop it. Even George Clooney can die, and people won’t care for more than a couple days, and have you seen his Q-rating?!”

“What’s a Q-Rating, sad earth, weirdo?”

“It’s a measure of how much people like you if enough people know who you are to generate it. People love Clooney. He’s handsome and charming. People into men want to have sex with him and have him for a father, and people into women want to have sex with him and have him for a best friend.”

“His name is weird.”

“No argument there, but he is quite attractive, and I bet he would be a fun person to play mini golf with.”

“Has George Clooney ever played mini golf?”

“Probably not. He’s too handsome for mini golf.”

“That’s what I figured. I like Thor.”

“Yeah, he was probably a better example to use. I’m not inclined towards men in general, but I’d make quality sex on Thor.”

“Me too. I’d do crazy stuff to that guy with my tentacles.”

“Good for you. Sincerely. Get in there. I hope you woo Thor into consensual sex someday.”

“Hey, thanks buddy. You’re pretty nice for someone who has given up on life.”

“Well. I’m old and I’m tired. I’m probably resentful. Actually, I am resentful, but the question is whether that plays into the equation which it most likely does. I’ve made the world markedly worse at least in the last decade of my life, not better. As someone who thinks their purpose is to make the world better, I’m quantifiably failing at life. That’s not great. Also, life hurts a lot.”

“Like you stub your ridiculous, human, non-pod toes a lot?”

“I mean, there’s stuff like that, and you’re certainly metaphorically right. Also, feet really are kind of weird, aren’t they? Gotta say, I dig your setup.

“Anyway, it’s the grind of waking up every day and trying to live. Trying to be what the world requires us to be. Trying to be happy. To meditate and masturbate and masticate and earn money in a broken way of societalizing humans where we are just basically prey for other, more powerful humans who have more stuff than they could possibly ever use, but still need to hoard it and make us all want to kill each other so they can make money on the weapon sales. We try to be better every day and try to create and find peace and to ‘be something.’ God, the burden of trying to ‘be something.’”

“What does that mean? We don’t have ‘be something’ on my world.”

“I have no idea how to provide a satisfying answer to that without a fundamental understanding of how human socialization works in all its pointlessness. Just know that I’m glad for you. Keep it that way.”

“This conversation has been fun and also a bummer depending on the part we are discussing. I will leave now. Walk on, weird footed, stupid creature.”

“Thank you, cool, side-headed octopus guy. Have a nice day, if you can.”

This interaction made the man smile, knowing that not all creatures live like humans with their pointless contradictions and squashed capabilities for change based on the greed of a few mega-rich narcissists, communications professionals, non-MD chiropractors who go by ‘Dr. (insert their first name),’ and let’s not forget Wall Street and the banks. He was still left with his own existential unfulfillment. He saw the endless maze for a very ambitious scientist to put his rats in.

He couldn’t even truly opt out in any way that was not this one, love and the life sentence that is love in pain. In the end, walking was a much better choice. Plus, he was arrogant and couldn’t imagine life without him existing in it. He imagined the world would be just fine. Sometimes he thought it would be better, but he couldn’t imagine missing it. It’s funny how the failed pop culture sub-sub-sub phenomenon of FOMO actually serves as quite the lifesaving principle.

There was nothing else to do, so on he walked.