Thoughts On Life

Every time I see a photo of a certain Republican candidate with orange hair and an increasingly tanned-from-a-booth visage I think of the scene in The Wedding Planner where, the day before her wedding, a panicky bride presents with a blotchy, orange face from too long under the tanner. JLo says ‘quarter cup of lemon juice and half a cup of salt and scrub scrub scrub’.

You live most of your life with your eyes screwed shut and you don’t even know it. Then one day you open them and realize that your real is godawful. You close them again; don’t want to look at that picture. Sometimes when you open them again you realize your real is freaking brilliant.

Does that make you schizo, or manic depressive or just very alive and aware? Or all three? Life is mercurial for some and that’s a fact.

The law of increasing complexity: the less aware you are the fewer choices you make consciously and the simpler life seems at some level. At a consequence level though, it’s chaotic because the unconscious choices you make control your behaviour and your world as if you were a puppet.

The great thing is that if you want to you can say it’s not my fault. The world is doing this to me. And it is.

But the big cahuna question is why the hell do I let it? The more you figure it out the more you realize how many unconscious choices you’ve been making to let people over-ride you. You have to make more conscious choices and face the fear that made you avoid them in the first place. And there’s no turning back, more’s the pity. It’s much easier to just be a victim and let life and people crucify you.

Well, not really.

Some people can see all the repressed emotions that are flying around in a group, all the passive aggressive behaviour. It can be pretty damn lonely because they can’t talk to  anybody, hey, did you see that?!! If they have somebody to share it with, that’s great. If they don’t, they either drive themselves dilly with the debate is it me, is it them, am I mad, are they crazy.

Or they write a screenplay or a play.

Much as everybody says being lonely is the worst thing in the world, it isn’t. Being mostly numb, half dead, passive aggressive, controlling, blind and deaf, that’s the worst. Because some part of you knows it and screams at you all the time. You have to work real hard to keep it out of your awareness so there’s nothing left for you to focus on joy. It exhausts you at a level you can’t access but it takes a toll on your body. One day, boom!

We’re all over-adaptive in some way or another. If you’re aware of it you’ll feel like a ghost in your own town until you find your voice. And when you do you might also find that you don’t like that town at all. You might grab the only horse there is and head on out. Some of the people left behind will be sad to see you go but thrilled for you. Others will blacken your name. If it happens, just keep on riding, don’t look back.

Or you might find that you are the horse. You're just a kid horse and you have to head on out alone. Don't worry, you'll find others soon enough.

I don’t like missionaries who target the poor or the needy, give them nice stuff like food and shelter and then indoctrinate them because at some level, even if they’re adults, there’s a vulnerable child within. The missionaries exploit the same principle that makes a child loyal to a man or woman who takes them hostage and then rapes them for years. Stockholm Syndrome, it’s called. It has many variations and there’s more than one way to take a child hostage and rape it.

Missionaries don’t respect your right to think for yourself. They respect their right to overpower your mind, though. And they sure believe that God talks to them more than he/she does to you.

To date James Patterson has written 130 books in 38 years and sold 305 million copies in all. He’s been the world’s best-selling author since 2001; way ahead of JK Rowling. He writes unashamedly to a formula and has an army of ghost writers working for him now, as well as a PR department in his publisher Little, Brown which he rules with an iron fist. He’s having a ball with it all.

His first book, The Thomas Berryman Number, was rejected 31 times before somebody at Little, Brown said ‘yeah, this is a winner’.