How many times have you heard the words, "Everything's going to be alright"? Sometimes with a pat on the shoulder, a hollow speech, and a camera you can’t see?

No matter you want to hear those words right? Want someone to hold you and speak grave words so casually they eventually become nothing but vowels pieced with consonants, sounds our vocal cords make through their vibrations, noise that the people of the past decided meant something, right? Wouldn’t you like that to be real?

But what do they mean, really?

Because how can you say that everything will be fine, if you don’t understand anything? How can you stand on shore, waving to someone drowning, telling them to “just breathe”? Ripping the eyes out of someone’s sockets, and tell them to appreciate how beautiful the world’s colours are? Drive a knife into someone’s throat, twist the veins around your steel blade, weaving a tapestry of your liking while they stare at you with cold, unmoving eyes until they choke to death?

What was the point, anyway?

You can lie to me all you want.

But nothing is alright, and nothing will be alright.

People live their entire lives on autopilot. Going about their routine lives, nothing more than obedient puppets. Tell me honestly, have you ever paused, gone into your head, and asked, “Hey, why am I doing this? Why am I even here? What’s the point of all this?”

We spend a quarter of our lives sitting in a classroom, and for what? So many, too many kids stew in frustration, resentment, hatred of the whirling fans and fluorescent lights and the white shirt they put on in front of the mirror every day.

Bullying and unfairness and injustice, a system of meaningless education but no morals.

Why are we judged for the way we look, something we can’t control? Why are we defined by the people around us, when we’re all here, for ourselves? Why is our world set in a way that what we have is never enough, and what we don’t is always better?

But the better question is, why do we exist? WHY DO WE LIVE?

Is any of this real? I mean the constructs we put in place to protect our minds. We all tell ourselves lies. Wrong, right, or grey, we make decision based of off instinct. I’m not trying to boil down to intelligence. Rather, it’s the illusion of choice and free will. They contradict each other. Choice is the set of all possible outcomes of a problem. Free will is the ability to act outside of the problem. Do you see it? It’s the problem, the nexus of possibilities, that’s important. We’re limited by action.

Are you aware of how your tongue sits in your mouth?

Are you aware of that itch on the sole of your foot?

Are you aware of how your nose blocks part of your vision?

Are you aware of how your right hand has never touched your right elbow?

Are you aware that in your eagerness to obtain a certain age, you have forfeited all experiences up to this point?

Can you control what happens the next second? Space could collapse. The earth could explode. Physics could disentegrate.

And you have no power.

None.

Over any of the topics I've mentioned

The wind was blowing hard

The whole house seemed to shift and creak

With each gust, the candle light flickered

Casting a ghostly glow that shadowed on

The faces of my brothers and sisters

I scoot closer to my mother and lay my head on her lap

As the dampness begins to fill our tiny house as if it

Threatened to drown us with each breath we took

My father boarding up our windows in preparation for the storm

As the drizzle began to hit our window panes

You could smell the sea, that smell that had been so refreshing

Seemed to be stuffy, sicking smell now

The gulls were quiet, you could hear the sea churning

As if it were mad and could no longer fit into it borders of the beach

Threatening to boil over and sweep our little house right off the cliffs

To be lost in the sea forever

@FlowerAngelCh

The lights brighten and the crowd cheers over the sound of the opening music.

"It's time to play Family Feud!" shouts the announcer. "Give it up for Steve Harvey!"

A man in a handsome suit steps out. He smiles at the crowd before him, his instruments of justice, keen to mete out their cruel punishment of public humiliation. As much as he loved his job in the old days, influencing history in the worst and best of ways, he also loves his new, streamlined process, and working with the public rather than against it.

God of Family Feuds and Avenger of Evil Deeds

Sits on the couch,

With a bag of chips,

Watching Sunday football,

A score for his team,

He yells and chips go flying,

And tells a dolphin to bring him more chips,

The other team scores and he stands up,

"NO!!!!!"

He calls for his trident and smashes the TV,

Then he goes to do some fishing.

Wet slevees.

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(I'm really really really really really really really really really really really sorry.)

On my third date with my now-wife, I might have accidentally broken someone’s faith in meaningful life.

Philosophy and free will came up somehow. That may seem weird as a casual conversation topic, but I believe I was taking a 200-level course on existentialism that semester. It may also seem weird as a date conversation topic, but I asked her out after we had a lengthy discussion of The Last Picture Showby Larry McMurtry (may he rest in peace), so this was really par for the course.

But for whatever reason, I explained a conclusion I had reached a couple years before.

“Free will is a myth,” I opined.

“Oh?” she said. Or maybe she just raised her eyebrows, I don’t know… this was 18 years ago.

“We make decisions based on our brain chemistry and experiences,” I explained. “The first is largely out of our control. The second would seem to be a guide toward making a choice. But the thing is, we develop experiences that shape our personalities long before we have any influence over our lives. When we’re babies, we’re already experiencing love, or hunger, or pain, or colors or water or whatever. We accumulate a lot of experiences in those first couple years that will guide our choices, but we have absolutely no say in any of it. That means that when we finally arein a position to make choices of some sort, and we draw upon our experiences and feelings to guide us, all of them have been predetermined. We feel like we’re choosing among possibilities; really, we make the inevitable choice based on the inputs provided to us. That determined choice itself becomes one of our experiences, and the ball just keeps rolling from there.”

“Huh,” she said, which really meant, “you’re a ridiculous nerd and you’re adorable.” (I think we were around two weeks from realizing and stating we were in love.)

“None of that really matters, though,” I said. “We’re all in the same position, and to function in our individual lives or in society, we can’t just throw up our hands and cry ‘determinism’; that would be pointless. We just make our choices, which all feel real enough, and we evaluate others’ choices too, even though they don’t have free will either. But we still need to determine who’s good, who’s bad, who should be our friend, so we do. Saying “free will is a myth” is a bit like dividing by one. Whatever crazy equation you’ve got, you can put it over one if you feel like it: the answer doesn’t change. It would be a pointless extra step, but you’re not technically wrong to do it. So yeah, it changes nothing, but free will is a myth.”

“WHAT?” said a voice from behind the dorm room’s divider. Her roommate appeared. I’d say she looked like I had kicked her dog, but I think she would have preferred me to have kicked her dog. “We don’t have free will? How does any of what we do matter!” There were tears. We spent some time talking her down.

And that was the last time I discussed anything vaguely philosophical without looking very carefully around the room.

And then I posted this story on the internet for strangers.

Epilogue: I later conducted a half-hour AOL Instant Messenger debate with that same roommate about whether it was better to have the sauce baked in your calzone or left separate for dipping.

Yep – I was a really cool college sophomore.

Every morning I wake with a song in my head. Recently the old song ‘7’ by ‘Prince and the New Power Generation’ has been stuck in my head on replay for days. Like the high pitch ring of tinnitus, it plays softly in the background when I go about my day or listen to other music. Silence brings it forth with a renewed strength.

I am uncertain as to the meaning of this haunting but it feels powerful? I have never had a song play on my mind’s radio on a loop for this long. If you listen to the entire song you may notice that it seems like a prophecy steeped in religious connotations. Being agnostic, I feel less of a religious pull and more of an energy, a spirituality of sorts, linked to it. I would love for you to listen to it and tell me what your interpretation is.

Oddly enough, my sister (who lives on the other side of the continent) sent me a Marco a couple of days ago and said she’s had a lot of things surrounding the number seven lately. I hadn’t told her about my song yet...

“All seven and we’ll watch them fall

They stand in the way of love

And we will smoke them all

With an intellect

and a savior-faire

No one in the whole universe

Will ever compare

I am yours now and

you are mine

And together we’ll love through all

Space and time

so don’t cry

One day all seven will die...”

Listen to the whole song here:

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=r0mPezhPDwY&list=RDAMVMr0mPezhPDwY

If someone says it's opposite day, then wouldn't that mean it's not opposite day? Because if you say it's opposite day, then that would mean that it's not opposite day. But if it's not opposite day, then if you say it's opposite day, then it's not actually opposite day. But if it's not opposite day, then that means that when you say it's opposite day, then it is actually opposite. But if it is opposite day, then... and so on and so on.