Your Tie

Your Tie is the Noose That Your Life Hangs You By

To an eternal Philosopher, uneasy thoughts cross one's mind often.

Uneasy, perhaps, to those unaccustomed to questioning their mortality; but a foray into the norm for those like myself, who fully embrace the fact that life ends when it ends.

I recently had a few job interviews, for which I wore suits; one of the things that I despise most abjectly.

While sitting in a waiting room among other applicants, a thought crossed my mind...

"Your Tie is the Noose That Your Life Hangs You By"

Consider the occasions at which you wear a tie:

Formal Events

Funerals

Weddings

Important Meetings

... and finally...

Resting in your own coffin, while bugs devour the rest of you.

Each instance, another sign that life is shorter.  Major life (and end-of-life) events; both yours and those of others.

People often say they "feel older" after these things, and for a good reason... each one is a major benchmark in one's life!  Partaking in these events (from a participatory capacity; not a professional one) ages a person, because they are often celebrating their own life or someone's that they've known for a long time.

 

 

Consider, also, the type of people who have to wear suits and/or ties in their careers...

People who wear them by choice seem happy, but people who are required to wear them but otherwise would not often seem very displeased with life... "dead inside".

It could be said that many people who wear suits daily, being Executives of large corporations, possess no sign of life anyway; bereft of conscience and over-abundant of narcissism; their groping piggy fingers abjectly removing life from those that they deem inferior to themselves, while simultaneously sucking the life from the planet.  Those who have no life of their own must remove it from others.

This is why they require their lessers to wear ties... to make those at the bottom believe they're more valuable than they are perceived to be... a smoke-screen... fish food for the gullible.

By artificially inflating the worth of those at the bottom, they are able to create enough misery within their souls for the soulless executives to feed upon.

Be it for profession or for celebration, one's tie shortens their life.  I entertain the belief that the less time one spends in a tie, the better their life will be.

'Tis true... "Your Tie is the Noose That Your Life Hangs You By"... whether it makes you dead inside, causing the slow death of others, witnessing life's landmarks, or embracing your final outfit.

Two Kinds of Life

Life is not necessarily what we perceive it to be.

There's the life we acknowledge: Nature

... but what of the life we create, through SCIENCE!

Science seeks, both, to explain life and to replicate it or protect it, where applicable; which is no different than creating it.

Science re-creates life every day...

Through lives saved with medicine...

To machines given life through electricity...

To advances in Agriculture, that allow us to keep eating...

To learning about natural phenomena, allowing us to be better protected when emergencies happen...

Science creates life every day, just like nature does.

And I believe that the two are intrinsically important to respect and admire.

I believe that both hold secrets to the mysteries in the world

and make the world more beautiful

and more tolerable.

They make me see a better tomorrow.

They give me hope.

They erase my pain; even for just a little while.

And let me see that the world, and the people in it, aren't necessarily so bad.

The Paradox of Hate

Hate is an evil, a necessary evil, and a paradox.

When I say the word, 'hate', what's the first thing that comes to mind?

Is it the KKK?

Is it Rick Santorum?

Hitler?

Or do you think of people and things that you hate?

People of certain Races?

People of certain Religions?

People of certain ideologies?

Or, maybe it makes you think of certain words or images...

"Zeig Heil!"?

Faggot?

Watermellons?

Maybe I spend too much time on social media, where everyone's voice is amplified tenfold by the broad reach of certain outlets...

I follow the news fairly closely, from a fairly wide variety of outlets.  Several of my sources attract people from all across the political and social spectrum; major (trustworthy) news organizations and fact-checking sites.

Due to the broad reach of these outlets, comments abound in the threads accompanying the articles; mainly of people arguing their positions on the stories.

I see a lot of hate... I mean, BLATANT racism, homophobia, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and every other branch of hatred you can imagine, in the commentary provided by the patrons of these outlets. 

But the thing is, the hate I see sparks a hate of my own... a hatred of hate... and with the racially-charged nature of so many of today's events, I get to a breaking point, and start spewing my own very, very nasty hate... yes, I've been guilty of it, too... I've said some DOWNRIGHT EVIL things in exasperation of the way the world is rigged, and with the way that some people act like cavemen.  Like many, I perceive great problems with society.  Like not-so many, I view members of the KKK as unevolved STAINS on the cultural landscape, and as proof of evolution; but not necessarily proof of 'natural selection', because there are SO DAMN MANY of them!

As someone who finds racism, homophobia, and misogyny to be abhorrent, I often fall into the trap of reflecting the hate and the vitriol right back in similar fashion, with equally inflammatory language.  Fueled by utter disgust for anti-intellectual troglodytes, I do what I consider to be "giving them a taste of their own medicine..."

 ... and therein lies both the necessary evil and the paradox...

Let's be honest, here... the biggest and most important social movements, both great and terrible, have been fueled by hate of one kind or another...

The French Countrymen hated the Aristocracy...

The Jews hated being slaves in Egypt...

The African-Americans hated Jim Crow...

... and on the contrary...

The white Southerners hate(d) the African-Americans...

The Puritans hated Witches...

Hitler hated EVERYBODY...

The paradox being, hate is every bit as necessary as it is hurtful.

A Grateful Nation

“BOOOOOOOOM!!!”

In the span of less than a second, he'd gone from an enlisted soldier, to a civilian with an Honorable Discharge and a Purple Heart. That was only a few years ago...

Now he sits on his couch, heating a piece of aluminum foil with a lighter, chasing the wispy trails of heroin smoke through the air with a fast food straw. As he exhales, the smoke is illuminated by the flickering light of the television.

He folds up the foil and places it and his lighter on the coffee table, and sits back on his couch. His eyes, barely open enough to tell he's conscious. For the next few hours, he sits there; occasionally animating momentarily to cheer on the star of an action movie exuberantly for about two seconds, before collapsing back onto the couch and zoning out again.

A few hours later, he'll come down enough to realize that he's been watching the title screen from the DVD for quite some time... how long had it been playing the same ten second sequence over and over?

He's become a heroin addict. The once proud soldier and hero, reduced to a 105 lb, quivering skeleton of a man.

How did THAT happen?

People see him as a junky... the refuse of society... they don't consider the story of how he got here; nor do they know it. Some people just don't care at all. They just see the guy who can barely get off his couch anymore, and has to get high just to feel “normal”.

The people pointing fingers of disgust don't realize, though, that they helped put him there.

The accident had happened a few years ago, while overseas in the Army. The pain he now felt was chronic; unyielding.

The V.A. says he might need surgery for his injury, but they want to exhaust all the other options first. After all, surgery can be risky... and if it doesn't go right, they might have to amputate. “But until then, here's a prescription for Oxycontin... just take this when the pain feels unmanageable...”

“Wow! That's an expensive medication... how long will I be on it?”

“Hopefully, not long.”

“Ok.”

It's medicine, after all... it couldn't POSSIBLY be bad for him, could it?

A doctor wouldn't give this to him if it would hurt him, would he? After all, “First, do no harm...”

Right?

… but what other viable pain management options did the doctor have at his disposal?  What choices did he have to treat this debilitating pain?

A month goes by... nothing.

… 6 months go by... they've tried a few massage and chiropractic techniques... no real result.

… a year goes by... still, nothing has worked...

The pain is still as bad as it ever was.

“We still have a few more things to try... do you need your prescription refilled again?”

“Do you need your prescription filled again?”

“Do you need your prescription filled again?”

“Do you need your prescription filled again?”

“You're going through your prescriptions pretty fast, now... are you ok?”

“I just want this pain to stop... are there any other options?”

“No... not really...”

“... then I need my prescription filled.”

Another month passes...

“I just lost my job... it's getting harder to afford this prescription... we need to do something soon!”

“We just have a few more things to try. But maybe we'll also keep trying the massage and chiropractic treatments. Do you need your prescription filled again?”

“Ok. Yes, I do.”

Another month passes...

“--hey, man... the doctor gave me these after I had my wisdom teeth removed... I don't need the rest of them... do you wanna buy them from me?”

“Ok. Yes, I do.”

Another month passes...

“--hey, man... I can get you pills for less than the pharmacy... and I won't ask questions and make you feel bad for taking them... I know how badly you need them... my brother was in the Army, too...”

Another month passes...

“--hey, man... I can't front you pills without cash... but there are options...”

“---wait a minute... I can get heroin for HOW much??? … and it's the same thing???”

Meanwhile, high up in the pharmaceutical company's top floors, the board meeting commences...

“How have profits been in the pain-management sector?”

“Sir, our numbers are SOARING! People have a lot of pain to manage... and boy, are they managing!”

“Excellent!”

“-- Sir, there's a problem, though...”

“What problem?”

“Addiction, sir. Lots of people are getting addicted to our painkillers...”

“Well, as long as they're paying for them, that's their own problem... they should have known what they were getting into when they started... I mean, this stuff is heroin, after all.”

… later, on the evening news...

“...will we need boots on the ground in the fight against ISIL? Let me introduce our Armed Services Correspondent...”