In the meantime, every day, it seems to get easier for me to be more real with God, if that makes sense. Not just God, but with myself and others, too. I'm noticing that I'm beginning to let my hair down a little more, walking a little taller and with a bit more spring in my step each day, smiling more, feeling joy to the point of tears, while also letting myself feel and express my negative emotions too.

I am not afraid to cuss God out, though I do hope I continue to grow less angry overall over time. Anger and frustration aren't good things to harbor in our souls, that is for damn sure. But, it's also equally bad to suppress such emotions. It's best to just let them ebb and flow, like ocean waves, instead of trying to bottle them up until you explode, usually on someone or something that didn't do a thing to invite your indignation. 

For right now, I'm just forced to accept the fact that I'm an angry creature. That doesn't mean I'll accept it forever. However, throughout my childhood, I never really had a way to vent out my emotions. To be fair, I was too young for most of my life to really know what was going on. Now, as I near my twentieth birthday, I feel tremendously upset over the hand I was dealt, and can't help but burst into burning tears of resentment and sadness when I see old pictures or VHS tapes of myself when I was a baby, hooked up to life support for so many months. Or when I look back at my elementary and middle school years, and remember the faces though not the names of those who treated me so cruelly. Or when I look back just a few years ago, when I was ravaged by Pseudomonas. Or, when I look back to just five days ago, when I thought I was about to lose another grandpa. 

I mean, it's practically impossible not to get angry and upset when we're presented with so much suffering and death, especially when it seems it's nobody's fault. However, as much as it digs daggers into my heart and turns me into a raging bull, practically everything wrong in the world can be traced back to human error. Why is Cystic Fibrosis a thing? Because a few centuries ago, people were drinking water contaminated with lead. One copy of the CF protected people from lead poisoning. Two of them killed people before they became toddlers. Why was the water contaminated? Because most people were living in poverty. Why were most people living in poverty? Because the few who didn't hogged all of the food, and clean water, and the best beer, and literally poured buckets of shit and piss all over the heads of the lowly serfs below them. People didn't create Cystic Fibrosis, in the sense that they purposefully did so. But, because of humans, Cystic Fibrosis came to be. 

Similar things can be said about heart disease, and diabetes, and cancer, and every other horrible thing that exists. Why hasn't covid-19 been eradicated yet? Because of human nature, to put it simply. Covid can be traced back to wildlife impoverished people had to eat to stop themselves from starving, while their government (and the governments of the world in general) literally get fat in dining halls guarded by golden lion statues. Again, if Americans gave up gambling and instead used that money to feed the hungry, we could've easily prevented covid-19 from happening, even though it came from a city in China, and saved numerous wildlife species and billions of human lives in the process. And, don't even get me started on the rampant anti-mask, anti-vax, "covid's just a cold" bullshit people have been spreading, especially among the Christian community. Again, what a wretched species we are!

But, I said it once and I'll say it a thousand times, focusing on the horrors of this world too much will poison our bodies and our souls until we're six feet underground and forever in the deepest pits of hell. I'll also reiterate that it's a constant struggle to choose positivity over negativity. To me, doing such a thing is like focusing on the beauty of a single wildflower while in the midst of a raging wildfire. Yet, it must be done. We must focus on the simplest positives no matter how bad everything else is. I'm not quite sure why, to be entirely honest, other than it keeps us going. Why does it keep us alive, I don't know. It just does. 

So, I'll keep driving north on Simms, then east on Quincy, then south on Wadsworth, then west and north on Chatfield, then west on Ken Caryl, then a circle around the valley, then back on Simms till a roundabout brings me to Quincy, blasting Charlie Parr and JJ Lawhorn and Otis Taylor through rolled-down windows for the world to hear, so long as it keeps my head above water and refreshes my soul. I know some may say I oughta donate the time spent driving the same damn roads for hours and hours for seemingly no reason on better things, like volunteering at a horse rescue or walking elderly neighbors' dogs. But, for now, my soul requires that I drive that same damn route for miles and miles, for no other reason than it keeps me going when my feet hang low, kinda like Tyler Childers sang in his song Whitehouse Road. Roving around the same damn roads just to listen to music and leave the house is probably better than snorting cocaine like Childers sang about, however. 

If I get all sick and depressed again, lots of bad things happen. People worry. Worried people start getting sick themselves. And, it's just a terrible cycle. A horrible butterfly effect. Perhaps, spending my stimmies on a 250cc four-stroke ain't so selfish, after all. Perhaps, in order for me to serve others, I must be healthy enough to do so. In order to be healthy enough to serve others, I need to tend to my soul by doing redneck shit every weekend, such as racing dirtbikes, making feathers fly with 20 gauge shotguns, and beating the ever-loving crap out of my Xterra on mountain trails that reach 14,000 feet in some places. 

I'm not quite sure where I was going with this blog or how to end it. Perhaps, I just needed to ramble, and some stuff just had to be written down for later. But, it's late on a Sunday night. It's been one hell of a week. I just wish my mind would shut up so I can sleep.