Scarier Than an Atheist

School struggles. Sobriety. Shit.

I thought that when I quit drinking and smoking weed I would have so much more time on my hands, but life never has a shortage of problems. If every obstacle in my life were suddenly and miraculously removed, every one of them would be replaced by a newer, stranger one; this is an apparent fact of life, that there is no escape from struggle, for anybody. If no big troubles exist in one's life, the little ones will loom larger, insinuate just as deeply into the mind and cause just as much stress. We are required to feel stress. Millions to thousands of years ago, it was all about eating and not being eaten, but jungles turned to concrete and the danger lessened but the anxiety has not, will not, can not. Bills unpaid, deadlines passed by, dreams undreamed, impulses ignored, prayers unwhispered, dissolved every morning like sugar in coffee, present but invisible amongst the things to be done RIGHT NOW with a thick and crippling urgency.

Maybe I'm not equipped to endure this the way you are, maybe I was made or thereafter formed to just barely scrape by, tackling the day by day and letting the months and years tackle me, overcome me with unattained goals, unfulfilled expectations just like every other American child who was told they could be whatever they wanted to be but was never told how much work it would take, that it wasn't an entitlement or a guarantee but a distant and unlikely option. I wasn't told that failure is very nearly as common as trying, that there aren't enough white picket fences for everybody in the world. I wasn't told that my having one meant someone not having one, that my rise would necessitate so many staying down. Perhaps I can take comfort that my staying down necessitates someone's rise, but it doesn't really work that way, does it?

Writing, writing writing. Or vomiting existentially the thoughts that poison my figurative gut. What do you care? You're nobody, because nobody reads this. Less than a drop in the massive informational bucket that is the internet, I could confess to a million crimes right here and never face prosecution, had I the gall to commit a million crimes in the first place. But I've already been caught for every crime I've committed, already sentenced, already working them off. I'm a lousy criminal, can't get away with anything. Except for anything that I write here--this is all sure to go unnoticed. So the only crime I can commit with any security is thoughtcrime.

But I'm not really original enough for that, I'm afraid. What could I write here that's truly seditious, truly unorthodox, truly challenging in today's world where madness and hatred and ignorance and propaganda are already so conventional, so thoroughly saturated into our consciousness from every channel and radio station that nothing can shock us anymore?

Would it shock you if I said I was scarier than an atheist, because I believe there is a God and that he hates religion? Scarier than a terrorist because I think a revolution will come not with bullets but with bytes? Scarier than the devil himself because I am real?