la_belle_laide | (no subject)

After Kung Fu tonight I was driving the Empress home as usual. After I dropped her off, as usual I put on my iPod. I was sitting there listening to Faith No More and I said, “Wait, this isn't right. Dad wants to tell me something.” So I flipped on the radio and put it on scan like I usually do. The first song I heard was another Dinah Washington.

It's very clear, our love is here to stay
Not for a year but ever and a day
The radio and the telephone and the movies that we know
May just be passing fancies and in time may go

But oh, my dear, our love is here to stay
Together we're going a long, long way
In time the Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble
They're only made of clay
But our love is here to stay

That pretty much nails how I feel—or perhaps want to feel—about karma and continuation. I might have mentioned a few times (a minute) that my family are not Christian and we don't believe in God, heaven, hell, limbo, purgatory, or any of that other stuff. At most, what most of us believe in is some kind of unexplainable eternal consciousness and no one in my immediate family is arrogant enough to presume to understand that. As far as my own beliefs go, I am okay with not knowing. I'm not supposed to know. I'm just a human with some grey matter, looking for a pattern in a mostly random series of events. A lot of what I think is based loosely on quantum physics and the laws of nature, like the law of conservation of energy: nothing that is made of energy—which includes everything—ever stops existing; it just changes form. If the “form” had a consciousness it is still obviously up in the air if it retains it, in some inestimable way. I believe that it does, and sometimes this belief feels like a choice, and sometimes it feels very much like reason. Nothing is contrary to nature; Scully said that in X Files. If you can look at something through the lens of, of not science (scientific method is far too stringent to measure the intangible; for things like this, it just doesn't work,) but through the lens of logic, well, it seems logical.

How often do you hear Dinah Washington on the radio? No one up this way even knows who the hell she is. You tell people, “My dad's manager was Dinah Washington” and they go, “OH! Wait...who's that again?” (Which is such a shame, I think.) She was also his favorite artist, or at least the musical artist who meant the most to him in his life. So when I'm sitting there going, “Dad wants to tell me something” and this totally random Dinah Washington song comes on saying, “Everything is made of clay; it's temporary, but there is still something eternal,” you kind of can't help but go, “Well, I can't deny that means something.”

And then I'm crying my face off and I miss my turn onto Sunrise and get pissed off and go, “WTF! Now I missed my turn! Why tonight of all nights would I miss my stupid turn?” and then Dinah Washington comes on again, this time going,

That's why its better drinking again
And thinking of when you left me

I'm trying to make it up to home, with just a memory
I know you heard me the first time
I said I'm going to make it on home

and I start to get a little irrational maybe and think, “Well, is this like an answer? Did I miss my turn because someone's been out drinking and maybe something bad would have happened on Sunrise as I'm just trying to make it home?”

Of course the answer to that is that there isn't an answer, because you never find out about something that doesn't happen. And here I could go all kinds of into the alternate universe thing where this happens and that doesn't, and why does this one matter and the other one doesn't, and banging on and on about that whole thing, but why bother? Most scientists have come to accept that there are other realities. How hard is it to believe that maybe your consciousness is connected in all of those and that someone can send you a sign? Is it thatmuch of a stretch?

Then the whole way home I heard about Patrick Swayze and how he didn't want anyone to mourn him, and Ted Kennedy forbidding crying in the Kennedy house after his death, and someone else who had lost someone and was wallowing in their grief, and then Evanescences “My Immortal” all of which seem to be saying, “don't let this happen to you; don't wallow.”

I know it's a stretch and obviously I'm really emotional and maybe that leads to being irrational, but I hope that even if I'm irrational I'm not being illogical—that I'm at least following my own little trail of quantum breadcrumbs. I don't want to be one of “those people,” one of the ones for whom wishful thinking overrides rationalism and I start getting all frouffy about the world of spirits, ghosts, people being “called home” and goddamn angels playing in the clouds watching over their loved ones and floating around in some frouffy “waiting room” until everyone else crosses some stupid goddamn “rainbow bridge” and then hang out with some big dumb white god for all eternity. I feel like I'm bordering on that nonsense and I don't want to even touch it with a plastic one.

But I can't help it; it makes sense. That's why I look for answers in these crazy science books. Well, not answers, but ideas. I will never presume to understand it, but it's nice to think about sometimes, and when you get little things like this going on it kind of gives you a boost in a way.