Some (More) Thoughts I Have Had While Attempting to Meditate

Just breathing is (still) more difficult than I anticipated.

I’ve written before about adding mindful meditation to the regimen of things I do to help me cope with my thoughts and emotions and live a better, (somewhat) healthier life than I have over the past decade. For the unfamiliar, mindfulness is all about being aware of the present moment while calmly acknowledging and accepting one’s feelings, thoughts and bodily sensations. In short, mindful meditation is a lot of attempting to focus on your breath and then coaxing your mind back to said breath when it inevitably wanders.

My mind (still) wanders a lot. Here are some things I have recently thought about while meditating.

It would really suck to be a claustrophobic genie.

Of all the things you can lose in this life, weight is probably one of the easiest to find.

Shouldn’t that song be called “The Devil Went Up to Georgia?” Well, that’s if we’re operating under the assumption that the Prince of Darkness was traveling from home.

Until I figure out why I’m so afraid of commitment, I guess I should commit to not dating.

That line in Oasis’ “Champagne Supernova” where Liam Gallagher asks “Where were you while we were getting high?” has always seemed rather strange to me, because in my experience it’s not the high people considering the whereabouts of someone else because they are, well, high. Instead it’s more a conversation where someone asks, “Where were you?” and then you have to come up with some sort of fib because the truthful response is usually “Getting high.”

Why would you put eggs in a cage to begin with?

So if you’re Noah from The Notebook and you decide to write a letter to Allie every single day for a year, without receiving one fucking response, what do you even write on, like, day 200? Also, if he had her address, why wouldn’t he take a trip to her home to scope out the situation and maybe at least see if she still lives there, what she’s up to, make sure she’s alive, etc.? Sure, that’s creepy, weird and obsessive, but so is writing someone a letter every day for 365 straight days, and so was that thing where he refurbished that house where they had had lost their virginities to each other.

Every life narrative is inherently a survival story.

It’d be great if we as a society established and followed rules around spoiler alerts. There’s really no “best practices” on that front. I mean, if I were to write about, say, The Notebook, should I still feel obligated to give a spoiler alert, or has enough time passed / has it made its way thoroughly enough into the zeitgeist that a spoiler alert is no longer necessary?

I really wish I could pick certain things and erase them from my memory. Especially the things I haven’t learned anything from but that continue to disturb me when they randomly enter my mind when I’m meditating or whatever. Like the fact that I am Eskimo Brothers with my very own older brother. With two women. I was first both times, though. So I have that going for me, which is nice.

You can’t shoot an email. You can’t throw shade. You can’t grab a shower.

Drake and I seem to have very different definitions of “Starting from the bottom.”

You know you’re starting to get old when the actresses in MILF porn tend to be younger than you.

Something I wish I had in my life is a sitcom-esque friendship. My friends and I don’t live the kind of life where we can hang out at each other’s apartments or at the same bar on a nightly basis. We hardly ever have time to hang out in diners and we definitely don’t have leisurely breakfasts at said diners before heading to work in the morning. We have other shit we have to do, which is sometimes kind of a shame.

I wonder what diseases they will cure in my lifetime. And I wonder if this will affect the length of my life.

Sometimes, the only way to win is to quit.

Is Nickelback really that bad? They never did anything wrong to me. It’s unsettling to me — now that I am actively thinking about it and have completely lost any concentration I had on my respiratory activity — that I’ve spent so much time and energy railing against them when there are people in my actual life who are, I imagine, infinitely worse than those dudes are. Maybe people like me hate on Nickelback, EL James, Stephenie Meyer, etc. because they have figured out what we haven’t been able to: how to use their art to make an assload of money and entertain millions upon millions of people without seeming to be particularly skilled at their craft or even trying all that hard to succeed. That’s not wrong, and it doesn’t make them bad. All Nickelback did, basically, was make some music that a lot of people happen to like. I can’t discount the merits of that even if I don’t particularly understand the band’s appeal. Nickelback has probably even saved some lives through their music. (There are results on Google that seem to back this up, though I’m not sure which are satirical or not. Also since I Googled “Nickelback saved my life” I have been getting some very, very strange targeted advertising.)

Making an effort to avoid things I know will make me anxious until I’m well enough for them to not make me (as) anxious anymore isn’t selfish and it’s not something I should be ashamed of. Doing the opposite would be, though.

In my experience, few things will change your views on religion and the people who practice it than going through a period or two when you genuinely wonder how in the fuck you’re going to make it through the day, week, month, year — when you get to thinking you’d buy anything someone was selling if it would bring you a modicum of comfort and peace.

When I was little, I was very intrigued by aliens, but also very afraid of them. For several of my formative years I lived in constant fear that aliens would abduct me in the middle of the night. This was when I lived in a very rural area of western Pennsylvania, with a corn field across the street from my family’s house and deep woods behind it. It seemed like the kind of place you could get abducted from. Now I live in one of the biggest cities in the world, where this sort of thing seems less easy to pull off. However, if aliens decide to attack and attempt to annihilate the human race, a big city would likely be where they would start. I guess I’ll just always hope that no matter where I am it’s not the wrong place at the wrong time. So much of life hinges on that, whether or not extraterrestrials are involved.

You can learn a lot about how to act from the people you spend a lot of time around, and who influence you in positive ways. But as I’ve gotten older and (slightly) more mature, I’ve realized that you can learn just as much about how not to act from the people you spend a lot of time around who are a somewhat negative presence. You can learn from anyone in your life, and it’s not at all uncommon to learn the most from the people you respect or admire the least.