Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique

First off, let me say that I am not a big proponent of organized religions and a belief in a higher entity. A god or goddess of any sort has never been a part of my life but when there are large scale tragedies like wars or the current devastation of the day, the earthquake and resulting tsunami horrors in Asia, I almost wish I had a God to cling to. It is just so hard for me to wrap my head around the knowledge that life is so goddamn uneven. That so many people are suffering in one part of the world, their world litterally washed away and other people are safe inside gated communities and are looking forward to rushing out to the movie theatres to go see Meet The Fockers while gorging on copious amounts of artifically buttered popcorn.

I often wonder what life is all about. Why life has meaning, if indeed it does in the large scheme of things. Maybe the world is like a big dog and us inhabitants are just fleas. Maybe our fate is as random as the dogs decision to scratch his side or chew on his paw. So much is said about life being so short, of it being a fleeting thing. And then there is the saying about living every second to the fullest because any second could be your last. I cannot argue with any of these statements and as inspiring as they are meant to be, they also make life seem so futile, so meaningless.

Maybe the clearest truth is that life doesn't necessarily have any meaning. Maybe life just is. Maybe philosophers, scientists, and worry warts like myself need to stop figuring out what life is and just live.

Yes, I know that normally one thinks of Hell as a fire filled rocky place full of dancing devils with pointy tails and sticks but I know what the real Hell looks like. It is a dark cramped place that smells of mildew and rust. It is a place where one must try to undo things done until one's hands slip and one's fingers are smashed into abrasive pipes until one's skin is shredded off like cheddar cheese. It is a place full of despair and frustration.

It is under my goddamned kitchen sink! It was supposed to be an easy enough task. Swap the leaky kitchen faucet for a shiney new one and attach a line to the dishwasher.
"How long will it take?" my wife asked.
"It will take a while but the water will only have to be off for 20 minutes max." I said with such certainty. But no. Five minutes in I was in the muckish land of plumbing Hell that makes the bravest of souls piss in their pants.

I was supposed to replace the hot water outlet with a new one and that is where the trouble started. The old one took part of the riser coming out of the wall with it and so now I had no threads available for the new one. And worse, I noticed something that surprised me. The pipes in the wall were copper, not steel, (like the ones I encountered remodeling the bathroom), and so now I had to rush to Home Depot, where Satan resides, and purchase a propane torch and solder and all that good stuff.

But first..... first I had to break into the wall to get to the copper pipes. I won't bore you with all the Hellish details but suffice it to say, the 20 minute to one hour job turned into 5 hours and that was just to get the pipes back together and working. I still haven't installed the faucet.

God, I love old houses.

Someone once told me that life either barrels over you or you barrel through life cutting a path, your own path. I am not much of a path cutter. I want to be but I seem to just let life barrel over me, push me down. I am not proud of this fact but it is the truth. As seconds turn into days that turn into years and I see the immersion of a greyish white chest hair my psyche seems more fragile. My mortality stares me down like a gradeschool bully. This sadness of feeling like the unaccomplished rears it's big baby head a couple times a week.

Last week, I heard the news that Francis Crick, the British scientist who helped discover the double helix structure of DNA had died. Now mind you, I didn't even know who he was but as his life was recounted on NPR, I was almost brought to tears. Not because he was a wonderfully accomplished man and a lovely spirit who seemed to enjoy 99% of his breathes here on earth and he was no longer with us but because I lacked his lust for life.

Now I do not want you to think that I do not have an apathetic bone in my body. I do. I routinely get weepy when I hear of the other worlds attrocities like the genocides in Darfur where whole cities are being slaughtered and the world turns a blind eye, (hmmm? no oil there I suppose), or the situation in Uganda where little girls are taken as sex slaves and little boys are taken as child soldiers and the world is pretty much silent.

I do cry inside for all of the hellish things that go on in the world, but lately my sadness is more about me not doing what makes me happy. It is a pattern I repeat over and over again. I wonder how many people do this as well. This is not to say that I do not enjoy portions of my life. I do. But the main focus, the core of my time on this earth has been not spent in pursuing anything that remotely resembles my life's dreams but instead has been spent cutting hunks of metal. (more on that later)

I can no longer stand the fact that I continually have a stuffy nose.