For Wyatt
Meditation for February 7th, 2016
Competition
In nature a lot of male animals compete for the right to mate with a female. Some butt heads or fight with tooth and claw while others show off their beautiful plumage. Competition is everywhere. We make up games and sports to meet those needs. We also come up with hierarchical cultures and try to climb to the top of. Male and female humans love competition. Our whole society is a competition.
Today was the super bowl. Two supposed best of the best teams marched down the field for 60 minutes – with timeouts, commercials, halftime and between quarters, dudes celebrating and getting up, refs conferring, coaches yelling at refs conferring, coaches’ challenging refs call and blimps and things make the game seven hours long. They competed for the ultimate prize: to be Papa John’s best friend. Peyton Manning won. He competed and he was better than the other guy – we don’t remember the name of losers.
Is competition important? If you are to be worth anything, you must be better than other people at something. Sports, music, dressing exactly like someone in the 80s did, having sex with a dangerous amount of partners and getting the last word are all things people try to be the best at. Being bad or unable to do something is fine, but being mediocre or even second best is worthy of suicide or becoming a has been bemoaning how awesome that thing used to be before the “kids” ruined it.
We even have the people who are more peacock than ram, artists. Watch a musician strutting across the stage gyrating in leather and tattooed biceps with long flowing hair wildly thrashing to the thump thump thump of the primitive mating songs and you can’t help picture the brightly colored feather fan and shake either to attract a female or show another male who is the dominant metal head. Painters have their speckled smocks, poets and their falling apart journals and dour faces, writers and the way they serve your vanilla lattes, performance artists and the way they try to convince you they do art are all different plumages for mating or fighting.
Some people even compete by lament competition. They are trying rise up above the mere mortal need of friendly competition and entertainment and prove they are in fact the superior predator but in fact they are nothing more than a hyena laughing in the darkness waiting for the real predators to finish the meat. It doesn’t matter that some people like stuff, a competitive person will quickly separate themselves to be special and right…and alone.
Everything we do, no matter what meaning we give it, is to mate or fight. Be the best at one of those or stop trying to be human.
Prayer
Lord Baby Jesus,
may I destroy my competition,
so I may stand on a hill of the bodies of those I vanquished.
The Man Upstairs,
make me the perfect instrument,
To get the touchdown, shot, home run, the birdie, the queen of hearts,
so that I may win.
Because winning is in fact everything and losing is why Neanderthals died off or became Slavic and Homo Sapiens became everyone else.
Jesus Q. Christ on a Crutch,
let me let people enjoy things,
no matter how trivial I think it is,
because it probably is my insecurities and the fact that I hate myself
is the reason I have to belittle others.
JChri!
Yo.
I prayed every day and night
to win this damn game and I fucking lost.
Why?
Oh, Mighty Odin!
Wise One Eyed Traveller.
As I chug chug chug on this here gee-tar,
let that inappropriately young girl in the front row
wanna be my gurl tonight.
Amen.
Craft
Take everything out of your room. Sell it, give it away or throw it away. Keep a mattress. No sheets. Make sure that there isn’t a carpet or rug. Buy an electrical hot water heater. Buy a nice mug. Buy nothing but English breakfast tea. Find a bunch of pickle jars to use to go the bathroom. Sit on that mattress and drink tea.
The object is to not enjoy anything but the tea and sitting there. Stare at the wall. Don’t leave for days. You have everything you need in your room. Sit there until you head feels light and the light starts to have a permanent halo. Sit there until the walls breath and the floor starts to roll.
In this room you are not hurting anyone. In this room you can’t be effected by what others enjoy. You are in this room not shitting on people’s parades and trying to act better than.
This is the closest to perfection you will get.
Goal
Competition is the spice of life. Don’t just sit and talk trash, play the game or enjoy watching.