Meditation for December 27th
An Apology
We are nearing the end of this meditation venture, where I said I would write a meditation every day for a year. Now that I am at the tail end of this, I know I owe all of you an apology.
The reason I started this Cracked Pot Meditation is that on September 3rd, 2014, I was diagnosed with stage 3 cancer. I had to get a test, go through four intense rounds of chemo, have several lymph nodes removed via a very invasive procedure, and then wait to find out if I’m fine or have only five years to live, and then deal with the emotional and physical aftermath of all I went through. My head was clouded by the chemo treatments and the intense depression that usually follows. I had huge cognitive issues, and I lost the love to read and write.
So I forced myself to practice writing daily, writing satirical blog posts about meditation and other new-agey things. Sometimes I get sgetous. Most of the time, I wanted to make you laugh. I needed to laugh at myself since I was just stuck in my brain, my foggy, chemo brain. I couldn’t escape the moment with books, TV, my phone, or anything else because my body kept my brain there, and frankly, that was the most horrible thing I have ever had to endure.
So I wanted to keep writing something. Just to battle the fatigue and cognitive fog. Some nights I didn’t want to do anything. I was out of ideas. It was too late. I couldn’t do it one more night. I wrote it on my phone most of the time, lying in bed, fatigued and in pain, and posted it without even editing.
I got some hate mail. People didn’t like my making fun of Buddhism or Christianity. Some people didn’t feel safe because I poked fun at chakras and the zodiac.
I do owe an apology, but not for those.
In October, I was diagnosed in remission. My battle with cancer was over. I could now look forward to going on my life. I was a free man.
It took one of the biggest devils to negotiate deals with the devil ever.
You’ve probably noticed that things haven’t been going very well since 2016. In fact, you might say, things haven’t been worse. That is because to get remission from cancer, I had to make a deal with the devil. I had to give away a secure world, a safe world, a known world for remission and a chance to keep living.
Why did I make this kind of deal? I complain all the time that I did not choose to be here in the first place and don’t believe in God, so there isn’t really a reason to want to keep living, so why would I want to extend my life longer than necessary? It would seem wild to sabotage the whole world to live, especially if I have to live in the world I created with my deal.
Funny story. I was cruising down the road feeling all bad about the possibility of dying of cancer when I arrived at a crossroads. At that crossroads stood a man who was a beast. He offered me a way out, and I accepted the deal without delay.
He said he could take my cancer away for the small price of my soul.
The unfortunate situation is that I had pawned my soul to Layne Staley in 1993 for some heroin and a half pack of GPC 100s. I had no soul to sell, but that didn’t stop me from making a deal.
I pulled out my fiddle and said, “If I beat you at playing this here fiddle, then I get remission from cancer”.
The devil said, “Drats, I don’t play the fiddle.”
“What do I have then to trade?”
“You live in a form of reality that is somewhere in the middle as far as possible worlds. It isn’t the worst, but it isn’t the best, so if you wish to live cancer-free and be in remission, you will need to offer the world and this form of reality to be the absolute worst, but don’t worry, if it were the actual worst. Nothing would exist anymore, so it would be the worst without ceasing to exist. You will live in a world that is always on the verge of Armageddon. You won’t have an actual higher power that has purpose for its creation, so religion and myth will be meaningless, and there will only be the will of a few billionaires that will keep utopia from ever coming to fruition.
“That is what I want in a trade for your freedom from cancer that is eating your lymphatic system.”
“Yes, absolutely!”
I couldn’t believe the world to be that much worse than it is now, so I took the deal with no thought of what that would mean for all of humanity and reality in general, so for that, I apologise for this shitty world that won’t ever get better since it is what is keeping me cancer-free.
Best one yet
Agreed.