Meditation for February 8th
Competition
In nature, many male animals compete for the right to mate with a female or to expand hunting and grazing lands. Some butt heads or fight with tooth and claw, while others show off their beautiful feathered plumage. Competition is everywhere. We make up games and sports to meet those needs; our entire economic system is based on competition. Our whole society is a competition. There needs to be clear winners and clear losers, or we don’t know who deserves good things. In our modern society, it is a competition to see who can collect the most dollars. You are either getting dollars or losing dollars.
The Super Bowl is in February. The two supposed best of the best teams will march 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 (this was written in 2016) best friend. It’s not just a competition between the teams playing; it is also a competition between the cities and the fans. Sometimes the team that wins has the fans who lose. See New England, and if you are really old, Dallas. Some people will compete to see who is the least interested in sports. This is like a couple of peacocks spreading their tail feathers while rams are head-butting, and don’t really care about the birds, but if they wanted to, could kill them easily.
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 number of partners, having the most money, and getting the last word are all things people try to be the best at. Being inadequate or unable to do something is fine; people will do fundraisers for you, but being mediocre or even second best is losing. Not winning is not worth living for, and no one wants to hang out with someone who didn’t win.
We even have the people who are more peacock than rams: 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 but 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 oak-milk lattes, performance artists and the way they try to convince you they do ‘art’ are all different plumages for mating or fighting.
Some people try not to compete. They are trying to rise above the mere mortal need of friendly competition and entertainment and prove they are, in fact, the superior predator. Still, 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 try to avoid the competition; they are in the game whether they like it or not.
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 out 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 is probably my insecurities and the fact that I hate myself
This 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 water heater. Buy a nice mug. Buy nothing but English breakfast tea. Find a bunch of pickle jars to use as toilets, that mattress, and drink tea.
The object is not to 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 your head feels light and the light starts to have a permanent halo. Sit there until the walls breathe and the floor begins to roll.
In this room, you are not hurting anyone. In this room, you can’t be affected by what others enjoy. You are in this room, not shitting on people’s parades and trying to act better than.
This is as close to perfection as you will get.
Goal
Competition is the spice of life. Don’t just sit there and talk trash; play the game or enjoy watching.