Cracked Pot Meditations – I Don’t Know What To Do Anymore

On January 11, 2016, I began a daily practice of writing a joke meditation of the day, called Cracked Pot Meditations. I was still recovering from the treatment of cancer, and I was having very challenging cognitive issues, so I chose just to put something simple and easy to write every day. Posting it to the blog allowed me to hold myself accountable. Some of those meditations were poorly written and unedited. I have gone back and begun editing these and adding an illustration, starting with the April 27th meditation. I hope you enjoy.

This was a response to the police shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile in 2016. Baton Rouge police shot Sterling after they had him on the ground. Castile was pulled over with his wife and four-year-old child and was shot seven times because he had let the cop know he had a legally licensed firearm in the car. This is four years before George Floyd. Stats show that Black American men are 2.5 times more likely to be shot by a cop than a white man, and Native American men are 1.2 times more likely to be shot by cops than black men. Still, mainstream media doesn’t report these shootings, nor have there been any nationwide outrage over these shootings. Sorry, this isn’t funny.

Meditation for July 5th

I Don’t Know What To Do Anymore

I want to make you laugh, I want to let you know that this simple solution will fix everything, or I want to make a few people who think differently suffer and realize that their life is a waste. I have browsed through numerous websites discussing various topics that I could write about in a humorous and relatable way. I can’t find anything.

I watched two videos of men getting shot in cold blood.

I am sick. The very breath I use to live and meditate has been knocked out of me. I don’t want to keep seeing this.

I also don’t want to hear or read most of your responses to it. I don’t want to read your links that may or may not tell me how I could be a better ally, or how this simple change to our system will get rid of systematic racism, militarized police officers, gun violence, and the political system that is failing to help anyone. I don’t want to hear your witty banter, your angry written all cap screams, your comedy, your, “is it too soon?” joke, your leftist weak ass open letter writing whine, nor do I want to hear your jihadist bible gun loving dixie flag racist bullshit either.

Nothing is funny.

I want to make it all go away. I want to say that I love you, and you act like it. You can write all kinds of great love poetry on a blog (like this one) or your cute little social media site, but it’s when you’re out in the world that you genuinely show love for each other. I love my family and friends, but I also love the strangers. Give the homeless crazy guy a chance, give the stuck up rich bitch a chance. . . just love.

~ Now it’s 2025 and people of color are still getting shot by cops, our country is funding one the most televised genocides ever committed, we are back on the brink of nuclear war, we are funding a national police force that rivals the budget of several countries GDP combined, and we are building concentration camps. It is getting hard to fucking care these days, and it’s even harder to find a reason for any of this.

People still think the system itself will repair itself, if only we try harder by voting. We live in a system where one party pretends to be two parties. One party pushes us further to the right, and the other party asks us for $5 to ensure we don’t go further left. Meanwhile, wealthy individuals discuss a third party that would fit into that narrow space between the Republicans and the Democrats. They all have the same bosses, the corporations.

The police don’t protect and serve us; they protect property and investments. The cops are militarized and mobile on our streets using the same equipment that militaries use. The media shines its light on what the corporations want highlighted. It’s not the militarized cops starting shit, it’s the starbuck window and the looting. A block-wide demonstration is made to look like a whole city is burning to the ground, so the country folk get angry and buy more ammo in case the masked vigilantes leave the city and start trying to burn the small towns down for complete anarchy.

This is particularly concerning, given that the whole world is becoming increasingly uninhabitable, and we have little to no say in protecting our environment, which is often handled by politicians who corporations advise. We have literally made the world such that kids in grade school through high school are collectively experiencing an existential crisis, as the future becomes increasingly uncertain.

We worship politicians who align with maybe a value or two like gods. We are a society of celebrity worshippers. We think that Brat Summer was going to be so much better than this when Harris ran her campaign saying she would enforce and enact policies right of Ronald fucking Reagan?

One of the biggest “cures” that influencers and celebrities endorse to help us deal with the ailing world is positive thinking, suggesting that simply thinking nice things will make the world a better place. Suppose I will separate my recycling and not water my lawn this summer. In that case, I will have done my part, and the world will become a better place. However, in reality, recycling does nothing, and corporations use far more water than I could ever save. Now that we have AI and so many people in the world using their phones and computers, even more water is being wasted in cooling the hot server farms needed to compute a picture of Kamala and me having brunch.

Self-care has become a multi-billion-dollar industry, where we can sit in our baths with candles and bath bombs, thinking we are engaging in silent resistance, when in fact, it’s marketing us to become more isolated and less of a community, preventing us from having difficult conversations and uniting against the system. They want us chasing bliss rather than chasing a better world. The saying works both ways: ignorance is bliss, and bliss is ignorance. So do your yoga and go to the spa after, when you come out, the world will probably be marginally worse.

Where can we go for help? I’m a big proponent of therapy, but you can only do so much inner work, but when the environment we live in is hostile to our survival, we might be erasing our hard work. Religion? Christianity is just a tool used by the bourgeoisie. It’s no wonder Christianity went from a cult of Jews trying to spread love and for the Romans to leave Judea to an empire spreading hate and capitalism.

Sorry about the negativity, but when I saw today’s meditation that I wrote in 2016, I realized that not only had things not changed, but they had gotten worse. Not only did it get worse, but we also allowed it to worsen. I don’t believe in utopia, but what I do think is that the current system, and I count both the Trumpians and the Democrats as part of this system, is an utter failure. I don’t have national pride. Yesterday was the Fourth of July, and all I did was comfort two dogs and hate America, as everyone around me launched so many made-in-China fireworks into the air that it changed the weather.

Meditate on that cupcake.