Does science require faith?

Last week a picture was circulated around my neighborhood of Facebook.

This one right here.

It immediately spawned two conversations with believers and I, of course, gleefully joined in the fun. Both discussions were interesting in their own way, I do love a good argument, but one of them really stuck with me because it underlined one of the many difficulties people have when discussing science and religion, and that problem is language.

It started out simple, we were having a discussion about whether or not there was evidence for souls (protip: there isn’t), when this guy popped in:

That's right, his contribution to the discussion on creation science, neurology, quantum physics,and souls, is "We may not be able to prove anything, but you don't know anything either". Now, as is typical of Internet arguments, everyone stopped the interesting argument we were having to engage the new guy. We all tried our own tactics of logic and reason, an atheists favorite game, but it didn't go anywhere. We tried explaining the difference between blind faith and verifiable evidence...

Wait, wat?

And here is where we run into a little problem that the English language has created for us. This gentleman is someone I've known casually for a few years. He's not an idiot, but he's clearly not highly educated either. He was surrounded on all sides with researched and practiced atheists, and in these things everybody just wants to be right, so all he was left with was something that he felt couldn't be disproved: the only things that we truly have evidence for are the things that we ourselves have experienced, all the rest requires an element of faith, thus, faith is both normal and prudent. 

But that isn't what faith is at all. There is a difference between faith and reasonable belief, and all real science is based upon reasonable belief. He goes further to say that he WOULD listen to us, but he doesn't have to because none of us are scientists. 

Notice that someone 'liked' this. That's when I knew we had a problem.

When I leave to start my car in the morning, it's not faith that I have walking out the front door. I know barely anything about the mechanics of my vehicle, but I have a reasonable belief that everything is in working order and enough rudimentary knowledge of the physics behind it to expect it to continue functioning. The difference between myself and a mechanic or engineer who designs motor vehicles is collected knowledge and experience. If I do know something about how a car works, let's say the car battery, it is not considered invalid information just because I can't explain the rest of the car. And even the engineer herself didn't start off at the beginning, she jumped into a career where people were already building and designing cars, learned everything she had to, and started working in the field where she continued her education.She doesn't have to know how to make car paint, just how to apply that knowledge. There is just too much information for one person to know everything. Science works the same way.

A final parting shot from our antagonist...

*sigh*

So now, not only are we uneducated, but all of our knowledge that he doesn't understand was acquired through science fiction as opposed to valid sources. Not only this, but he raises the stakes. Now we have to prove Evolution (This has already been done, just speak to the nearest biologist or use google if you have any questions), disprove souls (It's impossible to disprove something that doesn't exist, which only underlines how we've been wasting our time here), and become brilliant scientists with MANY accolades. That's right, unless Neil deGrasse Tyson himself wonders into this conversation, golden boy refuses to listen to anything we say. 

I think I'll let someone else have the last word about this conversation...

I try to stay away from direct insults, but that doesn't mean I don't agree with them.

And it all comes down to our antagonist's understanding of what the word 'faith' means. Faith is a belief not based on truth. It is not faith to believe that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow, that is an expected occurrence. To burden 'faith' with every nuance of "things that are believed" is to make the word lose all meaning. There is also a misunderstanding of how scientists use the word 'theory' and how the rest of us do. In science a theory is a highly tested hypothesis, so even things we consider facts like gravity are always considered theories. When your typical person uses the word theory, they mean some idea they've just had, and it is easy for those uneducated in scientific terminology to confuse the definitions. This ignorance is frequently exploited by the Intelligent Design crowd who like to cast doubt on evolution because it is considered a theory, highly tested and verifiable as that might mean, and your average citizen has no idea that there's any difference.

Well, now you do. To be clear, science is not a construction of faith because there are people testing it for weak spots every single day. It is stretching the definition of faith to say that my knowledge in science is based on faith because I myself am not a scientist. I hope that clears everything up, although I doubt it will for our friend here, because I don't have many accolades. Yet.

Why people make fun of religion.

A lot of people like to make fun of religion and religious people do not like that AT ALL. But why not? After all, every single religion operates in the closed minded belief that they are the only ones who actually know the real truth, and that the rest of us are misguided fools or stupendously ignorant. If you acted like this for any other reason people would never take you seriously, but faith wants to be respected and I just won't go along with that.

Many people take these attacks personally, like they are somehow representative of their entire faith. It's not that, it's just that there are too many things that beg to be mocked. As a comedian, I love picking apart things, and religion is always a fun subject. Following are three of the reasons I can currently think of that make it okay to mock religion.

1.) The Pope

Where would Jesus sit?

Somewhere on this planet is an old man sitting on a golden throne making decisions that influence the lives of millions of people. He is not beholden to any governmental body, he's elected for life, and he has followers in leadership positions across the globe. His organization is repeatedly in trouble for molesting children all over he damn place and then covering it up afterwards. Nobody knows how many people have left the church over this issue but, the more it happens, the more I wonder why the true faithful haven't cast down their leadership and replaced them with people who don't allow children's lives to be ruined. If any other organization other than a church did this kind of thing this often, this widespread, the entire world would shun them.

And let's not forget how many lives are forced into this world because the Catholic church refuses to allow their members to do any family planning. The world is over populated in many places, poor people are burdened with extra mouths they cannot feed, and the best defense against Aids in Africa is thrown right out the door because the Pope thinks that condoms are somehow the work of Satan.

And please note I'm not even remotely touching on anything that happened before I was born. History is full of examples where the Catholic faith was responsible for horrendous deeds.

You are always allowed to make fun of the Pope until he sells everything he owns to feed the poor, just like Jesus told him to.


2.) Hypocrisy

There's only one rule.

Long time readers know that I started my own satirical Facebook page specifically to make fun of this one thing. The amount of hypocrisy in the world is appalling. Every single time I see someone like Newt Gingrich talk about family values when he has three overlapping marriages, I want to throw my television out the window. And I have a large television and very small windows. We all know by now that the louder someone yells about gay people, the less we have to wait for them to get caught with a gay prostitute. And it doesn't end with people who claim to love you so much they want to beat the crap out of you for being different either. Here in the U.S. there is a direct correlation to how religious the state is to how racist it is. Politicians and other idiots will gladly speak both hate and religion in the same paragraph, all with a nice little "God Bless You" to tie it together.

This behavior is most common when I get into discussions online with the faithful. Even the smallest disagreement, or sometimes even a question, is frequently met with open hostility and rage. If, for instance, I point out that the same books in the bible that dictate our sexual behaviors also tell us that we aren't allowed to shave, wear mixed fabrics, AND give us rules for selling our daughters into slavery, so maybe they aren't the best standard for modern behavior, I am frequently met with a stubborn insistence that I should just shut up instead of challenging their belief that gay people are evil.

Occasionally someone will blow up an abortion clinic, killing plenty innocent people, most who are there for regular medicinal stuff, and they still have the audacity to do it in the name of the 'Pro-lifers'. As a matter of fact, the Pro-life movement pays the smallest amount of lip-service to calling these psychos the terrorists that they are. Go to ANY comment section where religion is discussed and you'll see countless examples of open hatred towards people who just believe differently. This is not only hypocrisy, but scary.

And, let me set this straight, you are always allowed to mock people who say one thing then do the opposite. If you establish a rule, you must follow it. If you claim to love all creatures and then slap someone in the face, you deserve everything people decide to say about you. Especially if it upsets you.


3.) Logic

Sure, whatever.

In most countries, the faithful far outnumber the rest of us. For thousands of years we've been forced to quietly acquiesce to the will and opinions of the mob. Even last night, the President of the United States ended his speech asking God to bless us and to bless America. Despite the fact that almost no Christian in this country behaves as the Bible tells them to, you don't have to live here more than two hours before you run into the influence that these people have on our society. And, while most of the faithful of all religions are nice and decent people, it's the violent thugs that tend to be the loudest and most willing to decide things for you. Since this is an election year, I get to hear a major presidential candidate cry out against the application of sharia law in the exact same conversation that he insists that we use his religion as the basis for law.

Logic and reasoned thought are the enemy of religion. It is actually the policy of most Intelligent Design 'Scientific' communities to automatically reject any evidence that disagrees with what they already believe. If we ever have the technology to build a wormhole to send probes back into the past to visually record dinosaurs 73 millions years ago, if these people are still alive the first words out of their mouths will be that the entire thing is fake. You could send them there and they would accuse you of drugging them. There is no way to get through to people who have made up their mind and refuse to listen to you.

Eventually you get tired of foolishly trying to reason with the unreasonable, but you still have to deal with them every single day, so how do you deal with this? Well, if you're like most of us, you just make fun of them. Everybody else who secretly agrees with you gets a laugh and when the target of your mockery gets upset, at least you got a laugh out of it. It's just that simple. I'm not trying to make fun of your faith, I'm sure you're a friendly person who feels guilty for not calling their mother every week and tries real hard not to beat your children, just like the rest of us, but the next time you see something on the internet mocking your faith, please remember that's it not target at the normal people. It's for the douchebags who reduced us to this.

Shocking, I know.

Why are atheists so smug?

Atheists get called a lot of things, but arrogant and smug are two of the most common. I get where you're coming from by asking, the New Atheist movement has no problem shoving their opinions in everyone's face and, when you watch videos of Dawkins or Hitchens casually dismissing away thousands of years of belief as superstition, it doesn't sit well with the average believer who has built their life on a foundation of ritual and faith. There are also innumerable Facebook groups created seemingly only for the reason of mocking faith, and the condescending attitude that we atheists cam have towards the faithful can be downright infuriating to those who don't understand us.

So, in the interest of creating a greater understanding, here are a few of the reasons why I believe we atheists can be such dickbags when it comes to dealing with people who don't see the world like we do.


1.) Santa Claus

This is how you teach your children not to trust everything you tell them.

This first one is going to require a little bit of imagination on your part. Now, I understand that it's easy to get defensive about what you believe, but if you're really curious about what makes us tick, try to keep it bottled up and ignore the imperfections in the analogy.

Imagine, if you will, a world in which almost everyone you knew never stopped believing in Santa Claus. When you drove to work, there would be posters of him everywhere, and his message of secretly watching you and your behavior for an upcoming judgement day would just casually slip out of the mouth of nearly everybody, from newscasters to politicians everyone believes in Santa.

But here's the thing, you don't. Now, for the most part you can just ignore it, after all, what harm does it really do? But then you start noticing that an uncommonly large amount of daily discussion has to do with this mythical creature. You turn on the news and there's wars overseas over the names of his reindeer or what color he is. Santa's rules for who is naughty or nice seem kind of arbitrary or common sense, but people will straight up punch you in the face if you disagree with them.

Most of the time you keep your mouth shut, but eventually everything just seems so silly. We've been to the North Pole, there's no sweatshop full of elves making toys. When you mention that at a family dinner, your mother tells you that parents buy the toys themselves and are happy to assist in Santa's good work. You want your mother to see the truth, but when you try to have a nice, logical discussion about it she clams up and you can see the disappointment in her eyes. Clearly she agrees with the community that if you don't believe that Santa is watching you every minute, there's no reason for you NOT to go on a murderous rape rampage any day.

I know that sounds silly, but that's pretty close to the world that we live in. You might believe in God, you might not, but if you don't there is absolutely no way to talk about the subject without sounding like you know something everybody else doesn't, because that is exactly the way that you view the world. And when only one out of ten people agree with you, it can get very frustrating.


2.) SCIENCE!

I think I can see my genome from here!

Humans like to codify their existence. We've always enjoyed naming and then grouping things together, and there are few arguments more intense than over the minutia that separates two very similar things, thoughts, or ideas. We've been noticing patterns in reality for thousands of years and this has led to every single modern advancement, be it beer, cellphones, eyeglasses, or even the Internet you're using to read this. This conversation amongst ourselves has involved every single type of person, religious creed, sex, or nationality that wanted to get involved. It isn't owned by anybody and the advancement of knowledge could arguably be considered one of the best pursuits of our time on this planet. Science isn't a religion, it's the way of the human species. It's how we've grown and evolved from wandering groups of barbaric tribes to civilizations with robots in space.

That being said, a lot of the war about religion takes place here and, while it's true that a lot of scientists are also atheists, it is not an atheist endeavor; there are many people of many faiths involved in the process and if you are ever interested in any aspect of it, the information is practically free for you to discover. The more you know about science, the more amazing the world around us is. So it seems strange to me that this is where the battles are most frequently waged, and the people with decades of experience, knowledge, and training, are somehow given less weight in the discussion when it happens in the public. If you watch a talk show about psychics there are going to be three or four charlatans well versed in duping the crowd, and exactly one person who everyone despises who will try to politely discuss how psychics work and nobody will listen to him. A politician can casually dismiss millions of man-hours of dedicated research, laboratory testing, and heated discussion hammering out theories that stand up to reality, many of them completed by people who believe exactly what he does, and the audience will actually cheer him for it.

Let's pause on that for a second.

There is no other occupation that I know of where the smartest people in the room are considered the least qualified people to listen to. Here in America over 50% of the GOP think biologists are full of garbage. Even the Catholic Church admits that evolution is true, and we even have evidence of it, but that doesn't stop the faithful for dismissing the greatest achievements of human intelligence because it's too complicated for the uneducated to understand. People would instead rather trust the man behind the pulpit (not the molester, we have a new one) who tells them differently because of something he read in a book once. Apparently it's easier to believe that thousands of the smartest people in the entire world are somehow trying to scam the rest of us because, profit? I'm not sure how it works, but that seems to be the discussion.

So, how do you talk to talk to someone who doesn't even believe in reality without sounding smug? I don't know, but it's difficult.



3.) Revenge. 

This is why we get angry.

 I'm going to be perfectly frank here: religion is about control. That's not necessarily a bad thing, parents have to watch their children, but unchecked authority rarely turns out well for the people involved. The list of crimes against religion are legion, and they are still happening every single day.
Is it really arrogant to tell the same group of people who used to burn herbalists for being witches that it's superstition that makes them believe that a woman who owns a cat she so doesn't get the plague must be using the powers of Satan? Sure we don't believe that anymore, because of science, but when the conversation is brought into something that matters today, like who has permission to get married, the arguments against it are unscientific and superstitious. Sure the Bible suggests that we should kill gay people, but there are also a ton of verses that equate women to property, and we're mostly smart enough not to take those seriously anymore. You also aren't allowed to shave or wear mixed fibers in your clothing, but nobody marches in the street over those issues.

Atheists and nonbelievers have been treated badly for thousands of years, almost worse than people tend to treat the heretics of a different (read: almost identical) faith. Now that we understand enough of the universe to be able to close many of the gaps in human knowledge, the conversation and deference to power have started to shift. New Atheists like myself aren't against you or even what we consider to be your quaint and harmless rituals and sacrifices, but when religion is still trying to control us when we know better, the conversation easily takes on a new and different flavor.

If you've been grinding someone's face in the dirt for untold centuries you shouldn't complain when they start to fight back. And now, mostly thanks to the internet and free information, the numbers of nonbelievers are increasing every day. We don't try to actively convert most of them, all it takes is a simple internet search and everything that your religious leaders don't want you to know is right in front of you.

And it's not smug to point at things if you're the only one who has their eyes open.

4 ways to meet your lover.

These are some of the strategies I've implemented in my quest for past relationships. These experiences are all drawn from my early days. I obviously operate from dumb luck and brass balls.



1.) Naivete

I was cute and innocent too, once. Later: Sharp claws and pissing on things

Who was it?

My first girlfriend was a 19 year old premed student and was hands down one of the most attractive young women this homeschooler had ever seen. She was staying with her family through the summer and got a seasonal job at McDonald's where I was working at when I was 18.

Strategy?

None, I had no clue how to talk to women. The Australian surfer dude and Keanu Reeves wannabe found her to be the only girl who didn't respond to his six pack and accent, so he encouraged the virgin to go after her instead. He did everything to coach me ('Just TALK TO HER YOU IDIOT!!') but I had never even come close to asking a girl out in my life and she eventually just did it herself.

Did it work?

If by 'work', you mean 'chaste kissing' and having a pretty girl sit on my lap for the first time in my life, then yes. Our first date was a coffee at a local restaurant and I won her heart by not caring if she brought her kid sister. We saw each other the rest of the summer.

What happened?

She used to be a Wild Child and had converted to Mormonism after alcoholism and depression had almost led her to killing herself in high school, she believed her new faith had saved her life and it was everything to her. I was still 9/10ths of a Jesus Freak, and her heading back to BYU pressured us into trying to convert each other which led to the relationships demise. There were no hard feelings and I sent her off with the first Teddy Bear I owned as an infant. 

What did I learn?

Damaged sexy women respond well to a healthy dose of chivalry. This being my first relationship, I started the mental femanese dictionary that I still use today. Also: Heartbreak sucks.







  2.) Prayer

The best way to feel like you're contributing without doing a damn thing.

Who was it?

My first wife. She was a nice girl and looked like a giant chipmunk with food stuffed in her cheeks.

Strategy?

Starting when I was aprox. 14 I prayed for my future wife every single day. It wasn't hell or damnation that kept me from pursuing women, but the belief in predestination and that if I even touched another woman it was like cheating on my future spouse. Pretty messed up, I know.

Did it work?

Technically yes. Someone did some matchmaking between the two virgins that they knew and we ended up making out on our first date (a home viewing of the movie, 8 seconds. I still don't know how that movie ends). Our relationship grew stronger after her adopted family (She was raised by her aunt and uncle after her mother was considered too much of an alcoholic and the state of Illinois took her away) and her started fighting and she ran away. I never knew where she was, but the resulting stress  kept us together and we ended up getting married less than a year after dating, two days after she turned 18. Also, we were virgins and had no idea what the hell we were doing. I convinced myself it was God's will and the rest was history.

What happened?

She really wasn't into the whole church thing and it turns out she felt like our domestic lifestyle was stealing her youth and she broke up with me so she could go out partying with her friends. We lost touch almost immediately and the last time I saw her she was with her new family over ten years later with a small swarm of children and an even bigger ass. She looked happy.

What did I learn?

Like the lady said, love just isn't enough. I also learned that sometimes someone will leave you without telling you there's even a problem because they care enough about you to try to work through it, which goes against what they selfishly want to happen. Also, being divorced makes you like 10X more cynical. I also figured out that you can't have premarital sex if you've been divorced already, which lead me to doing a lot of really fun things down the road.



3.) P.R. dept.

This picture will mean something different to you after the following entry.

Who was it?

Before my first wife and I even finalized our divorce I had quit my job, started waiting tables, started smoking, and had an entirely new set of friends. Like most large groups of friends, it was held together by the female relationships and I love me some girlfriends. There are a few stories that fit this model, but I'm going to talk about the one focused on Anal Sex.

Strategy?

I was the sweet young guy who gets his heart broken and armors himself with cynicism, but I have always loved women and make friends with them easily. My personal code of ethics at the time prevented me from sleeping with my friends, but women love to promote the decent guys that they know and I started dating a LOT of my friends' friends.

Did it work?

It still works as a great way to meet people. As a matter of fact, this is my preferred route. It's easier to build up great friendships with people and to casually be introduced to all of their friends than to have to filter out all the assholes yourself. This worked a lot better in my 20's before everybody's friends got married and had kids, but now that I'm in my 30's everybody is getting divorced and finally catching up to me.

What happened?

The best story is the three week relationship with a moody girl who was trying to re-establish her relationship with God so was trying to keep her virginity, so we were only allowed to have anal sex. And we had a lot of anal sex. Quite frankly, those three weeks removed the taboo aspect of it for me so I can pretty much take it or leave it. Also, she was pretty crazy and it just didn't work out.

What did I learn?

How to Anal correctly. No, seriously, that's all I learned from this one. Since then, I've been trusted enough to introduce this into several relationships (it's always been their idea), which only backfired once when one of my ex's discovered she got her most powerful orgasms that way and never stopped shoving her butt in my face. So, there's that.




 4.) Bond, James Bond.

I'll take her shaken AND stirred.

Who was it?

Resident overworked and oversexed Denny's waitress.

Strategy?

Wanting to take control of this whole dating thing, I simply started mimicking the most charming character I had ever seen or read about, James Bond. We have absolutely nothing in common, but you would be amazed at how far eye contact, unshakeable confidence, and a charming sense of humor will get you with the opposite sex. This is my go-to personality when I'm interested in someone and every girlfriend I have ever had will tell you how charming I can be when it suits me.  Gentlemen, this is the answer to the question, 'why does that average looking guy get so many attractive women?'

Did it work?

Fuck yes this works. In this scenario I had just finished working security at the local gay bar for New Years Eve, I think I still had lipstick on my cheeks from all the drag queens who wanted to kiss me that night and I left it on there because why the hell wouldn't you? My best friend and I went to grab a bite and the waittress came up to our table with a quip, I responded in turn and, just like in the movies, skip forward a bit to some of the most amazing sex of all time. Despite the fact that she did this kind of thing whenever she wanted to, later she admitted to sex addiction, the difference between enjoying someone and being invisible is sometimes separated only by your ability to straight up act like a boss.

What did I learn?

That playing with women was more interesting than the RPG group I used to hang out with. This was before WOW took all of my nerdy friends away and we had to meet in person to nerd out. Boobs just happen to be a lot more interesting in person than dice and Orcs. I also learned that adults can sexually explore each other without being emotionally attached, which incidentally led to both some of the best stories that have ever happened to me. More on that later.


------------------------------

When I put it out there like this, you can actually watch my evolution with women. These experiences led me to become comfortable around women and confident in my ability to make things enjoyable for both of us. I'm not always so good at the long term stuff, but meeting people only gets easier. I have since earned my Friends With Benefits badge several times and have taken a stab at a second marriage and several other 2-3 year relationships. I was going to stop writing about dating for a while, but my previous blogs have come up in conversation several times since then, and you might as well give them what they want. And that's the best advice ever.

First verse is the best verse! (Being Single Pt. 5)

I would like to thank everybody who reached out to me after my last post, especially to the two men who told me about their own experiences, thank you for that. I'm back now and those feelings are buried where they belong.

On the Mooooooooooon,

I also got a chance to talk to three of my exes, and it was interesting to see how they responded to it. I was with each of these women for at least two years....

The first ex started a conversation with me via text, genuinely concerned about my well being, making sure I was in a good place, and saying a lot of nice things about myself (She once again thanked me for being so wonderful to her while we were still together and apologized for not treating me as well). She's a happy mother and wife now; she met the guy only a few weeks after we split up, but I was never sore about it. Life is funny like that sometimes. She has normal life struggles and a cute family. I like her husband, and even gave him a guitar once.

The second ex wrote me a long email, not wanting to interfere with my life (she goes on adventures into other countries like a bad-ass, but we always seem to get back into touch). We had a very heartfelt conversation (where she also thanked me for treating her so fantastically), but she also wanted to make sure that I was doing well and was genuinely concerned about me. She's always one of my favorite people.

The third ex, however, decided to take a different route. Her entire text was, 'Well written. Would have been useful information to know before we got together.'. Now my reply, 'I didn't know this was about you.' made her call and explain that she didn't mean to sound incredibly self-absorbed and selfish, she just isn't good with words. I never found out if her text meant she would have erased our entire lives together if she knew I had trust issues (a weird thing for a rape victim to tell somebody), or if she would have attempted to overcome them. Considering her lack of empathy towards me most of the time we were together, I know which one I think it is, but I'm sure she'll let me know after she reads this. I don't know if we're capable of ever being friends again.

But I didn't write this to make one of exes look bad. Ex3 is a pretty cool chick like 93% of the time. I wrote this to talk about my favorite part of the relationship, the beginning.....

I met these women in three very different ways (School, Myspace, Drinking on a Monday afternoon), and all of them ended very differently (Leaving me after she met somebody else, Failed marriage, aborted pregnancy after we split up), but some of the feelings towards the beginning were very similar.

New relationships are about discovery and hope, watching parts of yourself long dormant awaken to new possibilities, and lots of intense sex. You find yourself looking for similarities, trying to connect with this person on every level possible. Conversations run long into the night, your eating habits get thrown off, and your entire brain starts to rewire itself because of this one thing. You start to bore your friends, the ones who don't get jealous, and you might even fall of the face off the earth entirely if you don't know how to keep balance in your life.

Despite the massive difference in the ways these three relationships started and ended, the intensity of the first few months, that elusive honeymoon period, helped to keep the relationships afloat for quite a while. Incidentally, Ex1 and Ex2 both had pretty nasty endings. Ex2 was already sleeping with her next boyfriend before I even moved out, and I think I broke up with Ex1 about six times before it finally stuck (I actually told her the last time we got together that I was only doing it so that I could be mean enough to her for her to figure out for herself that we would never, ever work out. It didn't take very long after that). Ex3 made some interesting choices before we split up, but her complete disregard for my feelings certainly helped me run out the door. In each of these scenarios I specifically remember the immense river of emotions and happiness that comprised our early relationship. I have vivid memories of colors being brighter and everything we did together meant something, like it was fated.

Listen, I'm an Atheist and I love me some Science. I know that it's all chemicals and psychology, but when did that ever make drugs less interesting?

Answer: Never.

And here's the thing. I know that the Honeymoon phase can last. I've seen people recreate those emotions with someone over and over again, each time after it drifts away they keep finding new and creative ways to bring it back. We're all human and full of faults, some more than others granted, but everybody loves being there, so why is this illusion so difficult to maintain?

I remember the exact moment it shattered when I was with Ex1 because she commented on it as it happened. We were driving towards a bank in east Boise and I said something mean and cranky in a sarcastic reply to something. "That's it", she said. "That was the end of the beginning, or the beginning of the end, if that's how you want to look at it." I denied it of course, I imagine myself pouting here as I valiantly try to defend the best phase of our relationship. But even as I struggled to defend that Straw Man Ambush, a little itch in the back of my skull told me she was right. And she was right, I already had enough resentment built up inside of me for the bile to start spilling out of my big, stupid mouth. And once that resentment gets entrenched, there's always a film of it resting somewhere and it's hard to get back to where everything looks fresh and new again.

Ex1 was right and it only got worse from there. I put up with some behaviors that were completely unacceptable to me for quite a while. As the issue grew progressively worse the intensity of that conflict erupted into several large arguments, almost always ending with a new profession of heartfelt emotion and a promise of things to change. But promises are easily broken and eventually there was just too much burning resentment inside of me for it to ever work out between us. We wanted it to, but it just wasn't possible anymore.

And here is where I think some of my own problems might lie. Maybe the problem isn't that people do things that build resentment, maybe the issue is learning how to get rid of it once it's there and learning how to live with what's left. I can't imagine that in the 300 years my Grandparents have been together that they haven't had long periods of disconnection. But somehow they just continued to keep choosing to be with each other and to make it work. Part of it's the culture, they aren't called the Greatest Generation for nothing, but there's no reason why you couldn't do it today.

But it's hard. It's very hard. Couples self destruct around me all the time. Eventually you learn to see the signs, but sometimes things erupt very slowly. When my last ex and I split, we hadn't been fighting much at all. Sure we were stressed, but we almost never fought about anything, and we were almost never that mean to each other. At some point we just decided we didn't want to be together anymore and we let the emotions slowly tear it apart until it was gone.We didn't even really fight at the end. It was cold, like the Mooooooooooooooon.

Time to pick a new direction.

And this is the end of Being Single. I've got other things I want to rant about, and this whole 'introspectively looking at the past thing' takes a lot out of a fella.

Wake up before reading this one. (Being Single Pt. 4)

Once, somebody got me drunk and raped me. 

This should get a little heavy so I'm going to post some cute pictures of my puppies to help us (me) get through this.

This is Lu the rescue pup meeting our new beagle Frankie for the first time ever last autumn.

I would like to start off by apologizing to all the women I've ever been really close to that I've never shared this story with before: I understand that we talked about what happened to you that one time (twice in one case), but you should know more than most how difficult it can be to bring this kind of thing into the open with anybody, and I've always been a secretive person*.

Secondly, I'd like to address the inevitable idiots out there who only allow themselves to think with their testicles and who consistently claim that you can't rape men under any circumstances: You people are idiots and I hope that you are shooting blanks because you would make a horrible father.

 Okay, here we go.....


 *- A secretive person that tells the entire Internet instead. Don't ask me, I'm just as confused about the things that I do as you are.

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My first wife left me in 99. This was before all of my friends were on the Internet with me (they still had real lives and went out and did things, before WOW destroyed EVERYTHING), and before anybody I knew owned a cell phone. My first wife and I were both virgins when we got married and she was only the third girl I had ever kissed, so let's just call this the beginning of my dating life. She also broke up with me in October, so I got to enjoy the last holiday season of the millennium with a shattered world view (I wasn't even officially an Atheist yet!) mired in the past while it seemed like the rest of the planet was looking towards the future. I was young, naive, and inexperienced, which is a horrible thing to be as a man.

The morning after she told me she was leaving me (she moved onto my couch for three weeks because 21 year olds are idiots), I put in my notice at work, immediately started my three week vacation, then started waiting tables the day that vacation was over. This new job would introduce me to smoking, bars, and casual sex; I was finally acting like I was in my 20's. Before the end of the year, and way before the divorce was final, I started seeing this new girl who wanted to keep her virginity, so we had anal sex every other day for three straight weeks. 

Sorry for that visual, here's Frankie the puppy being cute again.

The Anal Girl didn't last very long, not surprisingly considering I was still wearing my wedding ring on a necklace, and my affections wandered around for a while until landing on what would be the first of many new obsessions. She was thin, graceful, talented, and completely interested in casually eating my heart while watching me die, in other words: the Perfect Girl.

But we're not talking about her right now, she's for later, but you have to understand that I had created a life preserver out of this stinking hell hole and it was filled with thoughts of her. Sure, that was a pretty stupid thing to do, but I am also an idiot so it all made sense at the time.

By that summer I was really learning how to drink. I'd buy a fifth of whatever and leave it in the truck, heading down to the local bar after work to drink socially, and then go wherever the night took me (usually nowhere, because I am a fat and angry nerd). I was waiting tables and discovering a lot of things about people and life in general. I had never really been much of an extrovert before (I've always been an attention whore, but that's not the same thing), and I was slowly starting to come out of my shell and develop the personality that most of us are forced to do in high school (Thanks again parents!).

Yes, we bought our dogs a chair to use as a nest. It was always this adorable.

Many nights after my shift was over, you would find me sitting at Old Chicago, beer in hand, with no destination in mind but the inevitability of our own mortality. Everything was so fresh and raw back then, I still cared SO DAMN MUCH about everything, and I couldn't wait to stop that from happening with sweet, delicious beer. The girl of my dreams was driving me insane, and this was before I saw her naked, and I was just starting to realize how different the world worked than I was raised to believe that it did, but I did have one stable thing in my life: My personal code of behavior.

Despite the fact that Perfect Girl and I were still only in the unrequited love stage, both of us thought the other one wasn't interested, we hung out constantly. I had built up this fantasy/game plan where things would all be done 'the right way'. And the 'right way', for those of you who aren't naive 20 somethings with a hard crush, is to stop fucking other people the minute you realize that you want things to work out with somebody, even if they don't know you are interested in them. As a full grown cynic, that sounds silly to me now, but it was everything to me back then. I was so committed to Perfect Girl, that I was abstaining from sex based purely on the vague possibility that if we did ever end up together it HAD TO BE PERFECT, so I just wasn't interested in anybody else*.

She's only ever done this once, somebody must have told her about Snoopy.

Enter the villain of the piece. She was 'older', not quite 30, also divorced, and a bartender at the same restaurant that I worked at. She was petite and thin lipped, and she absolutely loved to prey on the younger guys at work. I'm almost positive now that she was processing her own pain by using her sexuality so aggressively, but it could just be that loved herself some dick and you don't have to work very hard to get a 23 year old to sleep with you. 

Until she met me, which she took as a challenge, and that's when things got weird. I wouldn't see her every night, but when I did she would wait until I was a couple in and then come over and offer to buy me some shots. And I love me some shots, I don't think I have ever turned down shots in my life, no reason to go back in time to change things now. Under normal circumstances she'd throw out the occasional flirtatious remark and I'd fire back with something more or less clever but clearly stating that it would never happen, which is easy to do when sober. Drunk Mikey, on the other hand, will have sex with you in the bar bathroom at closing time while your boyfriend waits obliviously for both of us around the corner (Sorry dude), but I didn't really know this about myself yet. I had turned her down so many times, and we were friends now, right? We talked during and after work, we shared things like friends do, so she knew about PG and I honestly wasn't that worried about it. I was saving myself for the PG and she knew that, she knew what I wanted in my heart of hearts, who manipulates the naive kid with broken heart who just wants things to somehow be normal again?

This was my lap everyday shortly after I woke up for an entire year. I have never felt so loved.

The night that it happened is hard to remember, there was a lot of alcohol involved. She saddled up to me at the bar (or maybe we met there intentionally), and started laughing and talking like friends do. I'm not normally a black out drunk, this incident is one of the reasons why I stop before that happens, but I do know what happened that night: she bought a LOT of alcohol and I drank it.

Somehow we ended up in my truck behind the Office Max across the street. It was shamefully quick and unsatisfying for both of us, which I find strangely hilarious now, the rest is blurry until the next morning, when I woke up angry.

I have always been an angry person, but this was a confused angry. I blamed myself, of course, and didn't react to it in the way that a woman might have. Sure, I was hurt and confused, but as a single man without any strong family ties (my family had moved up to northern Idaho to flee Y2K), mentors, or otherwise trustworthy adults around, I made kind of a mess of things when I tired to figure it all out.

It's okay Frankie, I still love you.

When grown men are taken sexually advantage of in our culture (AMERICA!) there is a lot of garbage that comes with it, and I dealt with all of it. First of all, I was raised in a conservative and passively sexist family, sheltered too much as a teenager, and completely unaware that it was even a possibility for me to be taken advantage of sexually. I didn't even understand that you could get drunk enough to do something that you wouldn't even dream of doing sober. I also didn't know that people would manipulate you into being friends with them so that they could take advantage of you. I had nobody to talk to, I was too embarrassed to bring it up anyway, so I just ended up blaming myself for the entire thing. Which is the opposite of healthy.

And this still affects me today. I didn't grow up mistrusting women, even as a child I knew my mother to be an anomaly, but after my first wife left me without a single warning shot fired (we had one entire fight in our two years of marriage, so I certainly didn't see that coming), and then this event, it didn't take me long to start believing deep down inside myself that women as a sex were simply not to be trusted. When my ex and I split up last month, she was honestly shocked at how many things I just wasn't telling her. It's not that I didn't desperately NEED to share these things with her, or that she wasn't completely open with me, it's just that it was nearly impossible for me to trust her. Relationship after relationship has ended the same way, with women slowly coming to the conclusion that I will never let them in. Sure, I can be warm, friendly, caring, tender, passionate, and intelligent, but inside I am closed off and alone. Always. And it's cold in here, but I've never been able to let anybody else in, I am always convinced deep on the inside that no matter how much I want things to work out that someday (soon) I will be alone again, cast out from the home just like every time. It's a self fulfilling prophecy, I know how it ticks, and I can't stop it from happening again and again and again and again.... Even this last time, there was no fight, just another woman who was simply tired of trying.

And they always keep your dog.

 

This is the job for a professional, one that I can't afford and probably wouldn't listen to anyway. And even if they ever helped me to untangle this chaos of emotions, I'd still be dealing with a long and cynical history with the opposite sex. I'm not afraid of trying again, I always do sooner or later, but the scars are being built on scars now, and that's hard for all of us.

For those of you who have seen me unload on people who treat rape like it isn't a thing, especially those who try to pretend that a 13 year old boy can't get raped if the adult is an attractive women, now you know why it bothers me so much and I got so angry. For those of you who have heard me say that I've never been raped in those conversations, you have probably never had anything like this ever happen to you before.

Thanks for reading my story. It's okay if you hug me the next time you see me, just don't say anything out loud about this, I have a reputation you know. 




P.S. - Many months later, I tried to salvage some of my broken ego by sleeping with my rapist again. Our friendship was understandably over by then, but we were both drunk at the same bar and I was still raw about it and wanted some revenge sex. She turned me down, of course, and that is the way our story ends.... 

P.P.S. I really miss the dogs.

* - For those of you who absolutely must know what happens, PG and I did eventually admit our attraction to each other, three weeks later part of her family died in a horrible car accident. We didn't make it and now she's happy and very successful in another city while I pretend she doesn't exist (mostly).

Patterns and reflections. (Being Single Pt. 3)

Before we continue on this journey, here is a picture from my mother:

She's being deafly serious.

In others universes, I'm sure there are plenty versions of me who are professors and scientists, but in this one I was home-schooled by a crazy, deaf lady with a third grade education who has been addicted to the Internet since '93 and believes that there is an actual hearing conspiracy against deaf people.* Since I'm 34 I'm going to go ahead and take full responsibility for not furthering my own education and living up to my potential, but childhood can be a difficult self to overcome.

We are fourth dimensional creatures, but we have the greatest difficulty seeing anything outside of the first three. I am nearly blind moving forward into the future, like an earthworm pressing itself through soil, barely able to sense what's about to happen to myself and mostly reacting to reality when it hits me in my stupid face. The past is also difficult. I don't exactly remember being three feet tall, running around the pine tree at my parent's yard sale as a child, but I have vivid memories of those memories and the loss of them would almost be like losing parts of myself, or at least running out of beer (forever).

There is an interconnectedness to the Universe, a certain harmony (with mathematics as notes and vibrating strings as instruments. SCIENCE!) that has rules and patterns that determine our reality. Our species flourished because our big, fat, meat eating brains were more adept at recognizing these patterns and utilizing that harmony for our own ends. Now we have things like metallurgy, twitter, and the International Space Station. Reality is mind shatteringly, almost unrealistically huge and complex. We have developed a powerful set of filters to keep these kinds of things from distracting us eternally, but this is where a lot of secrets lie: on the other side of the veil.

Which brings us to this...

I got this tattoo done after my 2nd divorce in my 20's:

Each insect represented an ex I had at the time of the tattoo, all of them were walking around the single side of the mobius strip to represent the endless replication of the patterns we reinforce into our own lives. My first wife is the one with the biggest ass.

I don't think I intended to place so much determinism into a physical manifestation of my own philosophy, but it is very telling in the dating world that many of us have a "type" or have certain traits that we find nearly irresistible and, damn the torpedoes, we're going full speed ahead. I've tried desperately to find meaning in the choices that I feel compelled to make, feeling that there must be a way to intellectualize this process, but to no avail. And then, instead of trying to piece it all together, I just let my mind relax and suddenly it made lot of sense: everything comes down to sex and violence.

Life wants to exist, and badly. A branch of life decided a long time ago to start consuming other life and it's been nothing since but one long arms race to see who gets to exists forever (protip: NOTHING wins! Energy death of the universe is imminent, try to remember that next time you feel special). Ever since we came along it's been a lot more of the same, just with more flair. Most of the mistakes we make in picking our partners, or in losing our partners, are defined not by our own patterns, but the meta-patterns of sex and violence.

Some lucky animals get to do both at the same time.

Let's take me as a warped example. I have slept with several women who were currently in relationships. I am not proud of this fact about myself but, as I've gotten older, fatter, and unhealthier, this doesn't really happen anymore and I seem to have gained some perspective. It turns out that opportunistic mating behaviors are fairly common in nature, and it was only condoms and random luck that kept me from making those into real reproductive incidents. I was a fairly normal, adult, human male that was given the opportunity to mate without the expenditure of extra calories or responsibilities. This doesn't abdicate any responsibility that I possess for my actions, but it does explain why I felt compelled to do them. Many of our desires and attractions to our mate are programmed into us at a very deep level, and everything built on top of it is always in danger of being unstable. Conflicting tastes, experiences, and cultural influences make it nearly an impossible task to identify an efficient decision making process in the procuring and keeping of a potential long term mate. This is why your picker is broken. This is why you can't trust yourself.

But it also means that it's not (entirely) your fault. Sure, you're a selfish bastard who has to constantly remind yourself that you're not the center of the universe, but so does everybody else. The system is chaotic and flawed. Everybody is somebody else's bitch or asshole. We all try not to be, but we just can't help ourselves.


And I find a lot of peace in that fact. We are all just a complex series of vibrating strings pulsating through the cultural ether for a finite, but stupendous adventure. Meaning is to be extracted.

I think I'll start on that chapter tomorrow.


*-Next week's meeting is going to be at 7:30!