Hope

When Purplemary54 tagged me to do a post on hope as part of the blog relay for hope, I thought, ‘There’s no hope.’  Someone called me a nihilist.  I looked it up.  I’m dark but I’m not a nihilist.  Why does a nine year old write a story called “Sometimes I want to die?”  The story wasn’t about my wanting to die, it was about the existence of good and evil forces and flirting with the idea of examining death, so there.

The universe is so vast that no one really understands it.  Scientists and philosophers say it.  I like to imagine that this fact combined with the fact that you don’t use a third of your brain means that there’s untapped magical power somewhere in your tiny little head.

Hope hides in the corners of that place in my brain that directs my feet while my stupid mouth blathers on about how everything needs to be annihilated.  I’ve realized how much I’ve accomplished toward a goal when I stop running my mouth.  I’ve been moving toward it the whole time.  But my mouth complains that there isn’t any payoff for all that work. The payoff is being involved in the process, observing and absorbing my environment with everything about me open; this way I can be satisfied by separating from the idea that I’m supposed to get some packaged notion after completing my goals.

While I’m writing this I’m trying to figure out how to sustain this idea. I have a job, but need to find another one because in December the gallery closes for three months and I don’t know if I’ll be called back.  I had better find some goddamned hope from somewhere so that I’m not motivated by fear and desperation, which everyone can smell on you.

I want to demonstrate my hope on a larger scale.  Hope for the world, for the country for the people – that’s where I falter.  I was told that it starts with me. Me, I like sharing ideas in writing. I’d like to plant the seeds of the idea that money is bullshit, and that we’re buying up all this stuff and contributing to our own demise and we have no idea really.  That’s why I don’t get excited by any candidates under this economic model, at all!  I hope that if the right people get that idea, some new economic model can be constructed with elements of a new ideology coming from many different places in the world.

But I really have to battle my so-called nihilistic views when it comes to supporting this idea because at the rate we’re going with our greedy little selves, sometimes I think maybe the earth is just toilet paper, here for us to use up to wipe our asses until it’s all gone.

This assignment asks me to ask someone else to write on Hope.  I’ll ask Miss Four Eyes because she said facetiously that she sounded like the hipster version of Pollyana when talking about her sweet little dog, and in general, Miss Four Eyes is wry and hilarious.  Feel free to decline but if you should take the assignment, here are the instructions:

Step 1: Write a blog post about hope & publish it on your blog.
Step 2: Invite one (or more!) bloggers to do the same.
Step 3: Link to the person who recruited you (me, in this case) at the top of the post, and the people you’re recruiting at the bottom of the post.