I was having difficulty concentrating lately until I got a delivery from my marijuana provider, who is also a dairy farmer. It was a beautiful sight to behold: three dozen eggs of all sizes and colors. It was time to get down to some serious egg eating, and after five consecutive egg meals I realized I had my focus back. Some of you might think it strange to eat so many consecutive dishes made from the same basic ingredient, but let me tell you: I have seen egg ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, watched eggs glitter near the Tannhauser Gate … whoa, it seems that this concentration thing is a little more complicated than I thought.
As delicious as this ovum fest was, that’s not what I want to talk to you about. It’s the lesson I learned from letting myself make a long-term commitment to one food. Eggs are large, they contain multitudes. But for our purposes here, they simply make for a very tasty metaphor. It’s always been obvious that the more concentration you put into anything, the richer the return, but the trick to the big payoff is going deep. Be consumed as you consume -- love what you put in your mouth and try to put it in as many different ways as you can. We don’t want things to just occupy us, but rather we want to be preoccupied by whatever comes our way. If we let ourselves be smitten, there is much less chance we’ll smite. Live your life like this in all your pursuits, allow controlled obsession whenever you can, and you’ll have such a great end of times that you’ll wish it wasn’t going to.
In an era of total overspill of everything, we are vulnerable to building our lives on nothing. As a longtime archivist of books, music, and assorted life ephemera, I can tell you these days I feel like I’m drowning in a sea of opportunities. Did you know that there are five books collecting the wit and wisdom of football coach Joe “Joe Pa” Paterno, and you can access them in three different media forms? As of 4:00 pm today, he has at least six nicknames.
We live in the time of too much information. There is such a din and we all want to be heard. I’m excited when someone tells me I’m an idiot because at least I know they’re listening. But more important than the desire to be heard is the need to hear. Our mission in these last days should be the constant search for input. Peak experiences are what we want, but where they are can be a mystery. So keep your mind and all your senses open. The only solution is to focus and fixate, find out what makes you move, then make your move and don’t let go.
We want to let the options life offers get a hold on us, but then we must also get a grip on ourselves. Every schoolboy that acquaints himself with the PlayStation nature of his genitals will at least have some sense of the need for moderation. Life is not all fun and games, but most of the best times are. The time will come, though, when you must achieve that special balance. Hopefully you will experience that epiphanous moment when you finally realize it’s your willy, not a wii, that you’re playing with. The wisdom just lands in your lap, and it’s this wisdom we all need to practice if we want to have the most rewarding end-times experience possible.
All things will be over, but they don’t have to be over easy.