John Prine, you wrote my life - day 5

Years ago, I had a themeless website where I collected and recorded things that interested me.  I don't know what became of most of the stuff, but one thing I managed to save was a series of posts I wrote that I titled: "John Prine, You Wrote My Life."

In honor of John and in hopes that he recovers fully from covid-19 and is released from the hospital soon, I'm going to post here one chapter a day from that writing, along with a YouTube clip of John singing the song that inspired it (as long as a YouTube clip exists of it).

I have no doubt John's songs have written millions of folks' experiences.  These are mine.

John Prine, You Wrote My Life

a life unstuck in time (to borrow a phrase from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr),

so this story can go on and on in dis-order, added to at any time the whim (or need) arises

Chapter 5

Flashback Blues©

---John Prine

Photographs show the laughs
Recorded in between the bad times
Happy sailors dancing on a sinking ship
Cloudy skies and dead fruit flies
Waving goodbye with tears in my eyes
Well, sure I made it, but ya know it was a hell of a trip

What on Earth are they feeding hogs to make frying bacon smell like aluminum? Should I be eating this stuff? Okay, maybe that was an easy one. But there are lots of easy questions that we never think about our answers to - they're automatic.

Questions are answered for you before you ever have the opportunity to ask them. From the moment of your birth, someone is telling you who you are, and what the world is like. You don't need to ever even formulate a question. They give you a name, tell you who you are and how you look, and describe the world to you, just the way they see it. They even tell you what you see, and then what to think about it. If you ever get around to asking any questions, you've already got an immutable basis to filter your query through. You'll never know what the world really is from your own point of view.

Some of us have a harder time with that than others. And our lives are really not something most people can understand. They think we need to be fixed. Drugged if necessary. We're supposed to be happy, or at least content. At the very least, we're not supposed to make other people uncomfortable by calling into question the validity of their contentment.

I don't think we have to justify or modify our 'abnormal' lives, but the pressure to do so is pretty intense. Still, most of life for most everyone consists of day after day of meaninglessness - or at least unknown meaning. That's why having families and religion are as popular as they are. Something to pretend is a reason. And for those of us who can't quit asking if the reasons are real or good enough, life can simply fluctuate between boredom and extreme depression. For some, it is simply too painful. And death seems preferable. Sometimes, I still think it would be. I tried to go there once. Maybe someday I'll realize that that's the key to the knowledge of the infinite, and I'll try to go there again. But for now, it seems like I have something else to do, and it sometimes seems like that something else is to obtain that knowledge this side of death.

"What Granny did was to get you out of this old room." It's not important who said that to me. People are in our lives for a reason. Not a physical reason - but a spiritual one. I had the thought at one time that my father and brother, who both killed themselves as young men, had been here to bring me to a certain point along the journey and then abandon me in order to provide the catalyst to hurl me fully into the 3rd dimension, behind the veil of forgetfulness - otherwise, I never would have come. Then I began to see it like this: spirit itself is hurled behind the veil, into the "lower" dimensions, and our lives are how it "talks about" that condition - physical manifestations of the acts of spirit. So, my father and brother didn't do anything to lead me anywhere. They, like everyone else here, were manifestations of spirit casting itself down from heaven. And in this fractal, this enactment of it, I was that part of spirit which was cast down. They played the role of God to my Lucifer. The eternal archetypal story, repeated infinitely in infinite ways.

There is a return in all those myths. A resurrection, an ascension, a rebirth. Looking forward to it, if that's the play.

Unfortunately, those questions that we never have the opportunity to answer for ourselves include a description of the archetypal condition. Spirit casting spirit out of heaven? How else are you gonna know what's beyond your walls if you don't cast at least a piece of yourself out? Go. Who will go to the farthest, darkest corners of creation, and tell me what you find there? Come back with the knowledge, and I will be richer in knowledge than I am now. Of course there's the risk. That you'll forget where you came from. Why you left. And you might get lonely. You might miss that part of you left behind. You might feel lost. And in your pain and weariness, you might start to believe you were thrown out.

We're all living the same life. There's only one. With infinite permutations - variations in the script.

We have to stop judging other people's scripts. And that means we stop trying to fix or change or direct them. We just need to respect them, accept them, and thank them for collecting their information about what's out there in creation. We all go back to the source with our trip mementos. We better start thanking the people whose lives disgust us - thank them for taking that part in the play so we didn't have to. We're all part of the same play. And anything we can do to make another person's part suck a little less makes the whole play suck a little less.