"I have an existential map.  It has 'you are here' written all over it."

-Stephen Wright

I used to have a friend that would tell me 'ignorance is bliss'.  He would then go on to describe his ideal circumstance in being blissfully ignorant, painting a picture of himself nearly comatose in a wheelchair on the front lawn of his home, watching the sprinkler go back and forth with unending interest as he lay drooling on himself.  At the time  we both thought that we were pretty smart people.  Quoting books and reciting dry comedy, trying to one-up eachother with the newest record we had found, making sure to learn all the lyrics before showing it off.  We were like sponges.  Little asshole know-it-all sponges.  The funny part about being a know-it-all is that you don't realize how naive you really are.  You don't realize how much more there is to experience.  You just go on thinking the way you do, in your own little world.  With this I don't mean that we weren't open to experience.  But what happens is that you start to get so engrained in patterns of thinking that you tend to not look beyond those views.  Content with what you know.  Comfortable.  Confident.  For example, we used to be so angry at organized religion.  Not so much the religion itself but the people and their dogmas.  Especially people who claimed and preached a particular religion. They who looked down their noses at people who were not like themselves, and then had the audacity to not follow their own convictions.  The comedy of it all is that we were just as hypocritical as they.  And we secretly looked down our noses at them.  On a side note, this reminds me of something my friend Ashley once said to me:

"We all jerk off about how smart we are sometimes without there ever really being anything sexy about the idea."

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that we were and still are very ignorant.  The difference between the me of yesterday and myself of today is that I realize it.   I could never begin to imagine the scope, but that doesn't mean I don't know it's there.  I don't think there is such a thing as pure ignorance, so it must not be the key to bliss.  Even my dog has memory.  And I'm assuming that even at the level of retardation described above, one must be as egocentric as an infant, but also must know the displeasure of yearning for the unattainable. Even if those feelings can't be formulated into a way we can understand. (Why does the sprinkler go back and forth all day long?)

What about love?  Plato said that Love is nothing but the longing, and once you've attained it, it is no longer love.  I dunno.  Zen?  Meditation?  Enlightenment?  It's hard to maintain your composure when an SUV cuts off your compact on the highway.  And unless I want to cut all ties to everything and everyone I know and hide away in the jungle (where I don't have to pay property taxes), I can't find these things very functional.  Wait, forget everything I just said.  I just found bliss.  It involved a drive-thru, sit-com reruns and Tetris.  And a nap.

Goodnight.