Out And Proud, and I don't mean that in a Gay way.

I live in a place that is packed full of Christian Goodness. There are times when it feels like I am stuck in an episode of the Brady Bunch; the other choice is to head out beyond the Flannel Curtain to the outer suburbs, which resembles Shameless.

And the trouble is, in a community this small, you need everyone on side, because there aren't enough people here to have sectarian strife. Except for those tossers in Hobart, we don't need them for anything.

We all have to get along with each other, 'cos if you pissed too many people off your social circle would shrink down to your relatives, and that would make dating and infidelity far more awkward.

But even here, I am finding it hard to be polite about people's religious beliefs. I don't believe in:

1. The Undead Flying Hebrew Construction Worker Who Said to Be Nice, or

2. The Sacred and Unquestionable (in spite of all the nasty shit he did in the Hadith) Prophet Mohammet with the Flying Horse, or,

3. Moses of the Profound and Notable Absence from the Historical and Archaeological Record.

And as I write this, I am actually feeling really creeped out to be criticizing these Abrahamic faiths even so far. That is probably because, until recent times, the Terrifying Faithful could kill you in Very Nasty Ways for even thinking such things.

Well, here goes. I am outing myself.

I don't believe in the Supernatural, and that goes for any and all Gods, Demons, Ghouls, Angels, Pixies, Reiki, Crystal healing, Spirit Guides, the Entire Hindu Pantheon, all 40, 000 of them or so.

I Believe that things happen because space, time, energy and matter interact with each other in very complex, but ultimately knowable ways.

And I believe that I am a part of that, for as long as my matter is so arranged that the energy of the universe, made available in my body as it breaks down complex molecules and reacts them exothermically with oxygen, powers the matter that is my body to wander about thinking, eating and on rare occasions when the opportunity presents itself, shagging.

I believe that I am a piece of carbon based Darwinian life, and i am extraordinarily grateful to exist, in light of the odds against me being born and the ease with which my body can cease to function.

I am seriously fucking grateful to the universe for my consciousness, not because it is an eternal Soul, but because it is an ephemeral Effect, as the prism of the physical brain 'refracts' the energy of sunlight stored in my food, and shines my consciousness out into the slightly warm almost-nothingness that is the great expanse of space, for just a very little while.

My thanks for this are deeper than can be expressed by saying thank-you to a god that I have made in my own image. I exist, for now. So do you. For now.

And as Now is all we have, lets make it a damned good Now, with as much kindness and charity and good engineering and splendid music as possible.

If you love someone, I don't mind how, so long as everyone has a nice time and no-one catches anything nasty. If you are into weird games, like S+M or Rugby Leauge, you're welcome to it, just wear protective equipment, and try not to dislocate anything.

All my love, peoples. Have a Blast.

B.

The Urge to get High

One of the things that I cannot find in the literature about young people and substance abuse is an acknowledgement that people -and I mean all of us- have at some stage, wanted to get loaded.

I'm not talking about two glasses of bubbly after work, I mean that feeling, after 40 hours in an office, where your threshold of self restraint has been busted like a banner gets busted when a football team runs through it. You want excess of SOMETHING.

Booze, Sex, downhill Skiing, it doesn't matter a damn how you get there, you just need the dopamine.

It's that cranky combination of claustrophobia, habituation to the smell in the office air conditioning, physical jitteryness from lots of inactivity and caffeine, sexual frustration and mental fatigue. And, Boredom.

Capitalised, proper-noun, weapons-grade Boredom of the ordinary kind, refined in the workplace into something that can etch glass. Its as bad as being back in high school.

It was fucking dull to be a teenager, as I recall, if you weren't beautiful, sporty and/or had parents that could (and) would dress you in a way that wasn't socially debilitating.

My nickname, for example, was Sargent Obesity because I wore so many clothes from Surplus stores and was, indeed, a proper fat bastard.

It was shit. I found my way through it later in life by loosing 30Kg and buying some proper fucking clothes as soon as I was free of the family home and financially able, but more importantly I came across ideas that inspired me and made me feel that life was worth living.

That, and I finally got laid.

The next guy that tells me that high-school was the best time of his life is going to have me tell him that he is either terribly sad, or was very, very lucky, in addition to the standard Go Fuck Yourself that will accompany either option.

Young people need something to believe in and something useful to do. Until we can give them one or both, I am not going to bitch about it if they smoke a bit of weed and listen to heavy music. Really, this is a symptom, and unless we have something to offer I cannot bring myself to feel overly righteous and/or scandalised.

In fact, I might just ask them for a joint, if they have one going spare.