side effects of insomnia include:

DEATH

I can never sleep when I know I have to wake up early. Something about knowing I have a finite amount of time to sleep or I may get none at all. It causes anxiety in me which of course keeps me from getting rest and if I wake up in the middle of the night I usually have trouble getting back to bed for that same reason.

Often times I have these dreams where I die. Now from what I was told by the Matrix and Inception, when you die in a dream you wake up. But not me, I stay dead for awhile and experience what I can only describe as oblivion for what seems like forever. I then wake up realizing that one day in the not too distant future, I am destined to die and there is nothing I can do about it. No amount of love, money, or strength can save me from this fate and everything I do, is simply a delay of the inevitable.

It’s a difficult concept, oblivion. Even when we are sleeping our minds are still working. Or when you get blackout drunk or put under for surgery, you wake up with gaps in the story, but there was still a last memory and your current state of mind to hold onto. Oblivion on the other hand, has nothing. It is neither black nor white, cold or hot, frightening or calming. It is nothing. The complete absence of sense, emotion, and consciousness.

It’s funny how most of life is about acquiring things, relationships, and money. And when faced with death it’s about coping with the idea of letting go of everything. It sometimes bums me out that as a professional party thrower, the one event I won’t get to go to is my own funeral. I think (and I know this is morbid), that my funeral would be the best party for me ever thrown simply because it’s real. It’s not about the music or the alcohol, it’s about how you affected peoples lives. I’d want mine to be a celebration, and since everything we do these days is filmed or recorded, it would be like a “Brandons Greatest Hits” Party.

I read a book called the 50th rule wherein it describes the power of fearlessness and how everyones death, no matter what form it takes, is in them from the day they are born. There is no shaking it and the sooner you come to grips with that, the more powerfully you can live your life. I find it interesting because that is usually peoples goal of life: enjoying it. Of course more weight is put upon your actions for those that believe in an afterlife. I always wondered why atheists aren’t completely devoid of morals and ethics, because in their reality, if they don’t get caught doing bad things, there is no consequence… but I digress.

When I wake up from my near death experiences, I try to shake it off and take from it an appreciation of life, that’s it’s finite quality and mysterious ending only serve to make it more valuable and to breathe in every moment.

Fond Visions of the Zombie Apocalypse

It seems that the Zombie Apocalypse has become a regular part of all twenty something conversations. You can’t amble through a house party, coffee house or college campus without overhearing the strategum and theory of the soon to be survivors of the oncoming Z- Day.

We actually fantasize about 99% of the population becoming brainless soulless creatures that have an insatiable craving for live human flesh. Though the rational human would think of this as a bad thing and use adjectives such as “horrible”, “terrifying” or “tragic” we use words like “awesome”, “epic” and “sweet.” Why the hell would my peers and I actually look forward and fantasize about something meant to scare the holy hell out of everyone? Because our lives have no meaning. That’s why.

Let us begin our terrible journey into the minds of the 21st century twenty something. It all starts with our grandparents. Our grandparents, the hard working honest people that they were, had to work their asses off. Times were tough for them but there was a sort of system, and that system went: go to school, get good job, stay at job, work your ass off, get married, have children, raise children, retire… watch excessive amounts of jeopardy. After their many years of toil in fields, sewing shops and world war II, they had no time for ridiculousness such as zombies and vampires and pale gay twinkly wanna be vampires. Our parents had a similiar path but they were an ingenious bunch developing computers and microwaves and video game consoles so that THEIR children could have easy, comfortable lives. Then comes us, the ungrateful, self entitled, wasteful, bastard children of the earth. We, in the wake of our parents are in a completely unique time in history. For the first time EVER a person can stay in their room, nay, in their BED for a week and still survive as a functioning member of society. We can run an entire business from a laptop, order in food and order entertainment. Everything is so convenient and ipod and smart phone and microwave easy that the sense of urgency of life ergo survival, which has been ingrained in the human psyche for millennium, is going through death throws.

I spend some days watching reruns… of shows… that I don’t even really like. Seriously. All fuckin day. I sit there watching mildly funny comedies or reality shows, AGAIN. I’ve already seen them. I know how they end. I didn’t even really like them the first time. And yet I sit, beleaguered and barely entertained. Think about the futility and wastefulness of this activity. That’s how little my time, and therefore life is worth.

I truly believe that the day that human beings stopped fearing that they could be eaten by something, God wept. Think about that. The idea of being eaten by something is so far and foreign for human beings now (except for maybe surfers) that we fear nothing, except each other. Something about being afraid of being eaten kept humanity honest, through our ingenuity we have destroyed our hunters and risen above lions, tigers and bears, to the top of the food chain. Add on top of that the fact that the majority of the population eats meat everyday but has never killed their own food, or even seen a dead unpackaged animal that wasn’t road kill. The combination of not being both a hunter or the hunted leaves a gaping hole in our minds. This hole, like so many others, must be filled.

As Tyler Durden aptly put it, our generation has no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. And so what do we do to fill the void? Entertainment. Movies and Video games are multi-billion dollar industries, with digital entertainment growing exponentially. And what do we do in video games? Kill. Enthusiastically and with points. So of course, this being our main source of entertainment, the next step is only logicial. To want to kill things in real life.

HOWEVER! We still have a conscience and don’t want to go to jail or become psychopaths. We want to kill but we don’t want to feel bad about it and since Frodo and the lads killed all the Orcs, our next step of humanoid soulless being that we can kill all the live long day and still sleep soundly at night is…

ZOMBIES!!! Hooray for Zombie Apocalypse! Zombie Apocalypse is a trending topic on twitter 24-7 because it is the answer to our existential uselessness. I can’t remember a day that really really mattered for the life of me. Maybe a job interview but I’ve quit or gotten fired from every job I’ve had so that doesn’t really matter. But when the Zombos arrive EVERYDAY MATTERS!! You can’t sit through reruns when Zombies want to literally eat your ass for lunch! Z-Day allows us to finally be free of the velvet trappings of modern life such as Twitter and marketing. Do you think a $5,000 hand bag has ANY fuckin value in Zombieland?! HELL NO! Know what a $5,000 handbag is in the Apocalypse? A BAG! That’s it! Just a piece of cloth to hold some of your crap. Every day is the big game and we can actually blow the heads off of people without feeling a lick of guilt. Downside? There is a 99% chance that you will become a Zombie but when faced with the alternative… we’ll take it. We’re basically Walking Dead anyways.

FAST CAR GIRLS

I can’t date girls that are into cars. It’s just an incongruous mixture that won’t work out, like oil and water, like southerners and literacy. It’s not that I don’t like some girls that like cars because I do. It’s that I have nothing to offer them. It’s one of those things they expect their fellas to be even more into they are and I could just care less. As they talk about their horsepower and tires I stare blankly praying that they don’t ask what I drive, which they inevitably do. Not only do I not have a car right now but I am not into cars at all. Want to know what I think is a cool car? The Batmobile. ‘Nuff said.

It’s not that I don’t think some cars are cool but I just don’t understand spending a ton of money on a fast car. I understand Bentleys and Phantoms because they are super comfortable and fancy as well as being the obvious status symbol that they are, but Lambos and Ferraris? I mean, what’s the point? “My car can go 160.” Yeah, that would be awesome if you lived in a movie or some type of reality where going 160 is necessary to live, but you don’t, you live in the real world with laws and speed limits and shit. You know how fast your car needs to go? Like 85 MAX. Otherwise you get a speeding ticket then you get a suspended license and then you hire someone else to drive you around in your stupid expensive car with seats for two. It’s not just the luxury cars, it’s rice rockets and stuff too. Unless you are a regular at the track, what is the point? This isn’t fast and the furious. You don’t race for pink slips with Vin Diesel, you’re just sitting in traffic like the rest of us slamming the gas until you get to the next stop light and obnoxiously setting off car alarms in the garages of shopping malls.

I understand hobbies and stuff. I do a lot of weird pointless stuff for fun, I just feel like it’s like having a toy that it’s illegal to play with. So fast car girls, as much as I wish it could work, I guess I’m saying we’re just from different sides of the track.

Young and the Restless

I’m in a funk. Not particularly sad, more irate, which is a peculiar emotion for me. It feels like there is battery acid in my stomach and I keep wanting to jump out of my skin and float away to a happy place like leaving a heavy husk behind me. I blame stress. It’s snuck up on me. I’ve been pretty good at adapting to my life to the boulders that have come thundering down the hill towards me but I feel like it has all caught up. In the last month I’ve gone through a move, a break up, a hostile takeover (initiated by me but stressful nonetheless), starting of a new company, a mountain of work from my new and old company and I still go to bed feeling like I haven’t done enough. I want to submerge myself in water, I’ll decide whether or not to come up for air once I’m down there.