Nietzsche’s painting

For a long time it hurt so much to be me that I hated everything I did. I hated my life because I was the star, I hated my wife for not hating me. It was a long sucky false dawn that finally began to go away. But I still get blue sometimes…
I had an OK day today. I got up, went to the track on my home made bike. It works OK now, it just doesn’t feel right. My other bike fit me like a glove, fit me so well that when I buy a bike again I will probably get another Trek 7000. (I think I said that it was a 7500 earlier. No, just the 7000.) So, it doesn’t feel right. Now wrong mind you, just not right. Maybe the best way to say it is: on the Frankenbike, you don’t every enjoy ridding so much that you forget you are on a bike.
I worked out hard, really pushing it and making hurt. I ran a bit harder than I normally do. I normally jog at a nice ground eating speed that doesn’t wind me.) Today I was really annoyed with my lieutenant so I outran him for 2 miles.
I came home, showered, and ate breakfast. My is more proof of the theory that women with double first names (Like Mary Lou, for instance) make great pancakes. I drove my pleasantly passionless car to work and started my day.
I got an email that I didn’t go to a briefing that I didn’t get an email for. This sets into a chain of events that will finish with my commander getting a copy of the email that says I missed a mandatory formation that had been scheduled for me. I wouldn’t get in trouble for this since the briefing was scheduled without telling me, but its very important that the people who will get the call from the commander about me are NOT surprised by this. So I tell them.
I moved around 1600 gallons of gas, 150 of diesel, and answered the phone. I helped an absent minded tech-sergeant remember how to open a valve. I emptied a bowser. (A bowser is a big flat barrel on wheels that we use to catch fuel when we have more than we can catch in a bucket but less than is really worth getting a truck for.) I figured out a problem that was stumping a sergeant.
I learned why the auto cut off kicks in to early, and why our pumps seem to be slow, why we receive fuel the way we do, and a new way that a guy who is an idiot is an idiot. I read my Bible over lunch (PB & J). All in all it was a pretty good day.
But I came home frazzled and pissy for some reason. My adorable daughter irritates the daylights out me. My gorgeous wife seems annoying. I just want everyone to shut up and leave me alone. I’ve found the only cure is to put off anything important and play some good music. It has to be the right kind of music. Music that makes you feel or see a beautiful darkness. Its the kind of music that makes you think of smoky a club, strong tall women in long black dresses dancing with wiry men inked in rich, full sleeve tattoos. Its the kind of music that makes you see weak sunlight, more orange than gold, shining of off silver roofs of sky high roofs on careworn brick towers.
Somehow when I close my eyes and listen Regina Spektor’s soaring voice, Bjorks haunting whisper-singing, or Debussy mad ethereal vision it takes away that angst. Nietzsche was so right. God is not, in fact, dead (though Nietzsche is), butt Nietzsche had much more to say than that quote. He said that life is absurd and it takes courage to admit that. Life is absurd.
But he saw where the pond’s ripples where going. He saw nihilism becoming the order of the day and warned against it. He believed that while life was absurd it was not nearly pointless. He argued passionately that despite the fact that religion was big lie, life still had a point. Since the things you were handed by life were absurd your job wasn’t to find an imaginary order, it was to take the random bits and make them into art.
The purpose of the individual life, according to Nietzsche, was to become art. He said the moral and courageous man faced the madness of life manfully and attempted to make is life art. He warned us to the coming man of the future, who no longer held captive by fear of the church thought that life was about destroying the art of others rather than producing his own art.
Somehow listening to Bjork, Spektor, Debussy, Wagner, Prokofiev, and the Cure makes me believe in Nietzsche’s art theory. It makes me want to ride my crappy bike to work instead of take my car till I can get a real bike, because ridding my bike to work is part of the art that is my life, even when the bike sucks. It makes me want to be art again when the world wants me to be a product.