The Void—Living On The Edge

Bank Of Bad Habits
Now let me tell you about the 7 Deadly Sins:
1. Pride…Thou shalt not have pride in thy neighbor.
2. Coveting…Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.
3. Lust…Thou shalt not lust after his neighbor’s wife.
4. Anger…Do not be angry with your neighbor’s wife.
5. Gluttony…Do not eat thy neighbor’s wife’s ……..popcorn.
6. Envy…Do not envy your neighbor’s wife.
7. Sloth…Do not be a slob.
And the eighth deadly sin is…………PIZZA!

Flattened Angles And Deflated Values
Waianae Beach

I needed to get away from Babbet. She was driving me crazy. The
monotonous beach life was starting to get to me too. I decided to take my book and go to a different beach. It wasn’t much different than Keaau, but it was seven miles down the highway. After getting a ride there, I sat under a shaded picnic table and took my book and my journal out from my bag. I was stagnating, but writing helped.

I had been feeling different for quite some time now. It was almost as if I had been living in some kind of vacuum. I was reading Sartre, but his book was awfully dense, and there wasn’t anybody around to talk with about it. There wasn’t anything to measure time against. The weather wasn’t any help. It was always the same. Eat, sleep, and read, day in, and day out. I felt like I was living close to the edge. No, that wasn’t the right word. I felt like I lived close to the void, maybe the edge of it. Oh, well, whatever! Most people didn’t even know there was a void. Living on the beach, though, kept me in tune with it.

Social fillers and addictions kept the void away. Bad habits—alcohol,
cigarettes, television, etc.—kept the void at a distance. With every
addiction came an entourage of social fillers. Take for example
smoking. Better yet, take smoking back in the Victorian era; it was a more celebrated addiction back then. Houses had special smoking rooms. There was a time and place for lighting up. Smoking good tobacco was a “gentleman’s right.” High culture—fine food, fine clothing, fine tobacco, etc.—came layered in levels of richness. In Victorian times, you didn’t just have a cigarette; you had a multi-leveled smoking experience. Every fabricated satisfaction, then and now, added angles to the void and those angles insulated the person from the void.

On the most basic of levels, it was all about desire, and what
motivates desire. The more desires, the more angles, the more angles, the more distant the void. It was only when angles flattened out, when values deflated, when desires lost their means for satisfaction that a person began to feel the presence of the void. A sure fire way to bring about that “presence,” was to experience the death of a loved one, or perhaps become diagnosed with an irreversible illness. Tragedy flat-lined most angles, and evaporated all fillers. When everything else went flat, the void got exposed. Living on the beach as I was, with few social fillers at hand, I was becoming all to conscious of the void, uncomfortably conscious.