Barfly

I shut my eyes for a while, was tired anyway, been living for a long time, felt long sometimes and at others it felt like a dream that had only lasted a few hours. I would turn back into dust in a few years time, or a hundred, and I tried to stop identifying too much with my current human state, the body and the costume I was inhabiting just now. I met God in a bar one time, one of these annoying confident people who never ran out of things to say, and kept looking at me like what’s wrong with you you’ve got an angry and bored looking face, why don’t you cheer up, but he wasn’t that smart as he couldn’t see inside me, see that I was glowing and radiant, you just had to look harder.

I tried to shut off, was just wanting a quiet smoke and a beer and he was sort of killing my mojo but you had to be compassionate, he was like this because of his circumstances and external factors, so they said, but I couldn’t help but thinking he was just a dick. “One day you die, and all you leave behind is a rotting corpse that you’d been busy protecting and idolising your whole life eh.” The words stuck in my head in amongst all the other drivel, and I said, what, you mean we shouldn’t protect ourselves, or we should idolise other people? Neither, he replied, just that if you’ve lived your life like that you’ve done it wrong, you’re singling yourself out and prioritising yourself in a selfish and egotistical way. You mean we should prioritise others and act as if we’re all one, everyone and everything in the universe, on the same level and equally worthy of love and compassion? I didn’t really know where that had come from, somewhere in the reserve bits of the brain we don’t usually have access to unless we’re dreaming or smoking salvia. Yes, he replied, and walked off into the night, except it was the afternoon.