*heavy sigh*

I know this isn't an original statement.. I'm not the first person to think it or say it or write about it, but isn't it scary that religion is so nessesary to comfort us about the fucked up ways we're living our lives?

How do we justify this rat race we're all participating in? How to we justify that we're all being played like a fiddle by people who stand to benefit from us believing that it's our time to be workerbees and that we should do our best for the people in charge, so we can earn a place in heaven where we can relax by a stream or spend time with our families and friends. How do we justify sitting on our asses for 10 hours a day and clicking a mouse and pretending that life is going to just go on and on and on, and how do we justify that we are giving our lives up to make someone else rich? How do we justify that to OURSELVES? Here we are, each and every one of us, with blood in our veins and air in our lungs, pretending that the average age to die, which is 63 years old, is either SOOO FAR AWAY or is not going to happen to us. I wish it were true. I wish all of my family and all of my friends would turn out to be the lucky ones that live to be much older, but at the same time I am a little sick of lying to myself. My life is just about half over right now. OKAY, yes, It's POSSIBLE I could live longer. Possible but not probable.

Here are some of the leading causes of cancer:

STRESS: Like when you listen to your bosses scream at each other all day. Like when you're scared of getting canned. Like when you're worried about money. Like when you feel guilty about all the things you're not doing, like visiting family. Like when you're stuck in rush hour. Like when you feel bad that you're eating another filet-a-fish from McDonald's. Like when you realize that you don't have time to work in your garden, trim the hedges, do the dish, wash clothes, AND watch desperate housewives.

FREE RADICALS: From carbonated beverages, from hydroginated oils, from almost every food that has been processed like french fries or donuts or tortilla chips. Free radicals occur whenever we eat any food, but foods with antioxidants will neutralize the free radicals before they can do much damage. Every time you choose to eat a meal that has no vegetables or fruits or unprocessed grains you are bombarding your system with little destroying agents. Cancer causing agents. Coney dogs taste great, but you better throw in a side salad. Seriously. Lettuce isn't just for rabbits anymore... even nasty ass iceburg lettuce has a healthy dose of antioxidants.

ELECTROMAGNETIC ENERGY and WIRELESS DEVICES: Guess what? The same wirless technology that is being used to make us faster and more efficient rats on our wheels is also cooking our fucking brain. Do you know how many people are developing brain cancer now as oppose to 50 years ago? Many people say it's increases as much as 500 percent in the past half decade. Why? SERIOUSLY, Cell phones, wireless internet, wireless mouses, bluetooth, remote controls, GIANT ELECTRICAL TOWERS everyfuckingware, car alarms, home alarms, sattilites... if you could pick up all of the action going on around you, you'd freak the hell out. Well I think our bodies are picking it up, and our cells are freaking the hell out. X-RAY techs have been wearing protective clothing for YEARS because it's a well known peice of scientific knowlege that these things are not harmless. You might want to think about this before you get that new star-treck looking wireless earpiece. DO YOU WANT IT BEAMED TO YOUR HEAD, SCOTTY?!

ENVIROMENTAL TOXINS: Meaning, smog, morning commute clouds, water laced with harmful chemicals and cholrine to neutralize the shit and everything else that people flush down their drains. The shit, actually, is the least scary... I'd be more scared of the chemicals we are washing our clothes and hair and dishes in.

MY whole point of this cancer tangent is this: we don't have long here anyway, so do you really want to use your time here making a fortune for someone else? WE DON'T GET TO LIVE THAT LONG!! The older I get the better a trailor in the woods sounds. I wish I could grow my own food, raise some chickens, notice when the treese start to lose their leaves for the summer and know that when my muscles ache it came from an honest day's work instead of from some rougue chemical additive to to the chicken nuggets that is affecting my body differently than it affected the monkeys in the labratory tests.

How is it that we just go on like this? You know what I tell myself sometimes? It's important to work hard while we're here, and someday we're going to have a chance to rest.. in heaven... we will be with family. We will laugh. We will eat good food and share it with friends. We will sing together, we'll dance together, we'll chase firefiles. We will hear the bullfrogs croaking again. We will see the stars sparkling in the sky. The little kids will be running and laughing and the bigger kids will be hanging from the trees. The adults will be outside too, in shorts and tee shirts with tall glasses of lemonade. Someone will be playing the guitar. Maybe Jesus. I can see him jamming out... long hair blowing back, birkenstocks on.... the party will go long into the night, and we will praise Jesus over and over because he is the one that saved us from ourselves.. saved us from the horrors of our lives...

and other times I feel like this, how I feel right now, and I want to cry, because life could actually be like that if we would all lay down the headsets and the handcuffs and the books about how to chase the cheese - if we could all just make our earth a little more like heaven, we would come a lot closer to loving our lives and maybe lasting more than 63 years. If only we could start over...

I don't want to wait until heaven to laugh again, and I don't want to keep telling myself that it's right to live in a way that creates so little joy. I want to seek out the bullfrogs, seek out my friends, and slow down long enough to watch the leaves fall from the sky.