Why am I here?

I don’t mean that in a wake-up-half-drunk-next-to-a-stranger kind of way, either. Although, fumbling clumsily for your shoes under the bed while wadding your balled up underwear into your coat pocket as you search frantically for your keys as quietly as possible so as not to disturb the unidentified naked, tattooed human snoring obliviously on as you desperately mouth a typical refrain of the Morning After Prayer: “Please God, if you let my car be outside and help me find my way home I’LL NEVER DRINK AGAIN,” is a great time to ask that question, too.

I mean it on a deeper existential level. (“Existential,” for those of you, like me, who do not know what that word means unless you crack open your Random House and find it alphabetically in the ‘E’s’, means “Of, pertaining to, or characteristic of existentialism.” So. Phew. Glad to have cleared that up for you. (Don’t you just fucking hate definitions like that? I mean, what a goddamn waste of all of our time. (Which reminds me of an experience I had in elementary school. I must have been in second grade which, I think, made me eight. (Or four, if I was Doogie Howser. (I wasn’t.)) While writing a paper I asked my father, “How do you spell ‘disease’?” I knew it started with a ‘d,’ but I wasn’t sure if it was desease, decease or the much more correct disease. So, like any child in distress, (or ‘destress,’ if you’re eight), I asked my father. And you know what he told me? “Look it up.” It was at that moment that I began to despise, (dispise), the dictionary. Because looking through all the words that start with “de” and all the words that start with “di” in the Merriam Webster that we had back in the day, (It was the HEFTY dictionary! The kind in which the letters of the alphabet were segmented by the gold-leaf thumb tabs in an effort to reduce your search time through that Guttenberg-esque-sized tome. (What I mean by that, boys and girls, is that our dictionary when I was a child was as large as one of the original Guttenberg Bibles, printed in the 1500s by Steve Guttenberg. (Just kidding. Steven Guttenberg was the star of such hits in the 1980’s as “Police Academy,” “Cocoon,” and “Three Men and a Baby.” I’m referring to the man who invented the printing press. (The more I think about it, I think the man who invented the printing press spelled his name “Gutenberg.” I should look that up. (Yep. It’s Gutenberg. Johannes Gutenberg. And since he died in 1468, I am going to go out on a limb and surmise that he invented the printing press a litte bit before 1500. (Gutenberg Bible, n, an edition of the Vulgate (I am NOT looking up “Vulgate” for anyone, but based on my extensive education in word etymology, I assume that it has something to do with a vagina) printed at Mainz before 1456, ascribed to Gutenberg and others: probably the first large book printed with movable type.)))))), not out of curiousity but because your sadistic father wants to HELP YOU LEARN not by providing you with an answer but by forcing you to wade through the entirety of the English language to figure out how to spell ONE WORD out of literally dozens and dozens that you had to write for your paper on insects. (ensects.) It is a book of DEFINITIONS, Father, not a SPELLING book! (In retrospect, it is possible that my father was illiterate and his refusal to help me spell “disease” was all part of an elaborate (ilaborate) plan of his to hide his inability to read, a plan that involved surrounding himself with Will & Ariel Durant history books, encyclopedias, and dictionaries, and then telling all of his children to go “look it up” whenever they had a question about anything.) In short, existentialism is “a philosophical movement, esp. of the 20th century, that stresses the individual’s position as a self-determining agent responsible for his or her own choices.”)))

I don’t want to list all my faults, because this is a blog and not my Morning Mantra, (“Good morning, Laurie, you worthless piece of shit. Try not to do anything stupid today, make any irretrievable mistakes or unduly piss anyone off. And stop stalking Rosanne Cash on Twitter. I’m pretty sure she’s sick of it.”) (I generally fail at abiding by that mantra by my first tweet, which tends to shatter all four points in one fell swoop.), but I don’t possess a lot of the things that I imagine a grounded, normal person would have. I am not especially close to my family. I don’t have any children or a significant other. Hell, I don’t even have an insignificant other. I don’t volunteer with any charities. And, not only do I not belong to a church, I don’t even believe in the endogenous spiritually that emanates from within them.

Editor’s note: Okay. Let’s all just take a step back here. Laurie, go get a cup of coffee and let the adults talk. Thank you all that are struggling to read this. If it makes you feel any better I am, too. I am a horrible editor. I am unable to focus, have a very weak educational background, and I am drunk. So very, very drunk. I may have to resign, post my resume on LinkdIn and get a job working for Yahoo!News. That being said, I do know that I haven’t made this essay easy for you, so I greatly appreciate the time and effort you have spent here today trying to understand it. I know that you have better things to do. (I just heard someone’s laundry timer go off. It’s best to get those clothes out of the dryer while they’re still warm. Fewer wrinkles to iron out.) I want to apologize for Laurie’s frantic abuse of parenthetical phrases and sentence structure, not to mention her gratuitous overuse of ginormous words. She means well. I think tonight she is trying to be the Theonious Monk of essayists. And, just like that famous jazz musician when he sat down in front of a piano, she is mangling the shit out this essay while imagining that it is dripping off of her fingers like honey. A couple of hours ago she was speaking like a normal person. But, now that she’s opened the dictionary to the ‘E’s’, she needs to embellish her eloquence with elongated enunciation. GODDAMMIT THAT’S IT, I’M SHUTTING THE DICTIONARY.

Ah, that’s good coffee!

So, my point being, I imagine that there are dozens of things (or pills) that people do (or pop) each day to keep from mentally spinning straight off this big blue marble into the infinite chasm of space. They focus on their children, for one. After all, when you’re choking over noxious diapers or worried whether or not your teenager has discovered what “sexting” is and, if so, if they will teach you how to do it, do you really have all that much time to sit around wondering why you’re here? The answer is in their expectant, upturned faces as you regurgitate food into their gullets. (Since I have no children of my own, it is possible that I am confusing the feeding habits of human offspring with that of the red-breasted robin. But, I think those of you with children get what I’m trying to say.)

Editor’s note: Just nod your heads yes.

I think it’s easy to get spooked by the enormity of the universe, by the breadth of history as it rolls over us from our ancestors’ time like an infinite tsunami that will never reach the shore. And it is extremely easy to breathe in that icy cold hiccup of anxiety-riddled truth, even if you have children: In the grand scheme of things, I really don’t matter.

So, maybe the best thing to do, when it occurs to you that you’re neither finding the cure for cancer or solving the world’s financial crisis nor are you writing the perfect song which seven billion people will love and sing in unison in perfect harmony, which causes the world to vibrate at a higher frequency which, in turn, magically dissipates all the excess carbon dioxide stored up CO2 in our atmosphere, resulting in you being the first singer/songwriter to simultaneously win the Nobel Peace Prize AND the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for having solved Global Climate Change, (while receiving the Grammy for Record of the Year. But, interestingly enough, not Song of the Year. Go figure. The Grammys are fucking weird like that.), maybe the best thing to do when that frightening realization hits you is to just take a deep breath and exhale.

Sometimes, all we can do is keep our head down, take little steps, and stop jumping against the screendoor of life like an anxiety-riddled Jack Terrier. Sometimes, we have to admit that, no matter how much money we have or how comfortable we are with the size and girth of our penis, someone is going to say something that makes us feel insignificant and small. (Obviously, I’m speaking for the men in the house there. And some of the ladies.) Sometimes, all we can do is admit that we can’t prevent stupid things from happening just because we scream and yell at the stupid people to stop doing stupid things with their stupid faces. Sometimes, we have to admit that, sometimes, that smile you shared with the cashier at the grocery store is going to be the best thing about an otherwise shitty day. Sometimes, talking about that crazy woman who eats toilet paper on that one tv show with the one co-worker with bad skin and a lazy eye who also just happens to be racist to the core is the best conversation you’re going to have all day. And sometimes we don’t even get that. Sometimes, we have to go on living even after we find out we’ve been betrayed, or disrespected, or treated unjustly, or we’ve been shattered emotionally.  And it’s a life filled with uncertainty and violence and cruelty and selfishness and pain. And it’s hard to find a purpose in life when everything sucks and there’s nothing good at the movies and Modern Family is in reruns.

And that’s when you take a deep breath and exhale. And it suddenly occurs to you that finding your center in the middle of THAT is your purpose in life. Everything else is garnish.

Until you wake up half-drunk next to someone who’s name might be…? Kelsey? Kelly? At that point, feel free to ask, “Why the hell am I here?”

And really mean it this time.