Traditionally, I have a pre-birthday mortality crisis each year, wherein I remember my own mortality and marvel at the passage of time. This is, of course, different from the existential crisis that happens if I think too long about being in this body in this dimension. I haven’t had one in a few years, which I only realized when a gentle wave of slight panic and bewilderment washed over me a few weeks ago. I suppose with all of the death surrounding me over the last few years I was more focused on reacting to others’ mortality instead of my own.

Although my mortality is something I have considered more than probably what would be considered normal or healthy, my understanding of it has changed over time (and time isn’t real either, by the way). What I previously understood as final I now understand is truly infinite, and not in a cheesy, insincere way; my research on the laws of quantum physics and other concepts like non-dualism would support an alternative theory of what death actually is or means. And even if I wasn’t reading all of the scientific, philosophical stuff I don’t think my idea of “death” would remain the same. The lives of my parallel selves that I’ve briefly visited in dream state are varied and interesting: I’m fighting dragons in underwater arenas, I’m backstage at Rick James concerts, I’m a gladiator in a twenty-person battle royale, I’m shopping at farmer’s markets, I’m dancing half-naked in my room to Sade.

So if I’m living all these lives simultaneously, including too the version writing this blog entry, then maybe “death” really is just falling asleep in one dream and waking up somewhere else, like I do every night. And if this self is made up of whatever the other selves are made of, and so are the dimensions the selves are existing in, providing a vehicle for which the Self can experience Itself over and over and over and over again… that is much less scary than the Judgment Day waiting room version that was drilled into my head before.

It follows then that these ideas have colored and deepened my interactions with other people too- myself interacting with a wide variety of my “selves”: the elderly man in the dusty shop on Fairfax who sold me a Turkish rug when I first moved here, who wept and thanked me while giving me the receipt; the sweet barista at the buzzy coffee shop asking where I got my hair cut; a gregarious woman smoking a black and playing cards on the sidewalk; the bassist whose fingers I drunkenly kissed in the club while complaining about the lack of new music; the Uber drivers giving me fortune teller’s advice and explaining their conspiracy theories with me. And yes, even the less savory ones also share this same streak of self.

And there are some less savory ones. The main feature of the crises I experience is just sheer incredulity at how fucked up this dimension can be. And, removing all these scientific/esoteric principles, the (in)corporeal reality seems bleak. Our collective destruction appears assured: triplet hurricanes forming in the Pacific as I write, damning proof of the changing climate; the constant bombing of civilians in Gaza that contribute to those events; the relentless extraction of resources from the Continent feeding the insatiable, parasitic greed of the West; the logging and burning of forests across the planet; and the list goes on and on.

Out of all the dimensions to incarnate on, this one? Really?!

Yes, really, unfortunately or not (I realize too this is also a matter of perspective). Further still I realize that even all of that could just be something I’m telling myself to rationalize the utter absurdity of existence as I’m experiencing it now. It’s a pretty good story- and, as I’ve written previously, everyone has their own personal mythologies.

Whatever the case may be… I think I’m growing up?