these circuits we run

I had to go home for the weekend - only Saturday night into Sunday afternoon. I was required to cover the regular pianist, as she and her husband were taking a month mission trip to visit their daughter and her husband in Mozambique, who are staying there for a couple of years. It was strange, being back at a place in which I had practically grown up, seeing people that had watched me grow and mature...and now a barrier stood between us, an insurmountable wall of ideological difference, and most of them didn't even know it.

My mother has only told a few select people at my church about my present heresy: the pastor's wife, a prominent woman in the church named Rachel, and the pianist. Still, it feels like a mean trick to play on the congregation. Even though I do not practice that religion, I do respect the observation of religious practice. It was like I had willingly agreed to that position under false pretenses (to those who did not know that I no longer believed).

I am becoming increasingly worried about my grandmother, and the reasons are twofold. First is that her blood pressure is ridiculous. Evidently sometime last week the doctor recorded her as being 234 over 114 - practically a walking stroke. And yet her body persists! She is waiting to die - waiting - and all that can be done is observe the process. The second reason is that I fear that my relatives are plotting something nefarious. They have gone beyond the usual attempts at insinuating that she is losing her mind, or trying to gain control over her and the dispersement of her estate. Evidently one of them (I shall not name who) went into her house while she was away and went through her records, checking on how much money she had in the bank. Later this individual claimed that this information was accessed online, that 'you can look up anyone's info online' and other such bullshit. What the fuck is wrong with them?

I have been trying to develop a solid ethic and religion upon which to rely, an authentic one that does not feel like mere lip synching to some old great thinker. So far I have only come up with a bare bones ideology (and its quite Nietzchean, I suppose) that still somehow manages to include the existence of divinity. For all my attempts at being logical I am unwilling to forsake the belief in deity. So be it.

I find myself becoming more and more disgusted with the general notion of people at which I have arrived: weak, self-serving, hypocritical, foolish, dense, short-sighted, trivial, and ultimately pointless. At the same time, I cannot help but sincerely believe that most people have the potential for value - maybe not greatness, but of at least being worthwhile.

However, we are blinded by the bones of our ancestors. The works they have wrought have been abused, and their original purpose has been forgotten. Baudrillard discusses a theory of reality wherein the original reality is imitated, perverted, and then replaced by the simulacrum reality that originally only represented it. Such is it with any device that people have conceived to aid in their lives - its use has corrupted into something degenerative.