Life is Strange

I have learned, I guess over the centuries, to take life as it comes and do the best
with what I have got. There is a lot going on in the world. I watch the news and I see the
negative side of everything, very little positive information in the news any more. Politics
is even worse. So much mudslinging makes watching campaign commercials mentally
painful.
I know where the negativity comes from and why it is so focused on in life. I have
learned that people are driven by the pleasure principle. Everyone is out to receive the
greatest amount of pleasure for the least amount of cost.
Pleasure, though, is kind of like the psychology of recovery from behavioral and
substance abuse addictions. One only gets out of therapy or those twelve step programs
what one puts into them. One can follow what the therapist tells them, or follow the steps
of those programs and make changes in their lives, or one can go through the motions
without really doing any work and blame the programs for not working.
I learned in one of my lifetimes that anything worth having was worth working
for, and that the more work I put into what I wanted to achieve the more I learned about
what I was wanting to accomplish and the closer I got to achieving my goals. I learned
about focus and dedication.
I remember I was a young boy living on a farm. I did not really mind the farm
work. I like milking the cows and feeding the chickens. Having animals to care for was a
really great experience, now that I can look back on it.
I learned about being close to nature, and the value of hard work. My father and I
got up every morning about four o'clock. We would go out and feed the cows and
chickens first thing. The cows were eating I would milk them, and while the chickens
were eating Dad would collect the eggs. We would take the labors of our work into mom
and she would fix a feast of a breakfast.
My father was always a smart man. He was home schooled by my grandmother,
grandma and grandpa still live with us. However, he wanted me to be better than he felt
he was. He wanted me to go to a formal school. He always put my schoolwork ahead of
work on the farm. He always had time in after the work day to help me with homework
and encourage me to always strive to be the best at anything I did.
I worked on the farm and went to school. After high school my father sat me
down and had a talk with me. He said, 'Son, it is time for you to make a decision. You
can stay here and work on the farm for the rest of your life eking out a living and your
grandfather and I have by working hard, or you can go to college. College will be hard. I
do not have the money to send you there so you will have to find a way of paying for
college yourself. There are grants and loans you school counselor can help you with and I
will be more than happy to help you in any way I can. I just want you to know that no
matter what choice you make I am one hundred percent behind you.
I spent the next week thinking about what dad had told me. I was working on the
fences all around the farm. First I had to repair the chicken coup, and then I had to go out
and repair all the fences on the farm. I liked the work. It kept me busy but it was not
challenging like some of my schoolwork, and I really wanted to see some of the places I
had seen in the films we had seen.
After that week repairing fences I sat down with dad on the front porch one night.
We were drinking coffee. The night was warm and there was a slight breeze blowing.
Everything felt just like it was supposed to feel. Although I yearned for the challenges
that life off the farm could bring I also really liked working on the farm.
I said, 'Dad, I like the farm but I really do want to go to school. I want to make
our farm the best farm I can make it. I talked to the guidance counselor and she told me
that the University 50 miles from here had a good agricultural program. I want to learn
the business of agriculture. I think we can turn this farm into a very profitable venture.'�
My Father beamed. 'That is just the decision that I have wanted you to make all
these years. I know I had to reach you about the farm, but I also had to encourage you to
look beyond your grandfather and me to see what you wanted to do with the farm. Ever
since you were a young boy I have tried to encourage your independence and nurture you
to love the farm like your grandfather and I do. Your decision has made me very happy,
you have grown into the young man I wanted you to be.
To make a long story short I finished my education in agriculture. The University
was pretty close so I lived at home and helped out on the farm as I could. My father hired
a man. He was young and full of life. He had such an appreciation for life. He told my
father he would work for room and board. He did not want any pay.
The man's name was Peter. I asked him why he wanted to work on the farm for
no pay. He told me that he had gotten an inheritance after his uncle dies and it was
enough to live on as long as he had a place to live and food to eat. He said he had been
rambling the past five years doing all kinds of work and decided he liked dairy farming.
He liked the thick, sour smell of animals. He said he enjoyed hard work. He said that this
was just the position he had been looking for ever since he left school.
Peter and I became fast friends. He claimed he was not religious but was very
spiritual, and that his sense of spirituality was based on closeness to nature. He helped me
with my philosophy courses and comparative religion courses. He made me see that there
was an unseen world around us that we could tap into at any time.
'In fact'�, he said, you have been doing that all your life you have just not realized
it. You have been nurtured by nature to be what you are becoming. You have seen for
yourself that for a man to get what he wants he has to make the best out of what he has.
You have the farm; soon you will have the education. You will have the ability to make
this farm whatever you want it to be as long as you follow your dreams'�.
I did, we did, follow our dreams, that is. We worked together to make the farm a very profitable business. Peter stayed with us and I, with my aging father's approval, made him far manager. We started to be able to pay him for his work, but we could never
have repayed him for his willingness to work for nothing but room and board for all those
years.
It was a good life. It was better than the other two lives I remembered. In one I
was an ultra religious, pompous ass of a preacher who beat people over the head with a
bible. I saw everything good that happened as a result of God's favor and every bad thing
as a punishment from God. I was very frustrated most of the time because I was living the
way I was taught the bible told us to but bad things kept happening and I could not figure out why I was being punished.
In retrospect I can now see that I had been living by this image of God as a micro
manger of human existence. I thought that God rewarded us and punished us according to
our deeds and thoughts about others. I thought I was right about everything that had to do
with religious life. I experienced the joy of elation a few times, but most of the time I
kept getting questions I could not answer and that frustrated me. Why do bad things
happen to good people? Why do good things happen to bad people? Why do innocent
children die of starvation? Why are there wars?
I had all the platitudes but none of the satisfaction of giving someone a real
answer. I could give my oversimplified answers to deep questions but still, on the inside,
I never felt the satisfaction that I had actually helped someone. I could never figure out
what I was doing wrong. It was a very unsatisfying life.
The next life was even more unsatisfying. I guess it was a reaction to the life I just
spoke of. I did not believe in a God. I knew that everything had a rational explanation. I
was so puffed up in my own opinions. I argued with and cut down religious people all the
time. I guess, in a way, I wanted something to believe in but on the other hand I could not
believe in something that could not be proven.
I had heard all the arguments about belief in God being a subjective experience that could be proven by the fact that so many had had the same type of subjective
experience. I told them that their belief was a manifestation of religio-social
indoctrination that had been going on since the beginning of time.
I was a pretty angry person. I drowned my sorrows in drink and drugs. I cut people down with my dull-witted intellect. I was always complaining about how this
loving God had created a world of such despair. I reveled in negativity. I eventually died
a very lonely death in a hospital from some unknown malady that I blamed God for and
that was why I did not believe in him.
I was startled awake buy some voice saying it was time to get up, get cleaned up,
and go to breakfast. My head was all foggy. 'How did I get here?'� I asked myself. I tried
to remember the night before.
Pills, lots of pills. I remebered a hospital, drinking charcoal, that thick, sweet taste, the nausea. The fuzziness. I got up from the bed I was in. It was not my bed. I looked over and there was this man in the next bed, he had a huge belly and smelled like
old poop. I sat up in the bed and he jolted awake. He looked at me with malevolence but he did not say anything.
This chipper young blonde woman with a name badge came. I couldn't read her
name. She asked if we were up. My roommate looked ant her and said, 'Shut up, bitch. Get your stinky ass out of my room'�. Then he looked at me and asked what I was looking
at. I didn't answer. The young blonde woman looked at him, and then she looked at me. 'Well'�. She said, 'I hope you are in a better humor than he is'�, she left.
My body felt like that thing cane syrup one can buy down south. I was moving do
slowly. I tried to walk faster to the bathroom but it was more like trying to walk on the
bottom of a pool, and the fuzziness in my head made it hard to hear, and harder to make
connections with my environment.
I asked the nice young lady with the name badge where the bathroom was. She
led me to the bathroom and unlocked the door for me. I noticed that smell, the one that reeks of urine on the floor. As I was in the bathroom my roommate came in. He lowered his pants and started peeing as he walked up to the toilet. I made the connection with the
pee smell pretty quickly.
I was washing my face and wetting my hair when he farted. It was a low, rumbling deep fart that comes from the belly and it smelled like last weeks garbage. I had
to leave the room because it smelled so bad. I swam down the hall through the syrup to where the rest of the people were.
They were sitting at a table. The tables were plastic fold up tables with wooden chairs that were held together with pegs. Off to the right there were two couches with people sitting on them staring up at a television that was on a music station, soft rock? It
seemed pleasant enough.
I could smell the smell of sausage and eggs wafting in from somewhere. There
was a room with plexi-glass and I could see two nurses back there. It looked like they
were filling out papers. Every now and then they would glance out at us and then go back
to writing. I finally put it together: I was in another psych ward.

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