Boats
2026-05-14
This one's gonna be a bit dark, so don't read further if that's not what you can handle right now.
My uncle shot himself in the head a few nights ago. He took his .22 and put it just underneath his chin and pulled the trigger. The bullet broke multiple teeth, destroyed his eye, and is currently lodged in his brain. Doctors say they won't take it out, and that they're pulling him off life support here directly. I don't expect him to survive the end of the day.
I remember when my dad broke the news to me; he said it so matter-of-factly, but I could feel the anger in his voice. I don't blame him. It's been a hard road to say the least, but it's one that none of us expected to lead to this kind of end. I made this post a few weeks ago, and the irony hurts so much—I could almost laugh. That post received some good attention when it came out, and I think the message still stands despite its overtly crass language. But to see what I fear come directly into my life—it's something that makes me so afraid I can't even begin to fathom it.
You know, I think I've seen what Hell will look like for me. I have this recurring dream many nights; it's an infinitely sprawling cruise ship. There's food everywhere, so many games to play—and it never ends. The night before my dad broke the news about my uncle, I found myself in that same dream environment. I remember I was in one of the restaurants on the ship, and I remember the gimmick of it too: it was the restaurant with thirty-three doors. Behind each door was a new kind of food to try. I remember going into the restaurant, and I saw my mom and sister there sitting at a table waiting for me to come eat with them. I got sidetracked, though, and found myself chatting it up with the waiters as they were serving out food. One of the waiters approached me and said "Hey, you think you could go to the back and grab me another pitcher of cheese?" Next to him were about eight pitchers of cheese. I looked at him and said "Which kind? The jalapeño?" He nodded, and as I went behind one of the doors to get it, I woke up.
Why is my life literally just The Sopranos?
There's this scene in Disco Elysium where the protagonist is having a dream and he's talking with a version of himself hung up on a tree by the neck. The hanged man tells him, "4.6 billion people—and you failed every single one of them. You really fucked up." About a week before my uncle shot himself, he asked me to help him with installing a hood for the back cab of his truck. I soft-declined the offer because I was too tired, but looking back, I realized that it wasn't about the truck. I really fucked up. No, I don't blame myself for what happened, but for someone who just got finished writing a whole diatribe on why people shouldn't kill themselves, I honestly feel like an absolute hypocrite. I wish I could've seen the stars for what they were, but I was just too caught up in my own constellations to see past my own damn nose. There's nothing I can do about it now, and all there is to do is look forward.
These hard times, they make it hard to pray. We talk so much about the perceived "benefits" of prayer, but that's all a total load of bullshit. We don't pray because we're tending to our gardens, reaping and sowing. We're fucking drowning, all of us—every second of every day. They don't call it salvation for nothing. All there will ever be when it's all said and done is grace; the rest of this toiling, the anguish, the lamentation—it will all go to dust along with everything else we've built for ourselves. All this talk about "saving the planet" or "innovating for the future" actually just means nothing to me. It's so far removed from what's actually at stake that I find any talk about it a gross and humiliating distraction. The demons see us talk about that stuff, and they just snicker at our pride and insolence. The real work—it's so simple, devastatingly simple. We look up to the sky and fail to see the beauty of what's right in front of us. It makes me feel sick that we're all so distracted.
I look at what's in front of us, and all I see is a sea of weeping. We're all drowning, aren't we? All I can do is give my heart to God, and hope that His grace extends to everyone I've ever met—and anyone who decides to make themselves my audience. That pain you're feeling? I've felt it too, and it might not get better, but it does get easier. Every day you don't suffocate in that sea is another chance to get better at swimming in it. We might not be able to see what's beyond those skies yet, but until then, we just have to contend with what's right in front of us. We have everything we need right here.
You cry enough tears, might as well build a boat.
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