Professional Idiot
2026-09-18
I'd rather be a Professional Idiot than an idiot professional.
But that's just me. I had a dream last night I can't shake this morning—hate it when they're so vivid. It was a close friend's wedding, and it was one of those anxiety-inducing dreams where the wedding was a bit of a dumpster fire. I kept losing track of time, ended up going to the ceremony in my underwear instead of a suit. Many of my close friends are secular, though the venue was hosted by the priests at my church. I remember seeing people go up to the priest to apologize for what a chaotic, messy endeavor the whole thing was. There was one point in the dream where I saw a version of myself in a cassock walking around the building; he took one look at me and walked away. Such a tease! Clearly, I've got a lot on my mind regarding a clash between my free-spirited secularism and a perhaps more stable, albeit liturgical, bureaucracy. I've spent a fair part of my life now feeling out of control, like I can't seem to firmly put myself in the driver's seat. Internal monsoons, wildfires, and the occasional fair breeze seem to dictate so much that feels outside of my grasp—even if I can dissect the tempest's patterns with a jarring degree of precision. Even if you film a car accident with the best cameras, it still doesn't change the fact that you're watching people die.
Nonetheless, the surrounding rhetoric of it gets tiring; even turning it into art gets tiring. Most things are tiring, sentience being the worst offender of the bunch. But still, the vivid experiences I find myself in help me stay true to the wonders of the mundane, as insignificant as they may seem. As much as the tedium can border on acedia, the grounding nature of stability—a constancy of environment, people, things, tasks, endeavors—helps remind me to hold my disillusion with a grain of, well, turmeric I guess. Being young often comes with a strange sense of wanderlust, though much of that for me was bound into small spaces; whether that space be the inside of my skull or within the jurisdictional confines of a single large city, I found that the more one travels, the smaller the universe gets. Who would want that to be so small? Who would even want such a daring sense of newness so frequently? I've found that kind of IRL escapism to be a troublesome facet of a liberal constitutional republic with semi-open borders. See the world? For what? That cynicism of mine creeps in like that, but it's much better to deal with one's troubles at home rather than some strange place that looked cool on Instagram.
That's just the price to pay for being a Professional Idiot, I suppose. I wonder how well I'll deal when my nous draws further to the heavens, demonic aberrations notwithstanding. Well, at least astral soul travel doesn't involve flying coach, so that's cool. Some are so afraid of death, but how can people be so sure that this is really all there is? It fucking sucks here, man. Maybe I'm just proverbially hating on the lotus-eaters, but the fruits of the flesh get so bitter after a while. To be so fat, yet still so hungry—what a travesty for this prosperous land my people found themselves in. That Athonite said America will become holy, but I don't think I'll see much of that in my lifetime—at least I sure hope not. Secession, demoralization, conflagration of resources—no, I am too weak to handle that kind of battle. But God knows just how weak I am and how strong I can be, so I'm not worried about those illusory troubles in the Land of Tomorrow. Today, there's enough equanimity to keep me at bay from my own right hand, so that's fine with me.
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