This Is My Rifle: Tiny Clubs Filled With Empty People

For the past few days I’ve been going back and forth between ideas about I want to write this week. I couldn’t make up my mind as to what exactly I wanted to say so instead I’m just gonna start writing and hopefully it’ll lead me somewhere. If not, then so be it. I mean, you really can’t complain. After all, this article is free. Well, that is until my evil plot to take over the world comes to fruition; at which point it will be mandatory to give me 30% of everything you earn each year. But then I’ll be a kazillionaire and I’ll probably be too busy ruling with an iron fist to write anything and keep you entertained for 15 minutes every week. So I guess these last few sentences pretty much defeated their own purpose and I just wasted valuable space in your brain with useless information. Ah well, you watch too much MTV anyway. I couldn’t imagine this paragraph being any more useless than watching The Situation walk around the Jersey Shore while pushing us to the verge of a complete universal collapse from extremely high douche levels.

Speaking of douchebags, last Saturday night I went to one of Vancouver’s many disgustingly awful, dirty vagina-scented nightclubs. I generally don’t frequent these establishments but I was invited by a certain young lady to come along and when you’re interested in somebody, you extend yourself further than you normally would. So with that said, I walked through what I can only refer to as “the gates of hell”.

Having spent a solid few hours in what most people consider an average Saturday night, I am absolutely convinced that the human species has officially hit rock bottom. As I stood in my corner by the DJ booth, I used my huge chunk of spare time to quietly observe the crowd. The more I people watched, the more I felt like I was doing irreversible damage to my soul.

Being somebody who all his life has fallen victim to being judged by his appearance and pre-conceived notions, I have taken extra steps to give people a chance and I’ve trained myself to be able to read people through body language and getting a feel for their energy. But in doing so I’ve also become very sensitive to it and it has an overwhelming effect on me. And so as I watched people come and go throughout the night, I noticed that the majority of them just seemed to be empty. There was no feeling or really any resemblance of any human qualities to them, just zombies wandering around in the darkness looking for something that seems to keep escaping them. Almost as if they weren’t sure what it was they were pursuing but they knew they lost it at some point along the way.

As angry as I am with our current cultural climate, it also saddens me to look at what we’ve become. There are moments that I look back at people I’ve been in contact with during my lifetime and I try to find the person that I was initially connected to. More often than not, I can’t seem to remember who or what the catalyst was that pushed them into the program but I do know that they are no longer present in my reality.

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment that we flew into a moral tailspin and exploded into a million pieces as we crash-landed back into the earth, but what we have now is the end result of it. We’ve long forgotten our basic values and principles. We’ve fallen so far into the darkness that to come across a human being whose integrity and dignity doesn’t come with a price tag is almost a once in a lifetime occurrence. Personally, I feel so alienated by my interactions with most of the general public that a lot of the time I do my best to avoid it. And when I can’t avoid it, it normally ends up being a horribly awkward experience that takes at least a few days to recover from.

I’m not sure why this happens but I have a theory. I believe there are many different levels to a healthy person. First is physical health, which is the easiest to maintain, then comes mental and emotional health, which work along the same lines as physical health but take a lot more time and effort, and lastly is spiritual health, which most of the population completely disregards because they don’t understand what it is.

While mental, emotional and physical health are mostly relegated to the 3 dimensional realm, spiritual health is much more complicated because there are infinite possibilities and really no dimensional boundaries to it. To have a connection to the universe or higher power is a relationship that undergoes constant expansion and contraction. Most people mistake this as something that can be attained through physical means. For example, going to church on Sunday, reading the bible or partaking in certain religious traditions. But all of these are examples of man’s attempt to bring an infinite structure into a world that is governed by space and time, which is logically impossible.

While I’m by no means against any religion or ideology that promotes love, peace and positivity, I also recognize what most people call a spiritual connection as a misguided attempt to simplify something that has so much depth, we can’t begin to explain it.

As time and technology have progressed, we’ve become what we believe to be “masters of the universe”. We’ve come up with clever ways to convince ourselves that we are in tune with the higher power because in our opinion, we are the higher power. And so we do the bare minimum to appease our inner childhood fears (if you masturbate you’re going to hell!) and then we turn away from it because according to our religious leaders we did just enough to save ourselves from burning in an eternal lake of fire. But a true spiritual connection isn’t something that you just hit the off switch and walk away from. In fact, it’s something that is constantly flowing through yourself and the world around you. It’s not reading a book or sitting in a pew once a week, it’s a growing awareness and something that changes shape on a daily basis.

So as I stood in that nightclub surrounded by darkness, I came to realize that what these people are looking for is a piece of themselves that they disconnected from a long time ago. As I explained to a friend of mine recently, there are certain things in life that once we give up we can never get back. Once we make the conscious decision to leave infinity we open a massive hole inside of ourselves. We always have the ability to re-connect with the higher power but as time goes on it becomes harder to re-establish that relationship and we slip further away from it. As a result we look for quick and easy ways to fill that void and in most cases we fill it with artificial things because it’s the only way we know how. We use drugs, sex, alcohol and other means to numb ourselves so we can temporarily escape from something we know is missing from our existence.

If you take anything away from what I’ve said here today, please just remember this:

The selling of one’s soul doesn’t happen all at once. It occurs through a series of compromises.

(Jason James is an artist, freelance columnist and writer for RefinedHype.com. You can listen/download his most recent album, "Marvelous World Of Color", here and you can contact him here and here.)