How Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy taught me to relax and stop giving so many fucks.

Hi. This is the voice of a late night infomercial speaking. Do you find yourself wide awake at night giving too many shits?

How about too many fucks?

To be clear, we aren't talking about proactive shits and fucks.

We're talking about fear and anxiety-driven shits and fucks that stem from ancient "holy balls I'm being chased by mysterious shadow predators" DNA which simultaneously hold you back from checking the mailbox out of fear that you'll have to have a conversation with your neighbors.

If you're worried about something that shouldn't be so trivial, or even if you're worried about worrying about things that shouldn't be so trivial, then boy do I have the book for you:

"Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams has always been a staple food in my literary diet.

It's my anti-anxiety literature of choice.

But to be clear, I would not simply classify it as a comfort food.

It's an organic superfood full of comfort, wisdom, dark humor, light humor, Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster humor, and every meta-ounce of philosophical wisdom one might need to prevent themselves from panicking during situations they have little control over.

Sometimes, it actually pays off to imagine the Earth being completely destroyed in order to facilitate an intergalactic highway construction project for a hyperspace express route.

What would you do if you were the sole survivor?

Panic? There's no time to panic.

Sometimes you've got to lean into the "well, this shit sucks but I'll think of something!" philosophy and plow forward.

Last call, final words of whimsy: Don't panic, embrace the great spirit of adventure, and avoid Vogon poetry at all costs.

For many of us, writing and creating isn't a choice: It's a need.

There's this painfully romanticized notion about artists that comes from the collective conscious.

It's this idea that artists are wired to starve. To hustle. To be obsessive. Overly sensitive. Overly emotional.

Agoraphobic.

Introverted.

Needy.

Depressive.

Insomniacs.

Unorganized.

Outcasts.

Addicts.

Unlovable.

Crazy.

Unpredictable.

Lost.

If you find yourself believing that these things are true, or acceptable, then it's time to set that bullshit aside.

We live in a world that doesn't facilitate our inner creative, innovative, or individualistic needs. It's an old-school industrial economy model that rids us of our creative brilliance from an early age.

It makes us fearful of being creative and one-of-a-kind due to anything outside of the populous being deemed different, strange, or weird.

It teaches us to chase trends and the fantastical bliss that viral attention and money could one day bring us, rather than focus on the healing and love that individual artistic expression could bring into our present moment and fuel our inner well.

If we are to look beneath the veil of that fantasy for "making it" and acquiring extraordinary riches, we'll likely find that it's a subconscious yearning for having the time and space to express and discover our individual selves.

It's a repressed itch that isn't being scratched, and a result of the pain we feel by performing for collective, mass-society entities that do not align with our inner need-states.

This process others us, isolates us, and is responsible for that long list of tropes at the top of the post. As well as the idea that hyper-sensitivity is a weakness, rather than a strength.

We need to build a society that nurtures the individual.

A society that celebrates and cherishes the weird, the unseen, and the Other.

There is a unique gift inside all of us. And if we can create an ecosystem in which we nurture the individual vs. the entity, we can collectively unleash a Pandora's box of brilliance, love, and togetherness.

Together we can share our gifts and make this planet the utopia it is capable of being.

What I'm watching: Donnie Darko by Richard Kelly

One of my fondest memories growing up was going to the video rental store. My family's store of choice was Hastings, located on Cole and Overland in Boise, ID (now closed, like most video rental stores in this country).

It was the spring of 2022 when Donnie Darko came to home video. I was in the 7th grade. I remember seeing a decent-sized collection of plastic Donnie Darko DVD covers on the shelves. And one single DVD copy left.

I was hypnotized by the cover art. The rabbit. The mystery. So I grabbed it.

The rest is history, as they say.

It's a film that has stuck with me for nearly 20 years. The tone. The horror. The filmscore. The performances. The peculiar one liners. And the allegorical nature that never fully reveals itself.

I've grown to love allegory films. And I think it's because every time I watch them, I can apply different sense of meaning to it depending on where I'm at in my life at a given time.

They are films that not only grow on you, but grow with you.

Currently, I am studying a good bit of Carl G. Jung. So the elements of synchronicity, individuation, and active imagination are hitting a bit more strongly than I've ever experienced upon watching this film.

Particularly that of the liquid spear/soul tunnel that protrudes from Donnie's gut area throughout the film.

And the connection between Jung's ideations on acausal synchronization, astrology, and quantum physics + spacetime continuum.

It makes me think a bit more about who Grandma Death/Roberta Sparrow really was.

Or "if" she was.

Lastly, it would be a miss to not mention the filmscore. The soundscapes that Michael Andrews put together for this film, combined with the excellent 80s songs from the likes of INXS, Tears for Fears, The Church, and Joy Division concoct such a haunting dream state throughout the entire experience.

This is a work of art I will continue to marinate on for years to come.

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