Trying to chill out a little.
Today I am in Cabo San Lucas. I am thinking about how close we are to death all of the time. It seems that, as of late, tragedy strikes willy-nilly; it is entirely unpredictable. We were in my lady's parents' house, looking at some of the Christmas cards they had received for the holidays. There was a family that sent one and had their father depicted as an angel. No one had any idea that he had died. Apparently, he had some rare lung problem or something and died essentially overnight. From what they told me, he had been a strong young buck, and it made no sense. It could have been a car accident as well, honestly; I don’t remember. I just know it was super random. Even when I was down by the pool earlier, I overheard a man talking to some people; it sounded like they were meeting for the first time. He explained to them that his wife had passed away earlier that year, very unexpectedly. Maybe it is just that I am getting older, and when you get older, you notice more of what is going on around you. But maybe more people are dying of random stuff. It seems like everyone is getting cancer or having a rare condition or getting themselves blown up. Is everyone dying? Every day is a miracle—yes, that is true—but I wish it wasn’t, if you get what I mean. We could literally die at any time. I leaned over the balcony and thought about how, if I just jumped off, I could ruin everyone down at the pool's vacation. What a prank that would be. We are just so close to dying all the time. All over the world, people are starving and getting strange diseases with no names. All the time, someone's uncle gets cancer or crashes their motorcycle. It’s incredible that we don’t die every time we get in a car. I can’t believe some of the folks we are letting behind the steering wheel these days. I think that we should have to get a psych evaluation or something every year to drive a car, to make sure we are of sound mind. I can’t understand why some of you don’t wear your seatbelts—it’s crazy to me. I don’t think I am paranoid. I guess, at this point, I just think about how near to mortality I am all the time and do what I can, usually. We went fishing on this boat with guys we didn’t know today, and we caught marlin. The fish was huge. It will probably be the biggest fish I ever catch. The guy said it was probably over 100 pounds. We put our lives in Chewy’s hands this morning when we got on the boat with him. We trusted him to do what he said he would. We believed that he would keep us safe for, like, six hours in another country, in the ocean. The ocean is one of God’s untamable forces. He was our captain, and he protected us because it was his job, mostly, but it’s still wild that we did that with a random guy. We rode in a taxi with a random guy on the way to the marina and back as well. We put so much trust in people we have never met every day. We trust that everyone on the freeway will be a good driver and not kill someone. Every time we get on a plane, we trust that some unseen person in the cockpit will fly a contraption—of which most of us have no understanding—to another place hundreds of miles away. One of the most emphatic statements of trust we can make is to say we would trust someone with our lives. I, myself, have said this in a sense of the dramatic to let others know they can believe in someone. But when you think about it, we trust most everyone with our lives. Every person that has ever driven you somewhere—technically, you trusted them with your life. Whether you lived or died was up to them and if they didn’t pay attention to stuff that day. I will admit, I look at my phone when I am driving on the rarest of occasions. I am rolling the dice and assuming that nothing important will happen in the five seconds that I look down. But what if it did? I could just die. Think about the Titanic. Whose fault was that? Technically, we could say it was Captain E.J. Smith. He took the ship too fast through a bunch of icebergs, I guess, and people even warned him. He could have stopped it. I really believe that when something like the Titanic happens, we lose trust a little bit in everyone. The rules become more stringent because of one person sort of blowing it, or one person breaking our societal trust. I think of 9/11. I was only a baby when that happened, but I’ve had lots of people tell me that airports got a lot more strict after that. TSA got way crazier, and you used to be able to wait for people right outside of their gate and stuff like that. But I think after 9/11 happened, maybe we all lost our sense of trust in each other a little bit. I think that when things like that happen, we lose our trust in one another in some way. It’s like when you watch the news and see that some creep diddled a little boy. We immediately lose some portion of our trust for humanity. We all get a little more suspicious of each other because the guy on the TV looked pretty regular, and so now every average Joe could be a culprit. Maybe it’s just me, but when I see stuff like that or hear horror stories, I always get more paranoid. Sometimes it will go away after an hour or two, but sometimes those sneaking suspicions stay with me. Ever since I got a girlfriend, I am way more worried about things like that because bad stuff happens to ladies way more. It is just a fact. Ladies are victims of weird stuff or violent crimes a lot more, and so that is on my mind pretty often if my lady is traveling or going somewhere foreign without me. I have to have faith in the systems that society has set up in the places that she goes. I have to just believe that people there care enough to keep her safe in case something weird happens. It is a strange feeling, but I guess, in some way, we are always at the mercy of those systems. But I think we all know that those systems fail pretty often. Traffic lights are some of those systems that keep us safe. People ignore those and die every day. Not everyone is going to obey the rules, and that is something I suppose we just have to live with. It is a fact of life that I honestly have a hard time with. It’s a beautiful thing that we have progressed this far as a species for a lot of it just going off of other people's word. For a lot of years, we were almost entirely reliant on the system of trust. I think back in the days, way before, lying would get a lot more people killed. For example, they just had descriptions of mushrooms or drawings of plants in books and other guys told you which ones would kill you and which ones would make you feel better, and you just go off of that info. There is an infinite amount of systems I could name, almost, that are based solely on trust. I think that is incredible. It shows that we, as a human race, are, for the most part, trying to be good and trying to be honest. It is honesty and integrity that keeps most of our systems intact. Just the basic idea of doing what you say you will. It keeps all of us safe. There is something really wholesome about that to me. I wouldn’t pass my kid off to any stranger to hold, but I bet a lot of them, whether they are like an asshole or something, would be really cautious and make sure the baby was safe. Stuff like that makes me pretty hopeful. It is hard for me to know how cautious I should be. Especially when I am traveling or on a vacation in another country like I am now. How much faith do I have in society here? Is my faith in humanity location-based? I would say, for most of us, it is. I think that is a sad truth, but certain circumstances just can’t allow for the same trust we afford others. In either case, I am trying to figure out how to have a more positive mental state when it comes to other people. I typically have a guilty till proven innocent mentality when it comes to strangers and strange lands. How cautious is too cautious? To a certain point you can be so careful it ruins your life. I want to be safe and do what I can to avoid disaster, but, at the same time, I don’t want to be a stooge for the rules. It is a fine line of balance for this type of stuff. I do want to be more at ease but, at the same time, acknowledge that every day is a gift and that I should be grateful every time I get home safe, while simultaneously not driving myself crazy with ideas of how I would handle a certain unsafe situation or thoughts about what could go wrong. I feel like, if you really thought about how crazy it is, maybe you wouldn’t drive ever again. But we have to be hopeful and not think about that we can crash and die in a fiery mess every time we are behind the wheel. Because we will just go crazy if we worry all the time, so what’s even the point? Because if it happens, it will happen. It is so hard for me to know just the right way to balance those sorts of thoughts and to also be safe in the best way I can be and then also have a good time. Who knows.