Afternoons With Gomez

 This afternoon, like many afternoons I'm at home, after chores were done and shower taken, I made lunch and Gomez and I have been watching paranormal shows on TV, just as we've done for years.

The fact that Gomez shed his terminally-flawed and failing human suit going on two years ago has nothing to do with how we spend our time.

It's taken me a while to own up to this in public, because to many people, it sounds at best like pathetic fantasy and at worst like fucking insanity, but hear me out.

I'm an atheist, and have been for a long time. The thought of a higher being who made everything and pays attention to how every single tiny human spends their time is ridiculous. It's not comforting to me, it's creepy as shit. Even worse, if the tiny humans piss off the higher being, there's *another* higher being in charge of eternal time out where the souls of the tiny humans suffer for eternity. And the very worst- it does fuck-all to make sure babies don't die of hunger and people don't die violent deaths that you'd think any higher being worth anything could have intercepted super-easily. There's your fucking insanity, right there. 

Apologies to my friends and family who take comfort in some form of the above set-up. If it works for you and helps give you strength in your life journey, I'm all for it. I'm not going to say you're living in a pathetic fantasy, because I'm an atheist, not an asshole.

So, I don't believe in the Universal Supernatural, but I do believe in small, mundane, local and personal Supernatural things. 

I believe in these because I believe in Science. Science says that there are things we cannot see with our eyes, but that are 100% there. Science says that energy (and that's what a "soul" is- the energy keeping our human suits motoring around) cannot be destroyed, it can only be displaced. 

Many societies believe that our ancestors or people we love who die, absolutely hang around to check up on us, try to protect us, try to warn us of things that could harm us, comfort us...basically all the shit they did while they were alive, out of love. 

That's what I can believe and what comforts me. Not some Universal being watching us like we're their ant farm, and keeping impartial scores of how we rate as ants using some arbitrary score card, but those who were invested in our lives and who care viscerally what happens to us.

My grandparents, great-grandparents, friends who have passed over, and 10,000% Gomez, are all still here, encouraging me when I need it, chastising me when I earn it, and just doing their best to keep me from fucking up as little as possible. Out of love. 

So, Gomez and I watch the paranormal shows. We laugh when the investigators demand that the spirits show them they are there...and then freak the hell out when they do exactly that. We get angry when people yell at the spirits who are just trying to go about their days in their own damn houses. 

Admittedly, if someone was a sadistic narcissistic jerk in their human suit, they're going to be a sadistic narcissistic jerk in the afterlife, and those bastards need to be told to move on, because that shit don't fly whether you can be seen or not.

Anyway, this is why I don't feel lonely, and although my grief at losing human-suit Gomez will never quite go away, he's still here, he's still my hero, he still helps me every single day, and now he's free of the limitations and short-circuits his human suit was riddled with- twitchy heart, diabetes, crushing anxiety, cancer-prone innards, fucking dementia. 

So, it's OK. 

I'm OK.

We're OK.