Mitcz.com : Official blog of Rev. Mitcz, the demented devilish comedian from Hollywood, CA.

I’ve been meaning to update, to write an entry that would follow-up my last “major” post about my decision to temporarily lead a life of celibacy, and to wax intellectually on sex, life, love, and emotions. I even thought I’d need to break those up into separate entries. But, no. I’ve realized they’re all inter-related, and all relevant to the grander picture. This will be long, and revealing. Perhaps, however, insightful and useful to you.

You blind yourselves with comfort lies
like “lightning never strikes you twice”
and we laugh at your amazed surprise
as the ark begins to sink.
- New Model Army “I Love The World”

I heard that song, from New Model Army, some 15 years ago. I still love that song, and I got a sort of emotional high hearing it live again just a few weeks ago. That term, “comfort lies”, has resonated with me for quite some time. I find myself using it time and time again when no other term fits. I’ve done a lot of studies on the human psyche. On fears. On reactions. On religion, love, substance abuse, paranoia, psychosis, things of that nature. I’ve come to discover that much of the human psyche’s more peculiar, blind-sided behavior can be blamed on these comfort lies.

You’ve seen the story played out a million times in movies and books, I’m sure. A society lives based on a set of “rules”, or a “reality” that isn’t necessarily all that it’s cracked up to be. It’s a lie, but it’s one that the society has grown to live with, and/or embrace. Suddenly, one enlightened individual breaks through the reality barrier and shatters the lie that all others in the society have mistakenly fallen whim to. A secret police force, government, militant group, gang, or a loose collection of people seek out the individual who’s going around with their “eyes open to the truth” and they attempt to exterminate them. Think Brazil, The Matrix, Minority Report, et al.

This same cruel charade plays itself out in the psyche of nearly every citizen of the human race. You believe in something, and hold it to be true, and find comfort in it. One day, that truth is crumbled, or cracked, and you desperately try to cover up the leak – or someone may die. Maybe only metaphorically, something in your head must be exterminated for shattering the comfort lie. Protecting these comfort lies is a pinnacle in our lives, and it can ultimately trump all other goals and priorities that one may have previous held as pinnacle.

Protecting a comfort lie from being shattered is what keeps the Catholics turning a blind eye to their hypocritical pillars of the faith molesting their children. It’s what keeps over 2,000 years of scientific advancement from being recognized and embraced. It’s what keeps their god alive, despite the overwhelming factual evidence proving his nonexistence time and time again. Like pretentious children, they plant fingers firmly in their ears and hum a gospel tune to drown out any dissidence. It is why there are evangelicals – your well-being in spite of your ungodliness exposes their lies and threatens their comfort. While I’ll never subscribe to what I consider merely trite filth, I now understand how important it is for these people to believe. They’ll fall apart at the seams when facing the grim reality – that no greater being gives the least amount of shit about their lives, that we’re all alone out here, it’s everyone for themselves, and our ultimate resting place is in the collective stomachs of the maggots who will consume our rotting corpses.

I’ve shattered many people’s comfort lies over the years. With my blunt, rash, almost demeaning tone, I’ve watched realities of friends, family, and foes alike crumble before me. I don’t do this because I’m sadistic, nor do I fashion myself some kind of messianic genius. I’m no more special or privileged than any of you. I have no sight into the future, or the stars. I know very little of the universe, or of Sagan-esque theories. I simply believe that humans are holding themselves captive in prisons they create in their minds. Bars made of comfort lies.

My theory, based on my years of personal research, is that it is the crushing of these comfort lies which throw people’s lives so wildly out of control. Addiction to drugs, drinking, smoking, sex, ad nauseam. All results of the loss of a comfort lie. When the lie is dead, and a new reality opens up, the comfort that lie provided disappears. Suddenly, you feel naked and wildly out of control. The whole world, it seems, has been turned on its axis, as you scramble to feel that comfort again. Many people turn to substance abuse to deaden the pain. And, for a time, that works wonders. It helps us forget. It helps us cope. It heals us much like a small adhesive strip on a large gash. The scarring will be there, since the wound was not tended to properly, but at least the bleeding has stopped and we can go about our lives for the time-being.

Many people fear being alone – whether it’s literally alone in a room, or “alone” in the grander sense of having no one to love and love them. Not as family or friend, but as a lover. For this reason, people will throw themselves into one doomed relationship after another, seeking the love and affection of people incapable of either, simply because there’s an assumed companionship, and it quells that fear of loneliness. They’ll forever chase and believe in the comfort lie that “all they need” is someone to share their life with, when in truth – they are not comfortable enough with themselves to truly benefit someone else in the same regard that they wish to be benefitted. Our most formidable years, after all, are generally spent seeking temporary (usually sexual) companionship. Into adulthood, we generally jump from one person to the next, spending as much time with them as we can handle, and then one or the other of us leaves the relationship and tries again. Very few people have intentionally kept themselves single, and fewer still have taken the time to develop an ultimate level of comfort within themselves, so they’ll never need to rely on the assumed comfort provided by another warm body. For most of our lives, we know less about ourselves than we do about our reaction to being with others. In a constant search for others – you’ll often lose yourself.

“Place not your faith in the deeds of others.
For what is given can be taken away”
- Peter Steele, Type O Negative

Maybe love is a comfort lie

Have you ever considered that love is just an idea? Not a physical, tangible thing. But, an idea. It’s something you create. No one defines love for you. You meet someone, and feel special. That feeling continues for whatever amount of time you’ve determined is worthy of definition and you call it “love”. You place so much faith, so much hope, so much of your energy and time and emotional stock into this idea that you forget you made it up entirely on your own. If love is an idea, and we place that idea on others, and humans are their own creation, their own chaos.. then nothing is a constant and nothing can be relied on. If nothing can be relied on, then no amount of labeling can truly define any person. And, with each inevitable change that we as humans will undergo in our lifetimes, someone out there is placing a new idea upon us and we upon them. How can that idea truly hold weight after 5, 10, 20, or 30 years? People fall in love with ideas, not people. You can only hope a person holds steady to the idea that you have placed on them.

Generally, this is easier with family, because we’re well aware we can’t just “break up” with them – and we’ve spent the better part of the worst parts of the most formidable parts of our lives together and we’ve grown together and made ourselves the ideas of each other. Sometimes, however, even family doesn’t love each other. Simply because their ideas of loving people don’t match. It’s not tragic, it’s mere consequence.

The comfort lie we place on love, and each other, is that “love will prevail”. That all differences, quarrels, foibles, follies, and basic incompatibilities can be simply painted over with a touch of the love brush. More friends than I count, myself amongst them, have made countless excuses for insufferable behavior on behalf of people they “loved”, simply because they thought love would prevail. Often times, however, it does not. But people don’t blame it on the facts of incompatibilities, or of someone being an insufferable human being. Instead, we hear that they “fell out of love”, they “went too fast”, that “they’re no longer the person I fell in love with” on and on. Why blame basic human nature on an intangible idea you created? Because of the need for that comforting lie. That it was not you who fucked up, or them, but some otherworldly circumstance. I’ve even heard it all blame on substances – “when s/he was sober.. it was bliss”. People are who they are, and you cannot love what you don’t know, only what you do. Is it so bad that maybe love is nothing more than a mere chemical reaction that we place more importance on than should be? That it’s just this ill-conceived idea with no basis in reality? Personally, I can live with that. I can happily accept that my time with people is limited by our ability to change in tandem and compatibility with my own personality at that time – however long that may be. I don’t fear them leaving me, or me leaving them.

I have accepted that every woman I ever loved was merely my loving their idea. One woman, I loved the idea of comfort and being “normal” since I feared my being an outcast, being a freak, for far too long. But I embraced that. I embraced being “abnormal”. I don’t mean to sound all uber-emo-core. I mean that I generally feel distant from society as a whole, in a world of my own. I thought that to be a lonely place, and I clung to her as my anchor. Once we severed that connection, I floated alone and realized a short while later – I like it here, and I need no one’s validation to be who I am. The woman who followed, I loved the idea of her embracing me for who I was, and I loved the idea that she made me feel like a confident person, who embraced his own identity and was being crowned for such an achievement. After a crushing defeat under her, I thought lost that identity, and that confidence. Confidence breeds confidence, however, and after some time I realized I had that confidence without her or anyone else around to prop me up. It was within me, and I relied on her as a crutch, and at times a catalyst. I now have the combined comforts of both of those loves – but neither of the loves themselves. I don’t need them, however, because I have them all on my own, and I don’t feel any desire to seek someone else out and absorb any missing part of myself.

As an aside, I believe if we all lived until we were 350 years old, marriage would likely become little more than an announcement of finding someone we can tolerate for a little while. And, really, I think that’s all that marriage is anyway. The only interest I have in getting married is to have a party amongst loved ones and celebrate life. Oh, and to give my mom hope since she likely thinks I’m doomed to “be alone” and that I should “really try and find someone to share my life with”.

Mom, I have. It’s called “my fans”. All I need is an audience, for comedy or otherwise. I am an entertainer, and that is my purpose. I do not fear life without a lover, as I have as many lovers that will buy a ticket to see me. No one audience will ever hurl hateful words at another of my audiences out of jealousy or spite, simply because I may have spent more time with one than the other. Audiences don’t mind how often I perform for them – or how many different ones I have in a given year. You, reading this now, are my temporary lover until you close the window or move along to something else. It might seem impersonal, but that’s fine by me. If I’ve made an impression on you that will last a lifetime, that’s all I can ask for and it’s all I’ll ever need.

More to the original point – what benefit is there to finding someone to love? Companionship? You have that with your friends. Sex? You can get that on any corner (literally) – and many times over if you know where to look. Do you just want to fuck one person for a great, long while and “explore and learn each other, sexually”, while sharing tender moments and secrets and dreams? Fine. I think you should most certainly explore that. However, if you feel you need that, then no amount of companionship will help you, because you are not a whole person. You’re a partial person, in search of a missing piece that you hope to find in someone else. We call that co-dependency. If that is what you are, then recognize and embrace it. If you cannot do either, then I believe we’ve found your comfort lie.

What I’ve discovered, in several months of ongoing celibacy, is that I do not need what I thought I needed. I thought I needed someone to help me do basic chores, to take care of me while I was sick, and that I needed intimacy. I’ve had none of that in more time than you’d care to know. I was sick this last week and it was likely the first time in my life that I didn’t have a woman taking care of me. It was a strange feeling, to be sure, but I made it through just fine and it didn’t bother me. I don’t fear that feeling any longer. I’ve done well on my house chores of cleaning and (sometimes) cooking myself meals. It may sound sexist, but I always had women doing those things for me. Not because I was incapable, but because they offered and I wasn’t about to turn down the opportunity to do nothing and benefit from it. Sex, the one thing I thought for sure I’d go somewhat fuckin’ nuts without, I’ve been without for over 3 months now. Not just literal intercourse, but kissing, rubbing, touching, etc. None of it. Completely gone. Has it bothered me? Oddly enough, no. I don’t miss it, and I don’t care. I’m sure I’ll be out and having sex sometime soon – maybe before the end of the year, maybe longer. But, I no longer fear spending months at a time without sex.

My comfort lie in all of that? I believed that without sex, I would feel unwanted and be unwanted. I feared that I would cease being enjoyed by company. Without my tales of intimacy to friends and co-workers, I thought I’d be stuck with nothing interesting to talk about. I know how silly it sounds. But then, I’m not trying to justify myself to you, I’m only telling my tale. It turns out I had some co-dependency in me, and it was sexually-based. I’ve found, however, that I don’t need sex to feel wanted, and I can, after all, keep platonic female friends around without having to bed them first “just to see”.

The end point, in all of this, is to know thyself. To love thine self, above all else. The only way to truly know someone is to know their lies, and how to defeat them. It is only when you are truly honest with yourself that you can live, untethered, without fear, and in peace.

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