Saw ruminations

Just went to see Saw II, which I will admit scared the living fuck out of me. Less because of the death, more because of the shared pain of the father's fear. The knowledge of death. Driving home I was listening to Eminem at top volume, something I almost never do, and trying to figure out what it would be like to have cancer. Inoperable, untreatable cancer. Cancer that kills you. Kills you, no matter what. Kills.

The thought is terrifying. The only thing worse, I think, is having a spring-loaded death mask strapped to your head that will only be released when you slice away your own eye and pry a key out of your head.

Christ.

Speaking of He whom one very popular religion tells me would love to save my soul, and of death, when will I ever really be able to believe in God? Tomorrow? Never? Only at the end, in the last half second before a bus obliterates my skull? In times of really deep crisis I talk to God, (okay, I plead with God, and maybe they're not the same thing) but in between I can't find that ability in myself except in a weird, unspoken, almost unconsidered way. And I don't think that really counts, because it's rarely a practice I find myself able or willing to continue for long.

The thing about being agnostic is that your label isn't a "real" category the way "atheist" or "Catholic" is. If you're an atheist, you have a belief -- and that belief is that there is no God. Catholics believe God exists, and sometimes that notion sustains them. Since no one can prove conclusively that God either exists or doesn't, both groups are essentially faith-based. But agnostics...we just float in between. Does God or doesn't he? No idea. Not willing to rule out either side. We have no faith in anything spritual, anything past this world, we're simply waiting bodies in a holding tank. Someday the tank's walls will rupture and we'll fall wet and naked into dark graves, or new bodies, or Hell. Maybe. But then again...

...who knows?