Sin Eater

Its a little after two and I still can't sleep. I feel miserable so I'm going to use this opportunity to spread some of the hate in my head to the general public through this handy little text box. I'm going to take a proverbial shit in my hand and then extend it to you and politely ask you to eat it? Sound good? Cool.

I've been really thinking a lot today about metaphors that involve ingesting or expelling any sort of energy. You know, like the one about you eating my shit. Or the one in this nifty bible picture where Eve is giving Adam the apple to eat. It just seems like there's some relevance to the fact that he had to eat the sin. I'm pretty undecided about what this means and I don't have a point to make so I'm just going to fucking ramble. I'm going to expel some nonsense into this blog because I'm hoping to get some relief from it.

This entry is going to be about how people ingest and expel nonsense. Try to stay with me if I get all lofty and call that nonsense sin. Not specifically the, "I took the lord's name in vain" or "I fucked my cousin" kind of sin. I just mean bad stuff in general- Pain. Anguish. Regret. Guilt. Yadda yadda yadda. We've all got bad stuff floating around in us. And yeah if you fucked your cousin that's gonna do something weird to you too... where am I going with this? oh yeah. Everybody has to expel that stuff in some way.

I guess I never really realized how much I need to do it until last night when I was at yoga and our teacher was telling me to lock my energy in my closing my throat and flexing my butthole. (Yeah, this is what I do with my free time). He basically explained that people are always releasing energy and that one of the points of certain types of yoga is to retain energy. He said that building up heat and energy and whatever else through the practice of yoga and holding it in by plugging your nose and flexing your sphincter and closing your throat is a way to work on keeping it in. I gave it a shot because I'll try anything and it was the most uncomfortable feeling thing ever for me. Take out of the equation that a grown man was asking me to shut my butthole. The feeling I had when I did that stuff was an overwhelming "I have to get this out of me now." It was sooo strange to me and it hit me through doing it and through him explaining how people release energy by doing things like having sex, shitting, exercising, yelling I realized that just about everything I do is an effort to expel.

I, for whatever reason, need to expel my stuff and give it to everybody. I wonder if I would get the same relief from writing the things that bother me on a piece of paper and then ripping it up and throwing it away. I wonder if I could just say my shit out loud in a room by myself and let it go. I don't think I would. Maybe it's just because I'm personally an exhibitionist. Maybe I just need the attention. I wonder how other people deal with problems. I deal with mine by setting them on fire in the middle of town. I scream my sin. I write it here.

Other people though have different and interesting ways of expelling. Vomiting is one that's suddenly seeming a little more interesting to me than it has before. I used to think it was just about weight and body image but maybe it represents something more. That's a pretty violent way to expel. There's some real relief that comes from the physical act. Same goes for cutting. How many people have I talked to that like the initial rush of the razor breaking sin but have described their real fascination in watching themselves bleed and playing with the blood? A lot.



So this expulsion stuff is interesting. What's also interesting is the ingesting. Adam and Eve ate that apple. That fucking means something. I know it does. I'm getting all riled up about this and I really feel like it's important but I want to set you straight as to why. I don't think the bible happened. I don't think it's the word of some almighty God. I think some dude wrote it. And I don't think this dude was any smarter than anybody else. Now, that being said, I think people know way more than we think we do. I think that on some level we understand a lot more about the human condition than we can express in words. I think we understand a lot more about God and Spirituality that can be explicitly stated. I think these things that we don't know we know are transmitted unconsciously through metaphors. So in a way those bible stories that we all know probably didn't happen are really important in that they have coded messages from the collective unconscious embedded in them.

OK that was a little tangent but back to the main point. The ingesting.


I think the idea of this is that there is sin everywhere but it doesn't affect us until we make an actual effort to take it in. That's really interesting to me. Why wouldn't we just leave it alone? Like for instance. I told you at the beginning of this post that I was going to take a shit in my hand and ask you to eat it. You made the choice to keep reading. I'll give you that this one isn't as dark as you might have expected in the beginning but I write some depressing shit in here. And still you keep reading. Why are you reading this? What are you gaining by eating this apple? Why have I made a living out of sitting with people who have had terrible things happen to them and attempting to feel it as though I had lived their experiences? Why have I swallowed so much sin in my short life and gone back to ask for more? Why do I seek things out that I know will make me feel terrible just so I can turn around and purge it?

In some cultures when a person is on his/her death bed a close relative will come participate in a sin eating ceremony. The living person sits by the dying or deceased and eats some bread and drinks some water or wine that represent the sin of the passing soul so that that soul may rest peacefully. The sin eater literally eats that representation. Takes it right from the person. Weird. Jesus had a last supper where the apostles ate his body and drank his blood so he could go die. What is that about? This stuff spans across cultures. It is weird shit that we do both in daily life and in ritual. It's stuff that's embedded in the way we speak "He just ate total shit on that one". "I just had to stand there and swallow it."

This ingesting and expelling stuff is interesting to me. I can't explain exactly why its relevant but I know it is. I can't explain why I need to eat this sin but I do it. I can't explain why I need to turn around and shout it in someones face but I do.

So what do we do with this? Should we do the yoga thing and try to just ingest and not expel? Should we balance the ingestion with the expulsion? Should we just stay away from that proverbial apple all together and not have to deal with it? I don't know. What I do know is that as I think about this simple concept of ingest-process-expel all I can think of is how this accounts for so many different ways that people are fucked up in life.

Anyway, I know this might not make any sense and it might not be relevant but it's just really important to me right now. And of course it lines up with yet another song that's conveniently called sin eater. This one is second on the record. It's a little foreshadowing for what will come later. The song was named sin eater after it was written. The song isn't about anything I just talked about but the title makes reference to the fact that I've swallowed a lot of this sin my whole life and now I'm becoming it.



SIN EATER

We're damned. We never had a chance.
We have failed. Living lives in parallel.

I used to have these dreams. This hope about the future.
The best dream I've had lately was of never waking up.

We're damned. We never had a chance.
We have failed. Living lives in parallel.

We're searching for a God. We're looking for an answer.
We're lost. Betrayed. Looking for a better way.

And we feel abandoned. Betrayed by a God that never knew our fucking names.


And we're living in sin. Living in sin.
Living the sins of the father handed down.
Yeah we're living in sin. Living in sin.
Living the sins of our fathers because we did nothing to save ourselves from this sin.
From this sin.
Yeah we're living in sin.
Living in sin.


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