My Moria

A Story by John

Insomnia held my hand all the way through this journey.

My roommates are snoring
and this dark room is o' so boring...
that's all I got. I'm so tired but I can't fall asleep. Is hyper-vigilance the cause of insomnia? Or is insomnia the cause of hyper-vigilance? My mind is wandering past the normal corridors of philosophy and politics this evening, I think we shall go deeper, deeper still. Akin to the mines of Moria, my mind/mine is filled with dust and dirt, littered with ideals and abandoned adventures, and evidence of distress and disrepair to be seen by everyone who is passing through or just looking.
I often wonder if my experiences with the macabre and the extraordinary, and deliberate disorientation of the senses is somehow a final plea of my younger/former self, reliving a childhood I never had or seeing something I never saw. What is it when you experience deja vu of a dream you once had? What happens when you can't decipher the difference between dreams and memories? What if our memories are dreams and vice versa? I once was more afraid of crossing the street than I was of God. Since I was younger when crossing the street was scarier than God, does that mean I wasn't afraid of God because I didn't have a fuller understanding of Him? So.... If my fear of God now is greater than my fear of crossing the street, does that mean I have lost the significance of crossing the street or that I have found a fuller understanding of God? Is understanding God being aware of the fact that God might have put the street there to be not crossed by you, but an object/subject of fascination and a test of faith?
But wait, now my fear of crossing the street has lessened...
Is the neighborhood more friendly? Is it daytime or nighttime? How old do I have to be to not be afraid to walk across the street? How old do I have to be to fear God? But why should I be fearing God? If God is omnipotent then He knows past, present, and future as one. If that is so, then it seems plausible that the future, to a certain extent, is already preordained. So if God can see my future, then he already knows which sins I'm going to commit; that pretty much cancels out the purpose of the atonement that Christ paid for our sins. I mean, if God DOES know what sins I'm going to commit, then okay. He's God. I'm going to commit those sins and I don't have agency. But if He DOESN'T know what sins I'm going to commit then He isn't omniscient, therefore he is not God as he described himself to us.
Pre-determination of events creates a paradox in MY head. I don't know why it doesn't make sense to me, but it's just like the same old question: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Maybe that's the question of our universe. The third dimension. And when we discover the answer to that question, we'll transform to the fourth dimension and live out our lives in the woods with elves and brownies and fairies and...
I haven't slept in 4 days.