On being sad/tired/absurd

I like to listen to this song when I'm sad/tired because Gregory Lemarchal's voice is just so heavenly it doesn't matter that I barely understand what he's singing about. Actually, I do know what he's singing about and it's not because I know French, but because one night I realized that I really shouldn't be liking this song so much without knowing what it actually says, I mean, what if it turned out to be a Nazi anthem you never know. So I searched for the lyrics of the song and ran them through a translator and that did not work at all. Not to be deterred, I signed up for classes at Alliance and mastered French in like, six weeks because I really had to know what the song meant. Stat.

I wish.

What I really did was I did a search for "a corps perdu lyrics english translation" and then worked my way through page after page of sucky translations until I found one that made sense. And I discovered that the song is indeed a Nazi anthem. Just kidding. And what I understood is that it's a song about being drunk and making the most out of life. It's all very existential and that probably explains why Lemarchal gets so angsty at times. My favorite lines from this song are:

Les hommes meurent de n'avoir jamais cru
De n'avoir pas vecu ivres et sans fard
Soldats vaincus pour une guerre sans victoire

Which roughly translates to:

Men die because they've never believed
Because they've never lived drunk and openly
Beaten soldiers for a war without victory

That last line reminds me of Camus and his philosophy of the absurd, which amounts to (as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it)

...the resistance of the world to our endeavours. Whilst we crave for sense and harmony, the world has nothing to offer but chaos and a random play of blind forces. All our efforts to impose order and sense upon a world that can ultimately accommodate neither are therefore doomed to fail. The absurd, then, denominates both the most fundamental state of the world and the absurdity of human attempts at overcoming this basic fact.

And if you have any idea of what's going on around you, you will be inclined to agree. The world is absurd - no reason nor rhyme (ok, maybe just a bit) and we are all going to die in the end. If life were a game, it's rigged and totally unfair and just plain full of shit. The minute you press the Start button, you've lost. How fucking frustrating is that? Maybe it's not. No one ever said that you can't have fun while losing.

I know that I'll never ever measure up to Joseph Sayers. Okay, maybe we're the same height, but look at those pecs. And those guns. And that dick (you'll have to use your imagination). It'll take me a bazillion hours at the gym and tons of whey protein before I get that big and hairy and broody.

But I try. This week is detox week for me. This means no cigarettes, no alcohol, and sticking to the one hundred push ups workout plan. I'm so surprised I've made it this far without my ciggies. Not to say that it hasn't been hard. Yesterday was a really shitty day at the office and I swear my heart hurt so bad because of wanting to smoke. Anyway, there's just three more days left and I think the first puff I will have after this will be so sweet. I will be smoking less though because I've seriously been doing better on the push ups thing. Last week I could barely do forty but now I'm up to fifty-three. Yay.

The only drawback is that I've been burning calories like hell and I seriously need to keep eating just to make it through the day. This is challenging me to be more responsible and cook more of my own meals because I've been eating double servings of everything and it's burning a hole in my pockets.

Anyway, the point I was trying to make is that I'll never be like that guy and it's hopeless to try. Which does not change the fact that I will try, in part because if you shoot for the moon even if miss you'll still land among the stars, but mostly because I choose to try.

There is a road in front of you and even if that road goes nowhere, walk. Walk because you can. Walk because that is what it means to be alive.