"Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."
--
I can't help but look at you and see a walking, talking corpse. You'll be dead soon won't you? Just fifty or sixty more years of your precious comfort and distraction and you'll be rotting in the fucking grave -- another immature soul ready to spin the wheel again, Pat! Ready to waste another century careening haphazard and directionless 'round the sun.
Just keep putting roofs over heads and food on tables. Hey, maybe you'll manage to survive long enough to get Alzheimer's and forget it all just before you die, confused and alone.
The world is truly against me. No joke. No exaggeration. And it's the biggest chip on my shoulder. It's probably at the heart of my current despair. You just set such a horrible fucking example don't you? You aren't kind, or patient, or long-suffering, or respectful, or happy. Or happy. Or HAPPY. You're sad, angry, hateful, unsympathetic, abrasive mal-intents, who'll manipulate, lie, cheat, and steal at the drop of a hat to get something you want, then go to church on Sunday to thank God for making you in His perfect image. And you see nothing wrong with any of it. You don't worry. You don't regret. You sell out, fuck over, and sleep well at night.
I guess that makes me lonely. Deep, cavernous loneliness, that's me. Last-man-on-Earth style loneliness. Yes, I'm the only one of my kind. The only one who sees something wrong in whiling away this life clocking in and out in pursuit of ever greater paychecks. The only one who sees comfort and convenience as a death knell; as something to stifle and rob him of potential. Who sees ownership as burden. Who sees security as sham.
Oh, but wait, no. Let me explain: I know you all think you see these things. I know you "understand" them and "agree." What I mean is that I actually believe and apply them to my life, not just wax conjectural in agreement when someone brings it up.
I called myself a Christian for a while. Why? Because I loved and followed the teachings of the man they call Jesus Christ. Not because I liked the idea of a magic man dying so that I can go to heaven after I finish up my heathen, money-chasing, comfort seeking, bullshit excuse for an existence. I actually followed the teachings: Give up your property. Be meek. Serve your fellow man... I didn't just show up in suit and tie on shabbat, nodding as the pastor conceptualized. I lived what Jesus said.
And that's where we differ, you and me. That's where I'm alone. I know you don't think I'm alone. You think I just feel alone, right? even though there are so many people who are with me? You for example! You're right here with me. You feel the same way! And since you agree with me when I talk about the shallowness and greed of our culture, I must not really be alone. See, but here's the separating point: I leave our little hypothetical discussion and go back to my minimalist lifestyle where I choose not to work more than twenty hours a week, where I save more than I spend every month, where I hope and plan for a future rich in spirit as well as physical adventure... Whereas you head back to your forty hour work week, and your hundred dollar a month cable package, and your fifty dollar a month cell-phone contract, and your leased, $26,000 automobile, and your adjustable rate mortgage, to plan the next thirty years you'll spend paying it all off, so that you can at last be free to get right back into hawk on some new shit.
That's where I'm alone: Where I actually try - successful or not - to live what I believe in. And if it weren't for you, if it weren't for your overarching societal imperative of 'go to school, get degree, enter profession, acquire spouse, have children, buy home, retire, die...' If there were a few people wandering around who actually lived according to an ethos that didn't revolve around money and comfort and this prepackaged, nutrient-added life-path you all follow like fucking lemmings right off the side of the cliff, then maybe I could find some inspiration and support for a true ideal.
But that isn't how it is, is it? I'm fucking alone. You've all either bought in, sold out, or both, and I'm left as the only human being alive who wants to squeeze some life out of this life before it's up; who wants to be a good, kind, understanding, sympathetic, intelligent, thoughtful, peaceful, spiritually centered adult human being at some point premortem. Oh wait, I'm sorry -- who wants it AND ALSO FUCKING PURSUES IT. Who doesn't expect it to drop out of the sky after fifty years lived in complete contrast to the desire. See, that's what I mean when I say you're out to get me. I look to you for support and comradeship, because you claim the same desires but all you ever really do when I draw near is infect me with passivity, mediocrity, and your inexplicable tolerance of shitty, meaningless lives.
If I had just one person, just one human being who was ready and willing to come with me; one person to lean against, to be stronger for, to share the goal with... If I weren't completely alone, and worse, beset upon by an insipid, insistent world that feigns agreement while chastising and persecuting any who venture it; if I could occasionally say or do something foul and not immediately have it redoubled and returned with a childish "Oh yeah?"; if I weren't the only one making the effort to restrain his baser mannerisms and encourage his higher self... If any of this!
But so long as I never see a real life example of charity, compassion, and love, I'm fucked. If it's just me, making it all up as I go, fighting you all tooth and nail for some small corner in which to practice sanity, it just can't happen.
My father talks about the "end times" as predicted by the author Ellen White -- those last few decades leading up to God's triumphant return and subsequent destruction of everything he first created. While I'm no believer I do seem to keep coming back to the idea of the 'last days;' those that hallmark the end of all human endeavors in which even God, in omniscience, can find some subtle hope or worth.
Ellen White tells us that in the world's final chapter God's true followers will be persecuted and that they shall be forced to flee into the mountains. The common interpretation of this prediction envisions either an atheistic or secular-specific society turning upon the elect, viewing them as some sort of terrorist threat to civilization, and therefore imprisoning them, torturing them, and so forth. Basically what we do to Arabs in this country now. The last of God's chosen who escape the gulags will flee the populated world and hide from their oppressors, safely ensconced in mountainous, uncultivated areas.
I can't help but wager a reinterpretation: In the end times the last few people who consider life as more than simply an effort to gather and reproduce, being mainly separated from one another and therefore very much alone in their pursuit of the higher self, will be forced to flee the retail, consumer driven, TV watching, pop-trivium obsessed, inane, insane world that subdues and persecutes the higher man while bolstering the carnality inherent in his lesser self. They shall wander into the mountains to live unseen and unheard, where they will not truly or fully enjoy all that life might have offered them had they been born at any other than the end of times, but where, abode in their hermitages, they will at least find the peace and devotion their lost and crazed societies would not allow.
Showing posts with label sanity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sanity. Show all posts
Seek
All seeking is directionless. See what you find.
When you are kneeling in the utility room meditating before work... When your inability to focus on the space between your eyebrows; to hold the flow of energy through your interlocked fingers at the forefront of your mind; to sit rigidly without questioning the perfection of your posture... When you begin, of these frustrations, to lose faith even in the purpose and goal you've placed before yourself; when none of it seems to come together and you wonder what you might be doing wrong or whether there's really any way to do it right at all -- Look about you and realize that you are standing in a wide field: An endless green pasture that leads to mountains and lakes and rivers and plains and low lands and valleys and caves and plateaus; an endless, unexplored bounty of truth and fiction, purity and taint. There are no limits or boundaries and maps are worth little here. For none but you can find this field - no other has ever visited this inner world of yours - so none can say for certain where you'll meet perils or where treasures lie. This is your own private country. None have come before you. Explore!
Forget direction and goal. To be directed is to follow a path. And surely there are many virtues to following paths; deride it not! But path-following is not seeking, it is path-following. Seeking has its own virtues, pleasures, hardships, and rewards, and no one may discover these by following paths, for no path leads where seeking goes.
Seek and let your heart be light. Seek and care not for what you find. Seek and worry not for direction. Seek and be steadied by the knowledge:
All seeking is directionless. See what you find.
When you are kneeling in the utility room meditating before work... When your inability to focus on the space between your eyebrows; to hold the flow of energy through your interlocked fingers at the forefront of your mind; to sit rigidly without questioning the perfection of your posture... When you begin, of these frustrations, to lose faith even in the purpose and goal you've placed before yourself; when none of it seems to come together and you wonder what you might be doing wrong or whether there's really any way to do it right at all -- Look about you and realize that you are standing in a wide field: An endless green pasture that leads to mountains and lakes and rivers and plains and low lands and valleys and caves and plateaus; an endless, unexplored bounty of truth and fiction, purity and taint. There are no limits or boundaries and maps are worth little here. For none but you can find this field - no other has ever visited this inner world of yours - so none can say for certain where you'll meet perils or where treasures lie. This is your own private country. None have come before you. Explore!
Forget direction and goal. To be directed is to follow a path. And surely there are many virtues to following paths; deride it not! But path-following is not seeking, it is path-following. Seeking has its own virtues, pleasures, hardships, and rewards, and no one may discover these by following paths, for no path leads where seeking goes.
Seek and let your heart be light. Seek and care not for what you find. Seek and worry not for direction. Seek and be steadied by the knowledge:
All seeking is directionless. See what you find.
People
It is important neither to speak with - nor listen to - people if you wish to know peace. People are horrible. They want you to come to them; they are lonely and troubled without you. Truly they suffer in your absence and feel it as a void within their hearts, and when you come at last with extended hand to comfort and enjoy each other's company they trouble you with tones of voice and flippant, caustic comments; act as if you owe them something; entreat you to hennish tales, rumors, and private judgments cast down upon strangers, always from a lofty pace of cowardice. People are petty children without reason, thought, or understanding. They do not wish any more of themselves than ignorance, nor can they see beyond their own inflamed sense of self. People are a massive unchecked ego. They have no redeeming virtue.
A person, an individual, alone in a room, huddled over some careful, private task -- this has dignity. There is beauty in the lone animal practicing his nature's inclinations. But as few as two of them become a bumbling of the task. Two must split attentions. Half a mind is left to know the work before them, half is set to watch and judge the other; to guess at how the other might be judging in return. Two minds are two minds split; what halves remain can hardly make a whole. And they and all are better off in solitude where men and minds and hearts may truly grow.
Take people in as small a dose as can be had and feel no guilt denying them your stay. They only want you there to hurt you. They only need you there to lean against, to gauge how much they weigh.
A person, an individual, alone in a room, huddled over some careful, private task -- this has dignity. There is beauty in the lone animal practicing his nature's inclinations. But as few as two of them become a bumbling of the task. Two must split attentions. Half a mind is left to know the work before them, half is set to watch and judge the other; to guess at how the other might be judging in return. Two minds are two minds split; what halves remain can hardly make a whole. And they and all are better off in solitude where men and minds and hearts may truly grow.
Take people in as small a dose as can be had and feel no guilt denying them your stay. They only want you there to hurt you. They only need you there to lean against, to gauge how much they weigh.
Bad Mood
I may be chemically depressed. I wonder if that's what it would be called. I'm definitely in a bad mood, and have been, more and more, for the past week or two. I'm easily excited to anger and quick to bursts of rage. It's not really depression as I define depression. It's violence; violence of the temper -- that's what I've caught.
Now, it's not that I'm sitting here typing this message with a furrowed brow, red cheeks, and a hateful stare, thinking of how stupid everything is and how it should all go off and die somewhere. No really, I'm not. I swear. I'm quite content just this moment. If I didn't know any better I would suspect that I am no more restive than is my tendency; that I am as bio-chemically inert as a juniper in February. No, I don't know what that means either. I'm just trying to say that I feel absolutely normal in the interims. It's only when some small trifle of a disturbance falls within my purview that I find my moods leapfrogging passed the usual landmarks of annoyed, frustrated, and angered, straight into manic-homicidal-fit mode. Seriously... Hulk smash!
Hulk smash, indeed! I've been going straight into a full-on 'get the fuck away from me' mode without passing 'Go' or collecting $200, and I just haven't been able to stop myself. I haven't been able to pull myself aside and realize the insignificance of the thing that's upset me. And I had really started to be very good at that lately.
I've felt, for a few months now, that I am finally becoming a man. Probably since I turned twenty I have wondered if I would ever feel like I was an adult; if I would ever perceive myself as a full-grown, legitimate member of humanity, and not just a wide-eyed child bumbling through life, tossed about by the winds that flutter 'round this life. As of late I have begun, at last, to sense the end of my adolescence approaching. I find I have a sturdiness of mind and heart... Surely I will never cease to waver with the winds, nor would I want to. It is my nature to float a bit, to dabble in a thousand things. It is a nature I would not betray for much. But I judge that I have steadied greatly. I can more and more frequently see beyond myself and others, beyond the fleeting things; beyond moments and situations that would previously have entrapped me in their seeming importance.
Perhaps the greatest sense of maturity I now find has come in the recent discovery of what seems the suddenly sizable wall of life standing behind me. Even as I hope the most and best of my life is only soon to begin, I have become aware the depth and bounty of my own private archives thereof. A sense of superiority has emerged that comforts and adds perspective to my cares; that soothes and eases my worries with the awareness of the many similitudes present in what is new, to what I have, in my own time, seen come to fruit before and so often watched wither away again. I have witnessed, with my own senses, enough now to lend comfort to myself - not always to search it out in others, as does a child - but to look inward and grant my own inner being strength, resolve, encouragement, and even a meager port of patience, by sheer reflection upon my own vast stores of previous realities that once were, and are no more.
By these I am fast becoming a man. Yet, here I stand as evidence of the child within, very much alive and kicking; overwrought with momentary though uncontrollable torrents of anger.
I can see myself, even in the midst of these spells. There is still the father figure within watching over and rebuking the smallness, the petulance of the outburst. But he is so small then. His voice is such a tiny point of light in an otherwise complete blackness of firmament. I do not truly hear his tiny rebuke, but only see that he is somewhere far off and away rebuking; as one sees a ship's sail the moment before it vanishes behind the planet's edge. And I am powerless to restrain myself.
I suppose I had been using the signposts of annoyance and frustration as a means of early detection, to combat anger and hatred before it had the time to mass its full forces against me. Here, now, I find my enemy has redoubled his resolves. Every attack he wages is a blitzkrieg. The whooping of sirens sound nolonger as deterrent; nolonger an an announcement to mobilize defense -- but now only as a warning to take cover; that the bombs are in the air, gravity is nigh and irresistibly drawing them upon us, and nothing can be done to undo their course.
This is a chemical thing. I'm certain of it. Something is off in my brain's chemistry that is causing my sudden propensity to rage; this turning again into the worst shades of child-self. The knowledge codified itself within me just this morning when I realized the exact correlation of my temperament's fouling to my sudden increase of appetite. I have been eating greater portions these passed two weeks, and many snacks throughout the night. I now understand this as an unwitting subconscious attempt to regulate my faltering moods; to meet the gap of a chemical imbalance with the chemical releases come of consumption and digestion.
Yet I take it as further evidence of my budding maturity that I was able to detect these things. Not long ago I may have bumbled about, a tangled mess of hostile emotions, for weeks or even months without ever considering the source. It is often so difficult to read one's own changes of character. Or had I detected it, I may just as well have done nothing at all to curb it; may never have even considered the possibility of correction. It's strange how capable men are, though only when it concerns themselves mind you, to ignore shortcomings, and even when one is recognized, to draw it closer to themselves as a sort of welcomed parcel of their core being.
I recall with fondness a woman I once knew who, after treating me to a somewhat jarring car ride, announced solemnly and soulfully, "I'm a bad driver. I know I'm a bad driver and I've accepted that about myself." That didn't stop her from driving, of course, nor from bending as many fenders. And insomuch as I know it never occurred to her seriously, then, to go out of her way to learn any better driving habits. Nor was she able to fully grasp the danger in continuing to operate a two ton vehicle in the public space as a self-proclaimed "bad driver."
I take it as a further indication of my coming of age that I have divined this sudden emotional impropriety of mine, and moreso that my life's experience has granted me both the tools and designs to correct it. I once wheeled among the starts of mysticism and the best of what I have retained from those youthful pursuits is my admittedly abbreviated knowledge of meditation. While I haven't seriously practiced the art in some years and even now feel uncertainty in its application, I know exactly where I shall start in the reseating of my wayward chemistry. The mini-meditation I speak of requires simply that I close my eyes and breathe deliberately with the intent of bringing on a certain physical sensation -- a tingling about the neck, and eventually upon the face and shoulders. The results are physically pleasurable and inspire an increased sense of well-being. Incidentally I find it difficult and undesirable to focus my eyes for some time after this simple process. I have long suspected the medical results of this meditation to be a sort of burst-release of serotonin. Whatever its nature I mean to implement it in again lengthening my so recently shortened fuse. I shall also take this as a cue to lay designs on some form of fuller meditation and perhaps become more constant and rigorous in my physical workouts, which have slackened of late -- very probably due the same cause.
Now, it's not that I'm sitting here typing this message with a furrowed brow, red cheeks, and a hateful stare, thinking of how stupid everything is and how it should all go off and die somewhere. No really, I'm not. I swear. I'm quite content just this moment. If I didn't know any better I would suspect that I am no more restive than is my tendency; that I am as bio-chemically inert as a juniper in February. No, I don't know what that means either. I'm just trying to say that I feel absolutely normal in the interims. It's only when some small trifle of a disturbance falls within my purview that I find my moods leapfrogging passed the usual landmarks of annoyed, frustrated, and angered, straight into manic-homicidal-fit mode. Seriously... Hulk smash!
Hulk smash, indeed! I've been going straight into a full-on 'get the fuck away from me' mode without passing 'Go' or collecting $200, and I just haven't been able to stop myself. I haven't been able to pull myself aside and realize the insignificance of the thing that's upset me. And I had really started to be very good at that lately.
I've felt, for a few months now, that I am finally becoming a man. Probably since I turned twenty I have wondered if I would ever feel like I was an adult; if I would ever perceive myself as a full-grown, legitimate member of humanity, and not just a wide-eyed child bumbling through life, tossed about by the winds that flutter 'round this life. As of late I have begun, at last, to sense the end of my adolescence approaching. I find I have a sturdiness of mind and heart... Surely I will never cease to waver with the winds, nor would I want to. It is my nature to float a bit, to dabble in a thousand things. It is a nature I would not betray for much. But I judge that I have steadied greatly. I can more and more frequently see beyond myself and others, beyond the fleeting things; beyond moments and situations that would previously have entrapped me in their seeming importance.
Perhaps the greatest sense of maturity I now find has come in the recent discovery of what seems the suddenly sizable wall of life standing behind me. Even as I hope the most and best of my life is only soon to begin, I have become aware the depth and bounty of my own private archives thereof. A sense of superiority has emerged that comforts and adds perspective to my cares; that soothes and eases my worries with the awareness of the many similitudes present in what is new, to what I have, in my own time, seen come to fruit before and so often watched wither away again. I have witnessed, with my own senses, enough now to lend comfort to myself - not always to search it out in others, as does a child - but to look inward and grant my own inner being strength, resolve, encouragement, and even a meager port of patience, by sheer reflection upon my own vast stores of previous realities that once were, and are no more.
By these I am fast becoming a man. Yet, here I stand as evidence of the child within, very much alive and kicking; overwrought with momentary though uncontrollable torrents of anger.
I can see myself, even in the midst of these spells. There is still the father figure within watching over and rebuking the smallness, the petulance of the outburst. But he is so small then. His voice is such a tiny point of light in an otherwise complete blackness of firmament. I do not truly hear his tiny rebuke, but only see that he is somewhere far off and away rebuking; as one sees a ship's sail the moment before it vanishes behind the planet's edge. And I am powerless to restrain myself.
I suppose I had been using the signposts of annoyance and frustration as a means of early detection, to combat anger and hatred before it had the time to mass its full forces against me. Here, now, I find my enemy has redoubled his resolves. Every attack he wages is a blitzkrieg. The whooping of sirens sound nolonger as deterrent; nolonger an an announcement to mobilize defense -- but now only as a warning to take cover; that the bombs are in the air, gravity is nigh and irresistibly drawing them upon us, and nothing can be done to undo their course.
This is a chemical thing. I'm certain of it. Something is off in my brain's chemistry that is causing my sudden propensity to rage; this turning again into the worst shades of child-self. The knowledge codified itself within me just this morning when I realized the exact correlation of my temperament's fouling to my sudden increase of appetite. I have been eating greater portions these passed two weeks, and many snacks throughout the night. I now understand this as an unwitting subconscious attempt to regulate my faltering moods; to meet the gap of a chemical imbalance with the chemical releases come of consumption and digestion.
Yet I take it as further evidence of my budding maturity that I was able to detect these things. Not long ago I may have bumbled about, a tangled mess of hostile emotions, for weeks or even months without ever considering the source. It is often so difficult to read one's own changes of character. Or had I detected it, I may just as well have done nothing at all to curb it; may never have even considered the possibility of correction. It's strange how capable men are, though only when it concerns themselves mind you, to ignore shortcomings, and even when one is recognized, to draw it closer to themselves as a sort of welcomed parcel of their core being.
I recall with fondness a woman I once knew who, after treating me to a somewhat jarring car ride, announced solemnly and soulfully, "I'm a bad driver. I know I'm a bad driver and I've accepted that about myself." That didn't stop her from driving, of course, nor from bending as many fenders. And insomuch as I know it never occurred to her seriously, then, to go out of her way to learn any better driving habits. Nor was she able to fully grasp the danger in continuing to operate a two ton vehicle in the public space as a self-proclaimed "bad driver."
I take it as a further indication of my coming of age that I have divined this sudden emotional impropriety of mine, and moreso that my life's experience has granted me both the tools and designs to correct it. I once wheeled among the starts of mysticism and the best of what I have retained from those youthful pursuits is my admittedly abbreviated knowledge of meditation. While I haven't seriously practiced the art in some years and even now feel uncertainty in its application, I know exactly where I shall start in the reseating of my wayward chemistry. The mini-meditation I speak of requires simply that I close my eyes and breathe deliberately with the intent of bringing on a certain physical sensation -- a tingling about the neck, and eventually upon the face and shoulders. The results are physically pleasurable and inspire an increased sense of well-being. Incidentally I find it difficult and undesirable to focus my eyes for some time after this simple process. I have long suspected the medical results of this meditation to be a sort of burst-release of serotonin. Whatever its nature I mean to implement it in again lengthening my so recently shortened fuse. I shall also take this as a cue to lay designs on some form of fuller meditation and perhaps become more constant and rigorous in my physical workouts, which have slackened of late -- very probably due the same cause.
Fingers
I was jogging down the street just after dusk when I heard a shrieking; a cry of pain and torture. For a moment I hesitated to follow these sounds, slowly easing my way toward the cries as I considered them. Ahead I saw a man emerge from the side of one of the suburban homes dotting the lane. Finally, I took to a sprint.
"Does someone need help?" I shouted. "You tell me," was the extent of his casually delivered words, his eyes and gestures alone directing me to the scene.
At first I came upon a thirty-something man lying on the ground on a sheet of plastic. He was in a sort of collapsed position with his head set partially against a wall, either faint or asleep. He looked peaceful enough. I took him for drunk.
Blood had pooled in the alleys formed by the crumpled plastic beneath his shape, primarily at the ends of his arms; the right more grossly than the other. Several of his fingers were gone. They'd been chopped off, cleanly and in straight cuts. I knew immediately that he'd done it to himself; and not at all by accident.
I continued around the back of the building and found another man, older than the first; middle-aged; in the prime of middle age. He was sitting on a stool at a wooden table beneath the hot, yellow glow of a naked light-bulb. The ground around him was bloodied as well. All of his fingers were gone.
He sat with a solemn slouch and his face held a complex expression. He had the look of a man who regretted having had to do something, but who refused to regret the actual doing of it.
Seeing both men now, I felt the pressing need to either take action or at least make some sort of proclamation. After all, I'd rushed to these men to aid them, not just gawk at the horrors found. But I didn't know quite what to do, what to say. Neither was bleeding any longer, and the amount of blood loss did not seem, to me, to be life-threatening. I knew, without a doubt, that both of these men had done this thing themselves, had self-mutilated. These were acts of free will undertaken by men who had fully known and understood the permanence of the losses they would incur when first they began whatever strange enterprise it was that brought them before me now.
I couldn't quite bring myself to say aloud that they should go to the hospital. It seemed too ignorant to speak such an obvious conclusion, like telling a man stood stoically at roadside, watching his house burn down, that he should call the fire department. If he hasn't already, he wants the house to burn.
"Well, you're not going to bleed out," I said. "That's what they tell me," responded the newly fingerless, middle-aged man, in a slightly bothered tone. All I could do was stand gaping at the sights before me, which I did for some time. Then suddenly the man's attitude took a lift, as though my presence had drawn him from his inner contemplations. Now he came upon me with the look of boastful satisfaction; the sort of gleeful pride a child takes in displaying a rare new toy he's only just acquired.
He held out the stumps of each hand, turning them in the light for my inspection. Then his own eyes settled on them, widened in wonder. His gaze seemed to peer right through the hands, as though he was looking not at the skin and bone and flesh of them, but at the thought and story, the secret meaning deep within and far beyond the hand.
With this glint in his eye he let out a chortle of a laugh, and as we both looked down into his digitless palms he said to me, with a little smile at the corner of his aging mouth, "This is the first thing I've ever done with my life." And I knew exactly what he meant.
"Does someone need help?" I shouted. "You tell me," was the extent of his casually delivered words, his eyes and gestures alone directing me to the scene.
At first I came upon a thirty-something man lying on the ground on a sheet of plastic. He was in a sort of collapsed position with his head set partially against a wall, either faint or asleep. He looked peaceful enough. I took him for drunk.
Blood had pooled in the alleys formed by the crumpled plastic beneath his shape, primarily at the ends of his arms; the right more grossly than the other. Several of his fingers were gone. They'd been chopped off, cleanly and in straight cuts. I knew immediately that he'd done it to himself; and not at all by accident.
I continued around the back of the building and found another man, older than the first; middle-aged; in the prime of middle age. He was sitting on a stool at a wooden table beneath the hot, yellow glow of a naked light-bulb. The ground around him was bloodied as well. All of his fingers were gone.
He sat with a solemn slouch and his face held a complex expression. He had the look of a man who regretted having had to do something, but who refused to regret the actual doing of it.
Seeing both men now, I felt the pressing need to either take action or at least make some sort of proclamation. After all, I'd rushed to these men to aid them, not just gawk at the horrors found. But I didn't know quite what to do, what to say. Neither was bleeding any longer, and the amount of blood loss did not seem, to me, to be life-threatening. I knew, without a doubt, that both of these men had done this thing themselves, had self-mutilated. These were acts of free will undertaken by men who had fully known and understood the permanence of the losses they would incur when first they began whatever strange enterprise it was that brought them before me now.
I couldn't quite bring myself to say aloud that they should go to the hospital. It seemed too ignorant to speak such an obvious conclusion, like telling a man stood stoically at roadside, watching his house burn down, that he should call the fire department. If he hasn't already, he wants the house to burn.
"Well, you're not going to bleed out," I said. "That's what they tell me," responded the newly fingerless, middle-aged man, in a slightly bothered tone. All I could do was stand gaping at the sights before me, which I did for some time. Then suddenly the man's attitude took a lift, as though my presence had drawn him from his inner contemplations. Now he came upon me with the look of boastful satisfaction; the sort of gleeful pride a child takes in displaying a rare new toy he's only just acquired.
He held out the stumps of each hand, turning them in the light for my inspection. Then his own eyes settled on them, widened in wonder. His gaze seemed to peer right through the hands, as though he was looking not at the skin and bone and flesh of them, but at the thought and story, the secret meaning deep within and far beyond the hand.
With this glint in his eye he let out a chortle of a laugh, and as we both looked down into his digitless palms he said to me, with a little smile at the corner of his aging mouth, "This is the first thing I've ever done with my life." And I knew exactly what he meant.
Prosimian-Man
I am man and you are not. This is your world. You belong to it. You are sated by it, happy of it, and none to your fault. But I am an accident. This is not my world and I am not happy of it. I'm not meant to be here. But I am stranded. I am made myself the butt of a woeful cosmic joke.
In eternity they gambled, "What do you think would happen if we took one of us - a spiritually developed being; a consciousness who desires meaning and virtue, life and love; whose goals would not abide the comforts and trivialities of a life lived only for the sake of living still... What would come if such a being, unawares, were bore upon a planet of hairy, tick-eating ape, and left there to believe in it his natural home?"
The pot must ever grow among my kindred, casting bets on how it all shall surely one day end for me; or yet how it must one day still begin. For it can not be fairly said that my life has much begun, though false-starts do amount in me aplenty.
But what should happen to a spiritual being set among the squalor and feces of a race of primates? What mechanism might he find by which to cope amongst a peoples dedicated in every proposition to acquiring the largest bunch of bananas readily available, be they either on the tree or in some fellow other's apish paw. To always seek and take the largest cache, by lawless force as needs shall be, and spiting every meal come them of the un-bunched abundance budded, budding freely over and about.
Then to guard the loot's the thing! First to heap up treasure, then to lay aground the thicket, sharpen claws, beat chest, howl thunder. For peace among apes is only come of sinew's fear; of the one's supposed death and loss upon the other's much labored image of insurmountable virility.
And last to gorge! When gathered and preserved, to overwhelm the senses with the excess of the ill-got gains. To have as much and more as can be had, that some be lost to vomit. The primate's life: to live for sake of living. Every carnal comfort bought to ease the road to death, and nothing more pursued.
What becomes of man as born to ape? So decrees the cosmos to test the supposition and I am born. Though true the pool slows growth as I grow older. The odds, at first predicting a romantic teenage suicide, have long since turned to favor natural death, as there to be preceded by long and pitiful, unlikely, apish life. Such even that the parlour of heaven's gamblers has turned from roguish curiosity to the laments of guilt and despair.
They expected more of me. I am one of their own and here they find me lived amongst the apes; choosing here to stay. The suicide was much preferred to this. They would have found it just and right and beautiful, and I'd returned to my compatriots to cheers and laughter; the multitude's hands rapped upon my back. But fearing death too greatly I taught myself, instead, how well to suffer and remain. And heaven suffers with me for it.
They meant to see me killed - a god amongst heathens, man amidst ape. "A flame too alighting of the truth to be politely tolerated must be squelched at hands his own or otherwise." So they thought and right they were. But I have out-stepped their suppositions, hiding what alights of me beneath a bushel. I have thinned the air that feeds the wick and learned to breathe in shallows. I am a disappointment to my gods. So do I apologize. I must be putting on an awful show.
I am a man set among apes and I have likened it to a great cosmic wager. It is nothing less! though at once it may be more. Perhaps the ancients planned that I'd alight in these prosimians a thing or two before my passing... before they killed me for it, or I myself. Perhaps it were a task to come and do and die and then go home, and be again among my kind in joy and love and laughter of the trip; failure no disgrace so long as prodigy return me home to kind.
Oh fear of fear that heaven is not something I must earn my place among but one to which I first belonged. Fear of fear that, here beneath the bushel, walked among the monkeys, my posture doth decay. Fear of fear of fear that on that day I die, I die too monkey to go home.
In eternity they gambled, "What do you think would happen if we took one of us - a spiritually developed being; a consciousness who desires meaning and virtue, life and love; whose goals would not abide the comforts and trivialities of a life lived only for the sake of living still... What would come if such a being, unawares, were bore upon a planet of hairy, tick-eating ape, and left there to believe in it his natural home?"
The pot must ever grow among my kindred, casting bets on how it all shall surely one day end for me; or yet how it must one day still begin. For it can not be fairly said that my life has much begun, though false-starts do amount in me aplenty.
But what should happen to a spiritual being set among the squalor and feces of a race of primates? What mechanism might he find by which to cope amongst a peoples dedicated in every proposition to acquiring the largest bunch of bananas readily available, be they either on the tree or in some fellow other's apish paw. To always seek and take the largest cache, by lawless force as needs shall be, and spiting every meal come them of the un-bunched abundance budded, budding freely over and about.
Then to guard the loot's the thing! First to heap up treasure, then to lay aground the thicket, sharpen claws, beat chest, howl thunder. For peace among apes is only come of sinew's fear; of the one's supposed death and loss upon the other's much labored image of insurmountable virility.
And last to gorge! When gathered and preserved, to overwhelm the senses with the excess of the ill-got gains. To have as much and more as can be had, that some be lost to vomit. The primate's life: to live for sake of living. Every carnal comfort bought to ease the road to death, and nothing more pursued.
What becomes of man as born to ape? So decrees the cosmos to test the supposition and I am born. Though true the pool slows growth as I grow older. The odds, at first predicting a romantic teenage suicide, have long since turned to favor natural death, as there to be preceded by long and pitiful, unlikely, apish life. Such even that the parlour of heaven's gamblers has turned from roguish curiosity to the laments of guilt and despair.
They expected more of me. I am one of their own and here they find me lived amongst the apes; choosing here to stay. The suicide was much preferred to this. They would have found it just and right and beautiful, and I'd returned to my compatriots to cheers and laughter; the multitude's hands rapped upon my back. But fearing death too greatly I taught myself, instead, how well to suffer and remain. And heaven suffers with me for it.
They meant to see me killed - a god amongst heathens, man amidst ape. "A flame too alighting of the truth to be politely tolerated must be squelched at hands his own or otherwise." So they thought and right they were. But I have out-stepped their suppositions, hiding what alights of me beneath a bushel. I have thinned the air that feeds the wick and learned to breathe in shallows. I am a disappointment to my gods. So do I apologize. I must be putting on an awful show.
I am a man set among apes and I have likened it to a great cosmic wager. It is nothing less! though at once it may be more. Perhaps the ancients planned that I'd alight in these prosimians a thing or two before my passing... before they killed me for it, or I myself. Perhaps it were a task to come and do and die and then go home, and be again among my kind in joy and love and laughter of the trip; failure no disgrace so long as prodigy return me home to kind.
Oh fear of fear that heaven is not something I must earn my place among but one to which I first belonged. Fear of fear that, here beneath the bushel, walked among the monkeys, my posture doth decay. Fear of fear of fear that on that day I die, I die too monkey to go home.
Television is Like This
Television is like this:
Imagine you're fourteen years old again. Imagine you are a fourteen year old male. You've hit puberty. You've thought you were in love once or twice. You've experienced a lot in fourteen years, really. And lately you've become painfully conscious of other people. Nolonger do you run and play with mindless, uncaring joy as a child does. But now you are all too aware of the outer world's assumptions, expectations, and opinions of you.
Your tastes are changing. You've become interested in music and art on a new, perhaps more spiritually profound level. Sure, you're still just a dumb fourteen year old, and you probably think whatever they play on the popular radio station is great, but you are learning to experience music and other forms of art in a new way; a way that seems to impact you personally; that speaks to you directly.
And you've just begun to entertain a sort of rebelliousness and angst. You now find yourself unconsciously probing the boundaries of your world; bringing challenge to the so-called conventional wisdom, and to those authority figures who, until now, guided and predisposed all your understandings.
You are a fourteen year old male. You're evolving. You're growing. You're becoming spiritually aware. You've been on this planet fourteen years and there's a million miles ahead of you, sure, but your personal journey of self-discovery has undeniably begun.
And let's suppose that as you are undergoing all these changes and awakenings, the outside world, all your friends, all the people you've been told are cool, whose footfalls are to be noted and imitated, are all at once telling you, in the friendliest, most sincerely compassionate manner, about all these things they think you would really, really like... as a fourteen year old male.
They give you names of bands and television shows. They give you authors and movies. They give you artists, games, women, foods, and flavors... So helpful are they to point you at those things which they believe you, in your present state of mind and at your level of intellectual, emotional, and spiritual development, would find illuminating, intoxicating, diverting, and entertaining; that would make your world - your very life - a richer, more prosperous, more meaningful and enlightening journey.
And with all these kind suggestions overflowing the basket of your open arms you take yourself to a video shop to pick up the number one film, that very gem of celluloid theatrics that all your friends and peers joined together to laud above all other works, as that which would most pierce the fourteen-year-old male soul.
You bring it home, put it in the player, and press play. And it's fucking Barney. 'Barney the Purple Dinosaur - the Movie.' Or it's an hour and a half installment of 'Elmo's World.' You're a teenager, the bud of a man, and they've got you watching 'Hannah Montana on Ice.'
Then you turn on the radio to the sound of the DJ pitching you into one of those "great songs" by one of those "awesome bands" your peers mentioned. And it's an 'Alvin and the Chipmunks' cover.
You look again at the list of foods to try, and they're all Gerber brand. The women meant to satisfy your raging hormones are boyish and dull, the games are peg-in-hole, and the artists all color-by-number.
Television is like this: Imagine you're a twenty-eight year old male and the whole world is trying to give you just what it thinks a being of your emotional, intellectual, and spiritual maturity will want; will desire to see, consider, and discuss. And every single one of them is so sure they've got it right that they all, a thousand different media outlets, each employing hundreds of thinking, reasoning human beings to choose and produce the content they find worthy, all of them independently but simultaneously conclude that what will benefit you most, what will most endear you to them, what you really truly want to see and hear is "Dave Letterman had sex with staffers."
...
Lord send me boyish women and Elmo's World.
Imagine you're fourteen years old again. Imagine you are a fourteen year old male. You've hit puberty. You've thought you were in love once or twice. You've experienced a lot in fourteen years, really. And lately you've become painfully conscious of other people. Nolonger do you run and play with mindless, uncaring joy as a child does. But now you are all too aware of the outer world's assumptions, expectations, and opinions of you.
Your tastes are changing. You've become interested in music and art on a new, perhaps more spiritually profound level. Sure, you're still just a dumb fourteen year old, and you probably think whatever they play on the popular radio station is great, but you are learning to experience music and other forms of art in a new way; a way that seems to impact you personally; that speaks to you directly.
And you've just begun to entertain a sort of rebelliousness and angst. You now find yourself unconsciously probing the boundaries of your world; bringing challenge to the so-called conventional wisdom, and to those authority figures who, until now, guided and predisposed all your understandings.
You are a fourteen year old male. You're evolving. You're growing. You're becoming spiritually aware. You've been on this planet fourteen years and there's a million miles ahead of you, sure, but your personal journey of self-discovery has undeniably begun.
And let's suppose that as you are undergoing all these changes and awakenings, the outside world, all your friends, all the people you've been told are cool, whose footfalls are to be noted and imitated, are all at once telling you, in the friendliest, most sincerely compassionate manner, about all these things they think you would really, really like... as a fourteen year old male.
They give you names of bands and television shows. They give you authors and movies. They give you artists, games, women, foods, and flavors... So helpful are they to point you at those things which they believe you, in your present state of mind and at your level of intellectual, emotional, and spiritual development, would find illuminating, intoxicating, diverting, and entertaining; that would make your world - your very life - a richer, more prosperous, more meaningful and enlightening journey.
And with all these kind suggestions overflowing the basket of your open arms you take yourself to a video shop to pick up the number one film, that very gem of celluloid theatrics that all your friends and peers joined together to laud above all other works, as that which would most pierce the fourteen-year-old male soul.
You bring it home, put it in the player, and press play. And it's fucking Barney. 'Barney the Purple Dinosaur - the Movie.' Or it's an hour and a half installment of 'Elmo's World.' You're a teenager, the bud of a man, and they've got you watching 'Hannah Montana on Ice.'
Then you turn on the radio to the sound of the DJ pitching you into one of those "great songs" by one of those "awesome bands" your peers mentioned. And it's an 'Alvin and the Chipmunks' cover.
You look again at the list of foods to try, and they're all Gerber brand. The women meant to satisfy your raging hormones are boyish and dull, the games are peg-in-hole, and the artists all color-by-number.
Television is like this: Imagine you're a twenty-eight year old male and the whole world is trying to give you just what it thinks a being of your emotional, intellectual, and spiritual maturity will want; will desire to see, consider, and discuss. And every single one of them is so sure they've got it right that they all, a thousand different media outlets, each employing hundreds of thinking, reasoning human beings to choose and produce the content they find worthy, all of them independently but simultaneously conclude that what will benefit you most, what will most endear you to them, what you really truly want to see and hear is "Dave Letterman had sex with staffers."
...
Lord send me boyish women and Elmo's World.
We
Why does it bother me when I see them not living up to their potential? Otherwise I treat them hostilely, coldly; as strangers. So why should it burn me to see them settle? Who are they to me, after all. A nuisance, mostly. At least that's how I tend to cast them in my head. But why, then? I'm somehow expecting better of them at the same time as I expect the worst. How is this true? Why does it work inside me this way?
Do I care for them? The soft ones would like that. They'd like to reinforce their fluffy, pink, cotton candy ideals by pushing it all back to empathy and love. I'm not saying different but I'm not bringing it to bed just because it's pretty either. It has to justify. It has to prove.
It's a world that could, but doesn't full of people who would like to, but won't. How is that? How can fear be so much. How can cowardice rule entire nations like this? How can men - red-blooded, living, breathing, thick with sinew and muscle, men - men with minds and hearts and souls be so dominated by dead things; by objects, and institutions, pavement and glass. How can it be, and better why should it bother me?
If it dominates them and not me, and I hate them, what is it to me? Am I dominated by those things? Yes. But I'm not. But you are. Every other day is a private hell inside - a war, hating and fighting what the rest seem to lay upon you. Sometimes you win and do what you think is right. Sometimes you lose and fold to the perceived external imperative. It doesn't seem that way always, but it is. It doesn't look that way from the outside, but it is.
Then it isn't love and empathy. It's self loathing. I see in them what I harbor in myself and hate them for the mirror's image. I hurt for their compromises as I hurt for my own. To see them lessened is to witness the lessening of myself. Yes. Maybe. Probably. But then it sort of is empathy. I am a part of mankinde; a peece of the Continent; any mans death diminishes me. If you say so.
Anyway, if that's right what can you do? All your life's been spent fighting it. Your head's bled with the fighting of it since the 8th grade, at least. It's a twenty-years war and a stalemate at that. Where is there any winning it? How, if not before now, after now? I don't know. You could go again. You could go again and this time, say "I'm not coming back," and then don't. That would be something. That would really be something! But is that what you want? There's very little holding me. Most of what is stopping me is among them who've hurt me most. But is that what you want? Do you want to live like that? On the road? Maybe. For a little while, I should think. And maybe it's not about the wanderlust. Maybe I just have to go build something of my own, without a net; without a bunch of friends and family looking on in judgment, telling me how they'd do it better, when the record shows just how much they got it wrong themselves.
Sounds arrogant. I know. It probably is. That doesn't make it wrong. Maybe not but I'm not letting it in bed just 'cause it's pretty. It'll have to prove.
Do I care for them? The soft ones would like that. They'd like to reinforce their fluffy, pink, cotton candy ideals by pushing it all back to empathy and love. I'm not saying different but I'm not bringing it to bed just because it's pretty either. It has to justify. It has to prove.
It's a world that could, but doesn't full of people who would like to, but won't. How is that? How can fear be so much. How can cowardice rule entire nations like this? How can men - red-blooded, living, breathing, thick with sinew and muscle, men - men with minds and hearts and souls be so dominated by dead things; by objects, and institutions, pavement and glass. How can it be, and better why should it bother me?
If it dominates them and not me, and I hate them, what is it to me? Am I dominated by those things? Yes. But I'm not. But you are. Every other day is a private hell inside - a war, hating and fighting what the rest seem to lay upon you. Sometimes you win and do what you think is right. Sometimes you lose and fold to the perceived external imperative. It doesn't seem that way always, but it is. It doesn't look that way from the outside, but it is.
Then it isn't love and empathy. It's self loathing. I see in them what I harbor in myself and hate them for the mirror's image. I hurt for their compromises as I hurt for my own. To see them lessened is to witness the lessening of myself. Yes. Maybe. Probably. But then it sort of is empathy. I am a part of mankinde; a peece of the Continent; any mans death diminishes me. If you say so.
Anyway, if that's right what can you do? All your life's been spent fighting it. Your head's bled with the fighting of it since the 8th grade, at least. It's a twenty-years war and a stalemate at that. Where is there any winning it? How, if not before now, after now? I don't know. You could go again. You could go again and this time, say "I'm not coming back," and then don't. That would be something. That would really be something! But is that what you want? There's very little holding me. Most of what is stopping me is among them who've hurt me most. But is that what you want? Do you want to live like that? On the road? Maybe. For a little while, I should think. And maybe it's not about the wanderlust. Maybe I just have to go build something of my own, without a net; without a bunch of friends and family looking on in judgment, telling me how they'd do it better, when the record shows just how much they got it wrong themselves.
Sounds arrogant. I know. It probably is. That doesn't make it wrong. Maybe not but I'm not letting it in bed just 'cause it's pretty. It'll have to prove.
Dear Roy, It's Me, God.
There's a man inside my head. I'm sure he's only me; Though I've never seen him clearly nor heard his voice but as from the farthest reaches of some deep chamber. Still I know, at least, he's in there - tucked within some distant cave. I know this because he's driving me quite mad.
I'll sit at work when no one's around and nothing's to do; my mind wastefully spinning its gears, slowly burning off the oil in the pan, considering some fleetingly irrelevant topic. Or sometimes I'll be busy at the thankless labors of torturing myself, the way we're all so often called to do, with thoughts and memories that drive me into fits of shame or rage or hatred. There I'll be quietly, privately digging open old wounds; chewing into the tender flesh of my psyche -- not bothering anyone. When all of a sudden this fellow in my head will bellow out a din of inseparably overlapping echoes from the back and bottom of that far-off parking garage of his, leaving my head swimming in the reverberations.
What he's saying I can only ever guess at by those few chance syllables that somehow manage to pierce the thicket of low-frequency noise that accompanies all his chatter; which shutters the chambers of my mind like an elevated train rattling the walls of low-rent housing. I sometimes lose my balance for a moment in the unexpected cacophony of his words. And it feels like I'm losing my grip.
He's an aggravation to me, really. He upsets me. Over the years I've gathered enough from his disjointed words to see what he's after; to understand what he's on about, more or less. And I say, he's nothing but a bother.
I've grown accustom to all the other things in my head. The ficus in the corner, the oak desk that smells faintly of wood oil, the giant, winding water slide that puts out into the pool of warm, unbuttered ramen noodles... Absurd, uncouth, extravagant; at least the other items, places, and people tucked into my skull are tame enough to hold their peace until called; To take a numbered ticket and mill about benignly until their order's up.
But this fellow in the darkness - in the depth - he's no respect for democracy! He thinks his interests overshadow the others; that his demands are more pressing than those of the rage-a-holic trucker who accosted me at roadside last year. Even these most vicious memories know to hold their tongue until the right hour, but that's too good for the booming voice. He thinks himself the only I should entertain - having nothing of the others.
Yes, I know what that one's after. And he won't get it! You hear me? I can assure you, you'll not have it your way. I'll stand against you till the final hour! So won't you just give it up already and leave me to my folly? Won't you stop assaulting me with that insipid internal clarity of yours? I've heard you - heard your story out in full - and I reject you! So stop making me feel like I'm insane! Stop driving me crazy!!!
If you'd only leave me then I wouldn't feel ill as I do myself these harms. I could continue lifting trifles up for life and death; I could rest every thought and word that's ever hurt me in my bosom, vengefully and eternally; I could go right on giving years, decades, perhaps even a century of this existence to all that bears no consequence whatsoever. And I'd do it all happily, mindlessly, madly!
Why, without you I wouldn't even know my own madness and insomuch I'd be thought quite sane. Especially among these people! To them my insanities are considered wise and noble virtues. To them my sociopathy is canonical law. Surely, with but a bit of effort I could be king of the crazies if you'd only let me go.
Thou accursed sanity! This inner voice torments me with the lure of his righteousness; his calm serenity. He beckons me to join him in his cave, or rather to release him from it, while all I'd like to do is wile away my days working, eating, and vacuuming the rugs. Why must he reflect this potential state of being. Why must he reach into the fiction of my life and show me things real. Do you know the trouble you've caused me, sir?
Every time he speaks, the inside of my teeth start to itch, and each halve of my brain takes up a knife to stab its neighbor in the eye. And I feel I've suddenly lost my mind. But I've learned this from the voice, at least: I'm not going mad, but merely recognizing my own persistent state of madness.
I'm crazy, he says, so are you. But it's the noticing that hurts. It makes the world start to spin and there's no mystery why. The world was always spinning, but crazy people don't make record of such things. Only sane men wobble with the Earth. Only sane men realize they're upon it.
But I don't want this sanity he offers. Anyway, it's oh so difficult to achieve. How resolute you must be to persist at sanity while walking in the midst of psychotics. And how easy it is to lose all the gains you've made in but one relapsing act of lunacy. Just a moment's derision can send you flailing back to incomprehensibility in a wink!
So leave me, you! I don't want the Earth beneath my feet. I much prefer it wafting over head. And I don't mind living and dying in madness, so long as it means I'll get to slave away my youth to empty, heartless labors; burning all the while with hatred for the million men I lie awake at night writhing in contempt of; mending what I mean to break; cleaning what I mean to soil; and piling every rotten thing atop the last until I cannot see nor smell beyond the wretch and rank of every evil I've acquired.
Wait, that sounded crazy... Oh, won't you get out of my head!
I'll sit at work when no one's around and nothing's to do; my mind wastefully spinning its gears, slowly burning off the oil in the pan, considering some fleetingly irrelevant topic. Or sometimes I'll be busy at the thankless labors of torturing myself, the way we're all so often called to do, with thoughts and memories that drive me into fits of shame or rage or hatred. There I'll be quietly, privately digging open old wounds; chewing into the tender flesh of my psyche -- not bothering anyone. When all of a sudden this fellow in my head will bellow out a din of inseparably overlapping echoes from the back and bottom of that far-off parking garage of his, leaving my head swimming in the reverberations.
What he's saying I can only ever guess at by those few chance syllables that somehow manage to pierce the thicket of low-frequency noise that accompanies all his chatter; which shutters the chambers of my mind like an elevated train rattling the walls of low-rent housing. I sometimes lose my balance for a moment in the unexpected cacophony of his words. And it feels like I'm losing my grip.
He's an aggravation to me, really. He upsets me. Over the years I've gathered enough from his disjointed words to see what he's after; to understand what he's on about, more or less. And I say, he's nothing but a bother.
I've grown accustom to all the other things in my head. The ficus in the corner, the oak desk that smells faintly of wood oil, the giant, winding water slide that puts out into the pool of warm, unbuttered ramen noodles... Absurd, uncouth, extravagant; at least the other items, places, and people tucked into my skull are tame enough to hold their peace until called; To take a numbered ticket and mill about benignly until their order's up.
But this fellow in the darkness - in the depth - he's no respect for democracy! He thinks his interests overshadow the others; that his demands are more pressing than those of the rage-a-holic trucker who accosted me at roadside last year. Even these most vicious memories know to hold their tongue until the right hour, but that's too good for the booming voice. He thinks himself the only I should entertain - having nothing of the others.
Yes, I know what that one's after. And he won't get it! You hear me? I can assure you, you'll not have it your way. I'll stand against you till the final hour! So won't you just give it up already and leave me to my folly? Won't you stop assaulting me with that insipid internal clarity of yours? I've heard you - heard your story out in full - and I reject you! So stop making me feel like I'm insane! Stop driving me crazy!!!
If you'd only leave me then I wouldn't feel ill as I do myself these harms. I could continue lifting trifles up for life and death; I could rest every thought and word that's ever hurt me in my bosom, vengefully and eternally; I could go right on giving years, decades, perhaps even a century of this existence to all that bears no consequence whatsoever. And I'd do it all happily, mindlessly, madly!
Why, without you I wouldn't even know my own madness and insomuch I'd be thought quite sane. Especially among these people! To them my insanities are considered wise and noble virtues. To them my sociopathy is canonical law. Surely, with but a bit of effort I could be king of the crazies if you'd only let me go.
Thou accursed sanity! This inner voice torments me with the lure of his righteousness; his calm serenity. He beckons me to join him in his cave, or rather to release him from it, while all I'd like to do is wile away my days working, eating, and vacuuming the rugs. Why must he reflect this potential state of being. Why must he reach into the fiction of my life and show me things real. Do you know the trouble you've caused me, sir?
Every time he speaks, the inside of my teeth start to itch, and each halve of my brain takes up a knife to stab its neighbor in the eye. And I feel I've suddenly lost my mind. But I've learned this from the voice, at least: I'm not going mad, but merely recognizing my own persistent state of madness.
I'm crazy, he says, so are you. But it's the noticing that hurts. It makes the world start to spin and there's no mystery why. The world was always spinning, but crazy people don't make record of such things. Only sane men wobble with the Earth. Only sane men realize they're upon it.
But I don't want this sanity he offers. Anyway, it's oh so difficult to achieve. How resolute you must be to persist at sanity while walking in the midst of psychotics. And how easy it is to lose all the gains you've made in but one relapsing act of lunacy. Just a moment's derision can send you flailing back to incomprehensibility in a wink!
So leave me, you! I don't want the Earth beneath my feet. I much prefer it wafting over head. And I don't mind living and dying in madness, so long as it means I'll get to slave away my youth to empty, heartless labors; burning all the while with hatred for the million men I lie awake at night writhing in contempt of; mending what I mean to break; cleaning what I mean to soil; and piling every rotten thing atop the last until I cannot see nor smell beyond the wretch and rank of every evil I've acquired.
Wait, that sounded crazy... Oh, won't you get out of my head!
Average
I feel I'm drawn to mediocrity lately, as it concerns this project of mine: this blog. It's perhaps an unreasonable statement. Even I recognize the more obvious virtues of my latest efforts. ...Documenting bugs that Blogger chooses to ignore; Sharing inventions of code I'd never before had a forum in which to publish; And in the transfer of at least one old article (a recent favorite of mine) I sat down and added meaningfully to the content.
Still, I had envisioned this site a forum for my art -- finally a place in which to distill and concentrate the most perfect of my artistic labors; from music to movies to text. And yes, my snippets of code were to have a place here as well. But with the ever expanding Blog Archive for this first month, and the umpteen articles regarding tips and bugs and source code, I feel I've come to earn too much, too quickly in the way of averageness.
And even though I continue to shun the commercial lure of 'Monetizing' this blog by snapping in a few Google Adsense bars in the margins, the posts themselves seem to have taken on the all too familiar din of website commercialism.
I find myself making links to the other sites I mention - and do not misunderstand, this effort is made out of respect for the labors of my peers, a general thoroughness of the record, and to the convenience of the reader. Motives aside, the links I make look just as they do on any other blog. They still resemble the embodiment of greed I find throughout this internet. Each feels like a tiny landmine, lain beneath the sod of text by some viciously capitalistic author, in hopes the unsuspecting will step on one and be blown up - flung away to some other site - whereby he shall earn one twentieth of one precious cent for the click-through.
And I suddenly dislike the name of this blog. I don't so much mind it in the domain, but "...you fucking people." staring at me from the top left of every page seems not only to indulge, but to encourage, even provoke, the indignations within me. And despite all my vitriol, in my best moments I don't really want to be this way.
My talent for entertainingly bemoaning the ills of society; for haranguing the ignorant, deceitful, and unjust is only, after all, a talent. A man can have a talent for making war; for killing other men; for lying; for stealing; for cheating; for any number of horrible, evil, sinful things, but talent alone does not justify him in the doing of them. While I have yet to find the sense of self and inner peace that might imbue me with the strength required to restrain the lustful passions of my woeful talent, I can at least envision the day whereupon I shall. That day arrives no sooner for these spiteful words I've lingered overhead, ever enticing me to some new fit of unrest. Yes, they'll have to go.
I feel better about it now. That last paragraph is so beautiful; so unusually sane! Knowing that in a moment these words will perch, as if my own flock of songbirds, atop this oh-so-average endeavor has washed away the memory of her averageness. We have reproven. We are baptized; clean again. We have direction.
I can go on.
Still, I had envisioned this site a forum for my art -- finally a place in which to distill and concentrate the most perfect of my artistic labors; from music to movies to text. And yes, my snippets of code were to have a place here as well. But with the ever expanding Blog Archive for this first month, and the umpteen articles regarding tips and bugs and source code, I feel I've come to earn too much, too quickly in the way of averageness.
And even though I continue to shun the commercial lure of 'Monetizing' this blog by snapping in a few Google Adsense bars in the margins, the posts themselves seem to have taken on the all too familiar din of website commercialism.
I find myself making links to the other sites I mention - and do not misunderstand, this effort is made out of respect for the labors of my peers, a general thoroughness of the record, and to the convenience of the reader. Motives aside, the links I make look just as they do on any other blog. They still resemble the embodiment of greed I find throughout this internet. Each feels like a tiny landmine, lain beneath the sod of text by some viciously capitalistic author, in hopes the unsuspecting will step on one and be blown up - flung away to some other site - whereby he shall earn one twentieth of one precious cent for the click-through.
And I suddenly dislike the name of this blog. I don't so much mind it in the domain, but "...you fucking people." staring at me from the top left of every page seems not only to indulge, but to encourage, even provoke, the indignations within me. And despite all my vitriol, in my best moments I don't really want to be this way.
My talent for entertainingly bemoaning the ills of society; for haranguing the ignorant, deceitful, and unjust is only, after all, a talent. A man can have a talent for making war; for killing other men; for lying; for stealing; for cheating; for any number of horrible, evil, sinful things, but talent alone does not justify him in the doing of them. While I have yet to find the sense of self and inner peace that might imbue me with the strength required to restrain the lustful passions of my woeful talent, I can at least envision the day whereupon I shall. That day arrives no sooner for these spiteful words I've lingered overhead, ever enticing me to some new fit of unrest. Yes, they'll have to go.
I feel better about it now. That last paragraph is so beautiful; so unusually sane! Knowing that in a moment these words will perch, as if my own flock of songbirds, atop this oh-so-average endeavor has washed away the memory of her averageness. We have reproven. We are baptized; clean again. We have direction.
I can go on.
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