Sunday Morning Thoughts 12.15.13 – 12.22.13

I have a confession to make.

I’ve been in a slump. For how long is hard to tell. I could say weeks, or months. I could say years. Hell, if I worked hard enough at an explanation I’m sure I could argue it’s been going my entire life. It’s not an easy thing to admit, especially with how much effort goes into convincing the rest of the world of the complete opposite.

I had this whole bunch of nonsense written up what seems like ages ago. Preachy stuff, you know, trying to feign some sort of enlightened vision. Don’t get me wrong, there were a few good points. It just lacked its own essence in its own delivery. The words were alright by the usual standards. The problem is that they don’t live up to my standards.

So dig, I want to declare some sort of intention here. I won’t though, as that would just perpetuate the issue. No, instead there will be dissection, inflection, slight reflection, just a tad bit of analysis with little to no direction. Correction depends on pressing forward. Watch the ripples and the sort.

The echo of your life will bounce around in the caverns of others, just as other echoes exist in your own cave. Good, bad, indifferent or incomprehensible- those whom you meet and those who meet you create impacts in your timeline and each of us has our own way of valuing such things. Sometimes these values overlap but I’d wager that most don’t. If you have ever seen the ‘news’ in any medium, you know most of us don’t see eye to eye. Ipso facto- war, murder, rape, theft, racism, sexism, bullying, religion, nationalism and so on and so on. It seems as though the only thing that everyone can agree on is that there is something wrong. But even then, it’s still not really everyone.

However, this we already knew.

There has been discourse in all known human life. Perhaps it is only a set condition associated with mortality, or maybe not. Perhaps things are worse than they have ever been and they aim to keep getting worse. The impact we have on each other and the physical world around may actually be reaching its flash point. Or maybe not.

That doesn’t have too much to do with my slump, other than it existing in my head all of the time. The slump itself seems to be a demon of habit, lazy and rooted in a lack of confidence. Or something like that.

It may just be the time of the year. High holy days of materialism really get to me, especially when people viciously defend their destructive habits by loosely affiliating them with words of some bloke who was murdered a few hundred dozen years ago.

The irony is just too beautifully infuriating, considering what they gave that guy the chair for. Or whatever that times equivalent of the chair was. I just hope that this is just some big joke the rest of the species is playing on me.

But I know that it’s not the stupid holidays or the end of the year. It’s not my health or my job or my location, it’s just me. I read something a few days ago that said that the act of telling someone that you are doing something can often insight the same sort of psychological satisfaction as doing the professed deed. Not saying that it is the same thing, it’s just that you would feel as though it is. It feels good to promise something but actually taking on the task appears to be so much more effort.

I haven’t gotten to where I am in my life, wherever that might be, through promises. And even if that was what I thought at certain points in the past (or convince myself to think onward into the future) the promise never has the true impact.

I’ve had this twitch in my right eye for months now, and my back aches like I’ve spent years working in a coal mine. Or so I think. I don’t feel rested when I sleep and my dreams are vague horrors of no specific purpose and void of any meaning. And to top it off, I’ve cut my life short of so many of those vital outlets that kept the whole place from burning down. I’m wasting too much time.

My hiatus from writing may have been the most savage and malevolent thing I have ever done to myself, the effects of which reach out and infect almost every other part of my consciousness that I enjoy. The things I don’t like will magnify and march to the forefront of this mind trapped inside my skull and as a result, total production goes down in both quality and quantity.

But here I sit, a bad taste in my mouth from using the word production, and with no clear way out of such a slump. The only thing that offers itself up is time not obligated to any one or thing, and the supposedly uplifting symbolism of the end of one calendar year and the start of another. Other than that, it will still just be my self and my thoughts. The only reprieve will be from those means which I had made for myself and not yet destroyed, or seeking out new ones.

I would like very much for the answers to emerge after a few hundred words as they used to. Or at least seemed to do. But I am no longer that young, dressed head to toe in naivety, and can no longer be satisfied by the means of college aged millennials. At best, now I wear a very naive pair of socks and because of this, new ways must be forged. If the dreams I have continue to assault me with nonsensical symbolism, they shall be molded and sold with hand crafted meaning made from whatever was there.

Because, you see, after all of this time that I’ve been brooding over who gives a damn, the necessity of such slumps reveal themselves in murky clarity. Ups and downs exist for perspective, or at least they do to me. As a crafter of fictions both near and far, it is important to leech and reach for new depth both noble and superfluous. I am still young, but clearly no prodigy. I have been working at my few humble talents to make something else. There are those who don’t have to do that, and to them I say, how can thou be so boring?

Fresh from my slump, I know how to be boring and I know the illusion of joy that it seems to bring. But despite that, the fury has lived on inside and kept any true comfort wrapped in a healthy dose of paranoia. This, what seems to be insanity, is a very important step in finding the most pure and spectacular version of insanity. The one that fits just right on the first shot and has no need to be hemmed. I am an ape among apes armed only in the belief that this ape, that I call me, is somehow different from the rest of the apes, who all think of themselves as something special as well. The prodigies are already ahead, using up all their juice in the first lap. This ape, the one called me, is just getting ready for the long haul ahead. By the end, my feet may drip with blood. By the end, delirium may twist the everything, even down to the shapes and colors I once called normal. By the end, I may have gone completely off-the-deep-end, batshit bananas.

I just hope that will be the case because if the pop mentality becomes culture, we are all doomed. If me and those who wants something more don’t succeed, I’d rather die than accept my over priced shackles. I don’t even care if they’re designer.

Sunday Morning Thoughts: 12.8.13

This week we will take a look at the idea of progress. Don’t mind that this posting is falsely advertised in regards to its time stamped title. We are going to get a bit abstract, so if that isn’t your kind of thing, turn away now.

But progress and that ever-eluding human ambition seem to be always on my mind and might even find its way into yours here and there. I couldn’t say, as I have never been in your mind. This is your chance to take a glimpse into mine, though this will be metaphorically similar to an iceberg. I can only let so much out at a time.

But moving forward- progress. Get it? See what I did there? Anyway, I may be alone in this but despite progress allegedly being something involving the future, it is really only made up of the past. People guess at what futures may hold and despite many of them being rather educated and plausible, they cannot be known. A person can look back at all they’ve done up to the moment in which they stand and claim that progress is inevitable from there on out. Those people are usual idiots or fools, and not the good kind either.

The problem with probabilities as I see them, is that they don’t account for the improbable. Now this may be my madness or just my faint and fuzzy memory but to the best of my recollection, improbability is one of the key factors in any personal progress that I’ve made. Every leap forward was only vaguely planned, at best.

With that being said, I seem to be at a point in my life that I generally approve of.

Now with that being said, I should profess that in no way am I content. I itch and burn for more and more and more, and those loosely defined intentions do not show the exact way onward. They hardly even suggest which way to go and if they do, it seems to be wrapped in some sort of infuriating riddle. There are projects upon which I work and I have a good job and things along that nature, but if there is any wish of mine that were to be fulfilled, that would be to never be defined as something so single minded as an occupation.

Still, I don’t know how I wish to be defined, at least not exactly. I do know that occurrences that are considered likely, I also consider to be boring. If my memory serves me correctly, which it doesn’t always, the steps I’ve taken in life were not predictable.  Many of the great things were unexpected, while many of my tragedies could have been predicted, except for the true tragedies of course. Pop culture has turned that word into a deformed bastard of its former self.

So what does this mean? Are we all powerless to control our fates? Is progress an idea that only exists within the mind and has no play in reality? It is not my place to provide any sort of answers on such things. Ipso facto… that is exactly what I am going to try and do.

You see, I really rather despise the idea of fate. Whether that is just conditioning from my own personal past will have no effect on my argument against it. Fate is for the lazy. I believe firmly, no matter how foolish, that existence is totally moldable. That’s not to say such a task of metaphysical arts and crafts is easily accomplished. Nor do I think such a deed could be conquered by a single perspective. I just think that ultimately, it can be done.

I suppose the entirety of this half-assed essay could be summed into a simple and very common phrase, that being ‘I don’t know’. But I ask you, where is the elegance and sport in that?

You see, I believe, in each moment as it passes, that existence is the smallest of things. If I were to elaborate, I would confirm this by asking what is it that you truly experience? We’d all like to say the past but that is gone as soon as it passes from the present. The only fossils left behind are memories which can and most certainly will be altered based upon the present in accordance with where one would selfishly like the future to go. It is far more common for one to remember what they want to remember than what they need to remember. Further, I will be so bold as to say that what you want and need to remember is still different from what actually happened as each of those moments originally passed.

Then there’s the future. Everyone is talking about it and yet none of those talking are living like they give any kind of damn. From the tiniest deed to the most massively dire of straits, almost everyone around lives each moment based upon some made promise of some made-up history. Every little sheep tightening their own chains around their own ankles, each one chewing away all that is left of their lives.

But I know this because I often live it. Despite the reputation, a hypocrite would know more about what they are criticizing than he who does not participate.

But all of this doesn’t solve the issue, does it? Is there any such thing as progress? Which moments of time would such a thing even be based off? The past is at best a bent moment of the truth. The present is near immeasurable and far beyond capture. The future is bloated off of the illusions of the other two but is always beyond imagination.

Perhaps it is in that unpredictability that the truth resides. The idea that we will never really know why and that the mystery is that there is no mystery. It can be a terrifying proposal and I’ve spent many a sleepless hour being afraid of such things, even since I was a kid. Trying to grasp how small and insignificant you truly are can cripple anyone with fear. At first.

But.

If you think of all that is that you don’t know and how small and fragile your existence is, you might, with the right amount of madness, see a tremendous amount of freedom.

I do.

And when you begin to grasp such meaninglessness, you understand that if there is a force in the universe that is something like fate, it probably isn’t concerned with you. And that my friends, is freedom beyond imagination and for those with the right kind of madness, that sounds like an opportunity to make yourself into something colossal amongst all that tininess.

So is there such a thing as progress? I would have to say yay but only if thou embraces a good bit of thy insanity.

Sunday Morning Thoughts 12.2.13

The clock is ticking over all things, it would seem, but only one thing in particular matters at the moment. That, of course, would be this as I have finally given the the chance to live up to its name and occur at the advertised time. I haven’t fancied what I might talk about, which may be for the best. It could also be for the worst, so I had best get a move on to rectify any wrongs already made and very much alive.

So I’m trying to think about an ending. The one I had thus come up with looks like it won’t be so much of an end. It is certainly the height of the action but not where I want to leave off and run away on new adventures. My ending needs less excitement, strange as that may sound. An ending that contains a lot of action and occurrence is hiding some sort of weakness. All the motion is to cover up some sort of depth that was implied but never really reached, or so I believe. Even if a plethora of jaw dropping events occur right before the ending, it is not those events that shake us but rather, it is ourselves who through our means of mental digestion afterwards, find things that are even further beyond belief. In a book, or something like that, the writer has their own impression that they try and instill but each person has their own perspective on the matter. Even if they seem to agree with everyone else.

But this talk of novel concepts is not what this is all for. If you want to know the ending, then buy the book… as soon as I’ve finished writing it.

In the meantime, let’s discuss idiots and politics.

Now the term idiot may seem harsh but so is the word cancer. So we will use it in its intended and scientific manner of use. Now there are plenty of idiots in this world. I’m sure you may even have a few in your family. Now an idiot is usually so blinded by their own self righteous opinions that they cannot see the trail that leads to their own creation. To put it another way, they believe that a particular set of things is responsible for all their troubles, so they spend their time and air preaching about how they’ve been wronged. This, of course, is not the case and at the very best is horrible skewed from a single idea that had been blow out of proportion.

I was going to get into specifics but that only encourages the behavior. I would like to say, that most of the world’s issues, if not all of them were caused by other generations than my own. They love to blame the youth but it’s the baby boomers and Generation X who sucked the teat of the greatest generation dry. It was they who bankrupt and poisoned the world. It was they who started wars and they who send us off to them. I’m not saying everyone in those generations are responsible but if people want to throw around the blame game in a very vague fashion, they had best be prepared to put their dukes up.

It is my generation, our generation, that gets to inherit all of this while receiving the confidence boost of being told that we are not as good as those who came before us. We are the ones that are going to have to live through the pollution and war and debt and suffering that happens throughout the world. And it grows and grows and grows and those who hold that illusion of power continue the same paths and processes that brought us here in the first place. They conditioned us as kids to be good consumers and to waste and to watch the television and eat and eat and eat. They told us that we were special, so shitty behavior became justified. They made us this way, but blaming them makes us just like them.

So I won’t toss accusations unless they are thrown at me. They were tossed my way a few days ago, but by a deadbeat loser so I shouldn’t indulge further. He was the kind of guy who laughs at his own jokes. In fact he is the only one who laughs at his jokes.

Still, I’m trying to do my part because I can’t do it all. In fact, I can’t do most things that are needed to make life better but I can do a few. And more importantly, I know people who can. Though I don’t know how my role in all of this will look at the end, I have an idea. But first, I need to finish my book.