I've had to start taking the train to work because it's too cold and dangerous to be riding my bike anymore. I'm vaguely pissed about it, since there are only downsides to the experience. It's also this time of year that the trains start breaking down, often leaving me stuck for twenty minutes at a time in a car packed full of similarly depressed travelers, each of us quietly eyeing each other either out of boredom, or a desire to find the most hideous person on the train and enjoy the brief feeling of regular everyday superiority.
Growing up is a pain not so much for the responsibility, but for the fact that for the first time in your life you have to acknowledge that you aren't as unique as you had imagined. I grew up expecting fame and fortune to be waiting for me once I struck out on my own, only to come to terms much too quickly with my lack of motivation or talent. I grew up honestly believing I was the only living breathing human being, the only person who understood truly the tragedy of our brief short lives and the only person to ever be tormented by the false faces we're forced to wear each day to remain sane. Thankfully this middle-school level of philosophy fades from most of us (the unfortunate self-proclaimed poetic suicidals too busy cutting themselves to realize just how pathetic they truly are). It's an odd mix of thankfulness/disapointment to seee your own illusions about your self-important grandeur be shattered in an instant when you realize everyone is terrified of death - it's just that nobody talks about it. The faceless silent people you see on the train aren't blank slates, rather brains are rapt at attention behind those blank eyes, the whole lot of us waging a silent war within ourselves to not scream misfortune as we wait twenty or so minutes for the trains to start up again.
It's in these odd moments of clarity that I sometimes discover the odd inconsequential nature of my existance, realizing that my perception of time is an awful illusion, and that the whole lot of us will live forever despite already being dead. This is why, staring at my fellow disgruntled train passagers sighing relief as the train doors close finally, I consider holding my cell phone aloft and announcing "Attention ladies and gentlemen. The cell phone in my hand is actually a detonator linked to the highly-sophisticated bomb strapped to my chest, set to explode in ten seconds time. Find peace with your god while you can!"
In my mind the few men closest to me have tackled me to the ground long before I finish my rant, while everyone else is screaming, trampling each other as they try in vain to run to the other end of the crammed train.
Back in the real world I chuckle like a madman, while all the hidden people wonder what's wrong with me.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Friday, December 18, 2009
Dumb people
I'm rather hung up on a particular aspect of society these days, one I feel myself reluctantly unable to accept. In a way I feel rather betrayed by my childhood, though honestly I should stop expecting so much of the American education system, stop blaming others for my inability to reconcile reality.
Simply, I cannot come to terms with the fact that stupid people exist. I am unable to wrap my head around the idea that there are people who are unable to think logically, and whose reaction to sound logic is to become upset and enraged, to turn that which they don't understand into something worth fighting about.
I really don't want this to come off like some rant against the ignorant. I've honestly had it up to here with the holier-than-thou attitude of the new intellectuals, the bastard children of our awful higher education, using their newfound learned status to loudly denounce entire subsections of people for having beliefs contradictory to the liberal spectrum. There was an underclassman in my community college who I entertained a friendship with, and to be honest he was a pretty decent kid who will probably do well at getting stoned and playing bass guitar for the rest of his existance. Once the two of us epically bailed on a play we were forced to attend as part of an English class. I had recognizing more than a few performers as part of the horrible LARP crew that frequented the comic store I worked, I declared I was having none of it and the two of us snuck past the instructor and out through the rear stage door, nodding at the preparing performers as we ran for our cars.
That was a long explanation which basically comes down to the two of us dicking around at the mall, this mate of mine noticing a Confederate Flag license plate on some big red envirorment killing truck, and in a moment of "take that!" inspired bravado he bent the thing over backwards.
"Take that!" Shouted by countless numbers of my educated peers. The lesbian classmate who invited me to her protest rally outside the supposedly anti-gay coffee shop which fired her, the youtube rebutals of smirking atheists, disproving god with pie charts and other useless hyperbole. "Take that! This is the rallying cry at which I cringe, wishing people could learn to emphasize with their supposed enemies.
I don't really know where this goes. I guess I'm just very lost these days. It used to be I could just talk to somebody, though I now find myself constantly worrying if I'm actually connecting on an intellecual level with these people. Maybe I'm crazy, but I'm horrified when things which make perfect sense to me are seen as great insults by the people I interact with, or when I'm caught in a situation talking to someone, and it feels like I'm talking to some puppet or something, nobody watching from beyond the veil of humanity. It scares me to realize there's likely been countless scores of people who've thought the same of me. Tried to engage me on a higher level only to recieve a spattering of sardonic wit, my dismissive or sarcastic manner regarded as ignorance.
I really must sound like an elitest. Honestly, I find myself in a great conundrum. Do I consider myself a smart person? Maybe, I wish I was smarter to be honest. I wish I found time for books, for engaging cinema, for rewarding discussion amounst peers rather than just reiterating highlights of the latest South Park episode. Unfortunately, I am caught between two worlds. I am one of those people who is in love with the disgusting pulp media delivered to the masses. Maybe this is just a poor excuse for being a nerd but I read comic books more entranced by the attempted mythos of these ridiculous characters rather than for any reasonable plot. I consider pro-wrestling to be one of the highest art forms ever attempted, great stage plays starring an outlandish cast of muscle-bound men and over-sexualized women - the storyline never ending, the audience consisting of those who have no idea what great poets these men are. Most of all I love everything Japanese, a culture where a man dressed as a devil riding a motorcycle in a rubber suit can be an enduring character, where dangerous obsession with fantasy cartoon violence and underage pop idols is the norm for outcast Japanese men.
I guess I'm one of those people who likes things "ironically," as is the term tossed around. But really there's no irony. I love this filthy, self-serving media. I'd probably even watch Nascar if they didn't take it as seriously as they do - if the cars were painted up with skulls and during the Mountain Dew Turbo Minute everyone in the stands got to fire bottle rockets at the lead car.
So this is my problem - I am an educated person who longs for ignorance. I want to live in a world where I don't have to think all the time. I want to sit around and play Madden video games, watch The Dark Knight fifteen times and have no honest idea who Citizen Kane is or why on earth I should care. Instead of a backlog of important books and literature to read, I want a list of which Spiderman comics I'm missing. I want to be the kind of person who when someone presents me clear and direct evidence that god is dead, I can hold my head high and tell them "I hope that you find Jesus someday."
Instead here I am anxiously awaiting the weekend, where me and my local fetish support group will be dressing up in costumes and living out our depraved fantasies. Most of them seem dumb enough to just enjoy the fun, not thinking about what dangerous perverts they all are.
Maybe the fact that I recognize this, makes me the most dangerous one of them all.
Simply, I cannot come to terms with the fact that stupid people exist. I am unable to wrap my head around the idea that there are people who are unable to think logically, and whose reaction to sound logic is to become upset and enraged, to turn that which they don't understand into something worth fighting about.
I really don't want this to come off like some rant against the ignorant. I've honestly had it up to here with the holier-than-thou attitude of the new intellectuals, the bastard children of our awful higher education, using their newfound learned status to loudly denounce entire subsections of people for having beliefs contradictory to the liberal spectrum. There was an underclassman in my community college who I entertained a friendship with, and to be honest he was a pretty decent kid who will probably do well at getting stoned and playing bass guitar for the rest of his existance. Once the two of us epically bailed on a play we were forced to attend as part of an English class. I had recognizing more than a few performers as part of the horrible LARP crew that frequented the comic store I worked, I declared I was having none of it and the two of us snuck past the instructor and out through the rear stage door, nodding at the preparing performers as we ran for our cars.
That was a long explanation which basically comes down to the two of us dicking around at the mall, this mate of mine noticing a Confederate Flag license plate on some big red envirorment killing truck, and in a moment of "take that!" inspired bravado he bent the thing over backwards.
"Take that!" Shouted by countless numbers of my educated peers. The lesbian classmate who invited me to her protest rally outside the supposedly anti-gay coffee shop which fired her, the youtube rebutals of smirking atheists, disproving god with pie charts and other useless hyperbole. "Take that! This is the rallying cry at which I cringe, wishing people could learn to emphasize with their supposed enemies.
I don't really know where this goes. I guess I'm just very lost these days. It used to be I could just talk to somebody, though I now find myself constantly worrying if I'm actually connecting on an intellecual level with these people. Maybe I'm crazy, but I'm horrified when things which make perfect sense to me are seen as great insults by the people I interact with, or when I'm caught in a situation talking to someone, and it feels like I'm talking to some puppet or something, nobody watching from beyond the veil of humanity. It scares me to realize there's likely been countless scores of people who've thought the same of me. Tried to engage me on a higher level only to recieve a spattering of sardonic wit, my dismissive or sarcastic manner regarded as ignorance.
I really must sound like an elitest. Honestly, I find myself in a great conundrum. Do I consider myself a smart person? Maybe, I wish I was smarter to be honest. I wish I found time for books, for engaging cinema, for rewarding discussion amounst peers rather than just reiterating highlights of the latest South Park episode. Unfortunately, I am caught between two worlds. I am one of those people who is in love with the disgusting pulp media delivered to the masses. Maybe this is just a poor excuse for being a nerd but I read comic books more entranced by the attempted mythos of these ridiculous characters rather than for any reasonable plot. I consider pro-wrestling to be one of the highest art forms ever attempted, great stage plays starring an outlandish cast of muscle-bound men and over-sexualized women - the storyline never ending, the audience consisting of those who have no idea what great poets these men are. Most of all I love everything Japanese, a culture where a man dressed as a devil riding a motorcycle in a rubber suit can be an enduring character, where dangerous obsession with fantasy cartoon violence and underage pop idols is the norm for outcast Japanese men.
I guess I'm one of those people who likes things "ironically," as is the term tossed around. But really there's no irony. I love this filthy, self-serving media. I'd probably even watch Nascar if they didn't take it as seriously as they do - if the cars were painted up with skulls and during the Mountain Dew Turbo Minute everyone in the stands got to fire bottle rockets at the lead car.
So this is my problem - I am an educated person who longs for ignorance. I want to live in a world where I don't have to think all the time. I want to sit around and play Madden video games, watch The Dark Knight fifteen times and have no honest idea who Citizen Kane is or why on earth I should care. Instead of a backlog of important books and literature to read, I want a list of which Spiderman comics I'm missing. I want to be the kind of person who when someone presents me clear and direct evidence that god is dead, I can hold my head high and tell them "I hope that you find Jesus someday."
Instead here I am anxiously awaiting the weekend, where me and my local fetish support group will be dressing up in costumes and living out our depraved fantasies. Most of them seem dumb enough to just enjoy the fun, not thinking about what dangerous perverts they all are.
Maybe the fact that I recognize this, makes me the most dangerous one of them all.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Monday, December 7, 2009
Whatever
I've been in no great mood to write lately. Thanksgiving vacation I had pledged to get shit done, and instead spent the extended holiday sitting around my house jerking off at inprecise intervals. Saturday I was supposed to play out this whole extended sex/bdsm scene with my aforementioned slut of a daughter, but instead I fired off an email complaining of a half-factual panic attack and played Tekken instead. The real problem was that she's been much too needy, and much too into the idea of me as a viable boyfriend - and the idea of going out bowling with her friends scared the fucking shit out of me. What am I supposed to do? Grit my teeth and smile? Try to pretend that I have something in common with this boorish round-faced medical student when the only upside of our relationship is getting to live out any depraved fantasy I can concoct?
We're facebook friends now. I'm too tired to fuck and too fucking tired. In my desire for cheap and unfufilling thrills I've been printing out choice selections from fantasy erotica and beating off in the second floor bathroom at work. I've heard anti-depressants curb sexual appetite and I figure that's killing two birds with one stone.
We're facebook friends now. I'm too tired to fuck and too fucking tired. In my desire for cheap and unfufilling thrills I've been printing out choice selections from fantasy erotica and beating off in the second floor bathroom at work. I've heard anti-depressants curb sexual appetite and I figure that's killing two birds with one stone.
Friday, December 4, 2009
My Christ
The whole point of life is to suffer. Idealists would believe otherwise, but the truth is that the only standard by which humanity defines itself is through our unconcious desire to be oppressed. This is something that manifests itself in various ways - wars, famines, class struggles, and many other obvious ways. For our modern world however, our latent desire for oppression is something for which we have to find more modern solutions. This has led to a generation of people who sadly believe they understand suffering - either because they work some crappy job, or their dad drinks, or god forbid they were in an abusive relationship or addicted to drugs or some other nonsense. All we want to do is complain, in fact complaining has become a virtue, especially in this country. The mere act of enduring hardship is something for which we dole out praise and support, the loudest and most vocal complainers getting houses built for them in front of live studio audiences.
The point is, we're all equally miserable. We're conditioned to fuck up our own lives in grand dramatic fashion so that we have something to complain about later, our suffering the only point on which we can relate to our fellow man, a great competition, with those who have the most to complain about winning recognition as a proper human being.
The problem of course being that none of us have suffered. We gripe about working double shifts while children in third world countries starve, cry over the broken homes and percieved lonliness of our lives while migrant workers are crushed to death by the several decade old machines which make our sneakers.
Coincidentally, in the midst of writing this I get an IM from my BDSM girlfriend, who claims to be on the verge of tears:
"S is in the hospital, she's havign a breakdown. she called me last night after I got home and was crying and on the verge of cutting herself.. and recently she's had passing suicidal thoughts.. it's messy
I made her go to the ER
she's still there and on a waiting list to get into a psych facility for a few days to get her shit under control"
I think to post a sad smiley face as my response and laugh at how ridiculous our modern age is. This is a tragedy for these people, yet why? They should be celebrating to have this horrible failing of mind to rally around. The only thing by which humanity defines its heroes is through their hardships. We crucified our own savior and today it is that image by which we rally around. Not Jesus feeding the hungry or curing the sick or rising from the dead. We celebrate bleeding, broken Jesus - Jesus in pain. Our god is unlike your god we say.
Our god was real, because our god bled.
The point is, we're all equally miserable. We're conditioned to fuck up our own lives in grand dramatic fashion so that we have something to complain about later, our suffering the only point on which we can relate to our fellow man, a great competition, with those who have the most to complain about winning recognition as a proper human being.
The problem of course being that none of us have suffered. We gripe about working double shifts while children in third world countries starve, cry over the broken homes and percieved lonliness of our lives while migrant workers are crushed to death by the several decade old machines which make our sneakers.
Coincidentally, in the midst of writing this I get an IM from my BDSM girlfriend, who claims to be on the verge of tears:
"S is in the hospital, she's havign a breakdown. she called me last night after I got home and was crying and on the verge of cutting herself.. and recently she's had passing suicidal thoughts.. it's messy
I made her go to the ER
she's still there and on a waiting list to get into a psych facility for a few days to get her shit under control"
I think to post a sad smiley face as my response and laugh at how ridiculous our modern age is. This is a tragedy for these people, yet why? They should be celebrating to have this horrible failing of mind to rally around. The only thing by which humanity defines its heroes is through their hardships. We crucified our own savior and today it is that image by which we rally around. Not Jesus feeding the hungry or curing the sick or rising from the dead. We celebrate bleeding, broken Jesus - Jesus in pain. Our god is unlike your god we say.
Our god was real, because our god bled.
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