An Update about Why I Haven't Updated Much Lately

I have tried several times over the course of my life to keep a diary, and have invariably been stymied, mostly because of my inability to function in an organized manner, but perhaps also by a certain sense of futility. I am completely in love, lust, and worshipful reverence with the state of inspiration, the condition of having words magically flow from one's tongue or pen as though beamed down from a benevolent celestial realm, expressing ideals that seem perfect and true and sacred; I feel more alive while so vociferating than at any other time. At the risk of proferring TMI, the act of writing is so much an affirmation of life to me as to seem almost sexual, the ultimate vindication of humanity's nature, and nearly as pleasurable as the physical act which is necessary to create life (or at least was until the advent of in vitro fertilization; now we let our machines fuck us as often as we fuck ourselves).

But no matter how vital and empowering it is to write, the written product thereof is dead, dry, and difficult for me to stomach in quantity; occasionally something I read comes alive in my mind, but just as often the act of translating symbols on a page into living ideas is a tiresome mental chore, and the result often doesn't seem worth it. Why did I slog through 2000 words on Wikipedia just to completely and accurately learn a single fact, when I could have made up a fiction to amuse myself in 1% of the time required and felt as though I'd just gotten my mental rocks off in the process? Something is weird in my brain, probably from 14 years of growing up with essentially no friends who weren't imaginary, and the difference between a factual truth and a fictional Keatsian beauty of a "Truth" has never seemed all that relevant to me. After all, the world we live in is just kind of there, sitting around ignoring us in its typical nonsentient way; we didn't create it, it doesn't belong to us, and I don't feel that we really need to care about it. But the worlds in our imagination, the ones we weave into being from the stuff of dreams and whimsy, those are real to me, at least as real as the ground beneath my feet and a lot more important, but located in a dimension of pure mind where our squishy, filthy meat-bodies can't ever touch them.

So to me, writing is a holy act, the opening of a channel to a higher dimension of pure mind and the ultimate affirmation of the self, for whatever you write was written only by you, and no one else could have written exactly what you did for exactly the same reasons at exactly the same time. But that's only the action, the process, the verb "to write" in its third person present tense; the resultant noun whose plural is "writings" is only a consequence, as inevitable as the wet spot in the bed after you and 0 or more sexual partners have finished opening a channel to a higher dimension of lifeforce, possibly in an attempt to ultimately affirm your DNA (after nine months of discomfort and one resounding crescendo of agony for whichever of the reproducers has the misfortune to be a girl). I'm far more interested in the verb-writing than the noun-writing, and that goes double when I wrote them both.

Therefore, while I have written a number of what may well eventually make good posts for this blog, and tucked them away in my Escherian labyrith of disorganized notes, I am very seldom in much of a mood to go looking for them, edit them into something resembling a product fit for the consumption of my very small target market, and toss them out on the series of tubes in hopes of applause and vindication for my chosen path in life. It'll happen eventually, but it requires me to be in a productive mood when I have time to do more than simply produce. Producing is the easy part; it's cleaning up the mess that sucks.

Fuck You, Darwin

I've always hated strong people. My mom is a strong woman, and I hate her. I love her too, don't get me wrong; those two are not mutually exclusive like a lot of you have been taught. I love her for a lot of things about her that are good, but her capacity to be an unstoppable juggernaut who knocks down anything and everything in her path, stops at nothing to achieve her goal, is something I've always hated. She never accepts that she's beaten, just like me, but she doesn't settle for sitting around and fuming and wishing things could be different; she changes things, even if the only change she can make is for the worse. That's called strength, and I hate it.

I choose to be weak. I choose to do nothing rather than the wrong thing, and I believe that choice makes me noble. If you don't agree with that, then fine, that's you're right - and also fuck you for feeling that way, that's my purely personal response. You have every right to feel that way, and I objectively accept that; subjectively, I hate you for it. I hate a lot of things; we need more hate in the world.

You always hear about what a bad thing hate is, but it's not hate that is a problem, it's acting on hate. If you just don't like people of Type X, nobody gives a shit; you have every right to hate them for any reason or no reason. It's only a problem if you treat them poorly because of it. Your thoughts are your own, and they're wonderful no matter what they are; your actions are the part that needs accountability, the part where you have to be reasonable to others. Hate them all you like as long as you don't do anything about it.

We need more people willing to not do anything. I never want to do anything, and I hate myself about it. Hating yourself is a good thing, it makes you a little better prepared to deal with other people hating you. It's good practice. Thicken your skin, grow a spine, accept the hate and make it a part of you. Love your hate, and love yourself for being hateful. That's the answer right there.

Oh, and while we're talking about self-contradicting statements, here's another one, from 1984: Freedom is Slavery. That one's bullshit of course, but right under it is another one: Ignorance is Strength. That one's true, and you can find plenty of proof. Look at a lynch mob, or a stampede of frenzied bulls. Strong, and ignorant. If they took time to figure out what they were doing, they'd stop doing it, but then they'd be weak. Stopping and thinking is weakness; after all, strength is the capacity to exert force, and you can exert a lot more force if you don't care what you're exerting it on. You can drive faster if you don't watch where you're going, and that reckless speed makes you very good at smashing things that get in your way, like the aforementioned frenzied bulls. We need more weakness in this world. It shouldn't be the strong that survive, because they usually don't deserve to.

The Virtue of Omniscience

I have long believed in many notions that seem absurd to the conventional thinker, but which I feel to be fundamentally right on a deep, instinctive level. Here is one example.

It is always preferable that everyone should know everything. For instance, if someone knows exactly how to break into my house without being caught, and I know exactly how to catch him anyway and stop him without breaking a sweat, it's preferable to neither of us knowing those things. If someone knows my bank account password, that is fine as long as the bank knows that the person using my bank account password is not really me, and I know who the person trying to break into my account is, and that they have failed and where exactly they are, even why they were doing it. Maybe they legitimately need the money more than I do, and I know how to call the bank and let them know to allow them to get the money, and I'll know if they spend it for any other purpose. If you know how to destroy the world, you also know why you shouldn't (unless, factually and unarguably, you should, in which case you also know exactly what will happen after you destroy the world and why it is preferable to continued existence). An insane person knows he's insane, and knows how to be otherwise at any given moment; he doesn't use his knowledge in an insane way because he knows it would be insane to do so. You would even know how not to know a thing if you'd rather not know it, and you'd know that you opted not to know it and why, and could work around that knowledge as well as employ it.

Knowledge is only ever bad if it's inequitably distributed; we would all be best off having an infinite amount of it. The desire to keep secrets is a destructive twitch leftover from our caveman days, an irrational impulse that drives us to violence against those who breach our privacy rather than tolerate their knowledge of things which we feel shameful about. Fear, shame, wrath; they are all primitive emotions which omniscience would temporarily increase, only to eclipse and annihilate them in short order, leaving a world in which everyone is glad to be exactly what they are, and incapable of acting inappropriately (by a factual, not subjective and humanly flawed, definition of 'appropriate'). The faster we expand knowledge toward the infinite, the sooner we will begin to resemble the gods, who (assuming, for the sake of argument, that they do indeed exist) are omniscient and beyond our animal urges. Knowledge is literally what makes us divine, and so we should increase it ad infinitum.

The Bleak Certainty of Despair

None of my usual highfalutin' ideals today, I'm afraid. If you have an aversion to emo whining I'd suggest you skip this entry, because I'm in a dour mood indeed and I feel compelled to vent.

For years I've struggled knowingly with manic depression, after having not known that was what it was before. I've gotten past the point where it could control me as completely as it used to, but I still have entire weeks when nothing seems to go right and I'm just useless for accomplishing anything and can barely stand the thought of living to see another day. I know these moods pass and have banished the thought of doing anything irreversably drastic as a result of them, being sensible enough to realize that I have no right to deny my future self opporunities on the basis of my current moods. So I've taken refuge in a number of coping strategies, of which one of the most successful has been self-aggrandizement. I would imagine that what few virtues I do possess (writing talent, for example) might eventually earn the approval of some agency that was in the position to grant me ultimate power to make the world right according to my preferences, or at least to escape the world into a neverending fantasy that would fulfill my wildest dreams.

Today I confronted yet another of these bleak moods, promoted by a series of petty annoyances (and one not so petty one which puts my future, as in my having one at all, in serious question). And when I reached for my usual power trip, I found that the idea didn't satisfy me this time, because I realized that ultimately, my problem is an inability to stand the possibility of things going wrong in the future. Any current happiness is fleeting to me; no matter how much it satisfies me, the best it can hope to accomplish is to temporarily distract me from the knowledge that things could go horribly wrong tomorrow, condemning me in an instant to unbearable agony, degradation, terror, or any number of other fates I would give anything to avoid. But I saw today that there was nothing I could give, even if an entity of ultimate power were to offer me some bargain...for what that being could grant, it could also take away, for any reason or no reason, and I would have nothing but its word to suggest otherwise. Not being a person given to trust or faith, I couldn't believe that word, and so I would never feel secure, not even after being blessed by a benevolent deity with the fulfillment of my every whim. (That's not to say it might not be fun, but it would have to continue being fun forever or it would still fall under "temporary diversion"; I'd still never be content.)

So I see now that the adaptive nature which I've always believed was humanity's greatest strength, and also suspected was its greatest impulse, indeed has me by the balls even more thoroughly than I had suspected. There is no gift I can be given which would entirely and eternally free me from the fear of pain, disgust, and fear itself. Today I am legitimately a being without hope, and I recognize that I will be overcome with fear for the rest of my days, that short of the complete obliteration of my personality (which I would not submit to even if I trusted that the method employed was capable of doing the job right, and I certainly have no such faith in modern medical methods), nothing can ever set me fully at ease. Right now, the only thing I have to live for is a vague sense of gratitude toward my parents for having put up with me when I was terminally unemployed and seemed incapable of ever amounting to anything. I've made something of myself, but it's a something I don't much like, and I legitimately wish I would simply cease to exist forever (not simply dying, mind, for that makes no guarantees regarding any afterlife), because I see no other way I can be guaranteed never to suffer the worst fates I can imagine, and those fates are so frightening to me that no reward would be great enough for me to be able to accept the risk.

That's where I am today - nowhere, and going nowhere. To be very explicit, this isn't a "cry for help" and suicide is not on the table as an option; I simply have the bleak realization that life brings me no satisfaction, and probably never will again. I will eventually escape this mood, and you'll hear me ranting about how perfect the world could be if we all did X, Y and Z, and I'll believe it wholeheartedly and disavow this dour mood as just a depressive episode, over quickly and better forgotten. I'm not going to try and say otherwise; I just know as of now that this darkness will always return to snuff out all my joys, and that I can think of no way to guarantee it won't.

EDIT - Just to put things in perspective here, it's an hour later and I feel somewhat better. This in no way means I don't still believe as I did above, only that I've been distracted from that belief and am no longer fixated upon it. Like I said, I've learned that these moods come and go, so I need to take them with a grain of salt.

A Brief Note on The Emotional Rollercoaster

"If you can't handle me at my worst, you sure as Hell don't deserve me at my best."
--Marilyn Monroe

I've been knowingly rocking the bipolar lifestyle for at least a good half-decade now; back when I was a teenager I didn't know what was happening, but I eventually accepted that mood swings and bouts of either hyperactivity or severe lassitude were just a part of who I was. There's no denying that the short end of the stick doth mightily suck - "depression" is a misleading word, because it's really not sadness, it's glumness, a sense of utter despair and frustration where everything seems pointless, where you feel that the very things you most want to do are a waste of time and not worth the effort of bothering to do them. But I've learned to pay a lot of attention to myself, and I've found that those feelings always pass in time; it's just a question of finding a way to get through it. And in learning how to make that happen, how to accept a certain proportion of uselessness in myself, I've become stronger and more balanced than I think I ever could be if I simply took a pill to make my brain 'normal'.

I've lost a lot of friends because of this attitude, and that's one of the things that bums me out when I'm on the downslope. I wish they'd stick with me through thick and thin, but I don't blame them much for not granting that wish, as it's a massively selfish and unreasonable one, one I would never grant to someone else who claimed to deserve such loyalty while virtually guaranteeing they would never return it to any real extent. But while I have regrets, I don't consider them a reason to change. The highs are still worth the lows, and one of the things that gets me through in the dark times is the knowledge that, at the end of the day, I have been myself, and there can be no more pure purposes to my existence than that.

(Disclaimer: I have no medical or psychological proof of any of this. Perhaps a "professional" would decide manic-depression isn't the technically precise name for my condition; I really don't especially care, it's how I view the condition and I think being the one who has to live with it gives me the necessary diagnostic credentials. Still, don't skip out on taking your butt to a doctor just because I told you so; make the decision on the strength of your own ability to determine right from wrong, and give it a good lot of thought from every angle you can come up with.)