What man is at ease in his Inn?
Get out.
Wide is the world and cold.
Get out.
–Aleistar Crowley
My blog reeks of failure. From my followers being advertisers to nobody reading it, it is stagnant and un-growing. I plan to change this. It feels as futile as the plight of a giant squid–the gentle creature given credit for many an atrocity–who, even in the mouth of a sperm whale, struggles to escape, to not be eaten. Tentacle marks are often found on whale backs, something I find inspiring. Is that strange?
Let me write about my life, up until this point. For one thing, I hope the world will judge me charitably. My life so far has been an excercise, an experiment on the part of the gods. An experiment in weakness, an exercise in blindness and waste, and a testament to humanity’s stupidity. I write about myself now because I comfort myself to assume that there are others–wasteful, indolent, weak, in my position. There may be people like me: who could have done anything they wanted if only they had decided. Wandered too long, and time whittled their options until we ended in a pit, a veritable cess pool of our own creation. It would be nice if the story of how I got here, like the story of how so many got to where they were, cool. Mine isn’t. Or if it is, good fortune granted me the good parts, the bad were my doing, for the most part.
I have written and read fairly little. I haven’t worked hard at much, and neither have I come up with ideas on changing that. To be sure, I don’t want pity, at least not consciously, and if, subconsciously I do, then I prove my point. No, I think there is much to be learned from my life. Any life, really, but maybe mine’s fucked up enough that writing about it will contribute or help or be loathed. I will write, that is all I can do well, and you, dear reader, will decide what to do with it.
To start with, I am delusional. I thought, at some point in my life, that I was a genius (I am capable of immense, horrifying stupidity), when I am a narcissistic (though hopefully recovering), delusional, and trapped in a web of my devise, aided by certain currents of culture. I’ll elaborate later. I thought it would be cool to use we as a pronoun, like in that novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. No matter what I say about myself, I say it about myself and, inevitably, someone else. We will start doing that now. Who we refers to changes constantly. Keeps us on our toes, thinking. Less narcissistic, too. The thing about dystopias is that so many of their elements could make up a utopia: Brave New World is a perfect example, with its genetic engineering, its lack of suffering, the society’s slogan: everyone belongs to everyone else being a statement of what we consider simple fact. How many of us, reading these books, rally for a time against everything we can in those books? In 1984, Oceania uses the Metric system. Hooray, therefore, for Imperial measurement! The number in We loved clarity, hooray for confusion! My brain is broken, I suspect brain damage, but hopefully it will fix itself by way of constant use and neurogenesis. If my brain were as it was, I would be able to write paragraphs about all three of those books.
We have, banishing ourselves to the eternal outside, to the fringe, always had a different view on life, one might say our own culture (as Captain Picard said of Data), though that may be steep. We were, at the beginning of our lives, seperated, in our case from Syria, and transplanted elsewhere, in our case to the United States. We grew up, and our education was excellent. Few bad experiences with school, loved and was loved by almost every teacher, was told we were gifted (what if our pronoun use is psychologically unhealthy?) but didn’t know what to do. We devoted ourselves to reading a book here and there, to observing, and to wasting time, hardly realizing that we were making fatal mistakes, that we lead ourselves to ruin and disappointment. But how were we doing this? We didn’t know our desires. It’s a curious thing, a desire, where does it come from? The worst is when one cannot locate it. Say we have a desire to die. Cliche, painfully so, but all too real for us. We want to die, and yet we refuse to acknowledge it.
The point is, we have serious issues, and will write about them. For one, we have let ourselves be followers, we have let ourselves be weak, forgetting that we are not our own person, but figments of a society.
We want to hide, hide lest our stupidity and weakness be known. But it is our duty not to, it is our duty to become strong.
No, we have said that enough. We have assured ourselves enough. We have seen enough. We may even know enough. We must act, we must do. Do what? In this figment’s case, we must write a blog and hope someone will read it and gain from it. Is that the best we can do? For now, perhaps. We have friends, one hopes, and we have hearts, minds, youth. Cliches. We have cliches. This existence is shameful, it is painful being ourselves. The only hope of our existence is that we can become someone, something, different. Better, by all meaningful accounts.
You know what’s comforting to our sense of honor? Multiple universes and reincarnation. Multiple universes because anything we have done, we also did differently: anything we could have done, we did. Reincarnation, the same thing. I am, was, or will be this, that, the other thing. Everything we did, everyone we hurt, all we wasted, can be atoned for. Or maybe not. Religion attracts those in pain, but we know nothing.
Let this not be masturbation. Let us go out into the world. Let us develop ourselves. Let us live. Ugh. This is annoying, but what are we to say? Do shit! Now!
The Perils of Creation 