I had a short conversation with an Internet friend today, that stirred the coals of a sort of existesntialist burnout I’ve been feeling for a while now. She’s someone I only really know by her occasional posts on various threads, including mine, but whose opinions I’ve always found insightful.

I had made some off-the-cuff post expressing my frustration with the state of our culture, referencing Huxley, and lamenting the fact that unlike his Brave New World, in ours, people willingly dumb themselves down. Honestly it was unoriginal, pretentious crap. But at the time I wrote it I was being assaulted by vapid bullshit from a 24-hour news station, and making that post had fewer consequences than ripping the TV off the wall and smashing it.

She’d replied with a solid post that echoed and expanded on what I’d said. But before I could acknowledge it, she’d deleted the post. So I sent her a message, asking why. It turned out she was just reformatting it to post again. I was relieved, and explained that I was trying to engage more intelligent people in meaningful discussion, because it seemed to be lacking just about everywhere. She explained that when it comes to a lot of social media, smart people were in hiding. She told me that she was personally tired of being accused of being a “know it all” and an “overbearing female”.

And even as I recount this conversation, I can’t help but do so with a scowl on my face; one I’ve got to fight off because I’m writing this from a Panera, trying not to look like a crazy person typing out angry Yelp reviews.

I’ve alluded to this a few times in the past few months, on Facebook or in-person to friends, but the absurdity of the Human condition is something I haven’t been able to shrug off for a while now. The sense of it is always lurking in the periphery of everything I do, from conversations with friends, to the terrible jokes I make, to my inclination towards self-destructive choices in the pursuit of adventure, substance, and meaning.

But the idea that smart people are keeping their heads down so as to not offend the herds that have made celebrities out of the worst of our species, demanded to be fed only information they agree with, and hold in contempt knowledge that makes them feel as dumb as they actually are, gets under my skin like a hateful little parasite. And all I can really do to cope with the bastard is to sit here, pissing and moaning about it, on a blog that I generally don’t intend for anyone to read.

I’d like to end this with some helpful insight or a statement of resilience in the face of this absurdity, but honestly, I’m just going to go back home, fire up my idiot box, and stream some soma directly into my brain. I hear good things about “Wahlburgers”.

I have no idea when this blog became a dumpster of cryptic, random thoughts and vague bullshit, but for the handful of people who read this (for some unfathomable reason), I feel I should apologize. The crap I’ve written over the past few months has been just that: crap. 

I don’t think that this kind of grammatical bukkake would be appreciated by anyone. And even if I’m being selfish and posting for my own benefit, it’s still an exercise in self-indulgent masturbation.

I can do better, and if I’m not going to, then I frankly shouldn’t bother doing at all.

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“Life is pain, highness” 

-The Dread Pirate Roberts

Everyone is the star of their own movie. That’s as it should be, because as far as anyone knows, you only get one go at life. The thing that I have a problem with, is when people pretend previous pages in their screenplay read differently, now that they’re further into it. 

I understand why this happens; if people could literally go back and re-read their own scripts, scene for scene, word for word, a lot of folks would cut their own movies short. Hell, it’s bad enough to accurately remember awkward moments without cringing; subjecting yourself to an accurate version of truly painful ones might as well be considered a form of violence.

So to cope, people re-write their narrative as they go along. That’s fine when they’re the only character that’s affected by the revisions. When there’s a whole cast though, making retroactive changes to key scenes and then playing out the rest of the script, is a great way to ensure your story becomes a one-man show.

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So it seems Bukowski didn’t actually say that. Still, it’s a powerful sentiment. Here’s the full quote, by… whoever:

“Find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain from you your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you, and let it devour your remains.

For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.”

The point remains though; the things we love own us. That’s the trade-off in loving anything or anyone.