Money. If that’s what it’s all about? It seems such a waste of time. What does money give you? One minute not worrying about needing more. It’s like happiness. The fleeting moment that leaves you, at best not happy, at worst? Unhappy. Happiness felt by money is fleeting. It is the emotional equivalent of cocaine. You always know how much you have left, then it’s gone. And that dopamine-fueled search for more. The Buddha was right. Don’t want it and you won’t need it. Absence causes suffering. And for the record, I’m not confirming or denying my first-hand knowledge of cocaine.
Apophenia
That is the human tendency toward connection of unrelated phenomena where none exists, toward creating patterns, even when none exists. Trying to bring order to chaos, is what separates us from being an animal. I suppose there are other things, but other primates don’t seem much concerned with the correlation versus causation debate. Bonobos will go down on each other, and chimpanzees will rip your face off, but neither group seems too concerned with voting districts or feminism.
The rate of divorce in Maine correlates almost perfectly with the rate of consumption of margarine in the rest of the country. And that’s not even the strangest example of almost perfect correlation. The number of letters in the winning word of the national spelling bee and people killed by venomous spiders. Almost perfectly the same. The point of talking about this? Many people find a cause and effect here. Don’t eat margarine or your cousin in Maine gets a divorce? Her marriage is doomed. Don’t spell long words, or you might kill someone with a spider bite.
These examples are ridiculous. Life is ridiculous. And the same impetus that suggests to a certain element that mass killings or 9/11 or Kennedy assassinations happened for a larger purpose, will also suggest this ridiculousness. It’s part of the human condition. These patterns that exist or don’t, that are recognized or not, that are true or false. To anyone that believes them, they are as real as God, or as oxygen in the air, or as subatomic truth or infrared light. The argument, of course, is just because it cannot be sensed, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. A negative proof shifts the burden, right or wrong, to the skeptic. And a lack of evidence becomes a virtue, not a deficit.
I think we all know better. I do.
The secret
If it were possible would it matter? One of my favorite books is “Strange Life of Ivan Osokin.” In it, he begs a magician for another chance to live his life. And then proceeds to make every single mistake he made the first time until he finds himself with the magician again. He has an epiphany. He is on a wheel, that keeps spinning and returns him to the same place.
It’s by P.D. Ouspensky. If you haven’t heard of him, it’s not a big deal, hardly anyone has. But he writes about the secret. Not the bullshit prosperity gospel that brings you everything you think you want just because you believe it will. But the one that recognizes how people act. Realistically and metaphorically we live on a wheel. And it is the rare individual who even recognizes that. The few that can see the wheel and render its truths are defied, like Jesus or Siddhartha. It just doesn’t happen that often. And when it does, you know.
Against all odds
In terms of evolution, ants are very successful. So were dinosaurs. So are crocodiles. Bacteria are absolutely the apex. Humans are an anomaly. The fact that I care what you think? The cosmic or even geologic odds that this might happen are statistically zero. I’m feeling how Iʻm feeling against all odds, against the concept of odds. So there’s that. Short version: you can’t possibly empathize, but I’m not making up how I feel.
Paraffin
Put your hand 3/4 of an inch above the flame of a candle. Immediately, it hurts. Don’t move. Watch the burned wax turn black to paraffin. Its melting point is only 99 Fahrenheit. less than half a degree above your “normal.” More like urine than lava. Then, it stops burning. Black tendrils. It turns out what hurts is subjective. This is a metaphor.
Lick the bottom
You have to lick the bottom, so you know what it tastes like. You have to lose a lot, maybe everything, to know what you had meant anything at all. This existential struggle? Everyone goes through this, some just can’t articulate it. Who with a contemplative mind has not contemplated forever? Who hasn’t feared the idea? How many ants or roaches did you kill this year? What do you think their afterlife fate is? What do you think yours is?
I used to go to parties and realize what hour it was, and realize there were only so many hours left to try to have fun. That’s how I’ve been looking at life lately. If I’m lucky, I have 30 years left, and that’s far less than I’ve already been here. Are you ready? I’m not.
Inherent conflict
How do you finish telling a story when you can only think fifteen seconds at a time? How do you create a narrative when three minutes of contemplation is exhausting? These are rhetorical questions when I’m lucky. Writers write, right? But what if writing, what if every thought, is embroiled? I have no third act, and I don’t know if I ever will. I can’t get past the conflict. The conflict defines how I live; it defines who I am right now, who I’ve been for a while. The conflict or nothing is how I feel.
I saw an old friend last night and he was in chains over how he felt about a relationship he was in. I felt like I was in a zoo, watching something that had no personal resonance. I told him I was the same way for a while, after the last time, but after what happened, I decided to turn it off, and so I did. With me, it’s always been all or nothing. And for six years now, I have chosen nothing. I have broken the alternative so many times that it might not be an option to go back. I can tell the story, but I can’t live it anymore. Too many things get broken.
Solopsism revisited
I can trace back every anxiety and the majority of bad feelings in the last eight years to one source. Every time I drank too much, dissociated, or quit, I had one thing burrowed in my mind. Everything I was most scared of has happened. In every instance where the choice was binary, me or the other, the other was chosen. Everything I have explicitly asked for was consistently denied. This is true as recently as last night.
The consolation is that there is nothing left to fear. There is not much else to try. There is nothing left to lose.
And for all this, I am never spent. I wake up every morning still breathing, my heart still beating. The embers of forsaken ambition not related to you still smolder in my damp mornings. There is something else, and perhaps there always was.
A weird version of solipsism, at least in the universe of us. I am the only thing I can be sure exists.
I donʻt have a third act
The third act of a story is defined by resolution. The arc of a story is usually quite predictable. Now, what I do when I’m telling a story is take what happens prior to where a third act is supposed to be and pull it down. Further and further until you cannot bare to look. It’s beyond even the macabre interest in an accident scene. We dissolve into what we were, and I dissolve into the pain of these characters, but we rarely have an inkling of what we could become.
The second act creates the problem to solve. There is no third act in my story because I don’t have any solutions. It keeps happening and happening. And no one is wrong. And there’s no escape. There is no plan B. This is just how it is. Worse. This is who you are, who I am. Everyone taps out. Everyone begs with clasped fists. No one is spared. And everything burns. And every tap and clasp will be remembered but ignored.
I feel like my writing is more cubic Picasso or like Mondrian’s evolution from landscapes to lines than Renaissance detail. It’s arrogant to say but I see The Guernica when I close my eyes after finishing a good paragraph. I know I can do it because I’ve seen it. And I’ve always been more interested in the reduction of forms than layers of perfect replication.
I’m writing about a fictional character, can’t you tell?
Four horseman revisited
There are four horsemen of the apocalypse: Famine, Pestilence, War, and Death. Do you know what pestilence means? Hideous infectious disease. Pestilence was first called Conquest. I don’t know the philosophical implications of that, but I think it’s funny.
You would think Death would get the black horse, and you would be wrong. That belongs to Famine. Death rides the pale horse. Pestilence on white and War on red makes way more sense. I love to read things I don’t believe and know them better than people who do. Cherubs aren’t fat little babies, they’re three-headed monsters with heads of a lion, eagle, and human. Angels don’t have wings. And the only time the devil manifests in the world as a tangible creature is as a serpent to Eve in Genesis. No horns, no red suit, no pitchfork. Usually just a disembodied voice. #smallpoxblanket #dismemberinglahui #alohabetrayed