by the day. I figure my life is half over, give or take.

I don’t know what I’m working toward. I’m probably not working toward anything, just away from things. That is the western, post-enlightenment, capitalist way.

—

I’ve been hurt by a lot of people. I don’t have any sympathy for them. I’m really a reasonably patient guy. I’m about as patient as you can be and not be a reactive ass. And that makes for a short life. I have it in me to fight back, have opinions, be offensive, stake a claim, but mostly I don’t. Mostly I let people do their thing, until and unless they cross the threshold of my self-respect.

But getting back on point… I’ve been hurt by a lot of people.

Sometimes I wonder what I wish for them. I wonder just what “justice” is in individual cases. I suppose if I were to be either politically correct or terribly empathetic, I would say that “justice” is an inappropriate and strange term here and that people are free to do what they will.

Thing is, I’m not that politically correct, nor am I that empathetic.

I believe in hard justice.

And thus, justice is what I am unable to provide. Justice would be if I were to take on the role of “punisher” in the wake of wrongs. I used to think (when I was a teenager) that I was a subjective justice machine. This is clearly not the case and I don’t believe it any longer. If I were such a machine, people would be dead and I would be in jail.

Instead, I readily concede when asked that there is no justice in life.

But I know what I think. I know that it is unpopular. I also know that I have a very high I.Q. and am very well read and have more degrees than most and have written books and joined very exclusive intellectual clubs that are not open to just anyone.

Do such things make me right?

Do I believe in right?

I believe, at the end of the day, that right is a conceptual construct that has taken on a certain autonomy with respect to might that is unsustainable. That is to say: no. There is no right. There is power. Some have it, and some don’t. I have some of it, but not all of it.

There are also feelings. These are neither rational nor irrational. They are, instead, subjectivities. They are infinitely valuable (or at least, as valuable as any human life) and similarly worthless. They are the battlefield for supremacy. They are the battlefield for fulfillment and fruition.

They are the battlefield of being.

I want to be. I want very much to be, if only for a moment. I don’t know, though, if I can countenance the suffering and the sacrifice and the risk that this might entail. I don’t know if I am capable of being. I don’t know (honestly) if this is even actually what I want, but all other things I can imagine are immediately filed under “things I (probably) don’t want,” so it seems as prudent as anything to pursue this particular avenue.

—

Sometimes I want to simply buy an “avenging angel” costume and a pile of bullets and listen to pop songs about killing as I play judge, jury, and executioner for the world.

As Lucy said in a particularly astute cartoon, if nobody else is willing to claim the job out of some deference to the innumerable other, “I will!”

—

Somebody should.

It’s all a farce.

Bring the fucking judge and let’s be done with it already!

—

I suppose, at the end of the day, I long for totalitarianism. Because I am one of those (like a few billion others on earth) that thinks: one wrong conviction and a hundred right ones is an acceptable ratio. One wrong conviction to preserve a generation of stability is an acceptable ratio. Hell, 1,000,000 wrong convictions to preserve a 1,000,000,000 strong generation of stability is also an acceptable ratio.

Individual freedom? No one should be free. Ever. All should answer to the dictates of society, not as determined by the mob, but as determined by the elite, by the better-than, by the higher-than, by the smarter-than, by the powerful. Sorry, folks, I grew up where I grew up, and democracy has done more harm to me than the old Soviet Union ever did.

Let the guilty suffer. I only wish there was some way to make the guilty suffer and the innocent understand that actually, everyone is guilty and all suffering is therefore justified.

Call me a misogynist misanthropist. I won’t say you’re unfair or inaccurate.

—

When people are truly honest with each other, the worst happens.
When people are dishonest with each other, the worst happens.

Conclusion: the worst happens.

idealize what is far.

Works every time!

(For a moment. Then you find out that you have royally fucked up.)

are never answered without concession. If you are not, as is true in my case, amongst those that are capable of granting concessions without first dying, then you are destined to find that the big questions grow ever bigger as your life progresses.

The littlest problems become the problems that consume your life, and each time you are sure that you have outrun one of them and begin to lower your defenses, they return again with a vengeance heretofore unimagined.

You are trapped by yourself and by your desperate need for the world to be the way that you want it to be. The world, of course, will go on happily being something else entirely. And, if you are like me, you know that you will fight it each step of the way, no matter how hopeless, no mater how pathetic, no matter how dangerous. Such a path leads in two directions:

– You get to be Mao, Stalin, or Hitler
– Or you find yourself crushed under the wheels of justice, normativity, and sociality

—

The older I get, the more I am a Nietzschean.

—

The older I get, the more I wonder just what it is that holds my life together. Is there some miraculous technology of the self keeping my being afloat, or is it dumb luck that I am not yet consumed, despite those many twists, turns, and thresholds at which I thought I might be?

—

Do I love society or hate it?

—

Am I a totalitarian or an agnostic?

—

Is this the dialectical self or is it merely failure?

—

Will I know before I die, or is dying the only true form of knowing?

—

It’s official. I am going gray. This does not bode well for any dreams I may harbor of unusual longevity.