There was a time when I was engaged in a long-running argument with some fellow academics about the nature of social media.

They argued that it was an unnatural displacement of and substitute for human social interaction and relatedness that was neither edifying nor healthy.

I argued that it was a natural extension of human sociality, enabled by human technology, that connected the previously disconnected and enabled new forms of relatedness.

I see now that both camps were both correct and incorrect.

It is a natural extension of human sociality, enabled by human technology, that connects the previously disconnected and enables new forms of relatedness, and that is also neither edifying nor (in some cases) healthy.

— § –

On social media, I am able to find and reconnect with people that left my life long ago, and that in another era would have remained little more than rose-colored memories. I am able not just to re-make their acquaintance in passing, but in fact to forge a renewed relationship that is maintained technologically, with minimal investment, so that we can remain connected and take comfort in our newly rediscovered connection with a minimum of sacrifice (this being a difficult thing to make in busy middle-aged lives).

Hooray.

At the same time, we then watch each other age in a way that is perhaps too intimate; the rose-colored portraits in memories long past are replaced by steely realities—insecurities, compromises made, failures logged, positions abdicated. We come to respect either other less than is justified by our past investments in one another, or more so. We measure self against other, and against the self once known by other.

Inasmuch as one’s life narrative includes, as a significant element, one’s own social history, this narrative becomes far less solid. “The story of my life” becomes an ever-changing thing as its constitutive characters and recollections are no longer fixed in memory, but alive on the page and repeatedly and continuously subject to discursive forces. Good characters become—sadly—bad ones, and bad ones become good ones before they are each inverted once again days or weeks later. Long-settled moments are re-opened for reimagining without warning. The story is more honest than it once was in the sense of being subject to ongoing methods for consensus-building and adjudication, but it is no longer written for anyone; it can’t be relied upon; it changes, once again, day by day.

Social media does enable new forms of relatedness and identity, and they are “natural” manifestations of the human condition in light of social media, which itself proceeds from indelibly human impulses and desires. At the same time, these new forms occupy new spaces that the old ones could not—more immediate, more persuasive spaces in everyday life—and they tend to render less persuasive the categoricals that proceeded from the ld ones, amongst these the self-identity and self-conceptions of unapologetically modern vintage.

The latter happen to be those categoricals alongside which I was born, and upon which my life (and the lives of many others alive today) were founded.

— § —

None of this is to essentialize one form or the other as either prior or “more true” or “more real.”

Rather, it is to note that one can make a personal evaluation of which one prefers as oneself, conceding from the start that this preference likely has much to do with one’s own socialization, identity, and history.

I’m ready to say that for myself, as who I am, I’m increasingly wary of social media, because of—not despite—its benefits.

Being raised as I was, when I was, in the society in which I was, I’m wired to presume that I am a particular person and that I am this person as a matter of a particular history. I can see now (with apologies to those that I’ve critiqued in the past) that both of these things are melted—from solidity into air—by social media. Both the person and the history are now evolving, instantaneous system states, not documents of fruition over time.

I suspect that it will be different for those that were raised in the social media era.

But of course, they will have their own changes to contend with.

As the world accelerates, this being-out-of-time is likely to become—itself—the nature of the human condition.

A human is he or she that lives the bulk of his or her mature life outside of his or her “natural” time—e.g. the time of his or her “programming.”

A human is that mammal which is inherently anachronistic.

We will know that the catastrophe has arrived when a generation returns, once again, to lifelong historical synchrony.

— § —

In the meantime—

“…the time is out of joint…”

and

“A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath those clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body…the communicability of experience is decreasing.”

— § —

Out of time, out of place. That is the nature of age and experience in the late modern era.

As a matter of happenstance and being out-and-about, I met a man today—unshaved, in a hoodie and ragged jeans and red, unlaced, Converse sneakers—that fosters a dozen troubled teenage boys on a large ranch south of Utah Valley.

The guy had an interesting story. Former Fortune 100 executive from the west coast, retired with some cash but no wife, no family, no kids, and wanted to do some good in the world. Moved to Utah and went through the arduous process of getting the system to agree to allow an older single guy to foster troubled teens in the middle of nowhere. Now he keeps horses and helps the kids he takes on through their time in therapy.

Do I believe him? Yes. Why? Because he walked the walk. Simple, direct, blunt, authoritative, could talk about the industry intelligently, didn’t have time for bullshit. The large-company executive demeanor can’t be faked, it has to be earned. It’s a matter of battle-hardening. This guy was the real deal, and his story was inspiring to me.

We talked about the technology industry, the dot-com epoch and history, the culture of financials and enterprises, what it’s like to teach at NYU (he said he thought at one point that he might like to teach) and so on.

I don’t know that I’ve managed my life in such a way as to be able to buy a ranch, retire, and help young kids in trouble, ever. And I don’t know that I’d have the drive and determination to do it at his age (he said he’d been up all night trying to track down one of them, recently arrived, who’d run away). Plus, I’m a decade or two out from my time to make those kinds of decisions.

But it reminds me that people of all kinds are out there doing good in the world—even the ones that locals must imagine to be scruffy, bossy, and cold as ice. He belonged in New York, not in Provo. He knew as much.

— § —

I don’t know what my life is coming to just now.

I suppose it always feels that way in the moment. Periods of complacency are few and far between in life, and they’re almost always a bad idea—that’s why complacency gets the rap that it does. You’ve got to keep forward motion going on, always. Because only momentum can keep you from sinking under the waves that inevitably lap at the prow and threaten to knock you under.

It’s hard to keep that momentum, to keep your mojo, especially when you’ve been buffeted by particularly big waves or when you’re way out at sea and aren’t sure you’ll return. But momentum is the only thing. You can either reach the end of your life standing still and sinking or you can reach the end of your life racing the wind. I know which one I’d rather do.

— § —

The annual rite of car registration renewal is now past. This year’s cost? $2,400. Just under the $2,500 limit I’d set for myself that would have meant buying a new car.

Every year since buying new car(s) it’s the same. Stuff piles up. Then you have to address it in order to register. How I long for the days of a 250k Volvo 740 that always, always passed inspection and always, always started no matter what.

If you have one of those old Volvos and some minor thing goes wrong with it that might require a hundred or two in repairs… Stay strong. Do . not . give . up. Pay the dollars and fix it. Because those things will run forever and ever and ever and ever without the massive repair bills that newer cars routinely see.

A year or two ago, I had the thought of “downgrading” back to a late-’80s or early-’90s Volvo 240 wagon. They were cheap as dirt for examples that only had 100k or 125k. Like, $1,500 to $2,500. I told my wife I was gonna buy one of them recently and I took a look. They’re not out there at that price any longer.

Suddenly a 1989 240 wagon will run you the better part of $10,000 if it’s got less than 150k on it. Missed the boat.

Need to have the courage to act faster so that more boats aren’t missed. On a lot of things.

— § —

What is strength?

Strength is having impeccable manners and a solicitous comportment no matter how you feel, no matter what you’re facing.

When you can be your best person no matter the size of the difficulties that you face, and no matter whom you’re facing, win or lose, private or public, up or down, you know that you have finally grown up.

— § —

Strength is exactly the same thing as perspective.

Perspective is exactly the same thing as strength.

— § —

The Fiat I rented all week while the car was being repaired does not remind me at all of the Fiat I had as a teenager.

This thing was substantial, roomy, and “cute” in its idiosyncrasies.

The Fiat of my youth was brutal in its idiosyncrasies and built mostly out of construction paper. It had just enough room for me to sit inside of it, if I inserted myself with a shoehorn and kept my arms and legs tight against my body and didn’t breathe.

One odd thing—no gas cap. The Fiat 500 I rented all week had no freaking gas cap. Instead, the door to the gas tank had a plug that covered the filler hole when the door was closed. Not sure if this is a good idea or a bad idea. Not sure why it merits enough consideration for me to write about it, but there it is.

— § —

Still thinking about Mr. executive in the red shoes. Feel dumb for not networking and getting his contact information as I would have done had we met in NYC. I used to know how to do that kind of stuff. I’d like to pick his brain and learn a thing or two. Gotta remember how that works, now that I’m in Provo; otherwise, I’m the sort that could rapidly lose the ability to network.

That’s life.

Women and men are, quite simply, different species entirely.

So I have this gnawing, aching, unbearable pain in my core right now. I suppose it is here to stay, and will never go away.

Does life ever get better?

On the one hand, I have always been an optimist. I believe that things can be accomplished. I believe that problems can be overcome.

On the other hand, there is a kind of pessimist in me that wonders whether it really matters in the end.

Because life is not perfect, and often not even good, no matter what goes right. And it’s been that way since generations before I was born.

— § —

Dear life,

I still don’t know how I feel about you.

With ambivalence and in some measure of pain,

Aron

— § —

Every bone in my body is crying out for me to do something, to take action. To find a way to make things better. But right now, there is nothing to do. Hope. That’s it.

Cling to hope.

Because I don’t want to live life without her.

Only once in a great while is my mind absolutely empty.

Tonight is that once in a great long while.

Empty, empty, empty. There is nothing at all on my mind.

I suspect that introverts and extroverts experience the difference between them in different ways.

I think it would surprise extroverts to learn that the biggest thing that introverts feel from them is impatience. It feels as though it’s struggle for them to wait for us, and for our attention. To wait for our thoughts to happen. To wait for words. To wait for us to be available. I don’t mean at the level of days and weeks and meet-ups. I mean struggle to wait seconds when you’re standing next to them.

When you’re an introvert standing next to an extrovert, it can feel like they are invisibly, unwittingly pulling you along and you’re not ready to go where they’re going yet. There’s all sorts of other stuff going on for you, inside your introvert head, that they don’t know about, because it isn’t going on in the same way for them. And you think that they don’t get it and feel ignored and disregarded and you’re sensitive to that. And you try to hurry up and attend to the interaction because you think it’s making them uncomfortable. But often hurrying up fragments you a bit, makes you less coherent and less skilled and just less. And that makes them even more impatient because when they finally get you they feel like they’re not getting all of you, or the real you, as a result.

There’s also a kind of impatience with the difference. As an introvert, it can feel like extroverts are impatient even with the idea that there is a difference in the first place. It’s not that your mind works differently, it’s just that you don’t like them or aren’t being polite to them and want to make an excuse for it, or something like that.

— § —

I wonder what the flipside is? I’m not an extrovert so I don’t really know what it feels like to be an extrovert standing next to an introvert. I know that I just said that they feel ignored and disregarded, but in fact that’s my own interpretation as an introvert, based on the years of experience being me.

And even if that’s accurate, I wonder if that’s the biggest part of the experience for them, or if there’s some other more essential “what that it feels like” to be standing next to an introvert.

— § —

As introverts, I think we also struggle to be patient with ourselves. We’re used to trying to hurry up for everyone around us.

But that’s just not how it works. If I force myself to do something before I’m ready, the product sucks. Years of experience have taught me this. I have to let the gears turn (it can look like I’m doing nothing or slacking off) until the cognitive foundation is laid. I know I’m ready because suddenly I start the task almost without thinking about it—and then, when I’ve been patient and given myself the time to let it percolate on its own before starting—I am probably the fastest person around at getting it done, and with amazing results.

But it can’t be forced. My mental system has to conceptualize and understand what’s going to be done before I do it. Otherwise, I just suck at doing it.

But it’s hard to have that patience, to give yourself that time, in a world that is also itself in a hurry.

We have officially gone around the bend.

This election season the Republican party is putting up a literal reality show TV star known for being a general failure at everything and turning an inherited fortune into many bankruptcies and failed businesses, and he is following primary speeches with infomercials for raw stakes that he bought locally and then marked up several hundred perfect, in between what are effectively pseudo-Klan rallies.

On the Democratic side, one candidate is a 74-year-old Jewish socialist and he is actually being taken seriously by the American public as an open socialist, and he is neck-and-neck with someone wanting to be the first woman president, continuing the programs of the first African-American president, only she is on the airwaves telling the eastern half of the country that the Reagans of all people were great AIDS activists in their day, then telling the western half of the country that they were great Alzheimer’s activists in their day, neither of which could be farther from the truth (and in fact the former being the most bizarro peak in bizarro world).

I am totally onboard with Sanders, shocked that it’s even possible for me to be so, but also at the same time looking at all of this and wondering just how much stranger and farther beyond any expectation this election season can get.

— § —

I remember being a kid that was interested in collecting things that I liked. It was hard just to find out what existed and to verify that rumored Super Cool Things existed. There was a lot of hanging around in specialty shops, making friends with certain shop owners or employees that seemed to have obscure (almost esoteric, it sometimes felt) knowledge, then pining for years just to catch a glimpse of the mythical artifacts you’d managed to get them to mention to you.

Now, in the age of the Internet-centricity, collecting is something else entirely. You can find the most obscure version or instance of anything, any variety of any kind of good, in pictures, then chase it around the globe, wait to pounce on any discovery anywhere at any time, sometimes even get an amazing deal on the rarest of items, and have them shipped to your door.

I have to be careful because if I get the collecting bug again in the way that I had it when I was a kid, it is going to require a lot of self-control to keep it in check.

Too easy to just search for fabled things on Google Images, read all about them in international forums, and go “Ooooooh, I want it so bad!” and head over to eBay and save a search that will ping you the moment one appears for sale.

Madness.

“29.
Do you think you can improve the universe?
I do not believe it can be done.
If you try to change it, you will diminish it.
If you try to hold it, you will lose it.
Sometimes things are ahead and sometimes they are behind;
Sometimes breathing is hard, sometimes it comes easily;
Sometimes there is strength and sometimes weakness;
Sometimes one is up and sometimes down.
Therefore the sage avoids extremes, excesses, and complacency.”

“73.
A brave and passionate man will kill or be killed.
A brave and calm man will always preserve life.
Of these two which is good and which is harmful?
Some things are not favored by heaven. Who knows why?
Even the sage is unsure of this.”

— § —

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taoism

I do this thing where I have trouble focusing beyond the image that people present to the world. I tend to take everyone exactly and literally at face value.

And I have a tendency to want to attack the apparently strong and protect the apparently weak.

The problem is that what people present to the world is often a matter of self-protection. People that are hurting present themselves as strong. People that aren’t can allow themselves to be vulnerable and often come off as weak.

I have a studied habit of treating the entire world as though everyone always wears their heart on their sleeve. And then I hurt people because what’s on their sleeve isn’t what’s really going on inside.

I can be really bad at social life. And it is a studied response; it’s a set of “social skills” that I learned as a young person that was forever under attack, a way of trying to find justice and an ethical center in the midst of it all. But I think this way of approaching the world has hit its expiration date.

— § —

In my twenties, I came to this idea that it was most just to take people at face value. You have to accept what they say and show to you as the only things that are real for them. Anything else is to fail to respect them—to secretly to know more than they wanted to show you, which makes them more vulnerable than they wanted to be.

It’s a kind of small justice. But it misses the bigger justice because it’s a naive, simplistic way of looking at the world.

If you’re really going to help, really going to stand on the side of what’s right, you have to realize that real feelings happen without fanfare, and without publicity. The question isn’t “Are you going to respect what people are saying?” but “Are you going to try to help make the world better or not?”

Because if it’s the latter, you do actually have to get beyond what people are saying. Because what they’re saying, they’ve been made to say by the same lifetime of suffering that everyone leads. What they’re saying and showing openly they’re saying and showing just to get by.

I know that.

And I want to help.

But it means that I have to learn to toss the naiveté about literalism being somehow just, which will be tough because it’s a long habit of principle by now. I have to come to believe that what matters is everything that they don’t—can’t—say or show, and that it’s okay to try to see that. Self included.

— § —

For example, all those teachers over the years that I’ve hated for so long… I have to realize that they probably said and wrote those things because the fact of me in their class terrified them, made them anxious, created problems that put a knot in their stomach every day of the school year as they watched me do my thing and watched other kids notice. And that knowing this is not necessarily the same as violating them somehow.

All those old men that couldn’t ever let me be the slightest bit different… I have to realize that they saw me feeling a freedom that they’d lost, and that it killed them inside. And rather than hating them for not letting me have it, I have to try to understand that they couldn’t bear to be reminded, had to either look away or put an end to it or they couldn’t get through the day. And again, I have to come to understand that I can see this without re-injuring them.

And so on. There are so many.

I have to find that place where I understand these things, but don’t use them. That’s the second part of the struggle.

In my twenties I decided that literalism about what people wore on their sleeve was the just, humane answer because the alternative, understanding their suffering, was also to exploit it, which I sometimes did, and that made me feel bad. But I’m older now. More accomplished. Not so reliant, and not so vulnerable to sabotage. And so don’t have to fight back any longer.

That opens up a middle ground.

I can understand, read beyond the facade, but then stop at that. Just understand. And then continue to be me, but sensitively. And while realizing that I am now them. Life has had its way with me, too—but I don’t need to treat it as a warzone. It doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game, me or them. To understand does not have to imply that I also exploit. So it is okay to understand. I can get beyond the studied “justice” of refusing to see in order to not be tempted to use what I see—often, in so doing (let’s face it) end up creating aloneness on both sides of the aisle.

I can just see and be sensitive to their plight and stop at that. And still find a way to be me?

I don’t know whether I’ve ever managed to do that for long.

It’s worth trying to get there.

Presenting as a quorum of the not-nearly-certain society, they proceeded to prevaricate until dinner was old before diving in to eat ravenously, only to fall ill hours later due to food poisoning.

— § —

I am exhausted.

— § —

“…they spend their entire lives on a valiant quest for justice—which, much to their continued devastation, nobody is able to deliver to them.”

— § —

When I was small, the word “atomic” was an incantation, a way of summoning demons and casting the thoriated tungsten spells of a technology-torn future.

Now “atomic” is like “vintage,” all about furry caps worn by old men and cumbersome “technologies” that read more like heavily engineered cafeteria appliances.

— § —

The difference between genius and idiocy lies entirely in the audience. The speaker has little to do with it, sadly or not.

It’s all about wristwatches, my friend.

Tick tock, tick tock, souls in the refrigerator, tick tock, tick tock, on the rugby pitch of meta-time, don’t take another until you’ve cycled through the queue again.

At length, cogs will be fabricated once again, oil will be extracted once again, jewels will be polished once again.

Tick tock, tick tock.

The end approaches, even if you pretend it doesn’t while wearing wristwatches.

Every now and then I have these moments during which I catch a glimpse of honesty, like when you’re in a cab racing through the city and you see a flash of something that flips a switch in your mind and you cling, cling, cling for a moment to the desire to take a closer look until you realize that it’s already fifteen blocks later and there’s no way to go back.

— § —

My entire life, I’ve had one ambition under (or over?) all of the others, and that was to someday arrive at a place in which I was honest and knew what I thought and, in fact, said what I thought without a heavy filter. I’ve known people like this and each one of them has been brilliant.

The converse problem is that each one of them has also been terribly, terribly, terribly alone and misunderstood.

I don’t know how to reconcile the fact that I want to be honest with the fact that I don’t want to be alone, and the result is the lack of one kind of courage (with respect to honesty) that leads to a lot of half-attempts and a lot of windbagging, along with the presence of another kind of courage that is effectively the sacrificing of the self in order to have some measure of connection.

But there are times when it’s hard, when I feel as though I’m letting myself down by not producing or contributing what I was destined to produce and contribute. At the same time, I tell myself that I am not letting myself down if I make these compromises in order to have a life and to be connected to other people.

I end up running these equations over and over again in times of trouble and in dark hours.

I have stuff to say and do. I really do. And there have been moments when I have done so. The problem is that while a decade down the road the productivity that results tends to be amongst the things I’m most proud of, in the moment it almost always hurts, isolates me, leads me to face rejection, and so on. I still don’t know how to square the circle.

— § —

And then people say, “Gosh, you’re not being honest? You’re not being yourself? Then I want you out of my life.”

They say this, of course, not quite getting that it’s a Hobson’s choice, that in fact you’re better off for having had them in your life for a little while and that if you walked around like the insane oracle all day they’d never have given you the time of day to begin with.

Either way you can’t have had them forever. This way, at least you get to love and be loved for a time.

— § —

Point being that if you see this place or some other place as being a bunch of “windbaggishness” just keep in mind that it’s standing in for the great things that would be said and produced if only people (perhaps you?) weren’t so closed-minded and willing to let other people twist in the wind the moment they have something off the wall to say or do that might not resonate with you just now (and if fact might make you want to hit them) but that later—years later one—will seem to be years ahead of its time and very interesting.

— § —

Props to people like Jorge, Noah, Lennox, and others that I’ve met over the years that have made the supreme sacrifice: to be the lonely pariah in exchange for being able to fill the world with more truth. Truth is the most precious commodity known and without self-sacrificing truth-tellers, life would not be what it is.

When is the right time? Always? Never?

Who is the right person? Everyone? No one?

All the wistfulness in the world won’t make Humpty Dumpty into anyone but who he is.

I’ve been saying I’m too old for this for twenty years.

How does a life get to be what it is?

And what can be done about it?

I’ve watched others become doctors, lawyers, artists… Seen them ascend to stable heights.

What I want to know is who held the straws, who drew them, and what it all comes to in the end.

I want to be at the end and see how it all turns out.

I’d love to have had a hand in it.

Is that a sin?

Is there such a thing as sin?

Would be world be any different if there was?

So long as there are people, nothing can ever be saved.

— § —

For most of my life, everything has been rather painful. I’m an introvert, I can handle it. I’ll just stare at some leaves and pet some pond Koi and write some bad poetry. I’ll read the Tao te Ching and talk to the moon and listen to the sound of my steps in the grass. I know how to do all of that stuff.

But sometimes I wonder… Why? What can I do to change this?

Or is this just how it is?

— § —

What if I took a day and quit… everything?

Cancelled every subscription. Quit every job. Ended every friendship. Discarded every possession.

Tore layers and layers away until I was just a man, standing naked on a road somewhere, with nothing to my name and no attachments whatsoever?

What then? What if I quit everything?

The optimist is a useful idiot whom hope fools again and again and again. The optimist never learns from this. And the whole world, wanting to feel wise, dances on the optimist’s grave. The optimist, refusing to be buried, crawls out of the earth to dance alongside everyone else, and is thus caught inevitably caught unawares when it all starts over again.

— § —

I am forty years old. Forty.

— § —

https://youtu.be/7NYbojdoAQE

“Cut away, cut away!
Send transmission from the one armed scissor!
Dissect a trillion sighs away, will you get this letter?
Jagged pulp sliced in my veins, I write to remember!
‘Cause I’m a million miles away, will you get this letter?
Jagged pulp sliced in my veins, I write to remember!
I write to remember, I write to remember!
Cut away, cut away!
Send transmission from the one armed scissor!
Cut away, cut away!”

— § —

Oh, how the young seek reasons!
They try to make the best of things—
fighting their ways so valiantly through
gray days and weighty sums!

Such naïveté, though forgivable,
is far from colorfast;
innocence taken is always forgotten—
like childhood, primordially past.

The wizened know what’s never said:
‘Fate the liar is a cheat.
Wherever fate has taken you,
you have been misled—
made to wander, dragged astray,
poisoned as you’re fed.’

Mazes are mazes, nothing more,
no greater purpose served.
It’s meandering and the search for why
that precisely fate adores—

well—

that and callow nerve.

— § —

You get born and then you
go to school and then you
hate your parents and then you
finish school and then you
wander aimlessly and then you
wonder if you will ever amount to anything and then you
work while you wait and then you
realize that you have been working forever and then you
marry and then you
have kids and then you
fight a lot and then you
give your kids away and then you
realize you won’t do anything you planned and then you
arrive at very old and give up and then you
die to make room for someone else to be born.

— § —

There is this generative impulse. And there is this destructive impulse.

The generative impulse believes in tomorrow, while the destructive impulse believes that the apocalypse is tomorrow, or maybe even later today.

You get in a race with yourself, as the two halves of your being vie for position and seek to protect you from the damage that the other is certain to do. You sweat. You bleed. You cough and spit teeth. You flail and your eyes get wide and you try, try, try, try to reconcile these wildly diverging halves of the ethical universe.

Pulling, pulling, pulling, they tear you apart and in the end neither protects you from the other; instead, working together toward your protection, they bring about your destruction, and you find the whole thing to be ironically funny and post-mortem, you sit around drinking with sad Manhattanites and talking about how it’s all just a semiotic game and psychoanalysis is dead.

— § —

In the olden days, they used to bake. This is now officially classified as a form of oppression; no-one is allowed to bake without a license from one of the identity-politic-quora.

— § —

Testosterone, testosterone
where is your microphone?

Do you believe, in your heart of hearts, after the fact,
that you’ll get a reprieve?

— § —

Courtesy, courtesy, courtesy, courtesy of the
of the
of the
the

— § —

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

— § —

Sensing that things had become hopeless yet feeling at the same time that desperation that comes with knowing that your point has not been made, that no-one in the entire universe has heard the scream of your pain, I flung my glass with all my might across the room and against the wall, where it knowingly shattered into a thousand tiny, flapping, hapless butterflies.

Taking this to be a signal, I put on my hat, so very heavy in the gray afternoon light, and stumbled out into what seemed nonetheless like endless, laughing darkness.

— § —

Someday, I would love to be free. Cherished dreams and all.

I’ve heard that freedom is good.

— § —

Hormones, hormones, hormones, they tell you about your hormones but they don’t tell you how much you will hate them, how much you will miss them, how much you will live in them, how much you will learn to let them go.

— § —

Into the drug, into the drug, about the drug, without the drug, tell me about the drug, carry me about the drug, will the drug, pill the drug, I drug the drug ever forward.

https://www.youtu.be/Z778slDEsds

Ironic or not, what have you got?

— § —

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, silly humans with your justice plan:

Fuck.
You.
All.

— § —

https://youtu.be/V2LNEIOjTOA

“Picture my house in a postcard town
Picture a bomb in the sky
History at your door
Who could ask for more?
I’ve felt better.”

— § —

A sandwich, a sandwich, my kingdom for a sandwich,
my soul for a trite and officious bloody heart.

https://youtu.be/Th-AqMvvBzE

“I torch my soul to show the world that I am pure—
deep inside my heart—
no more lies…
I shall be free…”

— § —

Wherefore, wherefore, Shakespeare, baby?

Wherefore, you fucker?!

— § —

“Love.
Bleed in your own light.
Dream of your own life.
I miss me—
I miss everything I’ll never be
And on, and on.”

Sarcasm, namecalling, and pointed dismissiveness are ugly. So far as I am concerned, people that use them automatically lose the argument and the moral high ground, case closed.

Social justice warriors are failed activists and in many cases failed people.

Fathers have equal rights as mothers when it comes to parenting. Equal. Period. To say anything else is sexist. I am not backing down from that, ever. Hurl your worst insult and hate me until the end of time.

This election season, much of the coverage is about the demise of the Republican party as we know it. It is also seeing the demise of the Democratic party as we know it, though people can’t quite detect this yet and it isn’t getting covered.

Cars are a huge, huge pain in the ass.

Most people spend most of their lives working on things that they mostly don’t care about and mostly regretting it, mostly without having any idea how to escape this rather shitty problem.

The fact is that that’s because there is actually no escape.

Haters gonna hate. People disagree, it’s a fact. These days, people hate each other for disagreeing, because everyone is a baby-SJW and sees the entire universe in moral terms.

Maybe I do, too.

Society is the social disease.

Hell is other people. (I can’t take credit for that one.)

I have been pessimistic and full of vinegar much of the day. But these things are not said lightly. I’m not just tossing shit. I believe them.

I believe a lot of things that have pissed a lot of people off that I wish I hadn’t pissed off over the years. And yet what can you do? If you believe them, you believe them. You can lie and say you don’t, but then you’re just not being honest with people and you don’t have much of a relationship anyway.

It’s hard to maintain relationships.

It’s hard to do most anything worthwhile in life.