God, this place needs a make-over, especially now that social media is entering it's dramatic death phase. I'll have to think about that. Stay here, start a blog somewhere else? I have no idea. But I am missing the days of blogging and RSS feeds this week.
Adding: Permanently deleted the twitter micro-feed. Fuuuuuuuuck that guy and that place.
I have been hesitant to write more, simply because my thinking feels so disorganized lately and I can't imagine it doesn't come through in my writing. I write offline a little more than I used to though. Imagine, thoughts that don't immediately need to be broadcast! Anyway, I may try and write though it, online or off, and I guess this is fair warning?
Honestly, my particular tragedy, and maybe not that unique, is I have always wanted to write, but am not sure i have every really had anything to say? That is probably the trap, thinking I need to have something IMPORTANT to say.
I don't know, I started reading Fairy Tale by Stephen King this last week and he mentioned somewhere that during the pandemic he just asked himself what kind of story he wanted to write and that's what came out. I think, that is the correct approach. I just need to write what I would want to read or simply what pleases me and if it's stupid it's stupid. The older I get the bigger the universe feels and the less impressive my ability to grasp any sizable portion of feels anyway. Which is to say, age is slowly teaching me humility in all things, which must surely apply to my writing as well.
I've been reading a lot of near death experiences and death bed visions and I'm trying to put together what the common elements might imply. It's more of a thought experiment than an earnest belief for me, but given that there ARE common elements, I'm curious as to what cohesive picture they might paint, if any. This kind of thing may not be your jam, I understand.
some of the common elements to near death experiences are:
While, there are frequently discrepancies on how these details are presented, usually seem to match cultural expectations, the broad strokes are remarkably common. Let's assume for the sake of argument that those discrepancies are more just user-specific skins to ease the newly departed back into their spirit forms and that these are to some degree real experiences that give some hints to the structure of the afterlife or a bigger context for the sould. That said, the first things that always jump out at me are
1) Gosh, the afterlife bureaucracy sure makes a lot of mistakes. Why do people keep showing up before their time? Perhaps it is less a screw-up and more that being that close to death thins the walls between world?. Or that being that when your immediate survival is unclear, it can provide the opportunity for the spirit to wander until the matter is decided. idk, but I find it amusing there are so many apparent clerical errors.
2) If the whole point is to forget the spirit world during your time on Earth so you can evolve, why are they sending people back telling them to tell everyone about the afterlife? Doesn't it defeat the purpose to some degree? the entire point of any of it still seems unclear, so maybe the knowledge that there might be some greater context here is just meant to take the edge off of mortal life, so to speak. Idk, but it strikes me as strange.
I guess it just overall leaves me thinking, to what end? What does it matter that souls incarnate and experience and evolve over an eternity? Perhaps we are bits of a larger consciousness sent out to explore and report back, for the simple joy of exploration or purposes unknown.
And also, do I find this idea more or less appealing than your traditional Judeo-Christian heaven/hell or the more materialist emergent consciousness that only exists so long as this body does? I don't mind the materialist version, although I don't find it inspiring. If there's truly nothing after we die, it won't bother me much because I won't be around to feel anything about not being around to feel anything. I have long since abandoned the adventist/christian idea of heaven and hell just because it's both too contradictory and too punitive and far too obviously a means of controlling behavior via fear.
I will say the idea that the idea that all souls are eventually reformed and forgiven and return to the whole, if only because that was the only version of god I could see being worth following when I was growing up. In adventism there was this idea of pure grace wrapped up in contradictory thorns, and I always thought some part of the idea of grace made sense to me, at the very least as an aspirational way to try to live. It was just all the other bunk about how a person had to be based on the body they were born with that they kept trying to staple on to it that turned me off.
I guess my worry is that this would all be too boring? Maybe eternity even from this point of view would eventually lose its charms. Maybe the challenge of adversity is why souls choose to incarnate over and over?
What I kind of like about the idea is if it were true, there would not be an extraordinary impact on day to day life. Okay, so there's an afterlife, where we'll get a hug and cleaned up and some time in the rec room before we're sent back again. What of it? True, there's little incentive to be "good" per se in that story but there's also little incentive to be bad. Being bad increases our own suffering for no good reason and being good is its own reward. Weirdly, I find it more motivational than any afterlife structure I've seen so far. It answer the existential Purpose question: learn, grow, be kind. And also the mortality fear: don't worry too much about dying, this ain't your first rodeo and it won't be your last.
Maybe the particular purpose where humanity is concerned is that it is simply to see how long it takes a species of excitable primates with some modest reasoning skills to figure out how to chill the fuck out and not trash their own ecosystem. And some higher entity will simply rate and sort us appropriately ("figured it out faster than the giant slugs of the delphic expanse, but slower than the cetaceans of Zebulon 3. B-.")
Ultimately, as with all thoughts about the afterlife, I always come back to this: it kind of doesn't matter! Not that life is without meaning, but the afterlife will take care of itself. If we go into the light, that's what happens, and we're on to our next adventure. If there's nothing, I won't care! I'll be nothing! All that I really know is, afterlives aside, I'll only be in this body in this place in this time this once, so I should make use of what time I have while I am here.
So, do what exactly? I can think of worse starting points than: learn, grow, be kind, and worry less about dying than making sure I have as few regrets as possible when I do. Don't spend too much time worrying over the afterlife, when you have other things to work on. The afterlife will take care of itself one way or another.
Seems pretty reasonable to me.
I finally managed to finish the Good Place, rewatching the entire series up to where I stopped in season 4. the first two seasons are great, but it goes downhill after that and the last couple episodes were actively annoying to the point where it knocks an entire point off the star rating for me. I love the cast, I love the premise, I love the production values and set design, I just wish they had stuck the landing.
What made the show so exciting was this sense that it had something to say, that it was exploring all these philosophical ideas and was eventually going to land somewhere cohesive and interesting. I'm not sure why I expected a TV show to do what no living philosopher has ever been able to do (answer their own questions satisfactorily), but I am not a philosophy guy, so what do I know?
The culmination of all this talk about ethics and meaning was, frankly, distressing to me. The most perfect afterlife they can think of is one where you get to do everything you've ever wanted and then kill yourself once you're bored. that for a human being, suicide is the answer to eternity. It would be one thing if the show had been largely focused on eastern philosophy for the duration and this was what it built to, but it was very much focused on western and judeo-christian concepts of sin and punishment/reward which it then kind of awkwardly sidles away from, or at the very least coyly refuses to elaborate on. What I'm trying to say is they built a playful and fun but woefully shallow concept of the soul and the afterlife and it was a shaky platform to launch into discussions of meaning and purpose from.
Ultimately, I think they looked at eternity and blinked and chickened out. One question they probably should have answered to provide some context and foundation for any thoughts about meaning they were trying to convey, was why any of it was happening. Why was there an afterlife at all? Who made all the janets? Why were the demons/angels/functionaries of the afterlife at all concerned about whether humans were good or bad? Why are demons suited to eternity but a human being isn't? Why not have human souls expand and grow in complexity much like Derek in this eternity? maybe they become afterlife functionaries too? the show was so desperate to avoid any hint of religion that they failed to define some important terms to put the events of the show in any sort of context, even though something like a higher power that IS concerned about all these things is frequently implied. But the show frustratingly never answers the question of what its all for. Obviously the writers of a TV show can't solve the meaning of life for us, but in the context of the show, it probably would have helped if the writers would have actually committed to the setting by eventually adding some crucial details. So in a sense, I understand the ending. If I were in an afterlife that poorly thought out, I can understand why people would want a way out.
Personally, I think it would have all worked better if they'd worked reincarnation into it somehow. The idea that you die and your soul just lingers for not real reason is not too appealing, instead of the tests in the middle place, why not have them reincarnate over and over with some vague sense of previous lives and lessons learned and frame it around that? Instead of an eternity of perfect ease, a long series of lives on earth, with all the ups and downs that come with that? Remembering everything only in between incarnations? I guess my point is, they had a lot of options, and they chose a shrug, and yet another meditation on mortality that boils down to "death is the only thing that gives life meaning."
Even that strikes me as posturing though. "death is the only thing that gives life meaning" is more something we say to ourselves to cope with knowledge of our own mortality. I don't see how mortality imparts meaning, although I do see how it imparts urgency to the proceedings. We are not living in forever so we'd best get to it. I think if we had the capacity to live to 400 years old in good health and vitality we wouldn't be thinking, "ah, if only I had died 300 years ago to give this all some meaning." Meaning comes from all kinds of things. It may be true that for creatures with our brains and our bodies as they are now that we would handle certain kinds of eternities poorly, but I'm not sure it stands to reason that any long-term extension of consciousness would lead to boredom and madness. I can imagine an enduring body and an infinite universe providing quite a bit of entertainment, frankly. Which brings up another question, why in all of eternity did they never leave earth? Again, the vision here is weirdly limited.
Beyond that, we should probably also be careful to distinguish between the natural ennui of age and the value-added ennui of stressful world we've created for each other. We're all very tired, I understand, but we've also created a very narrow and stressful range of options for living that are difficult to cope with (in the name of religion or economics or good old fashioned bigotry). We might think more kindly of eternity if we didn't exhaust each other so much as a matter of principle.
But I do go on. Suffice to say, while I thought the first two seasons were really good, ultimately the show kind of chickens out and goes up its own navel into nothing in the grand tradition of philosophy. Glad I watched it, but ultimately disappointing. Alas.
The thing that strikes me after every one of my existential anxiety episodes is less the fear of dying, which remains, but more dying like this, as the person I am with the life I have. Not to put myself down, per se, but I don't enjoy my life even though I recognize it as the steady accumulation of conscious choices. I'm kind of a loser I think? Which is not to hate myself and not to say that I am somehow intrinsically unworthy of love, but I have no social life. I haven't had a date in a few years, I haven't had sex in eight years, and I have no prospects. After 12 years in Portland I have no close network of friends, no community I value and feel valued by. No greater purpose than to avoid suffering by creating the world's biggest personal space bubble. This is not the ideal I pictured for myself when I was younger. I wanted space from everyone and I got it. What a terrible thing to get what you've always wanted. I just think it would be embarrassing to die having figured this little of life out is all.
A major part of the issue is I have no idea what I want out of life or who I want to be in the world. All I know is I have a deep distaste of american society and kind of general weariness with how selfish and shallow people tend to be. Hard to connect with people with such a sour, disconnected attitude.
So in the interests getting over myself and having some conscious thoughts about what I want, here is a non-exhaustive list of things I would feel bad about not accomplishing or finding before I kick the bucket:
It's weird to be home, as it is always weird to be home after leaving adventism. My reaction is usually just to shut down and get through it and this extra medical stuff with my mom (she's recovering well so far) provokes a baseline anxiety level which also shuts me down, so I guess the net effect is I am doing the necessary to help my mom and stay positive and otherwise my mind is just anxiety static white noise.
Which is unfortunate, because living in neutral with a smooth brain broadcasting static has been the solution to my problems, a tactic that has not worked out well for me. To fully mix the metaphor, I left Adventism's orbit and shot out into space, apparently hoping I'd fall within the gravitational pull of another belief system or identity in another million years or so, without doing a quick double-check on the average human lifespan.
So here i am, dealing with very real shit, completely unprepared, having made a point of not preparing myself for anything the last couple decades realizing that maybe this is why people end up finding communities and partners so that they have someone's hand to squeeze when things get scarier.
The adventist community is and is not my community. I will always understand it, it will always be a part of me, but I don't share the belief system and feel an active urge to run when the convo turns religious (for a wide variety of very good reasons), so even here I am mostly facilitating my mom's community as they reach out to help or support her, but I am not directly participating myself. I am skimming the top of the adventist bubble, helping where i can.
And the only person really appropriate to talk to about a lot of this would be a partner, which I don't have and have not even tried to have for the greater part of a decade, and i have slowly withdrawn from a lot of my social circles, catastrophically so during covid, and as it turns out I need my space but I don't need or like to be in another solar system.*
Anyway, I need to change if I don't want it to be this way any time shit gets real. I don't like this society much but I need to find some kind of identity and purpose regardless, and hopefully a community, and hopefully a partner (or, less likely but still within the realm of possibility) partners.
When I was younger and on the smart kid track I thought I was destined for great things, but frankly I'm not sure great things are something I'm ever going to be interested in doing. As I get older, the simple life seems more than fine and I realize, very much to my surprise, that really what I care about is being part of a community where I feel comfortable and where I belong, and the real issue here is I just haven't found that yet. And while I do have good friends whom I love dearly, modern day life has scattered us to the four winds and I don't think my "hey, let's all live on a commune" pitch is going to go over too well.
Meanwhile, I am sitting here thinking while my mother naps and recovers from her surgery and I realize I need to do more but all I hear is this anxiety static. So I tell myself I can't really do anything about it at the moment, (I am not really going out too much to reduce potential disease vectoring for a post-op patient), but hasn't that been what I've been telling myself for 8 years? I give myself too many excuses for doing a lot more nothing.
Anyway, my brain is static, but what I AM doing is getting on the exercise bike in the garage and some basic exercises (it's far too hot to go outside much) and slowly cranking back the sleep schedule. I have come to the truly regrettable conclusion that if I start exercising I will probably think and feel better. Although, I am still prone to staying up late as a way of avoiding adventism I am finding, so that's a work in progress.
Anyway, something's stirring. This sucks, and I don't like what I made of my life or myself, but it's nothing anyone else can change. I keep hoping I'll have some kind of epiphany that clears away the static, but I don't think it works like that. the culmination of a series of choices is only going to be corrected by a series of different choices.
I think I'm just going to try and keep writing until either there's less static or the ideas get more coherent. So, you know, business as usual for this blog.** I'm sorry and you're welcome.
*I think we're up to four half-assed metaphors.
** should all this be done in an offline journal? Probably!
In the beginning, God hovered over the surface of the water. Well, not THE beginning, if you want to get all technical about it. For quite some time matter had been spinning, orbiting, condensing, expanding, and shooting truly offensive nocturnal emissions of noise and light into the void where anyone could see it. Except there wasn't anyone to see it, it just kind of happened and that was that. It had begun, but so what?
After several billion years of this, the measurement of one orbit of one planet of one star out of countless gazillions, something peered in from just outside space, with curious and envious eyes. Had a being been there and attuned to the right wavelengths and vibrations and other woo woo bullshit, they might have seen the Breach. The sense of something nearby but infinitely far away suddenly pressed up against the universal membrane and then something like a tiny pink tentacle poking through above one planet orbiting one star in one galaxy.
Had this neutral observer continued to look, they would have seen it rapidly expand downward until it hovered just over the face of the water. Ever so gently drifting down into this filthy amino soup until contact was made and something was imparted. Exchanged. Tiny tendrils of life seeping outwards from the God appendage, until eventually oceans were covered in a luminous net of information streaming back and forth to and from the Great Tentacle in the Sky.
Matter, caught in this net of foreign influence, began to jiggle and wiggle and recombine and interact in increasingly complicated and filthy ways, which led to more matter and more complicated matter and quickly spiraled well beyond the limits of good taste and sportsmanship. But they did and so they could and they could and so they did and the web of of tendrils connecting matter to the God Appendage, which someone with an obsessive need to label everything might call "the Web of Life", effortlessly kept pace, spinning from one to two and from two to more and then later to a whole hell of a lot more. And while there wasn't anything resembling thought happening the general vibe was that what happened in the primordial ocean STAYED in the primordial ocean, except for the bits the Great Tentacle sucked greedily in into the Breach.
Of course, it wasn't all fun and games. The wiggling would eventually stop and the information the tendril would withdraw and return to the network that fed the Great Tentacle, returning what had passed down back up the chain, back through the Breach and outside of what would eventually come to be known as spacetime. But matter wiggled against matter, creating more matter, and they all got a bit fatter and the party wiggled on.
As matter found new shapes to wiggle into it gained a impression, and then over quite a long time a sense, a sort of general vibe, an awareness, and eventually what you might finally call a sort of consciousness, at least sometimes. Kinda. I guess.
As luck would have it, over the same period of time it had refined the wiggling appendages through trial and error, first as tendrils in homage to the Great Web and then fins, and flippers, and so on. In a truly shocking coincidence, the first bit of complicated matter, a creature you might say, to develop legs also happened to be the first to develop a sense of shame.
Disgusted with the absolutely depraved nature of life in those swinging seas, the first creature took its first tentative steps on land. Unfortunately, it had not had the good sense to develop lungs first, so back into those wretched waves it went. But still the proof of concept was sound, and eventually the wet little hedonists wiggled onto the rocks and sand, late to the party more sedate forms of life with a stronger sense of propriety had started several millennia earlier. It didn't matter, a party's a party.
And so the tendrils of the Great Tentacle in the Sky covered the earth, sending increasingly complicated and steady streams of information to and from the Breach. A vast consciousness had enmeshed itself in an active but sterile universe and established a beachhead. And it was good. If you were the kind of pervert who was into that kind of thing.
One of my earliest memories is mortal terror. Lying in my bed, in the dark, in Phoenix, Arizona, listening to the thump, thump, thump of my pulse as my ear lay against my pillow. It came with a clear mental image or a feeling of walking in the dark in the snow. Each pulse beat a crunch, crunch, crunch as I walked. I couldn't bear to hear it.
This must have been shortly after I learned about mortality because I was consumed with anxiety to listen to it (and if I am being honest, other nights since). This was me, this was my life, this fragile thing, this crunch, crunch, crunch through the snow, alone in the dark, walking towards nothing. That big nothing.
I called for my mother, who assured me it would be a long time from now and prayed with me, as good mothers do.
Five nights ago, I hugged my mother good night and told her I loved her and felt her sob quietly, in mortal terror of surgery the next day. And I have every night since sat with her in the ICU, as she faces her own walk through the snow.
I don't know what we walk towards, but we don't walk alone.
I broke up with my last boyfriend 7ish* years ago, and then kind of gave up. let's just take it as a given that I should have been in therapy most of that time even though I've been too cheap to actually pay for it. that wasn't his fault, it's just a choice I made. I decided I could spare a month of "Goblin Mode" as the kids are calling it, and 84 months later am starting to think this wasn't a good life choice. Beware Goblin Mode kids, apathy has its own stubborn momentum.
I can make few claims to time well spent. Spending time well is not the true spirit of Goblin Mode. And I've gotten the exactly the kind of life I would expect after investing nothing in it. And yet, for some mysterious reason, I feel unsatisfied. Strange.
I do not know myself, and so I do not know where or who I fit with. It's as simple as that, I think. Don't know what I'm running from, don't know what I'm running towards. Which is how you end up running in circles. Goblin mode!
*Maybe eight? Idk, time has no meaning anymore.
I don't know what to do with my personal web presence anymore. However, I suddenly find an overtly depressive presentation incredibly boring. I'm bored. You're boring me Zoidberg. The new banner is one of my first attempts at astrophotography that I was proud of. Not great, but a fine first attempt. I am pleased with it regardless.
It's embarrassing to admit at 45, but I still do not know what I am about. So I guess the idea is, maybe instead of leaning into "hey, I'm depressed" I'll lean into "hey, I'm still figuring it out."
I like space. I like contexts removed from this cruel society. I like the idea of leaving here and wandering the stars in search of nicer people. That said, keenly aware that the actual necessity here is to somehow make peace with this place and find where I fit and what I'm about.
So there you go. I may have another go at the title, but it's good for now. I"m straight up stealing it from my friend's post-apocalyptic micro-fiction twitter account which I enjoy (@apocalypse_txt).
One thing that frustrates me about the age we live in is the dogged insistence on the supremacy of personal taste. It is an argument for stagnation and/or decline. I get that previous generations tried to pigeon-hole everyone based on the circumstances of their birth, or superficial characteristics into overly rigid social roles and absolutely agree that the freedom to self-determination and freedom from abuse or oppression is very important for everyone, but I'm not entirely sure we needed to run away from conflict entirely.
"Let people enjoy things" is the spirit of the age, but it also leads directly into anti-vax lunacy or delusional beliefs in deep state conspiracies if we're not careful. And looking around at the state of things, I'm not sure we can say we've been careful, exactly. You can see it in the way people can't have their entertainment choices questioned, or their personal beliefs stemming from infotainment telling them horse paste is a better medical therapy choice than a vaccine.
The good and righteous rebellion against biology or the circumstances of one's birth as destiny has been smoothly and utterly co-opted by consumerism, to our collective detriment. We came out of the closet and into the streets and right into Walmart. It is no longer a matter of reason and evidence, experience and study, it is simply a matter of marketing demographics and the products tailored to meet their needs, sold with flattery that matches their biases and confirms their prior beliefs. Every product is good, it's just that some are not for you. If you are a purveyor of fine products this is surely a golden age, but for the rest of us the results seem, ah, mixed.
In order for this to work, it must be true that it is simply too hard to determine matters of fact or craft. Everyone has a right to their opinion, so who is to say whose is ever correct? We are! We have the tools to establish standards, collect evidence, establish chains of evidence, admit error, and correct course as necessary. The fact that these processes have been historically abused by sexists and egotists and all kinds of other ists does not mean they are also not some of the most powerful tools we've ever developed to shape our societies, ourselves, and our future.
We can critique and reason well, with empathy and a priority on human dignity, even if that means disagreeing with someone's taste, or choices, or realizing we were embarrassingly wrong, or any other number of frankly uncomfortable situations. And while I wouldn't say all discomfort leads to growth, I would say you rarely grow without discomfort. With that in mind, a society dedicated to eliminating discomfort in the name of maximizing sales and personal freedom should have alarm klaxons blaring in our collecting consciousness.
I'm not proposing a regression to mean-spirited rationalizations for how things have to be out of some misguided nostalgia for past glories that never were, but I AM suggesting we are capable of distinguishing being mean for the sake of being mean, and pointed, well-reasoned critiques that hurt our feelings, or even well-reasoned critiques from an irritating source. Our parents and grandparents were frequently jerks that fetishized dealing out and surviving discomfort to the point of actual trauma, but the right kind of discomfort leads to stronger ideas, stronger minds, and stronger bodies and therefore we should be wary of arguments that emphasize comfort over growth just as much as we should be wary of arguments that glorify misery in the name of growth.
I guess what bums me out specifically about the direction star trek has headed is the overt pessimism for the future. The creators act like we've spent 40 years cringing away from Roddenberry's vision as unbearably naive. But part of the point of framing TOS from a utopian point of view, imo, is these stories are going to feel WRONG to us. These are supposed to be the stories of people who have left at least some of the counter-productive impulses and unhelpful behavior and ways of thinking behind them. Of course that seems weird to us. If we give up our darkest impulses and our ceaseless primate bickering, what stories could we possibly have left to tell?
These are the stories of the starship Enterprise! The point is to tell a story from the point of view from a radically different frame of reference from our own jaded cynicism and then imagine it as a wild adventure instead of utterly boring utopian tedium. This is difficult! It is daring! To imagine utopia and then brazenly assert it would interesting.
Unfortunately, over time, Star Trek seems less and less able to imagine utopia at all, having already abandoned the idea that anything but gritty ferengi realism is hopelessly naive. It has turned from a high-minded vision of what civilization could be, to a pessimistic review of what western civilization IS. High minded ideals undercut by corrupt politicians, greed, and our basest impulses for war and profit. There is benefit to writing Star Trek this way, you can certainly reflect the fall of the US in the fall of the federation if you like, but there are also plenty of other grimdark properties fully capable of completing that particular assignment.
The point of Star Trek is you can be better, but you have to try. And keep trying. And the first step to creating it is imagining it could exist at all, and that it would, against all our conflict-loving primate instincts, actually be fun and interesting and a far greater adventure than we can currently imagine.
Utopianism has its own pitfalls, so maybe the project was fatally flawed from the start. Either it's impossible or any utopianism that rings true would feel wrong to less socially evolved creatures such as ourselves. Regardless, I miss the days when watching Star Trek didn't leave me feeling bummed out because the future tastes like ash.
I'm probably going to change the theme again to something that isn't so blatantly shouting "I suffer from depression"
You can isolate yourself and get deeply weird and no one will really stop you. You are an adult! It is your right.
You can swipe left or right on the dating apps and not talk to anyone who matches with you.
You can refuse to have even a five hour plan, let alone days/weeks/years.
You can stop trying after your last serious relationship and just watch your cats die of old age.
You can sleep late, eat cookies for dinner, and slowly fade out of your so-called social life like collateral damage from careless, joyriding time travelers who have just oopsed your chances of ever existing. You can let it slide so far that the most socialization you get on any given day is 10 seconds of chit chat with the baristas who sling your coffee. They say they admire your translucence, the way the light refracts through you, but you suspect it makes them dizzy. You understand, the light you refract seems wrong somehow, plagued beams on an unholy spectrum. "time travelers..." you say with a shrug. They smile uncertainly in your sickly glow. You appreciate the effort they take to be kind.
You can just drop anchor, and survey the lifeless seas around you. No wind in your sail, no refuge on the horizon, no compass to speak of and no place you were going to. You can be lost at sea because you're lost on land. You can just do that. You are protected by law.
You can assume you can end your isolation at any time, that there are any number of access points to the social web all around you. You will be tragically wrong, but you could be forgiven for assuming that, given that it is true for long stretches of time. You will notice you have left yourself completely vulnerable in any public emergency, which you naively assume is never going to happen. In the unlikely event of a pandemic, picking an example out of thin air, you will be utterly fucked. Truly boned beyond all imagining, socially speaking. You will make no one's "pandemic bubble." because you have not been there for anyone. You will be grateful not to have coughed yourself to death, though. That part is nice. But you are allowed to leave yourself stubbornly flat-footed in the face of literally any eventuality. You are an adult. It is your right! It's remarkably stupid, but you can do that to yourself.
You can decide this society is so appalling you'd rather just not participate. It's childish, but you can decide that too. You're not wrong exactly. Living in a society of angry primates who hurt people for money and like to condescendingly tell you why hurting people for money is GOOD, actually, at every happy opportunity: funerals, grocery stores, online message boards where everyone agreed that guy had it coming. In fact, maximizing misery is the only thing that can happen in this or any universe, you naive child, you utter fool. But still. Apathy? That's NOT productive.
You can just be lukewarm so god will spit you out of his mouth. In the happy circumstance that god is not your dad and trying to devour you, you are happy to be god's spit take. You might take some solace in the fact that spit takes are inherently funny, but it's something of a bummer that you have lost your sense of connection to the divine, a sense of place in the daily warp and weft of creation, knit daily, and thanklessly, by the nornir, who have for some reason not formed a union to fight these sweatshop conditions.*
You can hope for some sort of divine epiphany. that your purpose and your place in the world will just get beamed into your mind from somewhere good by someone kind, but it doesn't seem to work that way too often. It has happened in fits and spurts (that's what HE said!) in your life, blinding moments of clarity, but it's not something you can depend on. God helps those who help themselves and have somehow escaped being devoured by Him. And information wants to be free but it wants you to come get it because information is laaaazy and frankly that's embarrassing for information. Information should assert itself. Look what these primates do to it when they try to grab for it themselves! Mangled beyond recognition by their messy emotional needs. Sad.
You can be tired of this planet and these people and being caught in the endless tangle of their lives, but that's just life in this place and escaping this gravity, well.... Also, you are not blue, you are not all powerful and you are not swinging the biggest blue dick anyone has ever seen on a movie screen and no one wants to "take Manhattan" if you know what they mean.
You can be okay, regardless. You can just sit with your disconnection, your dissociation, and your apathy and watch it like a curious dog. A curious dog who's been to therapy and is taking notes. "How do you feel about that?" Your inner therapist dog might ask. "I don't know." you say. "Hmmm." says therapist dog. He is taking notes again. You suspect he is not convinced. Also, you suspect he cannot actually write. He is a dog.
You can get a little weird in isolation and no one can stop you. That's okay! It is your right. When you finally figure out what you want and where you belong, you'll remember you like weirdos and it won't be a problem at all.
*"Well, they CAN'T stop or creation ceases to exist!" you might say. Maybe the truth is, time just stops until they resume knitting and 5 15 minute breaks a day with an hour for breakfast/lunch/dinner would affect nothing. Maybe time freezes 8 times a day but we never notice because we are linear beings, who will forever remain blissfully unaware of every little blip and burp in the time stream. Did you ever think about THAT, smart guy?
I read the Parable of the Sower and Talents out of order, and finally finished the "prequel" to Parable of the Talents today. It is hard to read about "the pox" after the last year, not because I think that particular situation is imminent, but because it does seem as completely unlikely as it used to. The seeds of that world reside within this one and it's disconcerting to sit with.
In the pox, a slow-burning pseudo-nuclear bomb in the form of economic collapse does not vaporize anyone, but it does slowly atomize society, until all that's left are predatory gangs, increasingly factionalized governments, corporate slavery and a teeming mass of people desperate, starving, and hoping not to be prey. Everyone is desperate, starving, struggling to survive and trust in the inherent goodness of human nature will get you killed.
It's not that I think we're that close to Mad Max, but you can see the seeds of that behavior in our "looking out for #1" society already, and after a year of shocking callous attitudes towards covid deaths it's only gotten worse in some sectors. There is a not so quiet social split happening between people who don't really give a shit who their behavior hurts and those who, frankly, find that appalling (every friend I know has a story of former friends along those lines right now), and the disconcerting premise of the Parable of the Sower is, there's no real reason the "who gives a shit, I got mine" people don't eventually "win," at least for a time.
As for Earthseed, I find the premise intriguing, and I like the emphasis on radical acceptance when it comes to change, but I'm not sure it's ... sufficient to reform a society lost to desperation, ruled by a callous disregard for human life.
I'm not sure what's sufficient to change our course either. People comfort themselves by saying, "well, when the chips are REALLY down, people will come together." And there certainly is a critical mass of people willing to do that. But after the last year, when the chips have been pretty far down and a surprising amount of people have eagerly performed a callous disregard for death and disease so long as it didn't affect them directly, i'm not longer so sure the current argument for giving a shit, in sum, is sufficient. And what it takes to get there, I don't yet know.
I should probably put more words here. While I'm at it, I should probably try to put more interesting in that I usually do.
My thinking is so scattered today. Other than the sum total of my atrocious habits, I'm not sure what to blame specifically. I think I need to go off caffeine again. Of all the things that are probably contributing, the fuzzy head I get when I have too much caffeine seems too consistent to ignore. Your mileage probably varies, I'm just ready to believe that I'm one of those people who processes caffeine so poorly it does more harm than good at this point. Whether I'm willing to give up mochas is the real question. Although I could stand to consume far less dairy too, so two birds I guess.
Scattered or not, the urge has once again arisen to figure something, anything out in my life. I am begging myself. The current state of things is intolerable. Honestly, one big reason for the misery of my life is the simple ability to shrug off quite a bit of self-inflicted misery. Occasionally it gets to be too much, even for me. I would like to be touched by another human being again, and feel comfortable in my skin around other human beings again, and I think it's okay to admit that. To do that, I need to make myself someone capable of doing that again and start living a life that has room for other people in it.
I have been consumed lately by my romantic failures. "Was I a fool?" I ask myself. "Probably," I answer. Dalton, Chris, Charles, several Matts, a Josh, and others. I worry I do the seinfeld equivalent of breaking it off because they eat their peas with a fork. Although, I am contemplating the notion that my judgement in some of these cases was actually decent, and I accurately noticed a fair deal-breaker and acted accordingly. It frustrates my relentlessly negative inner monologue to consider such heresies, but I must admit the possibility.
Still, I miss all of them for one reason or another. Regret chances not taken. Wonder about what might have been if I'd been capable of summoning a better version of myself at the time. It's covid isolation and I can only game so much before the Life Review pops up as an intrusive thought.
I've at least been reading more, which is some kind of small victory. It's ranged from fantasy pulp to thoughtful essays I can barely summon the attention span to finish and make some minimal sense of. But I'll take it. I like the version of myself that reads a lot, it's nice to see him even in a cameo role. Bizarrely what may be my biggest motivation here is my constant dissatisfaction with most SF/F I've been seeing on TV and movies lately. I just...don't like the large swathes of the current crop. The new Star Trek shows are too over-wrought to be fun and the rest seems similarly uninspired. There are a couple gems here and there, but still. I think the stories I'm missing are best realized in novels. Or maybe I just miss the experience of reading high concept novels.
Maybe I just miss reading novels. It is a very particular activity that fires the ol' neurons in the ol' grey matter in a particular way and I miss that specific sensation. My mouth is watering just thinking about it, which is very strange, but seems to happen these days when I'm doing anything edifying, be it music, language, or simply reading something other than an endless feed.
Is it possible we're not on this earth to monitor various feeds for some reason? Oh well, I'm sure if we scroll long enough the reason will become apparent. Yup, any day now.
Over time, I've begun to abandon an overt search for "depth," even if thinking well and clearly and deeply, whatever that means, remains the goal. It's clear to me now in the fullness of overweight middle-age that the search for depth and "deep conversations" was a form of youthful vanity. The unspoken self-flattery, of course, that I was capable of such depths, that we could come together and improve our thinking and that we would congratulate ourselves and each other about how well and how deeply we could now think, now that we were very 21 and so wonderfully mature.
Amidst the wreckage of my life, youthful aspirations long since cast aside once seen as lies I told myself and/or lies I was told by others, I am more inclined to seek out shallow conversations. I still wish to reason well and think clearly but the tone I seek is much more the genuine humility of "isn't wonderful that we can come together and reason and isn't it a tragedy that we do so so poorly, even after all these years?" Which is to say, at some point in your life-long learning, both the vastness of the universe and the hard limits of excitable, hierarchical primates should make SOME impact on your consciousness, hopefully provoking some moderate sense modesty and humility about the quality of your thinking and the idea that perhaps learning to think well is a life-long journey of trial and error in thought and deed that will at some point be rudely interrupted by death, well before you have finished learning what you want to learn.
Which isn't to say that humility can't be it's own kind of prideful trap, of course. "Isn't it wonderful how humble we are now?" is itself not a terribly humble thought. The question is, am I seeking a self-flattering identity or knowledge? Do I desire to be seen as "deep," and lauded accordingly, or am I still searching for answers to questions I still have a hard time even finding the words for? I'm much more interested in the latter than the former as time goes on, my inner Smart Kid howling in chains notwithstanding.
I really enjoyed this dialog from BONDiNG (S2E3). The last paragraph is very relatable.
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Pete: Frank, what happened?
Frank: You know that movie, where the little boy turns into a man and loses his virginity to a 30-year-old woman ?
Pete: No... oh, big?
Frank: It's the one where he gets his wish granted by the machine because he's not tall enough to ride the rides with the other kids?
Pete: yeah, big. It's 'cause he's not big enough to ride the rides.
Frank: It'll come to me.
Pete: Jaws?
Frank: Is Jaws the one with Bob Hanks?
Pete: okay, now you're just fucking with me
Frank: Anyway! Sometimes I feel like that's what happened to me. Like I'm this adult person man who's fucking hot chicks on trampolines, but inside, I know that I still have like a 13-year-old dick in my mind.
Pete: Yeah, I don't think that came out the way you wanted it to.
Frank: I can't do anything right! A job, a girlfriend, the pull-out method
Pete: Yeah, but do you want a baby, or ....?
Frank: I mean, it's not up to me, is it? It's her life, her body, you know? I have to like support her. I already fucked her once, right?
Pete: but you were so excited...
Frank: Anything seems exciting when you think it will change who you are. Like, maybe I won't be a total waste of space, if I can find something to fill that space with. But instead, you end up being more sad 'cause that emptiness can never be filled with someone else, 'cause the problem is always you. and how do you fill, how do you fill a space in you that's empty because of you?
2021 rolling in like,
It's not just 2020, or 2021 though, is it. We describe it that way to distance ourselves from a harsher reality. What's happening now is the collective result of our choices, with no easy way to convince people to change. People, it must be noted, who seem to have a pronounced tendency to dig in harder and harder, despite the fact that they, and we, are already pretty deep in a goddamn hole. Easier to say, "wow! what a year!" than "Wow! what a colossal, and completely avoidable, clusterfuck we've made of everything!" If it's an act of god, a random permutation of the calendar, it's somehow not our fault and someone else's problem.
It reminds me of those people, well me, who avoid opening mail when they suspect a bill is coming due. Doesn't change the nature of the bill, just changes it from a potentially manageable problem into a psychic weight that prevents me from tackling manageable problems. And, let me tell you, America has a lot of psychic baggage dragging it down right now. A host of manageable problems lovingly turned to psychic ether so a few people with a lot can get a little more.
Our task this year is to drag these abstract terrors kicking and screaming into the harsh glare of the real so that we may kill solve them and in doing so perhaps save ourselves. We are running out of time and no longer have the luxury of endless dissociation and prevarication simply so we don't have to clean our rooms. We are hoarders of emotional baggage, we collect it via inaction in the face of solveable problems and it's time to stop.
Well, after we binge this next series. I hear it's really good.
I look at the world, my own complacency and depression, and all I can think of is, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." and all I can think in response is, "Yup, that checks out."
I very obviously have not been doing enough. I am a shell of an adult. I am not trying to remove agency from those who behave selfishly and amorally and continue to shred our communities and social safety nets, but I am suggesting the rest of us aren't doing near enough to fight that decay and not near enough to provide a compelling alternative vision for this society.
the numbers on the calendar don't matter, we all simply have to do better and deal with some scary, but manageable shit. That's it.
