04/02/04
You've plunged back in, dove headfirst into the shallow end of the populace, as if there exists a mythical depth somewhere beyond your grasp. Those people that once surrounded you and seemed so secure and in control, now they seem little more than puppets, acting out whatever reality imposing ideas they embrace.
I feel sick. Motion sickness from the shifting seas of thought. Sitting in the center, somehow I remain mentally resistant to the ideas that have captured all those around me. I see the sadness in their eyes. Look at pictures of animals due for testing in laboratories and you will know the face of my family and friends. How can I just stand by and watch as these all-consuming, ideological entities siphon dry the life from those I once felt a connection to?
I seem to have lost my ability to speak the Polite American language that is so necessary and vital to maintain day to day life among these poisoned persons serving time in the Populace Penitentiary. I stumble and tumble across words and sentences that seem to be carefully constructed in my mind but come out as little more than incoherence with inappropriate intensity. Raging anarchistic tendencies surface and strike without warning, firebombing my speech center, cutting off communication and cries for help. My extremes are far removed from the culture radar, the ideas I have been fed as of late are seemingly from a world that is not my own. A world where ideas are confronted and possibly, language permitting, these ideas are consumed. With each exposure to the visual and audio library of rebellion, inducing liberation from toxic thoughts, I feel lonelier than ever.
Hopelessness is the first byproduct of becoming undone. Line by line, stitch by stitch, I am coming unraveled, and now, I feel lost and unsure of the directions that life will take me. My ideas on what is and what will be, the most important aspects of living life, are eroding almost as fast as my ideas about myself. Why do anything if everything is a game? Why get up in the morning, why keep working, why keep writing…if at the end of the day it's all just a simple, ever-expanding game where no one will ever win? And by winning I mean, to impose an individual's full view of reality upon mankind. At this rate we will just keep running like rats through a maze, which we just keep building up further and further from the exit. Where is the forward momentum? Why does every sub-division of every category of life just seem like a fracturing of interests? A lie conceived from boredom and deviation from what came from the generation before, just so we can have more and more small circle celebrities and awards and accomplishments that are in reality just a fraction of what they should be if the separate interests were combined. I may not be a writer that wins awards or gets on the best seller list, but if I try hard enough I can find someone to shower me with the praise and admiration that I crave. And that's what it comes to down to: rewards.
We all are seeking some sort of final prize for our actions. The prize I seek is acceptance and the love of mankind. To be allowed inside based on a display of my ability. To be the center of attention and be praised for my genius. To justify the existence of my partially subdued, over-inflated ego. In my hidden heart I demand your love and attention, but lacking the self-confidence to draw it from you verbally, I must instead put myself into words. I shape and form my brain into abstract symbols and slide under cover of a sly fiction and go to work in your psyche. Without persistence of a clear vision, all I wind up doing is driving myself into your minds and push you further away, burying myself further inside.
Why do I even want your love? Why do I have to prove myself to each and every one of you? What is it that you have that I don't? Is it just a search for communion with my fellow inhabitants of this demented dimension? I like to think it's something spiritual, something akin to the closeness we all once shared as a interconnected mass of bio-electric thought patterns, a veritable web of souls. But in reality I ache for a life where I find myself worthy of being part of someone else's story. Unable to stand and be the main character in my own dramedy, I instead designate myself as the coward, goofball, and jester. The pathetic wretch, old and young with a mind tortured by loneliness and despair that is in reality only a device developed to distance.
Once you take away your prize for any accomplishment, or question its ultimate worth to you, you lose focus and flap about like a dying fish removed from its fluid universe. Everything becomes empty and devoid of any worth because ultimately all acts give off the same rare reward: Acceptance. I think of god and free will and imagine that the secret is to embed acceptance of everyone into everyone. How can this be achieved without mind control? And what is mind control but an extreme form of what we attempt to do every day? With every casual conversation we are forming a fictional person within the memory of those around us. We tell them stories and they deviate from reality just like all fiction does, embellished for dramatic emphasis. With a culture so saturated with the structure of sadistic cinema, simplistic shows, and even some boring books (without pictures), we can easily choose to live our lives so as to produce the best possible stories to tell others. Which in turn if they accept those stories, they accept us and we become a little more fictional. Ever know someone larger than life that had a million and one stories to tell? How much of that person is fictional and how much is real? A sad, schizophrenic, selfish society built around the charismatic characters that fine tune their public persona with persuasion and purpose.
Anger is actually the first step, cleverly disguising the helplessness underneath. At the moments of anger you are still bound in the chains of lies and distraction, frustrated by the futility of identity maintenance in the face of crumbling concepts. Anger is the first landmark on the journey to emotional self-confrontation, the path to freedom from the influence of corrupted and archaic beliefs. Anger is birthed from the most secure levels of your identity: race, class, religion, and political affiliation, the categories that seem to produce the most intense battles of imposed reality. Our physical differences, the differences in our opportunities and comfort, opposing stories of the great unknown, and varying opinions of how mankind should be governed. Unable to know what we should do with our brainpower, we decide to use it in the ways that best serve ourselves, and our number one priority seems to be to develop an identity. Am I White? Am I Middle Class? Am I a Catholic? Am I Liberal? Which one are we? Can we be all of them? How many categories and divisions from others do we need to paste upon ourselves so as to feel complete and whole?
Staring nakedly, wide-eyed at the sun is preferable than to look at the light within and question these choices and labels of self. Without the option of looking in we all turn outward. What is around me and how does it make me feel? I don't like to feel shame, loneliness, and weakness. I want then, to feel pride, unity, and power. How do I achieve these goals? I do what is safe, what has come before and I go with the group mind as they must know what is best if there is so many of them united for a common goal.
This group most likely has all the requisite outlets for the complex emotional engines that burn inside. This group provides an enemy, a focus for your animosity for its opposing beliefs. And it feels good to have an opponent as it draws out our beastly, competitive nature. The more we oppose, the more we are alive. The bigger the enemy, the greater the passion within us, defining us. This group will also give you the flipside to this identity equation and is totally necessary to maintain the 'US vs. THEM' program. This group will provide a sense of communion, brotherhood, and union with like-minded individuals. People that look like you do, think like you do, talk like you do. The greater the connection with these compatriots in the cause, the greater the sense of righteousness and identity. With a discerning eye we can see the game, the feud between brothers, battling against their fellow man in a societal game of chess. A trap of our own design, forged from our inability for introspection.
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