The New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote an article recently that adds some credence to what I was writing about in the previous blog entry. At least, I think that it adds some such credence. The article is somewhat difficult to read because, try as I might, I’m finding it hard to gauge the specific level of sarchasm that is intoned therein. Either Brooks really does like to not think about anything, or he is mocking technology in general. Perhaps contracts with the Times allow for a kind of… what’s the term… bad writing for which one gets paid exhorbidant amounts of money.

Whatever the case, Mr. Brooks talks of the “externalization” of various mental functions via technology. The basic innovation of note here is the GPS device in his vehicle which allows him to essentially have no idea where he is going, not think at all with regard to his environment, while still arriving (with a pleasant “You have arrived” Adrogynine voice) at the destination. There is spurious talk of the overmind (oversoul if you ween that from my last post) at the terminus of which is a quote by Steinbeck concerning some similar idea. The crime of quoting good authors in bad writing goes beyond even original sin, and may way heavy on the scales if certain unamed deities were to judge such interlocutors in the afterlife. I’m an atheist, so I can’t even pray for Brooks’ soul.

My point here is that, while written terribly, the article achieves a singular merit in as much as Brooks proves my point that real space behavior is being changed by non-space innovation. There isn’t much eles to parse for you, reader, it just is as it is.

Of note, however, is a thought I had after reading the aforementioned article and thinking back over the glorified explosion which was yesterday’s blog. In particular I was thinking about how cultures evolve via this more or less constant battle between established mores and random mutation (innovation). What I’m thinking about here is how, while the internet may have changed the way in which some people are dating/courting, it hasn’t changed the ways in which they expect such activity to play itself out. The act itself (dating) can have a completely different medium that in did even 10 years ago but still has an established end-point that is not being altered by the same force that is altering the dating game itself. It’s as if the force of change must first breach a lower level of something analagous to Mazlow’s Hierarchy and work itself up the ladder for truly sweeping change to occur.

What does it mean? Does it mean that the ritual danse macabre that is dating has some intrinsic characteristic that allows it to be more easily manipulated than, say, the idea of monogamy? Does it mean that there is a hidden time stamp on cultural behavior that allows for newer and less established practices while older more established practices evince some immunity to same (monogamy predates “dating” by a long stretch)?

Actually, what is probably happening is that the idea of monogamy is not terribly incompatible with the technology that is changing the dating ritual. Anthropologists talk about the “cultural environment” as being analogous to ecosystems. It’s sort of the social Darwinism of the 21st century (less the eugenic flavor of the past century). I’ve long thought that as evolution plays itself out in meat space, so to do the same rules apply to cultural space. Humans are, after all, just animals. Our genes play by certain rules of evolution, so why can’t we extract it all fractally (going from say a biological focus to a cultural focus) and say that our cultural patterns will obey similar, if not identical rules? This is, I suppose, why someone invented the concept of a “meme” (a cultural gene) and why Brooks name-drops that term in his article.

What is curiousor and curiousor, though, is that even intellectuals find anethema the idea that humans are actually supposed to be playing by the natural rules. Or, rather, that humans are playing by natural rules by, for instance, driving ourselves headlong into extinction. On one hand, people are willing to think about more abstract human processes such as “cultural environment” as having rules that are “natural.” On the other hand, just about everyone ignores the point that we are (in all of our glorious teleological evolutionary status) basically doing the same thing to ourselves on a global scale that certain lower rodents do in their own environments on a small scale. Namely consuming available resources at staggering and unsustainable rates and breeding ourselves out of a possible future. The more I think about it, the more the metaphor “fractal” comes to mind.

To return to the point of dating, I think what we’re actually witnessing is how technology represents an aspect of the cultural environment. As that aspect changes, certain memes will find themselves pre-adapted to the new environment (e.g. monogamy) and thus survive, while others are maladapted to the new environment (e.g. the older dating ritual) and will thus will reach a meme frequency of approximately zero. It seems rather obvious that the rules of biological evolution are playing themselves out on the cultural stage to a fault. I’m sure it wouldn’t be too hard to make other observations of genetic phenomena in cultural space: fashion comes to mind as an example of something that breeds itself out of existence very quickly.

I now have written enough on this subject for now. I thank my muse for this particular spate of vociferousness. You know who you are.

-vec

At one extreme the development of the internet by finance capital and promises of eartly riches beyond imagining makes for a sort of haunted house of pop-ups, blinking advertisements and penis pill variants. Here we have the internet at its most vapid; devoid of any of the people that make it happen. Commerce would make the internet a grotesque strip mall of the mind, in which advertisments for products that no one needs are shunted directly into the brain stem whence they activate an autonomic credit card swiping response from the user. It is this internet that makes me shun it, on occasion; to not lament its unavailability and instead engage a park somewhere. Somewhere where they have books written by people that loved or hated life on the ground. People for whom trees were magnificent creatures.

On the other extreme we have various software and social networking sites that allow for interpersonal relationships to spawn from nothing more than brief connections in feeling. We meet someone, who lives two hundred or two thousand miles away and experience that person without certain “normal” human interaction (viz. body language and in many cases certain voice traits). It has to be noted that the popularity of certain internet phenomena (myspace, facebook, MMORPGs et al.) is created and maintained by certain demographics of people who were more or less born with an innate sense of how this intrawebnets thing works, how to make it do what they want. Though some few people are making staggering amounts of money on these types of social applications, they are only popular because they are social. There is, I think, a tacit understanding among people who frequently use any of these sorts of applications that the other people using them are of the same ilk. Our similarities difused over distances and merging with others like Neal Stephenson’s rolling metaphor: Quicksilver.

At some point in the not-to-distant past, it were normal for people to engage their sociality in face-to-face. Less normal, perhaps, as much as it were the singular option. The telephone, of course, could breach distance at approximately light speed, but it were both expensive and frustratingly stationary. There is also an inherent limitaion in phone use that only allows for the user to effectively “network” with people they already know (friends, family etc.). This particular quality made land lines of the past draw borders around peoples’ lives in terms of the technology they were using: “This is my circle of aquaintance, lest it be breached.” To add new nexuses to one’s network, then, required a regular bodily dip into pools of indivduals of various social meins and strata. Asking for the phone number of a potential mate was once a big first step, now its so casual as to not even illicit a blink. There are certainly less sweaty male palms out there these days.

Our sociality itself, at least in the younger generation, is changing at a rapid rate. There may be something postmodern that can be said about this whole endeavor (social networking), but we don’t even live in a postmodern world anymore. The postmodern might opine of the self-awareness of the machine itself; how it is a product of latent human traits and either reinforces or augments those traits. Among other things, the postmoderns are out there right now talking about what it is that we are creating right now. Will there be emergent AI on the internet (a la Terminator 3)? The new left postmoderns might talk of revolutions that could be sparked and whose flames could be fed by this network of machines. Some are thinking in terms of the database of human knowledge, accessible from all points at all times. I’ve even ruminated about this in an earlier post in this blog: the oversoul writ in binary code, every human being online twenty four hours a day.

Directionally speaking, then, those postmoderns that still exist are all engaged in the human-to-internet processes. To many, the internet is a continuing work in creation. People made it. It does things. People use it. Strangely, even anthropologists are in on this gig. Some seem to think that the real phenomenon that the internet represents is a collective act of creation in which certain social mechanisms are necesessarily present by default, even if they are altered in some way. This is especially the case with something like wikipedia, whose effort to actually build the oversoul is something of a given. Wikipedia doesn’t exist without recurrent collective action of posting and editing. But even further, people who study non-space (the internet) draw their boundaries at the GUI. The sociality of the event (e.g. wikipedia) stops when the light coming out of the monitor hits the eye.

Due to certain experiences in my life, I fully believe that the more important area of study is how the internet changes people, rather than how people change the interent. The obverse directional is as worthy of note as the creational. Not ten years ago, it might have seemed odd, or potentially fatal, to meet and converse with someone on the the internet and then at some point spend good money to go meet face to face the person with whom you had been in correspondence. This was a time of less chat and more email, but even after the chat phenom broke various boundaries, there has still lain an undercurrent of apprehension herein. Common admonitions are as follows: “He could be a serial killer!” “That hot 18-year-old cheerleader-cum-pornstar you’ve been talking to is probably a 300lb postal worker named Joe! With a peg leg!” Though I’m sure there are serial killers and pre-op transvestites out there who prey on the gullible, the above warnings almost sound to the reader (or maybe just me really) like urban myths; bed time stories to scare little Jenny away from adult chat rooms. [As an aside, I’m not going to go into the whole “To Catch a Predator” phenom that at some points seems laudable and at others terrifingly gestapo]

At the very least, the aforementioned caveats sound somewhat dated. The advent of VoiP has made it is as possible as it can be to know the sex of the person you’re talking to. Coupled with social networking sites, it’s more or less possible to discern the person in question in physical form. Some people, I suppose, could go to astronomical extremes to disguise their identities in order to fool the unsuspecting, but it’s rather easy to pick out bad people. It also occurs to me that the people that say such things are the people that don’t know a lot about the internet and its operations. Those with only a cursory knowledge of this tool could easily be pessimistic about its various uses.

I think what I’m trying to say is that people are adapting their actual lives to the availabilty of sundry internet capabilties. It’s not that they just pick up a new gadget (zomg iPhone) with new interface options and connectivity. Its that the very core of the human (at least American) understanding of social reality is being altered, in real time, by this (rather stagnant) intraweb thing. It is now more or less exceptable to meet people on the internet and travel to meet them for the first time in meat space. There are even sites that facilitate this type of thing; There’s a couch-surfing registry for people who have extra bed space for low-budget travelers (with ratings: “I give this couch 3 1/2 out of 4 stars. Very comfortable, but smelled vaguely of cat urine”). But really, even match.com and other singles sites offer the ability to search for people within a 1000 mile radius or more. What do they expect? People aren’t going to travel to meet?

In a strange twist of irony, this sort of behavior sort of defaults humans to a Christian-acceptable sort of dating. Since people can be so far removed from one another, how could they possibly copulate? It’s almost puritanical actually. Think about how the internet acts as a buffer and annonymity dispenser. If you don’t want to talk to the person anymore, you just don’t. Its not like they live in the same town as you and can suss your address out of the phone book. In these terms both parties are completely equal. Has anyone done a study of emergent gender and racial equality in real space because of the inherent equality experienced on the internet? What the hell am I getting into?!

This is now so long that I have to quit or I’ll go blind. I might have more to say on this later.

-vec

It occurs to me that this page could at some critical juncture cause me an undo amount of stress. Someone could read this page and think that I were less than what they expected me to be. I shouldn’t run for political office while this site is operational; and mayhap I shouldn’t flirt with the idea of woman (such as it is) for the same reason. I know from experience that too much honesty can be a bad thing, but then again I’m just about done hiding anything from anyone. Maybe if someone asks me something like “What kind of person are you?” I’ll just refer them to this URL. I suppose if someone read this blog and thought less of me, then that isn’t the sort of person I would want to share a great deal of company with.

The mother of a good friend of mine died this past week from a rare type of brain cancer. I knew that the inevitible was going to occur some time soon, but it sort of took me by surprise (as I guess these things do). The woman in question was one of the better human beings that I have ever met. Indeed, her hospitality helped me through some of the more difficult times in my life. It goes without saying that she deserved better, as many people do, but there is a certain buffer that is created when one’s fate is sealed and a timeline given. I can’t say that she was a particularly good friend of mine, but I do feel a connection to her: when I was at my worst, she certainly didn’t judge me. That is strong praise, considering where my worst has taken me in my life.

I understand grieving now to be a communal affair. Individuals don’t grieve so much as grieving multiplies through others. I suppose that is what life is all about: alone we are babes in the woods, together we move mountains. So it is with death that it brings us a greater understanding of those still living. All I can say is this: Sleep well. Or, perhaps Dylan Thomas said it better in a eulogy to his father:

Do not go gently into that good night
Rage, rage against the dying of the light

This whole buisness has made me re-examine some of my more or less fundamental tenets. This derth of emotion, experienced by myself for these many years, has led to a certain post hoc justification of same. That is to say that when one is rather emotionless (or in my case omni-emotional), one begins to think that this is some sort of elevated paradigm. Less the emotion, the human spirit is one step closer to enlightenment… or so I used to tell myself. But this week’s experiences in death (we’ll not talk about the murder that happened a couple of blocks from where I live this week) put the brillo to my rusty sense of humanity. I may be broken, but I sense some fixes incoming.

I say all this both out of respect for the dead, and also out of respect for the living. I have recently been reintroduced to certain feelings that I had sought to quash due to their volatile nature. Namely, I have been chaste for a long while now by my own doing. It were a conscious decision as many of my previous experiences have taught me how much trouble such things can bring. In an strange reversal though, this death experience has made me rethink what it means to be alive or, at the very least, feel alive. Some recent conversation has insinuated a certain youthful gaity in me that has brought back some of that perennially elusive charm that I have evinced on occasion.

Lock up your daughters.

-vec

I need to write some things down and, being at work, I am limited to either A) hand writing them on something that will inevitably get lost or B) write them here where they will more or less be preserved (barring some catastrophe of unknown proportions). I’ve said it before: This blog is in function much like a journal. Below are some thoughts that don’t necessarily match the “journal” paradigm.

I read an article in the Kansas City Star this previous morning that shunted a slew of disparate trains of thought into more of a cohesive whole. The article in question had to do with a local (Kansas City area) study done on high school students and their parents with regard to their opinions about the quality of current and need for further math and science education. The largest percentage of both the students and the parents opined that the current (abysmal really) state of affairs was either 1) fine or 2) better than fine. Most students felt that they would be fine in the real world (whatever that is) with the education they had already recieved. Most parents felt that all such teaching was adequate. Something like less that 30% of parents polled thought that math and science education were lacking and needed improvement.

It almost goes without saying that the most recent testing shows that high schoolers’ math education far underprepares American students for even entry level college courses. And that underpreparedness pales in comparison to just how far our students are behind much of the rest of the world.

At this juncture, it would be meet to list some other late observations:

1) Interstate highway systems (bridges in particular) that are old, falling apart, killing people.

2) Same as above but for inner cities. Recent hearings in congress about the content of rap music and its effects on young listeners brought some sharp rebuttal from one rapper: “Fix our communities and we’ll fix our lyrics.”

3) Same as above but for rural areas. There are some ghost towns here in Kansas that used to be small farming communities. There was also a short film about the skyrocketing suicide rate among farmers. Killing themselves for insurance money to pay off debts. This is a strange problem, but illustrative.

4) The Barak Obama campaign/fiasco/whatever. This is tough, but let me point out what he’s basically doing. His campaign is being run on a “I don’t know shit about Washington so I’m uncorrupted” platform that has a lot of young people engergized enough that they might actually show up at the polls. Many think that he’s a breath of fresh air or some other spurious metaphor. What he represents is the failure of our government, in whole and in part, to do things like… oh, I don’t know… govern without at the same time stealing every dollar they can possibly steal.

I should also note at this point some discussions that I’ve had with various individuals lately concerning work ethic. I know that there is a certain segment of the population that is simply lazy, and wants to get paid for being lazy. I’m willing to except that. What I’m not willing to except is the sense of entitlement that everyone seems to have these days. It’s like people think they should get paid simply for living in America. I’m postmodern enough to ask the question if there has ever really been a strong work ethic in this country. I wonder if all the hoopla has been a hold-over from Max Weber. Protestants populated America; Protestants have work ethic; Americans must have work ethic. Someone can write a book about this, but at least cite where you got the idea from please.

All of these things put together evokes a certain lament from parts of me that I didn’t even know existed. Growing up in America our youth are told that they live in the greatest nation on the planet. We’re supposed to trump everyone at everything. This enculturation produces, perhaps, the type of person that is willfully blind to our failures; whose rose colored glasses are produced in China. At some point I need to explore the post-war-to-present timeline for the origins and progressions of this failure, but now is not the time.

I sound like a Republican and that disturbs me a lot. It’s probably not so disturbing because the whole wheel has been moving for quite some time. The far right has pretty much turned radical and the far left is pretty much fundamental… and vice versa. There is strangely little difference, it seems, between a revolutionary and his dictator.

I’m going to stop here, but I have more to say on this subject. Notes to self: Fiddling while Rome Burns; Why Canada and Sweeden win at the world; The impossibility of fixing the impossible.

-vec

If one were to talk about singularities, one could do worse than note the sudden influx of family into my life. Not only were parental units in evidence recently, but a certain uncle has posted comments on the previous blog entry AND apparently an aunt from other enviorns has more or less mysteriously left a note on my truck indicating that she would like to engage in some face to face. All of these things taken together make me wonder whether there is a nefarious undercurrent, a driving force of known but heretofore undisclosed origin. That is to say, I hope that no one has read and disiminated the information on this blog under the guise of misinterpretation. I’m not particularly unwell, I’m simply working through some chronic demons.

It were insinuated that perhaps I care enough about writing to do something with same (in terms of career, etc.). Without even offering further demonstration, I can point to the fact that I didn’t post on this blog (and thus did nearly no writing whatsoever) for almost nine months. Writing, for me, is usually a means to an end, not an end in itself. How can one take something they like to do and ruin it by doing it all the time. Witness the KC Strip steak: I dream about a rare strip fortnightly, but should I eat one five days a week, it would become just another meal. I’ve discovered this to be the case with just about everything in life; Why destroy that which you love? Its not even tragic, its just silly.

My writing, especially this blog, is a necessarily narcissistic activity. I write here because I like to read what I write. I am my own biggest fan, as it were. I’m not writing to myself, but the writing itself is a window into the soul. Its really a matter of perspective: I can think about this crap all day, but the mind being fickle, allows for those thoughts to disipate into the proverbial ether. Writing them down I can peruse them at leasure, even read them repeatedly to burn them into my consciousness like so much branding iron.

I should also explain how writing professionally works, so no one thinks that I’m copping out by not engaging in that time-honored profession (less honored as perennially persecuted). Suppose there is a continuum of writing ability that numbers such ability as 1 - 100, with 100 being the sort of sublime writing that lasts for ages and evokes passions in every generation that chooses to engage it (like Shakespeare or some of William Gibson’s work). On the continuum, then, 1 would represent writing by someone was exactly one step above the functionally illiterate. Speaking of Bell Curves and averages, we could say that the average person writes at about a 50 on this scale. Now, to break into the writing game, as it were, someone needs to be writing at about a 90 to write anything important and/or interesting (less if one wants to be a text machine that pumps out things like… well, anything in a newspaper basically).

Perspective plays a big role in why people would say “you have a way with words.” From wherever you are on the continuum, anyone more than about a step removed in the positive direction might seem like they, indeed, have a way with words. However, that doesn’t mean that person is good enough to do use that way with words professionally. That’s sort of how I am: not good enough, and certainly not getting any better at a rate that would put me in the professional catergory before, say, the sun goes supernova.

I’m just trying to put things in perspective. This is also why I lend less credence to the lay (i.e. non-professional writer) opinion about my writing than people perhaps think I ought. Its not an insult, I rather think its pragmatic. I admit that this might be a failing on my part, but whatever.

I will say this: no one in my life who was ever in a position to cultivate or propegate talent has ever felt that I had enough of same to be worth such attention. I’ve either had bad role models and teachers (which might be the case if I had less than say about 200 in my life… the sample size is fairly large), or I simply don’t have the particular talent at anything worthy of dissimination and or continuance. Encouragement has always been in the “Yes, dear, that’s nice” catergory and not the “I wept” catergory. Sounds rather hollow. If meant to encourage, I’ve certainly not felt so moved.

Off now.

-vec

I need to append Chronicle 2 (below) with some thoughts that have occured to me in the short time since it was posted (really only a few minutes ago). I need to ride this train of thought for a while longer.

Most of my friends have, in the last few years, relegated themselves to domestic confines with significant others. Of these, many have even moved out of state, been married, bought houses. Any day now I expect to recieve news of imminent children and further marriages. I would never begrudge any of these people for doing what it is that they are doing. Indeed, the fact that they all seem to have reached similar conclusions (or beginnings as it were) at similar times, isn’t so much a singularity as it is an example of what I was talking about below in Chronicle 2.

There have been points in my life when I was jealous of others, or covetous of certain possessions and/or people. Wanting what one can’t have is the sort of sine qua non of the human condition. I don’t know if this is one of those times per se. I’m certainly envious that some, perhaps most, people have within their natures the ability to form and maintain these sorts of intimate relationships. At the risk of sounding as if I believe in some version of a higher power, I should say that perhaps I wasn’t dealt those cards. Nurture or nature? Here I am getting all misty-eyed again.

Whence these feelings? Is it because I am coming to terms with reality? Imagine for a second that it were demonstrated to you that you were going to be alone for the rest of your life; alone and poor, with perhaps cursory visits from past friends; the occasional wedding or anneversary invitation. Is that being demonstrated to me now? Has this been in the back of my mind for some time and only now am I choosing to approach it?

I’ve done a lot of stupid shit in my life but the question, I think, is whether the stupid shit I’ve done is symptomatic of a problem or the problem itself. If that answer were forthcoming, there may be a way to deal with the issue.

The hammer to the face though has really been that, while all these others have been off building lives, I’m still stuck here in the same town, the same apartment, sitting in front of the same computer, smoking the same cigarettes, drinking the same booze at the same bar, et fucking cetera. There are, again, no prospects for change. I’m savvy enough to know that change of one sort (in this case my life) is often the precurser to change of another sort (relationships et al.) but, again, I have this lack of ability to make myself care about anything enough to do anything about it. What kind of viscious cycle is this? This is how I live.

I live in an ocean of guilt now, and I verily I don’t want to let the tides of that ocean breach the shores of any of my friends’ lives. How selfish and drastic would that be? Not to mention horribly detrimental to someone’s life. No, please no one think that I am trying to guilt people into admitting that they had something to do with my current condition. I, and only I, am to blame for this snafu. I take responsibility, the weight of which is perhaps the cause of my inaction to relieve myself of some of this pain.

I think I’m done for tonight.

-vec

I was inexplicably sought out by my parentage today, though perhaps it wasn’t wholly unexpected. It had been more than six months since I had seen or talked to anyone in my family. I am somewhat of a recluse for reasons, I think, that are enumerated in the previous blog entry. There are other reasons, I’m sure.

I’m fully willing to admit that I am a fucked up individual. The problem is that I’m not fucked up enough to warrant state intervention or, indeed, warrant anything save the admonition “stop yer whinin’”. Get off the couch and just do it. Right?

I don’t think there is a medical condition that has ever been diagnosed that adequately explains my complete lack of desire to do anything with my life. There certainly isn’t any explanation as to why I cannot succeed at anything that I care about. Further, there is no parsing the complexities of why I can only care about a given thing in excess, and that the excess only lasts for some abnormally brief period of time. Witness my 4.0 grade point average that I pissed away into oblivion; witness my inability to form and maintain lasting relationships with the oposite sex; witness the fact that I very nearly let myself starve to death this past year because I couldn’t even be bothered to care about my continuing existence. I would never be so crass as to commit suicide; wasting away is more poetical.

Atheism may have saved my life at various points. Additionally I could probably wax Freudian about diverse aspects of my personality, such as it is. I’m not sure that I buy into the whole idea of psychotherapy, or even just therapy in general. It seems to me that therapy is the modern excuse to not have healthy relationships. The therapist takes the place of good friends and family in the absence thereof. Our connections severed by space, time and a certain necessary self-centerdness, requires a transplantation of individuals into given extant slots. Need A somehow can be met by persons B, C, D etc. The particular form of capitalism that we are engaged in dictates that you do, however, have to pay large sums of money to be allowed unrestricted access to the upper eschelons of Mazlow’s Hierarchy. Either that or you have to have good reason to make the state pay for some semblance of same.

Of course, all of this is just a long-winded way of saying that I have no one to talk to. Ever. My therapist, then, is this page. I talk to her, if you excuse my wanton anthropomorphism, because there is no one else. Sometimes I wonder if this is a new development (the lack of others in my life) or whether I have really been alone all my life.

I think there is a lesson learned here, but maybe learned too late in life to make much of a difference. I have never really been open about the true me, never talked about my desires or fears with anyone. Perhaps this is why I can’t maintain relationships: there is no intimacy from my side of the fence. In fact, having said that, I clearly deserve a kick in the teeth. How many women in my past were trying to be open with me, trying to forge some sort of deeper bond, while I simply pushed them away. No reciprocation forthcoming from me meant all of those relationships were doomed to fail. Epiphanies are a bitch. I’d like to apologize to all of those women right now, if any ever read this.

Just deserts are served though, since I am now beyond salvation. The age of 30 looms on the horizon and there hasn’t been a woman looking my way in years. I have no prospects for a future. Know that you were all right when you admonished me; I was too stupid to realize it until now. I’m probably still too stupid to do anything about it.

In a better world some publisher somewhere would read this blog and ween a seed of talent, heretofore unexploited, and offer me a job. Whence that seed would be cultivated and in time germinate into a career, if I may continue the metaphor. This isn’t a better world though. It’s still the same world that I woke up in. It’s the world in which all of the above, and all previous and future posts are, in fact, true. It’s the world where that seed doesn’t ever land on fertile soil… fuck this cliché. I’ve done it all to myself, and I’m sure I deserve every ounce.

More later, work now.

-vec

Something about my writing has been bothering me for quite a while now. The sporadic nature of the beast could be at issue, but it has more to do with content and expression than anything else. I ween that the best writers in history, those who win awards or whose works are considered classics, are those that can in some way distill expeience and emotion in ways that impart clearly to the reader the same. I would like to think that at some point in the past I had achieved such, but wishful thinking isn’t my strong point. I will say that, biographically speaking, it were easier to grasp the emotive process when youth was strong in the vein; easier than it has been in the last, lets say, 10 years. I lost some undefinable thing at some undefinable point that put my writing to the sword, as it were, and it hasn’t recovered since.

This isn’t to say that I am waxing nostalgic about innocence lost or squandered youth. I’m not so wrapped in cliché that I would deign channel the spirit of Holden Coffield. I think it were probably for the best that I quit actually feeling anything for the last decade or so. If I would have continued writing seriously, all pages would have been awash in various liquors and the occasional illicit substance. There would have been one-night-stands and other “conquerings” boasted about. I can say with all honesty that I am not proud of my past, though I certainly don’t hide from it. What’s done is done. For better or worse I didn’t turn out to be the next Dylan Thomas. I could have been more productive (that is, produced a metric ton of shite), but then again I could have also not learned anything by being locked inside the page.

Recently I’ve become a very emotional individual. It’s not that I have a good cry while in line at Jimmy John’s, but rather that feeling itself has crept into my life both suddenly and unexpectedly. I’ve been known of late to grow misty-eyed at certain moments (undisclosed) and even make some sort of childish attempt to deal with the fact that I do, in fact, know what love is (even if it is unrequited). But perhaps the most devestating of these emotions has been guilt; something that I have never previously dealt on a serious basis.

I can say with a degree of certitude that my emotional life has been essentially dominated by rage and rage only. Various entities, including myself, have at times been the target thereof, but it were rage nonetheless that has defined my personality. I’m not the dry “light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel” sort who would write about quashing their rage in favor of Jesus (Oh LAWD!), because the rage is most certainly not gone and I’m still an atheist. Rather, it has been supplemented, or annexed by a new emotional start-up company called Guilt (ltd.).

I now understand age itself as a function of guilt. Certain recent experiences have nearly crushed me with the weight of guilt. This is not some sophomoric metaphor (crushed) but rather experience in and of itself. Certain songs produce such a wave of self-loathing that I must leave the room when they are playing. Some days the guilt hurts me so bad that I can’t even function; the most menial of activities become trials in and of themselves because my mind is oppressed my this emotion. I would guess that this is how Christians feel all the time (certainly Catholics), and for them I now have a certain empathy. I even considered going to confession just to talk to a priest about guilt. Who would know more about it than a Catholic priest? I’m not joking.

What brought all this on is either the fact that I’m closing in on the age of thirty or it is simply beyond my ken altogether. I would like to think that I am the cold, calculating, brilliant mind that I sometimes evince, but really what I am is lonely. And perhaps it is the loneliness that has caused all of this emotive mess. The slightest transgression against those you know, when lonely, seems a mountain.

Then again, it may be that I find myself engaging in the same activities that I was engaging in ten years ago, albeit to a lesser extent, and that in and of itself produces the aforementioned guilt. I have learned some things, apparently, but not enough. I am still me, the me that rages at himself and others, and I give myself (nor am given) any reason to change.

That will segue into another bit about why I am where I am. For now, I’m out.

-vec

Nearly nine months have passed since my last, somewhat inebriated, post on this blog. I am consistantly amazed that this page still exists, though perhaps I shouldn’t be considering the nature of the intrawebnets. The continuing existence of things in non-space are, it seems, analagous to reality. That is, things continue with or without my intervention. This blog is more like a house plant: it could continue without me, but it ceases to grow without a certain degree of assistance (that is, writing).

It is a testament to the powers of the human mind that, having re-read my last blog entry from so long ago, that I could think to myself: “Who was it that I was talking about in that intoxicated ramble?” I had, consciously or not, chosen to forget; am now forced to remember, notwithstanding a certain degree of pain. There are things that I want to write about further, but now is not the time. In the coming days, expect much from me. I will endeavour to keep you entertained with my various degrees of low-grade insanity.

Know this: The Heroes season premier is tonight, which is all that really matters at this point in time.

Hi.

I hate religion.

Having said that,l I’m now about to write a tract about religion that is as non-biased as an anti-religious text can be.

Here’s what I think: I think that humans cannot, in this day and age, be subject to anything that is as ephemeral as God. God does not factor into any equation. God is not part of any physics experiment. God is not found in a leaf or a twig. God is a creation of humans… a creation that is nothing more than a placebo to the most vexing of questions: “What happens after I die?”

I’m writing this drunk, so forgive the mispellings and other errors of a gramatical nature.

Know this: I am in love with a woman that (apparently) has no ability to love in kind. You can call it unrequited if you wish, but I don’t think that “unrequited” sums up the issue. There are issues at stake that I don’t understand… I’m not privy to these issuse because she is silent regarding them.

There is no God in the possibility of human understanding that would invent such a situation. Know that this woman is not uncapable of love, but rather that her love is very non-directional… or perhaps non-existant. She can say many things about herself and her feelings, but all the talk does not even broach the surface of her complex inabilaty to offer love in a reciprocal manner.

It is not just me that she can’t love. If that were the case, I would even be happy for her. That is, should she love another, I would be ecstatic; at least love would have entered her life. But, no, I’m relatively certain that she is a virgin and will never no the love that can be created in a physical manner. Again, there is no God that could create such a being… unless she be a nun, which the girl in question is most certainly not.

There are various women that might read this post and glorify themselves as the woman of which I speak. All of you are wrong and should curb your arrogance now. None of the readers of this post know of whom I speak.

I told this particular woman, tonight, that she is one of the only women that I could possibly love, and she gave me the same treatment that she would give any other drunken idiot. She’s known me for a decade or more and cannot acknowledege me as different from some random guy she met on the street.

I gotta go for now.