Sunday, May 25, 2014

"What is that, Nietzsche? Shut the fuck up."

I’ve been thinking about a quote from Plato a lot recently.  Well, Plato by way of Socrates, but we’ll just say Plato of the sake of being succinct. 
Perhaps quoting Plato can be seen as pretentious. Perhaps, given my level of education, you think I have no business quoting Plato. 

But it’s my blog and you don’t have to read the damned thing. 

Plato supposed that “An unexamined life is not worth living” and I believe there is a lot of merit in that. He’s shown to be an immutable force in the world of philosophy and an oft studied and idealized historical figure. So there’s our jumping off point. 

Examine your life.    

Good.

Got it.  

When do I stop? 

Is constant examination a good thing? Could too much examination be unhealthy? 
It’s a scientific law that the very act of observation changes that which is being observed. 
What if those changes are to your detriment?

Let’s say you can’t laugh at a joke without wondering if those around you are questioning whether you actually find it funny or if you’re just laughing to prove to the group that you’re intelligent enough to understand the base level of humor being displayed. Then, in an compulsory extrapolation of that train of thought, you extend that curiosity outward and second guess the laughter of the group. 

Who here is not on the level?

You can’t fully immerse yourself in a romantic relationship without wondering what psychic scar tissue you’re currently wading through and how it came to be. 
You stare at the other person and wonder what you represent to there unconscious psyche. And when they get mad, you’re curious what dormant childhood trauma you've evoked. 

Beyond that you find yourself falling into halfcocked and quasi-educated dissections of people as base animals. Walking piles of meat who have unanalyzed emotional reactions to just about everything and cling to bizarre and antiquated superstitions and desperately try to make sense of the imminent nothingness of death as we continue in those constant steps towards it.

You play host to myriad demanding thoughts that are as relentless as the passing of time and you can’t see the irony of your own inability to stop the reactionary thinking because you have allowed yourself to accept the delusional assertion that you (and only you) somehow recognize the worlds maladaptive thought process and have risen above it, and that, that is the reason you’re depressed. 

It’s not you. It’s the world. 

You heard that Plato quote remember? 

Although you didn’t read the book, the know the quote and it’s given you the intellectual upper hand. 

You got it all figured out. That’s why you’re almost 30 and still baffled by yourself and you spend your free time sitting in your boxers, drinking too much coffee, and writing in vain attempts to make sense out of a few thoughts in that overrunning river of questions that makes up your mind. 

And by putting ink to paper (so to speak) you find you can quell a few internal storms and you have the faint glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe some day you could make a living out of writing things down. And maybe that’s more delusional than that aforementioned thought of inferred clarity.  

If an unexamined life in not worth living, perhaps an over examined life is an exercise in neurosis.  



Tuesday, May 6, 2014

"Behold your Bounderby!"

It’s 10:30 on a Tuesday night and I’m sitting on the roof of my building (right next to my apartment/hut) and I keep letting lose inextricable sighs.
I have, within the confines of my recently and greatly augmented life, a fair amount of time to reflect, speculate, and hypothesize on and about my past, present and hopeful trajectory. I still feel a powerful urge towards an undefined direction that I thought moving abroad would sate. That, on top of the arrival of emotions I had previously sunk with alcohol, and the new feelings that come with living in a foreign land and by myself for the first time ever, has me feeling out of sorts. I feel the overwhelming urge to create.  But music is out of the picture and every time I sit to write, I come up with blank pages or an empty screen. What could I add to the world that would be worthwhile or of substance? What would I enjoy that I could share with others that wouldn’t be some masturbatory practice. I write this blog to share my thoughts and experiences, but I always feel it’s a bit attention starved and occasionally highlighting a false reality I want people to perceive. 
So what is there? What’s that missing puzzle piece? Is that the shared dread that haunts mankind? Is that why we cultivate egos and worship deities and hope and work and pray? Perhaps I’m trying to boil too much down to a single question that when answered, would encapsulate the world. Or at least the world pertaining to the combined thoughts of the confused, delusional, and weary. 
I have ideas about sitting and staring into nothing, in the hopes of obtaining some peace of mind through a chance glimpse of oblivion. But I never get that glimpse. I can’t even seem to conjure a steady notion of what it is that that infinite chimera might look like. If this sounds like depressive ranting, that’s not how it’s meant. I mean, I think the yoke of depression will always bear down on my shoulders in some fashion or another, I’ve always been forthright about that. But I’m not in a bad way right now. Most days are good, and I’m sleeping like people are meant to sleep and I’m meditating in increasing measure and my physical activity is back to where I like it. At insane amounts of industrious and laborious actions.  So day to day, I’m feeling like a new man. But I don’t know who the hell this new guy is, and I don’t take kindly to strangers around these parts. So I have to figure out what the hell he wants and quick. Because the quicker that happens, the quicker I can take steps in a direction I feel confident about. Everyone wants to know where it is they're going. Right?  I mean, they say it’s not the destination, it's the journey. But then they turn around and say you should never leap before you look. Well I’ll tell them that talking in platitudes is for assholes.


 I’ll just keep on searching.