Your hand in mine...

I'm afraid; terrified. And, for once, it's not because of what may happen, but it is the fear of what may never develop.

All of my life, I've watched everyone do the same things. Reaffirming their ego, reaffirming their projection of who they think they are and should be, reaffirming the image that they want to place inside of other people's perspectives of them. We are animals in that sense: no matter how complex and nuanced anything is, it is almost always broken down into a territorial battle between selves. Everything is done so that they can think of themselves in a certain light. I've always thought that Man was selfish for this reason alone.

I've seen relationships fall away for no good reason, or for horrible ones. I've been at the center of those terrifying things, and I still and probably always will regret each loss. I will always think in that light and I will always want to be more than I ever will. The controls that we are all slaves to, to at least some small degree... the way that life controls us is the only real venom to be afraid of. People convince themselves that their fantasies are true, that they are as important as they think they are, that the world has them as a centered pivot. I am always left alone because of these things.

And now, I may have the chance to become something more. I am in love, to the deepest and highest meaning of that emotion. I think that I have found my soul mate, and I think that I have found the light that could easily cover me for the rest of my life. I may have the chance to be happier, and to make someone else happier.

I am viscerally afraid. I am worried and choked up and lost and hopeful and dying and in awe, all at the same time. But, mostly, I'm in awe. Well... mostly, I'm worried.

The largest parts of my life have always been like this. I am pushed back against a cliff, with nowhere to go, and I jump. I jump right into these arms that await, opened and ecstatic and loving and wanting. They want me to jump right into them.

That is what I am getting ready to do: to jump and scream and plummet and envelop and tear apart everything I think is concrete in my life. It always scares me.

And, at the same time, it is a new, tender experience. I am in the first throes of something grand, something grander than I would ever think was plausible. I may burn myself down, I may compact my own organs until I am crushed alive. I could see the most valuable parts of myself flounder. Maybe I will come out of it all being seen as a child with unrealistic dreams. Maybe I will come out of it a loser, a victim or collateral damage personified.

My entire life, my entire life I have been waiting for something like this. There has never been a companion in intensity or beauty to my heart. I have always been so close, and I have been impaled painfully every time. I've lost everything a thousand times over, every day for the last twenty-five years. I was empty before I knew what being empty meant. I comprehended nihilism before I realized that it had become the core of my being.

In the last few weeks, the bloom inside my soul has terrified me. The way that I feel when I hear your voice terrifies me. The warmth from thinking about you is too much to bear a lot of the time. These are the things I take too seriously, the romantic beast that has raged since the first day I ever heard another person call out to me. And, now, I have found someone that I believe is the embodiment of life's grace. I fall far too short to live up to deserving such a thing, and I know this all too well.

Regardless, I want you. I need you.

Regardless, I will jump.

I pray that I have found that something to jump into.

I am a wreck, a shattered being, a stranded sailor. You are my guiding light, my beloved, my whole.

All I can think about is how I'll fuck this up. And, all I can think about is how wonderful this will be. There is so much darkness inside of me. I think of you, and there is so much brilliance ignited. I will do anything to make this work, I believe. And that terrifies me, too.

But I will try. I will try. I will try. I will try. I will give this everything that I have. I will try.

I can't wait until I see you.

I can't sleep, I can't think, I can't breathe, I can't stay calm, I can't do anything but play and replay the feeling that my heart gives me when I think about what it will be like to see you.

Lead.Me.To.Heaven
The.Stench.Makes.Me.Sick.Of.Conception
The.Factory.Is.Underneath.Our.Skin
Working.In.Coniptions

Chained.To.A.Movement
The Paradox.Of.Being.Complacent
A.Lullaby.And.A.Reveille
A.Formative.Exception

Hold.Me.By.My.First.Breath
Impale.Us.On.The.Crescent

How many times do I have to live through the same death?

How many times do I have to fall off a high precipice?

How many times do I have to let my hopes fall?

How many times do I have to watch self-destruction?

How many times until I've had enough?

Moj Kochanie

In darkness I am far unwoven,

thrust against and into grain;

fostered unrelentingly.

To listen, to choose:

I've none but destiny;

the pull of blood

from in my bones,

it calls to me.

Sugary sweet, but tepid ahead

are the visions that I create.

And soft, unspoken emptiness

is ice; restraint.

But forward holds a different place

from anything I've seen:

Hollows filled with browning leaves,

ageless whisperings,

dug firmly into place;

crushed solely from these things.

Mirage or freedom: both are here,

both are underneath;

both inundating, still;

both are willow trees.

In spite, I palpitate your name,

I writhe and fall and seethe.

In spite, I throw it forward still,

to hope for everything.

And I laugh at the absurdity,

at every luscious following;

the painted, prismatic breeze:

the way you call to me.

Sit on my throne...

Things become irreversible.  That is what life is.

There is no closure, no empathy and no reversal.  There is only forward.

And when those things fall into place to be a palsy on our memories and a sting in our being, we learn then what it means to be irreversible.

I've seen the downward slant, and what it would ever take to re-right that decline.  There is no amount that exists, and there is nothing that can ever be saved.  To be Human is to constantly lose, to atrophy and to degenerate, until you are nothing, filled with the emptiness of what used to be there.  That is how I view life.

Mistakes are not given life to be learned from.  The real mistakes are what give us tremors at night, leave a bitterness on our tongues; we fight the slope of loss.  And we never regain anything.

The visionary lies to himself.

And so, we live.  Wrapped in lies, in fantasy and in emptiness; passing every closing watergate with a want to return, to be whole in the past.  But, there is no completeness, because even then, we wanted something more.

And so, we live:  The kings of emptiness, the rulers of futility and child-like terror.

Death is not arbitrary.

The epitome, the definition and the shadow of this country lies in something so banal that it is both shallow and core-deep.  Something sickening, yet laughable; a line that was once drawn has become its own outline.

The news wants to know, "What grade do you give Obama in his first 100 days?"

We have killed millions of innocent people in our history.  We have killed 600,000 of our own population in a war against ourselves.  We treated a portion of our own people as though they were property, and have still not fully abdicated ourselves of that crime, hundreds of years later.  We have done so many other horrible things that may or may not be justified, and I say 'We', because it is the legacy we have inherited, and it is the responsibility placed on each subsequent generation. 

The stark violence of reality and of history is lost on the rose-colored lenses that Americans have been raised to adopt.  The corpulence that shows in our bloodlust, the detatchment with which we allow a relative few to hold the banners of our many... these contradicting elements have become the only kinds synergistic qualities that we recognize.

And so, we use only the most pedantic floodgate controls to gauge ourselves.  Is it because we cannot bear to confront that reality, and are afraid to accept the truth?

Or is it that we have become our own pedantic escapism?  How can we say that we are anything but our own slaves, bound to disunion and misanthropy?

To be an American is to be forever disappointed in the Human species.  To be Human is to recognize the fatal flaw in contemporary American thought.  The instant you let go of ignorance and shelter, you see just how scorched every landscape is, and how empty the fields inbetween are.

And in that shallowness, I see the arbtrary lines that an entire population uses to help themselves forget.  What would you grade such a country at?

Death personified,

I am the gaping closure;

the contradiction of life.

Our skin worn thin

Our bones exposed

Life reduced to ticks

From forest caves

and azure skies,

we crashed upon this earth...

The years, they passed,

and so did we;

but resistance would be brought...

Always object;

never subject

Can you see us?  Are we there?

Are we there?

Can you see me?  We are watching

We are watching

You are fading

in the daylight,

fading

Always upon you, light never ceases

Lost from yourself, light never ceases

Thousands of eyes, gaze never ceases

Light is upon you, life in you ceases

Through fiction, we saw the birth

of futures yet to come

Yet, in fiction lay the bones,

ugly in their nakedness

Yet, under this mortal sun,

we cannot hide ourselves

Those eyes and tower have seeped into our open veins

Uncoiled was its strength

and our souls en masse

poured down in sheets of rain,

and dissolved 'neath their feet

Spiraling further down,

our wills dissolve 'neath their feet!

Rise in the morning air;

greeted by cinders of the dead

Syndic calls your name;

show your thinned face at the window

Is this the next last day?

Prepare to be carried by the crows!

Heavy hand upon the land;

feel its weight inside you...

Magistrates dream of plague;

tongues loll in anticipation

You are awake in their darker visions

Drool slips from grinning mouths

The plague is forced on us all

Is it there?

Are they there?

Shouts of fact abound,

but whispers of truth burn through...

Is it there?

Are they there?

Is it there?

Are they there?

A cold, perennial flow; the vortex of my soul.

I am the embodiment of poison.  I am the concept itself.

The separation that is so deep between the rigid and the amorphous always seems to be slowly draining me.  I have the gestalts, the epiphanies; they never end up helping.

There is purity in what I believe and do, but that never translates because, regardless of that motivation, I still have a caged beast's chemicals.  I still run on the same contradictions as the rest of Man.  

It's time to go into the 'me' below; my morbid self beneath.

The Rescue

When it comes to pure logic, there seems to be the tendency to separate from the organic aspects of life, as if the logic itself rips apart natural, rhythmic development.  Binary trumps cell division; life is replaced by cause and effect, and thus, inner condescension and abhorrance.

People always want to feel as though they've got everything figured out.  And, since we thrive on the intentional stance, we always think we do have it all figured out, at least to a certain degree, even if our lack of knowledge is itself our reason.  Fear lets people hide from any real truth, while reassuring them through ignorance.  Understanding comes in waves of discontent and misanthropy.  And, at the end, everyone seems to go back to whatever comforts them, disregarding anything contrary or not a corollary.  The organism only seeks to strengthen itself and its intentions.

When logic is embraced, it is with the same ignorance.  People feel as though they can disregard the organic and shout down at it through a prism of objectivity and detatchment, as if the two are inseparable.  Objectivity itself is somehow grouped with apathy or disdain in the Human mind, as if looking beyond Nature leaves the physical personality of the world behind.  This is our failing.

When people as a whole can learn to see with both the objective and the stoic eyes, putting aside all of the reasons they hate themselves for seeing the truth, and seeing beyond everything that is wrong inside of them, then the world will really move forward.  Until then, everything else is tertiary.  To me, it's all pointless with psychological steps forward, and as tangible as that will always be displayed, it will never be real until it is accepted in the individual's own mind.  Our entire civilization is pointless until both logical and organic thinking are accepted as one.

Stars now beneath our feet; we've known the terror and still not stopped...

The thoughts that are built like brick and mortar are the ones that never move.  They don't crumble or age; if they do, it's only to become more intense and ingrained.  As far removed as I am from that kind of life, from life itself, these structures always stand tall.  Most of the time, though, they are obscured and forgotten about.  But they're always there.

There is always the tendency to forget and move forward, to use the forward brain and not the linear one.  The brain that always thinks abstract about the future in a nebulous way.  It's easier to do that than to draw a line.  But from those thoughts come the comparison to the reality of life, and how inadequate it seems most of the time.  Life itself seems inadequate.

And at the same time, to say it's understated is itself an understatement.  Life is the nebula that embodies what is abstract, even if it doesn't show in the concrete dealings of society and the Great Interpersonality.  It feels like I'm trying to use more colors than my eye can perceive, or broadcasting at a frequency that I can't even hear.  But, nonetheless, I hear it.

Orchestrate...

I'm almost finished with my fifth album, and listening from my first up until my most recent project definitely shows that I've gotten a lot better at both playing and mixing. But, regardless of that, they are very contiguous, because they are all parts of the same organism (to me, at least).

The dichotomy in music has always been just that: a stark divergence. There is honest music, and there is self-serving music. Regardless of genre or instruments or style or tempo or anything else, these are the only real categories to me.

There aren't many people who have not told me where and how I should improve, or simply that I'm in the process of getting better. But that doesn't register with me. I don't make music to get better or to find an end point. That is what makes music worthless.

Even my most amateur stuff reveals to me a part of my personality in a visceral way. I don't know if other people can see this, or if it's just my own delusional self-confidence in the matter, but I think it's really there. It is all created only to further my exploration of my own mind and soul.

I always have to dance at the line between servitude and transcendence.

Thank God I'm out of Touch

When you imagine the future, and that point in that future when our lives are kept entirely digital -- no photo albums, no CDs, no journals, no books, no planners, nothing of our personal lives at all in any physical form. All of that will become information, and in doing so it will be a new level of self-representation. I think that transition is conceptually a huge evolutionary jump; a huge abstract leap.

I would assume that most relatively intelligent people who are alive now can imagine that kind of future. We're at a time wheni t always seems like someting big like that is about to happen, and we are at the membrane itself. But, when I think about how it could come about realistically, I'm convinced that it will take an amazingly future-minded company, the kind of company that is mildly benevolent when part of the story of some of the movies I've seen that weren't good enough to remember the name of. They make all of the things possible that seem so mundane when shown in that way. It will be what cell phones are now, and what a 16-bit console seemed like to me as a kid.

But the more I think about it, I think about how I blog on Blogger, use Gmail for email, use Google Video all the time, was looking earlier about putting my programming projects up on Code.Google.Com (and if it was even possible to make an account), and the many, many other different things I was looking at. If there is any company that can really be that company, the linchpin to a new technological era for society... a neo-AOL, but with an exponentially greater impact on life, it is Google. And it would be great if it were.

They are the only people who seem like they can pull off being a mildly benevolent stilt for modern life. They're the only company that I can realistically see always staying on that track, never becoming a monolithic evil force, or being phased out by time, or ending in a flurry of illegal acts. And the best part of it all is, they do all of the things that they do very well. They actually know what they're doing. There are so many other companies trying to do the same kinds of things (maybe not the multitude that Google does, but even at specific things, like blogs), but there is a ridiculously small number of companies for a given app that it's something I'd be really proud of.

So maybe the emotional revolution really is coming in my lifetime...

The Earth Is Not a Cold, Dead Place

I am here, in this reality, even if it is just my own. It is mine. I have nothing else; we all have nothing, save our own sense of reality.

I have that coiling urge to strike against my own untruth and my feeling of displacement, because the emptiness makes me feel as though I've lost my own sense of time. There are always those breaking points, and I never waste them.

Every facet of the world is both unimportant and paramount, but outside of me at the same time. And even though it usually feels monolithic in that towering, overcast way, my own life is on another level entirely.

The hardest thing for anyone who deals with any kind of addiction is trying to find a certain kind of neurosis. The feeling of laser precision that comes with the more introspective and introverted drugs is a very powerful motivator, in terms of self-discovery. But outside of alteration, my reality usually slams into a wall before it can be honed in any way at all. It makes me feel useless because of that. It makes me feel like I am impotent in any real capacity.

But the wealth underneath that is larger than anything else I've ever seen in life, and the longer I'm alive, the more profound I realize it is. I never felt all that grateful for being alive, but I do now. And even though I feel the same inadequacies most of the time, I feel like I've charged myself with my most important purposes and suffered my most significant trials without hesitation or blindness. I am never blind when it comes to myself, even though I am usually delusional.

I love myself. That is a strong phrase; stronger than most would understand. To say so casually that you owe it to yourself to find yourself is such an understatement to being alive. The sheer weight of impact in art is the only thing that has ever made me feel alive, and it is a practice of solitude. Pure solitude. No feigning, no compromise, no dissonance, no capitulation, no falsity. No deception whatsoever.

As much as I ever hope that I will find meaning and love around me or in another person doesn't matter at all anymore. I value it the same, and need it th e same, but I need myself more.

Of all the things that I write down to remind myself of how important my mind is, this is the greatest statement of self-trust. There are such dark recesses within me that will never see the light of recognition, because of their depth alone. People can't handle those kinds of truths, and will always be offended by their visceral nature. That is one thing that has always saddened me.

But it's all so beautiful; life itself is the ugly beauty of being Human. I can never compromise that, and to do so is to cease being alive and Human.

The greatest thing I have ever learned is how to embarrass myself through complete honesty. It is so hard to do, which is ironic and pathetic. To simply be honest is ridiculously hard. I never understood that.

And the day I quit is the day I die. These feelings are where God truly lives; I cannot handle letting myself down by neglecting them.

I wish others would feel that same inclination, even if only to reassure me that it is as important as I think it is....

We Are the Coup

To overcome oneself is what the good philosophers understand as the greatest trial. Life is not made for understanding, but for growing through.

Death is not an end, but it is certainly not what everyone makes it out to be. People gather to console themselves, not the deceased. There is no story for them, and that is why there is no end. The living's memories are the only anchor for them at that point. And yet, I am told to put my faith in the church; to vacillate to a different rhythm than my own. Any discordance is viewed as negative, as tertiary and as misguided. But my own sense is more profound than crutches or displacement and dissonance.

I have seen death, and I have seen the dead. I have mourned for both the dead and death itself in the same way: through recognition. Anything else is deception and self-loathing. And that is why I was never really a Catholic.

What we do here is all the more important when you realize that there is no end to the story, because the story itself ceases. There is no transcendence, because movement is finished at that point. It is an abrupt end to a steady line. There is no point at its apex.

And as empty as that sounds philosophically, it brings me much more wealth than the fantasy of seeing those people ever again. They are gone. Period.

And that is the rest that they rightfully deserve. They are in a better place, because they are not here anymore, not because they have gone to travel the stars or another realm.

Remit the signal...

Even through such a long recurring cycle, everything seemed completely new. There was a sense of discovery and novelty in everything, to a degree. And there still is, and I'm sure there always will be, because that is the dynamic nature of an examined life. But, those potholes that take me back only disappoint me and make me wish I had broken free completely.

I'm not the kind of person that holds unrequited emotions. I'm not the kind of person that leaves embers smoldering for years because of my own inadequacies. But, I still carry appreciations and positivity with me, even years after. What used to fill me with regret is now more of a nostalgic lesson, and a reason to look backward at all.

But the more you try to preserve those things, the more they are revealed to be what they always were: evanescent temporalities based on a false seed. They originate from the Self, and end at that same location, like a loop through the air. Whatever it touches is only reflected in itself and not throughout, but dwelt upon. They are the poisons of purity in the world of Man.

There are times that you have to cut those things loose, not out of spite or emptiness, but out of pity and anguish.

The lowest common denominator is what we're all after. When yours is miles above the next person's, your lowest is never low enough to maintain itself. Your lows are never met with any grounding.

The height, conversely, is always grounded and drives everything forward -- but not without the staggering reminder that it will always be free-form in some way; always erratic at its core. And that is what disillusions me to people, to other people, to others that I have known. It isn't that things move on, or that things develop away, or even that things are shown false. It's that realization that things never were in any real sense, because I have been led by the short-term memory of God straight into a wall that was always there to begin with. It makes the effort seem meaningless, and it makes the meaning of that all the more negative.

Deep within the circuity, there has to be some alternate route. There has to be something to justify all of this, somewhere...

And in that path lies much more emptiness, to be sure.

I can never find that root of understanding in another person, because there is no one deep enough to even recognize its existence. All of my points fall to be shallow puddles in muddied water, filled with adrenaline and the epitome of dopamine. That is all everything ends up amounting to. Dopamine. Fucking dopamine.

I Am a God-Fearing Atheist

The idea of atheism conceptually disposing with any idea of God or a higher power is a misconception. Although the term has been hijacked by both religious people and non-religious, both sides miss the point, I think.

Asexuality, for example, means essentially, "without sexuality". Atypical means something like, "not typical". The prefix simply negates the rest. Atheism means, "without theism."

I make this distinction because the difference between theism and atheism is not the difference between God's existence and non-existence. Theism is an idea that supposes a Creator that deliberately intervenes with Human existence. Deism, on the other hand (the belief that is understood to be held by our founding fathers), is different than theism because deism is a more agnostic approach to the idea of God.

It is still essentially monotheistic, but not in the sense that it is "theistic". Deism is the idea that there is some grand design or God, but it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with Human actions. A "Grand Observer", for example.

To be an atheist, to me, means that you are against the idea that God has given us a specific route to follow. It means you are against any person who believes God has directly spoken to them, or sent them literature, or given irreversible rules that must dominate our actions. So then, atheism is really the rejection of man-made religion and practice.

I am definitely an atheist in this sense. However, I am somewhat of a deist, because to believe that saying there is no God is kind of like saying there is no sense of physics. Whether it is called God or Nature or The Great Flying Spaghetti Monster. Simply because "He" can not realistically be an anthropomorphic representation of ourselves, it does not mean that there is nothing at all.

Agnosticism, however, is more of a buzz-term for being too open-minded. People tend to use agnosticism to say, "I'm smarter than you because I will believe anything, and therefore nothing completely." That kind of thought just shows how flawed our sense of Self has evolved.

So, if there is a concept of God, then what will that be, in terms of manifestation? To us, at least, and to what we have observed in our history, God has only taken one real shape: Rationality. Understanding. Reality.

As we learn, we find irrevocable truths about reality. The way that chemicals interact, the ideas of Human rights that become more universal as we become a global culture, the denunciation of all things inherently negative and self-centered, and our responsibilities to uphold what we deem to be true in the purer sense. Some day, far into the future I'm sure, there will be a single, singular truth; there will be one rationality and reality.

It will be something that is universal enough to encompass all of our modes of thought, yet dynamic enough to adapt to every situation in a contextual sense. It will be the representation of our complete understanding of our own behavior and psychology. This, in the end, will be the only form that God will ever realistically take in our world.

So, I am God-fearing, only because I fear going against what I know is morally right. Dogma is too easy to see through if you take the time to do so, and as a person builds his or her intelligence, such dichotomies are painfully obvious. There is the true and untrue; the right and wrong. While this is almost always hard to apply, it is still there. There is always one wrong and one right, even if we don't understand the application thereof, or how it directly applies or can contribute to a solution. There is only one God, and one Satan. I fear doing anything to empower that concept of the Devil, because I do not want our society as a whole to descend into moral depravity. Not in the Christian sense, though, but in the absolute sense of it all. Slavery will always be wrong, whether we recognize it or not. Whether we do so is whether we admit our obligation to God, our obligation to existence itself. We are obliged to do what is right, because we are here.

This kind of concept is what I believe the post-modern movement was supposed to uncover. However, it has only seemed to be interpreted as a way of justifying moral relativism and self-interest as dogma. But, no matter how many people may ever think that owning another person is right, or abusing for the sake of abuse is right, or raping Nature itself is right... it will always be wrong. It is Humanity's choice to follow The Light, or self-destruct in Darkness.

They aren't all beautiful...

I used to have a lot more faith in Mankind, because I knew deep inside me that I was a part of it, and therefore what I held to be valuable could be reflected somewhere else, or even in a multitude of points. But, I'm 25, and I've never found any real evidence that this is true.

To say that I don't feel the Human race deserves to have people like me alive at this moment in time sounds pretentious, or vitriolic, or bitter... but it's how I feel. It isn't that I'm so lofty and high-horsed that I look down on everything, or that I am forlorn to the point of rejection. But when I look at all of the different ways the world is slowly descending into anyone's conceptualization of Hell, I start to believe this more and more.

I don't really think the world deserved someone like Nietzsche. I'm not sure he really ended up doing any good. I don't think the world deserved Aristotle, because all we've done up to now is rape his ideas for our own benefit. I don't think the world ever truly deserved music in the grander sense.

Because, right now is where we are at. We may have done great things in the past, and we may still do great things, but as of right now, we don't deserve any of our virtues. The only thing we do deserve is a steadfast surrender to death, or to self-destruction of some kind.

And, to pull this feeling around is going to take so much effort, so much optimism, so much innovation that I honestly don't believe that Humanity has that kind of capacity. It's as if we've reached the penultimate point of evolution, but we can never cross over that gorge because we weren't meant to. We are all caught in a protracted cycle of Roman collapse in the historical sense. We are all meant to relive tragedy, but without the familiar catharsis at the end.

All I can do to keep my sense of self is to disconnect and do what makes me happy. All I can do to make myself happy is to forsake the rest of Humanity, and delve within. Isn't that the antithesis, though, of what I desire in life? I would like to be a part, however small, of that great upending; the distortion and final collapse of selfishness.

It would be such a grand movement, and it would be the changing root that gave birth to incomprehensible greatness. But what it requires to take hold is something that I don't believe the Human brain is capable of. Because, for every Nietzsche, there is an Elizabeth, waiting to take every feeling of love he had for her and twist it, posthumously raping his ideals. For every Aristotle, there is a Plato; a more dialectic, but more degenerate form of purity, waiting to drag something into the depths of the Deimos. For every great musician willing to plumb every depth and cleanse Mankind of its ill-gotten philosophies, there are a hundred faux performers, jesters and emotional thieves and playwrights.

For every ounce of truth that we have constructed over millennia, there are tons and tons of selfishness, of emotional egocentricity, of pure sin. And this isn't the kind of sin that we'd like to attribute to monotheism. This is the real kind; the waiting, brooding snake that is a truth underneath our vaguer thoughts.

We'd rather clutch the wheel and watch those around us plunge into fire, not realizing the entire time that we are also headed there, because we'd rather have the spectacle. We'd rather give up, because the end cannot be pure in a selfish sense; once tainted, everything is scrap and trash. There is nothing worth saving in the existential sense, because we are all born into the falsely Human-defined concept of "sin".

It shows in our political structures and movements, our social hierarchies, our prejudices that last even through a barrage of rationality. It shows in everything we do. We are selfish first and foremost. There is no real purity, because that is our current root. Postmodernism is an ashamed idea that was never conceived to give us this result. We are the children of relativism that is absolute only in the fact that it is absolutely self-centered and greedy.

Like clockwork, I always go back to what someone told me a long time ago... that I was too smart for my own good.

We were the ones that marched and fell...

I'm not a vindictive person, in the sense that I do not enjoy being so. I don't take pleasure in the kind of dominance that the primal brain craves and strives for. But I feel as though I always come off in a contrary tone.

I spend so much time and effort honing my thoughts. I come to very complex realizations, but not in a conceited way. I don't think I'm better for having the views that I do. But I respect the rationality of it all.

It's hard to keep real views like mine, because everything in society is built on linking views to personality. The way you feel about something is the way you feel about yourself. And, while true in a basic sense, it should not mean that you are defined by those connections alone.

There are phrases and concepts that I always seem to remember in a detailed way, hard-written somewhere in my brain. One of these is the idea that Western (specifically American) culture is so centered around the association between wrong/right and true/untrue that it equates being wrong about something (even something completely factually-based) with being inadequate or stupid. If you're wrong, then your soul is wrong somehow; you are defective and have defected.

And I see where it can be justified. But the problem is that it leads people to assume that they should always be right, because it means more as self-confidence than anything else. So, nobody learns new things that challenge their world-view, because that is threatening information that promises to impose on their sense of security.

It's the reason that America is only now seeming to wise up to the idea that climate change is real, the reason that religion is such a deadly force in the realm of public philosophy, the reason that I can never seem to explain anything to anyone without their own personal opinion coming into play.

It's so stupid, because it allows people to be so glaringly ignorant, yet never be viewed as ignorant. It lets people choose to be stupid, to be shielded from reality and not feel like they are living in a fantasy world. It allows society to slowly crumble without progress, while fading dreams of irrational, childhood selfishness is the life preserver.

So, I stopped trying to plainly explain anything years ago. I usually say what I think will give the impact I'm looking for, and it's usually only half-true; I usually try to go in for the kill-shot before my voice falls on retracted ears. I believe that everything should be challenged, and if it cannot be defended, then it should fall. The reason for this is that everything in life that is even remotely beneficial or remotely valuable in any sense is able to be spoken for, at least on a primal level. There is always a grain of truth, even in a large concept that is flawed and untrue.

So I come off as condescending, as an ass, and that's fine with me. I don't really care what other people think, and I don't mean that in any way other than the literal. I really am apathetic towards what other people think of me. I don't have time for that. I measure my own worth, as everyone should.

This comes around to sound like a contradiction, though: As if I want to judge everyone else, but don't want to be judged by anyone. I don't know how to explain that idea away, because it is completely false. I abhor that kind of logic... but that's what it sounds like I'm doing.

Most people don't know how to challenge ideas; they only know how to challenge people's personalities and emotions. They only know how to berate and belittle. I can do that too, but I can do it to concepts and abstractions. I don't need to feel better than other people, because I don't really think I'm all that great. I just have a wealth of knowledge and intelligence that I wish I could use in some constructive way. The only thing I've found, though, is that blaring destructive argumentation. All I can do is kick out the foundation, and still, it is for a good reason. It's out of the kindness of my heart, as weird as that sounds.

But, at the same time, the more time I spend around people, the more I see them as not really deserving of real change. I see all of the debased behavior and all of the egotistical self-gratification in everything people say and every pose they make. All I see when anyone acts is them patting themselves on the backs in a myriad of ways; I see them reassuring themselves that they're more important than anyone else. I see them scoff at different beliefs and ideas, not because the ideas are stupid or pointless, but because they believe the people are stupid and pointless. Their sycophantic meanness comes out in that, and it is something that should immediately turn someone into the most unattractive person imaginable. But... it doesn't, of course.

Those are the kinds of people that make it the furthest. Those are the kinds of people with many friends, with many loves and opportunities. Those are the ones that make families. How sad is that? How much sadder is it that I don't think anyone understands what that really means?

To be true to myself, I have to be that sledgehammer. Even though I almost always choose to be silent or apathetic over being a prick, I still have those moments. And when someone does it to me, I do not shell up and defend my childhood self. I still look at the message more than the messenger... and I feel like I'm the only person who knows how to do that.

Whatever happened to real thought? What happened to the connection one was supposed and expected to make between their own personal morality and their actions? Why do I feel as though Humanity has become an empty game, where people can just find whatever they want to justify selfishness and waste, greed and domination, slavery and enslavement? It wasn't always like that.

The death of God is part of that equation. Nietzsche meant that people no longer fear that literal specter. Societies no longer move in unison with transcendental beliefs in the way that they once did. I'm sure that one day in the distant future, the Pope will announce that abortion really is alright, and the Church will keep a few more stragglers. They already did it with the idea of unbaptized babies sitting in Purgatory for all eternity...

Is that really what the height of the Human mind results in? Will we always just be a society of territorial children who can split atoms and alter the structure of nature itself? What a contradiction it all is....

I still like to tell myself that if I can exist with my state of mind, if I can see that deeply into thought and what it means to be a part of Man, then there has to be other people who think the same way. There has to be a reasonably good-looking chick who thinks like I do.

With my luck, she's probably overweight, homely and too introverted to realize anything substantial. It's nights like these that I relish all the opportunities I passed up to get laid from an empty relationship or a one-night stand. Even though sometimes I would regret it, in the long run, I'm so much happier knowing that I didn't sacrifice a part of myself for the same thing that everyone seems to be alive for (and only for).

Ever since I started writing again, I started thinking like a writer again. And once that started to happen, I realized just how base my surroundings have become. I realized just how dumb everyone around me is. I realized just how empty society has become; even moreso than I last remember, which I didn't think was possible.