A Thought About the World

I was thinking about the end of the world. Again. Not really the end, but the end of my world assuming I tough it out. Which is hilarious. To think that life is something that needs to be "toughed out". Walked off. I sometimes wonder if people who are basically set for life, whose only real decision to make is to go to work or not, or play the links in Carolina this weekend or shuffle off to Amsterdam for a bit to get away from "it all" ever feel like they're going to have to tough out the next few years. I suppose I don't really wonder. I'm sure they do. I like to think that I wonder so I can reflect more kindly on their various dispositions. Instead of wishing them all away to the heaven of hell's brambles. But I was thinking about the upcoming end of my iterations, when there is no more material to make new me's out of what is left of the old me's and no more material available to create new me-ness to replace the wholesale deletions. My thoughts turned, naturally as an American, to war.

When all of the oil runs out, and I hope it does sooner than later, mainly to generate some actual sea change and perhaps restructure the as we've accepted it into the as we've never known, but wished it to be, even if the restructuring ends up being more of a warp and upward mobile in ways I could never be societal metastization, what becomes of middle eastern interest? Do the propped up kings all topple over at once? Does religion come bursting in to fill the holes? Obviously it won't be anarchy. The world is far too connected for that to ever happen. Does america finally walk away from it all like some person stumbling home from a red light district in the morning with a massive hangover to their mattress stuffed with "just in case" money? And then I thought "who fucking cares."

I know I should. For my children's sake. But I'm never having kids. Right now my only claim to fame is that I escaped an abusive home and now have the power to break the cycle of violence and generational human corruption by not perpetuating it the only way I can guarantee the rest of the world will succeed. That's it. So I suppose that probably puts me in the category of people that "want to watch the world burn". Maybe not square in. But close. I don't think I have enough passion to make a sport of it. Which lead me to understand something. A carefree friend is enviable. A careless friend is a headache, but can be desirable in certain doses. A negligent friend is a liability. Well, I understood that before. But it reminded me. I don't know where I fit in there. Where do friends go that are constantly trying to snuff out the fires of their past? Burning their shadows away? Eating their demons.

I don't care how the world is going to end. Maybe the middle east will collapse in fifty years. I'm sure they'll find some way to make it work. They'll tough it out. Some things will change. A lot of things won't. I'll still have to take shit from people making snide remarks in the vein of "break a twenty (whistle) that's a lot of money to be carryin' around on a Tuesday" from asshole managers and foremen who make my monthly net in a couple days of work. I'll still have to deal with nurses asking me seven times if I've been shooting needles into my work scarred arms every time I get up enough money or desperation to see a physician. If it all burns down, I'll be third in line with a lawn chair, a cold beer, and a program to take in the floor show. Which is all fairly grim.

I did not mean to be that grim. Honestly. My life feels like a very long Vertigo shot. Time just keeps on racing away. The farther it stretches, the farther back I have to keep pushing things to stay alive, the more things fall out of focus and break down and it's the least I can do to hold onto the consciousness of here and now and impossible not to choke it to death with the force of the grip needed to keep it safe. I have no real stake in the outcome of the world's wars. I was unceremoniously ushered out of the war fighting arena, the academic arena, the peace keeping arena, the social and society arena, the tax paying arena. I don't know. I don't know where the fuck I'm going with this. Six hundred "no"s and one "yes". Two yeses. It's not that it gets difficult to believe things will improve. It's that it becomes foolish to believe so.

I don't want to believe that's it for me. Not in terms of writing. There's still much to be done and I know this is perhaps the stuttering beginnings of little stars and planets in the blueness of twilight before the moon rise of - what? Shut up. Shut it. Start over. There's still much to be done and I know this is perhaps the stuttering, tottering, beginnings of my flash in the pan in terms of production and development. A multi-year long stuttering to get that one paragraph out that I'll remember myself by. I don't want to believe the best I can hope for is to not get sick and have something to eat and enough to pay for cool in the summer and heat in winter and keep a roof over my fucking head and a cellphone turned on.

Which, I guess, ultimately is to say, space has been both kind and unkind. Kind to the people I care enough not to belabor, but unkind to the glass hearted intrepid nuclear radiant wayfarer. There have been complications. Unmediated things have come undone. I went about a month at one point without thinking about suicide. And then you feel it creeping up the back of your neck. The little worlds threading their way through the nerves in your right ear, across the back of your eyes to your left ear and lacing themselves together tighter and thicker until you feel like the bones of your forehead are going to collapse under the compression and your insides are going to come out like frosting squeezed out between the fingers of a kid crushing a sandwich cookie in his fist. So much time is spent in sorting. This is real. This is not. That is doable. This will kill you. This is tenable. That is not. You said this out of your mouth. You should have said this. Do not say that. This is valid. That will get you interned again. The sorting gets confusing. Frustrating. Makes me angry. And tired. Of many things. So much left to do.

The world as movie: I would have walked out years ago. Myself as movie: I already know how it ends, but I'm not walking out yet. I still haven't seen that one scene where I'm riding down a dirt road in a 240z with my korgy in the passenger seat barking at the rabbits in the brush while the sun sits on the mountains for a nap before the milky way belts across the sky like Beethoven through a concert hall. I don't know if I'll actually make it that far in or what planet that'll happen on. But I'm tryin' to tough it out. It would help if a tollbooth were to appear in my bedroom someday. I would never look back.


///Annie Lennox - "No More I Love Yous" remember this one? I still do. I was in love with Annie Lennox for a long time. All of ten years old and the lyrics to this song felt like she wrote them for me. I used to sit alone in my room and sing nirvana's half the man I used to be. It's funny, I guess. Not that the pain hasn't changed. Funny that the monsters are still outside after all this time.