What’s Left

What’s left is abused, burnt, and broken. It is a network of scars. What’s left exhibits the tempering effects of violence and neglect. It has been paying attention, listening, learning and enduring. It’s a forgotten friend who commiserates and damns. It limps and accuses. It loves and hates. What’s left breathes the same air that we do. Indifferently, it reflects our unflattering traits, but reveals their subtle, humanizing beauty. What’s left is the filter and an empty bottle.

Need Is a Value Judgment

Need is a value judgment. “What is” simply is. It harbors no lack of being, no necessity. “What is” has no need. It is. It just is. Need is a projection of nothing onto something. Need is your attitude towards something. It is a perceived lack, not an existent lack. It is a byproduct of your existence. Need is your vision of the world, and what you believe it should be.

The Philosopher

The thought-junkie slid the needle in with confidence, like it was supposed to be there. Smooth and practiced, it dove under the skin, squarely into the vein, and began leaking sophisticated, abstract information into his blood. The high was stunning and abrupt. It was vertigo and a tidal wave of hard logic. He knew so much about nothing at all. There was never enough. There was always more to know, more to vivisect. There were always holes to be knocked out, patched, and knocked out again. His mind was a dead nerve, killed by over-stimulation. As his tolerance and dosages increased, he became less a beast, and more feeble and useless. All that was magical became logical. Solid answers backpedaled, not breaking eye contact but stepping further away. The more you take, the more you need. There is no end to the hunger for fact. Almost everything made sense.

Empty, Unemployed, and Homeless

Sometimes you won’t know what to do with your hands. Life’s full of awkward moments when you’re not perfectly what you are, and your hands will be without purpose. They’ll be empty, unemployed, and homeless. In those moments you’ll look for a place to put them, and fail. It can happen in any kind of moment, though I’ve discovered that it happens most often for me in moments of joy. It might be that I’m just not very good at joy in general. It might be that it’s an alien thing for me, but most of the occasions when I didn’t know what to do with my hands were those times. Most other times my hands know exactly who they are, where to go, and just what to do.

Mirrors 2

We are all free. Most people simply prefer not to be, without realizing it. Obligations, responsibilities, possessions, and cages are all much easier than freedom. That is always the most difficult part of creation, the blank page, the empty canvas, the silence, all that crushing freedom. It’s madness. We constantly gripe that greater freedom is what we need to achieve happiness. Life’s hooks have snared us and are restraining us from achieving the grandeur for which we were certainly destined. Once cut loose, most people crumple like balled-up paper. If we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that we prefer the security and predictability of the restraints. There is safety in cages. They create the point of reference from which one can see the landscape of everything that they are not. Much like the giant children that we all really are, everything that we are not is everything that we want. We want to be precisely and only what our cage will not accommodate. So we push, struggle, and cavort against it to gain freedom and access to what we are not. Most of us can’t escape. Some do, and some are removed from their cages against their will. Once out, cocks fall limp, pulse rates climb, and fear and panic set in. Man is an animal no longer fit to be free. We’re like an inmate who’s been inside too long to know how to function on the outside. It’s neither good nor bad. It simply is. Outstanding individuals adapt to and excel within this new freedom, and ultimately live happily ever after, amen. It makes the rest of us writhe with jealousy, contempt, and pseudo-moral outrage. Pseudo-moral posturing abounds as we criticize and condemn those fit for what we want but cannot achieve. We trip over our pride and our own feet as we stumble, crying, screaming, and looking foolish. Ultimately failing, disappointing, and underachieving. By definition, not everybody can be exceptional. Eventually, mediocrity, complacency, and stability find you again, sobbing like a child, a little more shaken up than last time. Sometimes it leaves you better or worse than the time before. Either way, you’ll do it again. None of us are really that bright. We’ll dance like this until we drop. We’ll continue painting, writing, lifting weights, breaking mirrors, singing off-key, chasing pussy, making wars, and intellectualizing over dumb shit. It’s predictable and safe. Like a cage. It’s what we do.