mottos and metaphors

I slept for 15 hours today; I got home yesterday at around 6, and progressively felt worse and worse, freezing and shaking, until I finally went to bed. With the aid of our good friend Benadryl, I slept till about 3 PM, stayed awake long enough to check Facebook and write an email, then went back to sleep until about 11. I still feel ugh, but the freezing part is gone. It's Benadryl time soon.

With my sleep schedule well and truly fux0red by illness and diphenhydramine, I've been up since 11, trying to get some writing done.

I've had several mottos over the years. A sad one, about 10 years ago, was "embrace pain, fear nothing." This was when I was overcoming the Void, mentioned in earlier posts. Running full-tilt into emotional states, regardless of outcome, seemed to be a good way to reintroduce myself to emotions again. And it was, I suppose, though I cringe to this day when I remember the almost childlike intensity of some of the more negative emotional states I found myself in.

For a while after that, my motto was basically "It's all meaningless anyway!" I was working on music I referred to simply as -> 0 <- , pronounced "zero", and which would later become The Happiest Sadist. I suppose I exposed myself a bit too intimately to some bad emotional states, since I had become, at the time of this motto, a tad.. shall we say nihilistic? It didn't help that I was doing first-plateau doses of DXM on practically a daily basis; I've noticed that a number of people who get involved with DXM develop either a fear of or an intense fascination with the concept of zero. In my case, it was the latter.

A happier, yet still somewhat off-kilter motto I developed sometime in 2004, following a string of unrequited love affairs, was the oft-used and generic "Carpe diem." This I followed to the letter. I still look back on this time with a bit of romanticism; it was freedom minus my previous nihilism, yet with an unfortunate undertone of unconscious self-destruction. I didn't really believe anything would work, but I had come to love life again, and felt that even trying to do what I loved was worth any pain and suffering produced by my actions.

I shocked, horrified, and awed people with my apparent callous disregard for my personal health, safety, and sanity, but I can't say I really *regret* much of this period.

I'd like to think that my outlook has matured over the years, perhaps as a result of the "carpe diem" phase I went through. It's no longer necessary to me to push anything; I'm content to let things go where they will.

What follows is an extended metaphor for my current view of the world. I don't relally have a motto anymore, per se.

Imagine you live in a large, classroom-type place with a myriad of other people. You are all separated from each other by unbreakable glass walls. You have no need for food, drink, or sleep. Instead, you sit at your desk all day, and atop your desk is all the art supplies you could ever need: paint, brushes, canvases, paper, you name it.

You have a choice: you can spend your days painting, or you can do nothing and amuse yourself however you will. You can try to entertain or be entertained by those in the room with you, but keep in mind that you will never be able to touch them or reach them in any way.

If you choose to paint, you also have to realize that at the close of every day, a horrible monster will come into the room and eat everyone's paintings. There is no way to prevent this. If your paintings are especially beautiful or meaningful, the monster will first make sure to deface or otherwise pervert your paintings before finally eating them.

If you choose not to paint, the monster may still come for you anyway, and you'll come to sometime later to find a tiny piece of yourself missing.

What do you do? Some in the room with you choose not to paint, and you watch them grow smaller and smaller, over time. Less human. But that's their choice. You have no right to decide for them, or even to judge them on their decisions.

Those that do choose to paint are continually saddened by their artwork being eaten and/or destroyed every day. Some of them, as a result, paint only scenes of violence or cruelty or ugliness, in the hopes that the monster will either find them unnecessary to deface or even pleasing enough to not eat. And the monster does take some of these paintings home to its unthinkable lair, but these paintings are typically so horrifying and empty that they appall anyone who sees them.

The way I see it, the only option is to paint that which inspires, that which is beautiful... if the end result is ultimately the same, if the monster is going to eat and/or mutilate your paintings no matter what, unless you give in to it and paint only the scenes of death and decay it loves... why *not* paint what is beautiful? Yes, it will leave you in the end. The monster will take it from you, belittle you, and then paint over it with horrible colors, perverting it into untold horrors... but you had it for a while. It was yours. You saw it, you experienced it. The monster cannot take that from you.

And anyone else that sees or experiences what you paint will have the same experience of beauty and inspiration that you have had. You will have brightened their lives, for a few minutes at least.

What else can we do? We're alive, whether we like it or not. Everyone else's mileage may vary, but I'd rather fill my life with what gives me hope and a sense of meaning than tool through each day waiting to die.

And who knows? Maybe if we all create enough beauty and inspiration, we'll somehow be able to drive the monster back someday. I doubt it, but I think it's worth a try.

As an aside, I suppose I do have a motto now. It's far less applicable to daily life, but it fits. I was thinking about it while trying desperately to get this one story done tonight.

The motto is:
"Writing fiction is REALLY FUCKING HARD."