news, and also novelty.

So... I've been thinking a lot over the past few days.

First of all, my friends Jan and Jesse are planning on compiling a book about the Shrub; I've been invited to have a major role in it. I still have to actually sit down with Jan and map out exactly what's going to be in the book, but I've been writing some anecdotes that I think portray the Shrub from a variety of different perspectives. There's stuff about happier times, yet there's also stuff about some of the more... detrimental.. characters that have popped in and out of Shrub folklore. I'm writing a piece about Mark Eyerman, and if I can, I'd like to get John and Emily together and grill them about The Night Nick Went Insane.

I also have about five companies that have my resume now, and they're all supposed to get back to me in the next week or two. Supposedly. The one job sounds absolutely great; it's in Newark, and it's a night-shift job on a rotating schedule. This leaves my days free for personal fun stuff, keeps me from having to get up at 5 or 6 AM every day in the bitter, freezing cold to drive a gazillion miles to a place I hate, and gives me days that aren't weekends off. Yay! So I hope I get this job.

On an entirely personal, not-connected-to-anyone front, I feel better than I have in a long time.

For once in my life, I don't feel like I'm doing anything "wrong". This probably sounds silly or stupid, but I've always felt totally out of place in this world. Have you ever played Tetris? If you have, you remember what it's like when you get a piece that absolutely will not fit anywhere; you have to put it somewhere, and anywhere you put it leaves a giant gaping hole that bothers you immensely until you fix it. That's basically how I've always felt about myself.

What has always made me feel that way is that I've known from a very early age that I didn't see the world the same way as everyone else. Most people, once they hit kindergarten, and sometimes even sooner, quickly get acclimated to the whole human jungle, and learn to change themselves to better fit within it. Not me.

I've always thought the whole human program, the whole set of guidelines that dictates who wins or loses, who's "right" or "wrong", and so forth was complete and utter horseshit.

It wasn't the first time I perceived this, by any means, but one of the most profound experiences I had encountering the darker side of human nature happened when I was seven. It was second grade, and I had just transferred to East Bradford Elementary, my third elementary school, so I didn't really have much in the way of friends, yet. (And yes, I did get "asked to leave" St. Agnes, but I only left my kindergarten because it was a program offered by Immaculata College. I wasn't completely antisocial.)

It didn't really bother me, though. Not having friends meant I could explore the absolutely gigantic playground we had at my leisure, making up whole new worlds for myself in my mind. And sometimes I didn't even need to imagine things to be amused or stimulated.

This one day, I found this little fuzzy caterpillar. I had never seen one like that before. He was black with brown stripes of fur, and he wiggled around in the most adorable self-important manner ever. In short, I thought he (she? it?) was the absolute shit.

That is, until some third or fourth grade loser came up to me, saw me watching the caterpillar with abject fascination, and subsequently stomped on it. I looked up at him from where I was sitting on the ground. He gave me this slow, chilling smile that's never really left me.

The last straw at St. Agnes was a fight I got into in defense of my best friend, Lauren. She and I had a really cute first-grade romance-type thing going on. This one kid that had been picking on me all year started insulting her in the middle of class one day, so I got up out of my seat, and dove on him, beating the shit out of him and dragging him out of his chair.

But had this been my only incident, I probably would have been allowed to stay. Obviously, it wasn't.

I was really kicked out because of my attitudes regarding religion... at six years old. To make a long story short, I thought the whole religion thing was complete bullshit.

I'm not at all an atheist. I went through an atheistic period, but I was also severely depressed during that time period; it's kind of hard to believe in anything if you don't believe in yourself anymore.

But I can't point to any one particular system of belief or set of godforms and say "Yup, that's what I believe, and everything else is wrong." Anyone that knows me really well knows of my personal relationship with Kali as a godform, but explaining that is well beyond the scope of this little missive. So what do I believe in? What do I worship?

I worship life. I worship complexity. I believe in novelty and change.

Anything that survives long enough as a complex system- and this can be anything: a work of art that's survived the creation process, a relationship that's passed the first stages, a body of knowledge or even a new theory or hypothesis regarding something- is defying the laws of entropy. The laws of thermodynamics essentially dictate (correct me if I'm wrong) that everything is eternally trying to progress towards a disordered state, which is paradoxically the state in which the highest potential energy occurs. Absolute potential can also be defined in another way: as zero. You can't divide by zero, it was explained to me once, because you don't know exactly what you're dividing by.

I guess I'm sort of a Neo-Taoist, in a way, because I see existence as a constant battle between the number system, representing change, novelty, complexity, creation, and life in general, and zero, representing stasis, stagnation, absolute potential, and death. It's easy to get fooled by the seeming paradox between "absolute potential" and "death", because we tend to see the former as "good" and the latter as "bad", but that's because we're human. Absolute potential is nice, yes, because anything can happen out of it, but the thing to remember regarding absolute potential is that nothing does happen out of it, because the instant something does, it's no longer potential.

A good example of zero in practice is seen in a lyric from the Nine Inch Nails song, "I Do Not Want This":

"I stay inside my bed
I have lived so many lives
All in my head"

The protagonist here is depressed and sad due to having all these dreams and plans for life but never actualizing them. As living, conscious humans, we can't stand much zero in our lives, unless we're profoundly disturbed or wildly sociopathic.

This has turned into a long tangent, but to bring things back to the point, the fuzzy caterpillar I was so enraptured by was an example of the number system, of life in general. He/she/it was just going about his daily business, doing caterpillar stuff, whatever that is. It's fun to imagine what life would actually be like as a different lifeform; as a caterpillar you'd probably be mostly concerned with avoiding predators and gobbling enough to eat to survive your period in the cocoon or chrysalis you know you're going to have to make at some point so you can turn into something completely alien to you.

It's foreign to us, but it's still just one of a myriad of living, complex systems that have taken untold millions of years of evolution to become what they are now. And it can all be ruined in an instant by some stupid fuck who apparently really got off on inflicting pain and suffering.

I don't feel bad about myself anymore, however, because I've realized how firmly I've committed myself to opposing such things, to opposing the Zero in the world.

Am I going to have a traditionally happy life doing this? Absolutely not! I'm going to be very alone, most of the time. I always have been, and probably always will be. Most people are stuck playing out their little patterns endlessly. Sometimes they learn things, but a lot of the time they just wind up repeating the same patterns over and over again. They get bitter, and cynical, and if they even wind up successful enough in a biological sense to have children, they pass on the bitterness and cynicism to their children, and the whole thing repeats itself all over again. The noose tightens just a bit further and we all wind up just a little closer to zero.

Fuck that.

If you know me well at all, you know that I push myself and my surroundings to the utter limit. I'm never content with "just being". I try to inspire people, to push them to be better than they think they are. I try to get people to realize that what we're told we're supposed to be happy with is complete bullshit, for lack of a better word, and that we have the right, or maybe even the responsibility, to be, do, love, and see everything we possibly can. I can't stand anyone that tells anyone else that they "can't" do this or that, or that they're "not good enough" in one area or another. I try to counter the toxic effect the Zero people have on those unfortunate individuals I wind up loving.

But people like their boxes. They look for people that will fit in their boxes. People will stay in their boxes even if the boxes are horribly painful to them, because the boxes are familiar. They know the rules of their boxes, so, they reason, if they just do this or that, regardless of how this or that chafes at them as a person, they can still "win", in the end.

There really aren't any rules, though, other than "don't put people in boxes".

It's become apparent to me that what I do need to work on is the application of my all-your-box-is-belong-to-me, to paraphrase a tired internet meme, because it scares people off. I need to learn to be more low-key with it, though this depends on the situation.

But while my application may be way off at this point, my overall goal is not. There's not too much that could convince me otherwise right now. I've seen myself have a definite, positive effect on a number of people, and I have to admit, I had a lot of fun doing it.

"Be the trouble you want to see in the world."

I'm trying to do just that. And I'm going to have an absolute fucking blast.

meanwhile...

I'm in Olney, MD, in a Starbucks using the $3.99 / 2 hr "free" WiFi while Ashley is at work.

If I had known a relationship could ever be anything like this, I think I would have been a lot less willing to put up with things in my previous relationships. And if I had known that anything like this was even potentially in my future, I think I would have been a lot less inclined to spin off into existential despair.

I don't have the words to describe it, aside from saying she's wonderful. I tell her this, and all sorts of other things, all the time. She rolls her eyes and says I'm blind.

But I'm not blind.

I feel like I can see more clearly than ever.

Relationships like this put your whole life into perspective. You start being able to see yourself as a whole being, not as a collection of faults that make you undesirable. You stop trying to "fix" yourself, attempting to scourge yourself of your bad qualities to become some impossible perfect ideal. Because people aren't equations to be solved, they're complex, paradoxical, quixotic creatures whose differing parts of their natures do not always cancel out in the end.

As I said, I've been having a lot of trouble wording what I want to say on this subject. All I can say is that it's been life-changing.

I look at myself as a person, now, and, for the first time ever, I see a complete picture. I was always trying to focus on particular parts of myself, either to "fix" them or to escape the parts I didn't like. I'm not looking to escape anything, now. I just want the picture to develop as fully and strongly as possible.

( <3 )

various rants and musings

I hardly ever post anywhere (here or my ultra-secret other blog) anymore... I don't usually have the time.

My sister broke up with her boyfriend of 5 years on New Year's Eve. Apparently, while Ashley and I were at the New Year's parties, my mom had been trying to talk to him (the boyfriend) about... well.. actually being a decent boyfriend. He was cheap, controlling, childish, and petty, for starters. There's a whole bunch of things I could say about him, but in the interest of time, I won't.

To make a long story short, The Boyfriend got incredibly pissed off at my mom and said a bunch of nasty things (in front of Ashley, no less). Cait (my sister) immediately came back with her own insults, and I yelled "fuck you" to him while he was going down the stairs. He didn't challenge me. I wish he had.

I hate this kid. I shouldn't say "kid" because he's about a month older than me, but whatever.

I don't just hate him because of how he treated my sister, or my family for that matter. I also hate him because he's disillusioned me in a number of ways.

This kid was very punk. He lived that whole lifestyle, and embodied the whole "you can't tell me what to do" ethic. But he was a complete asshole, and, in so doing, he made a mockery of the entire punk movement.

The punk ethos, to me, is about equality, tolerance of differences, libertarianism, and self-reliance. It's funny; a lot of hardcore punk kids hate hippies... but in all honesty, they (we? I used to be a hardcore kid myself) were actually far more idealistic than many of the hippies they despised. But so many people pervert these ideals... Equality and tolerance become warped into simply another form of class-ism, while libertarianism and self-reliance become a childish refusal to cooperate with anything.

It's disillusioning because no matter how much you believe in the positive ideals, people will automatically associate you with people like Alby if you believe in these ideals.

I've always believed very strongly in the whole movement, but my beliefs are kind of crumbling now, and the sad/scary part is, I don't know where to go from here.

It all comes back to one thing- competition. I absolutely fucking hate competition. I think it's a retarded holdover from our animal pasts. And yes, we are indeed descended from the animal kingdom in an evolutionary sense. But for god's sake, do we need to GLORIFY this the way we do?

In all honesty, too, it isn't even so much the various cruelties and unhappinesses I associate with competition that bothers me.. it's more complicated than that.

It's sixth and seventh grade all over again.

REDNECK KID (so hormonally imbalanced that he's physically an adult at age twelve): Hey faggot! (pushes me into a locker)
(At the limits of my patience, thanks to this happening an uncountable number of times, I kick REDNECK KID in the solar plexus as hard as I can. He slumps to the ground, groaning)
REDNECK KID'S REDNECK FRIEND: What the fuck'd you do that for?
REDNECK KID (weeping indignant tears): I's just playin' wit' ya.

No, you weren't "playin' wit'" me. You were challenging me. I responded in kind. You wound up on the ground crying, so I guess that means I "won". But I didn't win; I never did... because I was supposed to win according to the rules of Redneck Kid's asinine gorilla dominance ritual. I had learned through painful experience that little asthmatic prepubescent me was not going to win a "fair" fight against the towering behemoths that went to my school.

In other words, I was supposed to play a game I never wanted to play in the first place, and have my behavior during said game restricted by rules that were meant to benefit the opposing side.

And the most incomprehensible part is that I'm supposed to enjoy such things. It's supposed to be fun. In fact, for most people, the "thrill" of playing a game that's not only idiotic but stacked against them from the beginning is practically their entire reason for being.

(head explodes) I don't get it.

If we're going to embrace Social Darwinism and glorify our animal heritage through competition, then let's get rid of the fucking value judgments and rules. Let's get rid of traffic lights, smoking bans, and laws forbidding child abuse, murder, rape, and the various other inhumanities we inflict upon each other. Survival of the fittest, right? The strong would survive, the weak would not. I'm not advocating this in any way; I'm merely presenting this as an intellectual exercise.

"But that's anarchy!" you exclaim. You're right, it is. The animal kingdom has no government; you don't see a United States of Lionland anywhere, do you? If we're to idolize our animal heritage, we should keep that in mind. But anarchy doesn't work for humans. You'd have absolute chaos for a while, with the sociopaths of the world killing, looting, and pillaging everything they could while those of us with more conscience or restraint would probably have a fairly good time of things, living our lives however we saw fit.

But then we'd eventually polarize into two or three groups per locality. If the sociopath types worked together to any capacity, the non-sociopaths would have to do the same in order to protect themselves. And we're forgetting a crucial factor- humanity is not split between sociopaths and non-sociopaths. It took me a long time to learn this.

It's more as if the sociopaths could almost be lumped in with the sort of people with which I tend to try and surround myself, even though the two "type" are practically polar opposites. Sociopaths need to be dominant; they believe they are the only people on the planet who are real. The people I like best are so against control and dominance that the outside world tends to see them as "aimless" or unproductive. But they struggle and work and sacrifice for their freedom just as much as the "normals" struggle for their little niche in the rat race. Since they fall outside conventional social mores, they could, in theory, be classified in with the sociopaths of the world. Neither group wants to be ruled; it's the ways in which they achieve this that are wildly different.

But the real division within humanity has nothing to do with sociopathy. The real division is between who wants to be ruled, and who doesn't. The former group is much, much larger than the latter.

Thus, any anarchic situation would eventually (d)evolve into a few control-and-power-loving sociopaths here and there leading a whole bunch of little sheep around. You might occasionally see an anti-control person or people in charge of a group devoted to opposing the sociopath groups, but these would be rare, and numbers count for a lot in warfare.

So it would basically be the same old story over and over again. The people who love power and control would take over with the help of the thundering masses that love being controlled, while a few shining lights in the darkness would continually try to fight the oppression. It'll repeat over and over again, throughout the remainder of human history, a constant cycle of structure leading to oppression followed by revolution followed by the beginnings of potentially oppressive structure all over again. It'll never change. 's why I don't usually "do" politics.

Where am I in all this? I used to think I was staunchly a part of the non-sociopathic anti-control group. I am, at heart, and always will be.. it's the expression of this that needs to change.

After a lot of soul-searching, I've realized I'll definitely have to rejoin the corporate machine once again. I've spent the past few months desperately trying to find ways out of this, but it's inevitable. They have The Power and I will have to grit my teeth and do what they say in order to take some of it for myself... because it's not just for myself, it's for anyone who wants to benefit from it.

I just hope I can stay the course. It's hard to walk a path when you can't see more than a few feet in front of your face.

And it's even harder knowing that even if you walk the right path, if you walk in an incorrect way you stand to alienate yourself from everyone you love.