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.