[402] Losing: The War of Attrition

I'm sorry.

I instinctively revile at an idea I think is at the heart of most lies. For what is true sorrow?

You may claim hell is other people. You may be lonely. You may know greed that drives you to screaming. You may be bruised from abuses of your mind, body, and time. You may dream of nothing more than a single second of silence.

Evil is nothing. Why do bad things happen to good people? Duh, there is no good and bad. I think we've lost what might have been considered a “social contract.” I find this idea unyieldingly terrifying. It's not that the raping and pillaging will take place in the streets, proud and shining. You may not have even been alive long enough to have noticed a change.

I hope I'm not alone in feeling constantly at odds with myself. It's a habit of constantly seeking to undermine my premises. Sometimes I see a war, and I want to describe that war for all its bloody details. Whether you've massacred the English language or gutted what might have resembled consistency or self-respect, I want to feast on each piece I can tear off. And nothing's more delicious than cannibalizing yourself.

For every good must be a stolen bounty followed by a muted “I'm sorry.” All pride in time spent or through high-society association must blush and giggle “I'm sorry.” All gluttonous indulgence of feeling must submit to the scrupulous mind's “I'm sorry.” Every cliché, every breath beneath each healthy day, and every nod to what's been swept away requires a signature, just here, I'm sorry.

To regard oneself as a victim of circumstance presupposes a sort of attack. Lambasted by a cruel world with imposed crueler expectations. It presupposes a crime, likely carried out without your knowledge and it won't be punished, certainly never popularized. You've been rendered impaired and are subject to compensation. Alas a culprit! Life! Life did this to me! And I'll see my revenge thusly!

What are we constructing? Not what's been built and left for us to play with. What are we building and why? Because I don't know. I build words and paragraphs and semi-detailed models from which to hoist my ideas. I build friendships I can barely define. I build a basin of experiences from which to hurl seemingly endless criticism that only bites really hard when I misappropriate dangerous liquids. But what are we building? Memes? Online marketplaces? Houses for bankers and peddlers of medicines?

I don't know my neighbors. I don't know my representatives. Sometimes, I don't know how to get 5 people I've known for years in the same room together. I see no we. I sense no community. I know of no common cause. I know what's popular. I know what's been “appropriated for a social liberal.” And for the life of me, for all I carry on about actions-in-a-context, I don't know the one I'm working in.

I don't know if “the world needs saving.” I don't know if I'll ever play a significant role in dong so or remain a nominally contributing factor in its inevitable demise. I don't know why I would pick one cause or fight one war over another. I have no personal stake...am I supposed to defer to my personal stake? I have a loose agenda, but who told me to have a goddamn agenda!?

Life asks that you do nothing but come into being and then eventually die. And even dying is being “wrestled with” in an effort to undermine its unsavory implications. For what would the world be without you here to never understand it!? If only the call to action was as clear as the call to the bathroom. Poo or die, just, ignore the part where you die anyway.

I think so many “bad times” are looming. This only stuck, like a dick in a newborn, in my head because it's...So. Damn. Predictable. And avoidable if “we” had any idea of what we wanted to build. Was it definitions? Would those definitions work not only on paper, but in practice, perhaps on words like “trust,” “patience,” or “good?” Who's to say THAT'S even possible in this relentlessly growing context!? When does it begin?

I don't want “us” to fail. I don't want the idea that “us” is even possible to be stuck on the stickiest rings of a spindly spider interweb. I want a shared goal, a mutual investment, and an ongoing conversation that is louder than all the noise from the impending crashes around us. I want it to be as easy to do it good as its been to feel bad. And I can still know absolutely nothing about my context other than I want to keep asking.

When you assume, you make an ass out of you and me. When you have no choice butt to assume, you make disjointed irrelevant juxtaposing not-quite-puns because you're running out of fancy ways to reiterate your running ideas regarding our circumstantial natures and whether it's even possible to do something about it through collective vocalization and practice resorting in mutual and simultaneous manifestations of behaviors that would stand as a form of moral and practical guidance to assure and promote the youth as well as assuage persistent and potentially deadly behaviors sussed from irrational, irresponsible, or immoral behaviors which can be shown to reduce to simple causes and effects only to be judged by whether they further speak towards the prime shared objective collective directive quite independently of the opinions and fears of the least informed or capable.