The moment is now.
With full acceptance and pride, let’s introduce another sophomoric rant. As I honestly can’t tell you the difference between reading what hippies say and what academics postulate, as far as “profound consequences as they pertain to your life,” I want to carry on with the moment in tow. The idea seems so very loud; that you are arrested by the show or artifice of the moment. You’re a collection of moments. Struck by a movie or song. Maybe you’re reliving or reviling an awkward interaction from youth. One way or another, you’re caught.
There is no magic like what grabs your attention. Let’s take from my current moment. A sleepy girlfriend and guest who said they were about to leave, only to be wrapped up in the music and theatricality of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Something that can do that isn’t presented to be “rated.” It’s a particular awareness. It’s a song and dance that precludes an actual song or dance. Can you appreciate a work of art like this under a constant anxiety about the future? Or can it only surprise you in its capacity for arresting your attention?
::A long pause happened before I started again:: The measure of progress appears in the consequences of the moment. Bill Clinton kept a piece of the moon on his desk so when people were arguing he could say “Fellas, that piece of rock has been here for billions of years before us and will be here for plenty after we’re gone, we should be able to work out our differences.” Not a direct quote. Introducing perspective as a measurement of the moment as much as anything else. “I feel this” a step removed from an equally contrived number assigned to make sense of it all.
Measurement. “I estimate that.” “As far as I can tell.” “Something something complicated quantum mechanics when we’re looking at it.”
We’re measurements. We’re a certain weight and height. We’re approximations of amalgamated thought and intention. That is, I am what my parents taught me and what I thought I needed to become in order to get what I wanted. My friend left and my girl fell asleep. The moment is enduringly compelling and at once fleeting.
I think sometimes my whole fight in life is to bring people into the moment. Like, I don’t want to “bring people to local politics.” I want you to feel, right now, that you can do something that makes your vote or intention resonate as worthwhile. Bureaucracy doesn’t speak to that. Flat nonsense “official web pages” don't empower by design. Power has no interest in helping you form how it’s exercised.
The whole exercise of argument and interaction is a statement of the moment. Watch debates, especially the ones hosted by Oxford. So “persuasive” the rhetoric. So “convincing” the style. The moment isn’t even concerned with “truth” at that point. Dangerous, or fun? Is it a game of semantics and style, or pursuant to how genuine reality operates?
It seems we’re habitually removed from statements and exercises that would remind us of our place in the cosmos and amongst ourselves. Then we get to revel in the ideas of what’s “taboo.” We get to project ourselves onto other people and dreamlike scenarios that suggest “better aspirations.” We’re not reinforcing the language of enslavement or subjugation. We’re “well-intentioned individuals” who decide left or right. We’re not a continuum or up for debate. We reinforce a protective “self.”
There’s this sentence that bugs the shit out of me. “Live your truth.” It at once is the best advice you could ever espouse, and yet completely excuses and dismisses the reasons and history leading up to that truth. I can only write, for example. I can’t know if you have or force you to read my previous writing to give you context. I can’t even claim confidently it would be worth it. I write in the moment. I look for the feeling and arguments as they’re to be had when the information hit you as the information is always fleeting. You don’t need 400 previous blogs to get in the moment. I don’t need the selling of your presumed understanding to grasp whether you’re respecting the moment.
It seems to be the reductio ad absurdum of all “thoughtful,” “well-intentioned,” “philosophical,” “genius,” “interesting,” “machine-like” people to swallow you up into the consequences of their reasoning. You’re drowned in the consequences as they see them. You’re opinion on the value of living on Mars is mute. You’re not the asshole with the apparatus to put us there. You have a thousand and one “that’s life” sentiments about the nature of humanity? Here’s my engine for morphing your lazy childlike conceptions. At the end of the day, you’re living or carrying out the fall-out from someone who’s taken the time to learn more about the many variables underlying your life.
I think people try to push back with claims like, “it’s not perfect!” As if it needs to be. What did the eleven(?) people who met the night before Lehman Brothers collapsed have to account for when it came to the millions of opinions about “gangster banksters?” Absolutely nothing. They’re moment reduced you to a pithy hapless statistic. And they bet on you reducing yourselves to the same stature. They won and habitually win.
The idea that “the world is generally good” is something that needs to be fought. Practically. I don’t care if we’re an extension of the universe and good can’t exist without evil or whatever the fuck some hippie wants to claim about balance or waves. I think there’s a giant presumption “things will work themselves out.” It’s bullshit. Things will default to what’s easiest and what will probably fuck you. My evidence? Entropy. Let it play out in a naive and insecure human mind and follow the dominoes.
How can I resurrect “responsibility?” I can only thrust it into the moment. It’s only real “now.” As I type, as I think, and as I decide. The mechanistic view wants to pigeonhole my being as the “natural consequence” of all that came before. I decry “fuck you!” and type or don’t. Share or not. Weigh the potential of bolstering words of others’ encouragement against disappearing behind damning self-assessments of the somehow opaque yet redundant diatribes.
I don’t know how to cope with the idea that everyone is me. What if had 87 blogs to read every day from my friends working through the bullshit on their minds? What if I got a hundred comments under a reddit post of other people who said “I think like this every night!” and we’ve fueled a new engine of thought? What happens when I’m a million miles away from the best compliments I’ve ever received because we all reduce/elevate ourselves into saying what we think needs to be said as ignorantly and un-eloquently as possible?
It’s easy enough to die for nothing. I didn’t choose to be born, so why should it follow that my life should mean anything? It’s on me to recognize and respect the opportunity. It’s up to me to help provide the language for those as stuck as I am. Waiting it out. Pretending solipsistic laziness is isolated genius. Talk, write, and share! Pretend your life ends tomorrow. Not with the relief of your own death. Pretend your friends are gone. Pretend your parents are gone. Pretend parts of your body are amputated and the next step is the complete reimagining of your life as a person who eats with their toes. Life is rushing by. I can read this blog on my last day and it can find you on yours. Who’s here with me?
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