After you break; after you reach a level of sorrow, pain, or paralyzing fear is when something hits you. Jesus had to die and resurrect. Hercules had to dive into hell and fight to come back. Addicts profess hitting “rock bottom” before they take the first of 12 steps. Runners describe a “high” from pushing their bodies through the pain. Whether you want an ancient parable, or modern catechism laying out the value of abject struggle leading to awesome if not immortal reward, there's plenty on offer.
It's with this sentiment in mind that I often think that I haven't struggled enough. I'm loath to admit “real problems” in the first place. I'm wired to irrationally panic, talk, and write before I even remotely bother to calculate what's coming next. Whether it's the goals I have for my land, or the principals I'd like to defend, I think there's a case that the “right” kind of struggle hasn't been engaged, and it's as plausible as any an explanation for things as a claim to the generalized indifference of the universe.
For me, it happens with certain authors or with phrases that come out of nowhere. What I fear, what rests in my chest besides the cool air of this snowing spring day, is being right. I want more than anything to be wildly off the mark as to what I both feel and think is in store for, not just the country's future, but humanity as well. I want the most depressing fictionalized accounts of future worlds to be fond parodies. I want every depressed or dead literary genius to be suffering from the same undiagnosed subspecies of egoism. I want the “most telling” and “consequential” descriptions of the doors closing out the light to be a set in a house of a million rooms.
There are consequences regardless of your approach to life, but the consequences of being right are worse. When you're right, you've made it impossible to believe that something couldn't have been done. You spotted the malevolent look in their eye the moment you met them, and yet your computer was stolen anyway. What gives!? You've studied in depth how societies fall or herd-mentality allows everyday normal people to be complicit in compounding waves of atrocity, yet people will insist you calm down and accept “the facts of life” or the circumstances you inhabit. But you're right, and you're suffering, and you're desperate to plan a workaround, and it doesn't matter.
I've said in the past that I don't get very many opportunities to “feel like me.” Some weird confluence of forces has to persuade me to lean in to my extroversion or dejected combative take on “hope.” To put yourself out there makes you a target. Besides the inherent danger of asking people to aim and shoot at you, it acts in lesser known or described ways. Millions of people could flock to you, and yet you're alienated. The circle is on your chest, not theirs. The words you used to whisper to yourself, or scream to a chosen few, are abused to literally every end, and particularly to one's you'd find abhorrent and opposed to what you intended. You're a repository for every resentful inclination a person may have felt against anything they don't live up to.
Every hero of mine has the same story. Every “justice movement” goes through the same paces and iterates similarly. I've heard every condescending and self-righteous declaration of my motives. When someone professes that, “you take the good with the bad” they don't stress that you literally don't have a choice, and the bad will be actively punishing you for bothering with the good, no matter how good, and the bad can jump straight to death threats. If I stand up for worker's rights as an embattled delivery boy, I'm “threatening livelihoods” and “salty” to the invigorated propagandized, and/or the harbinger of fate flowing from my worthwhile story and sacrifice in the eyes of labor organizers. I'm both, at all times, choosing to pop my head up or down.
My fear is that I'm right about all of the choices I haven't made for myself that I watch people make for themselves. It's the wildest extreme empathy has to offer. The relief! I constantly profess of choosing death, video games, or obesity. It's as duplicitous as I can ever manage. There is no relief to adopt the burden of giving up. There is no solace in tacking close to your isolation and indignity. There is no sustained power or value in exploiting your capacity for self-delusion and quiet complacency. I know, I've tried. I'll go so far as to say you're often not actively aware of what it's doing to you, but that's the point. It shows up when me, the guy who's begrudgingly consistent where it counts, “magically” becomes intolerable or negative when you can literally pair my sentiments across 13 years. Can you choose to not step on your dick for that long? Even my favorite authors have had things to recant, but with a singular concern for rooting out the truth as far as you can dig, absolutely.
Given that I don't know anything, by the time I feel comfortable claiming I might, it's hard for me to cope with what happens when the truth plays out. Be stuck skeptical. Be in doubt, always. AND THEN SHIT KEEPS COMING TRUE AS YOU THOUGHT! What a beyond bizarre state of affairs. Why, it could have been any number of a dozen reasons A went to B or C decided to D. But there you freakin' have it, like dominoes. No, maybe not every single time, but enough to be concerning. If the world operates with such regular and terrible consistency, what's my infinitely small window on that pattern going to do against the tide?
I think you have to blow up the moon.
The moon is the looming reminder that the sun is still shining. It took fundamental mathematical truths and the coordination of minds towards a singular goal to get there. It was once part of the Earth, now uncoupled, watching. It's a place to stash away that voice always flitting about our heads telling us things we don't want to hear. It's a place to throw our baggage of responsibilities when they're too heavy. It's a place of cold indifference with no ability to shine on its own.
The moon matters. Animals respond to it. Along with the stars it aides in navigation. It can be the perfect backdrop of a romantic evening. But it acts as an unconscious force, kneading the shores. If you're not paying attention, it can drown you. “What a silly thought!” Says the woman who's never fallen asleep on the beach.
There are many moons in many orbits around the earthen body you're using to perceive the world. The ebb and flow of their movement has real consequences. I only need one moon. I know when all of the things I don't want to say or all of the weight I don't want to carry are swaying, way up there, pulling me back and forth. Your moons though? Prepare the explosives. I know how yours make you dance because I'm intimately familiar with my own. It's not clairvoyant to read the words on the page. And if you'd bother to read about yourself, you might discover a way through your journey to hell.
I'm afraid I'm going to get everything I put my mind too. I'm afraid I'm going to open myself up to thousands of people and try to provide something that speaks to my values in earnest, and it will be something equally or stupider so that blows it up as I've always discovered. I'm scared I truly only matter to myself, and every selfish exploitation I've bore the brunt of is the “just” way of getting what you want in life. I'm scared that it's okay to be smug and self-satisfied and flawless in your judgment of other people and their motives. I can't stomach it. I can't slow my heart rate in thinking about what being convinced of that does to every ounce of my effort to behave otherwise. What I've clawed together so far, that I might have to sacrifice it for...for to fit...for to win...for a seat at the table...for people to like me...for the opportunity to sacrifice piece after piece for more connections or profit or timeline stories of my achievements and grandiosity that outpaces you. It's a fucking disgusting picture. It's a vain and decrepit joke.
I'm so fucking terrified that I'm not wrong. I can't cope with having the resources to be of greater consequence. I don't want to be like my heroes, beleaguered by idiots, getting into Twitter wars with the jealous and lazy. I don't want every instance I've typed “nigger” in a blog to send reporters to my ex's house. I don't want attention and praise. I want to work. Because whether I believe there's any point to life or not, work means something to me. Work never ceases. Work is the physical manifestation of what you actually believe, and evidence that your better nature can betray all of the stupid and confusing shit coming out of your mouth. Work is your immortal impression, and so you should be deathly afraid of not paying attention to what you're working towards. More important, you should bother being aware of whether or not you're working through!
I make decisions, but you allow them to matter. You lent yourselves to the parties. You helped pay for, unload and assemble, or took over for a spell at the kiosk. You provide the encouragement or “likes” or standing invitations to stop talking and visit already. How do any of us enable such a dramatic degree of deadly and hopeless decisions to matter more than basic decency? How do I just know it's never getting better, and there's no appeal, and no fix, and what I create will have bruises and scars from being punched and cut like there was never something! else that could be done? There isn't, is there? This is it. You can write about it. You can watch. But there's no one to help you get to the moon.
