"All the seven deadly sins are man's true nature. To be greedy. To be hateful. To have lust. Of course, you have to control them, but if you're made to feel guilty for being human, then you're going to be trapped in a never-ending sin-and-repent cycle that you can't escape from." - Marilyn Manson
Dear Internauts,
Happiness is more than the absence of sadness. Sometimes one requires the other.
I don't drop into nightmares every time I drift off to sleep like I did for years. They're still there, but I think the plots have all played out. I learned to accept the kind of absurd logic that comes from never being fully awake or asleep. It's like the flavor of lonely memories that make me stop and recollect that, oh yeah, that wasn't a conversation I had but one I watched other folks have online or read in a book somewhere. I'm still scared like hyper alert but that nerves wears out too much, and now it's just like a begrudging distrust of people, situations, attitudes, and the general reality that slides in and out of a subtly morphing repeat repeat repeat.
We argue a lot about stuff that doesn't much matter. Maybe part of it is that the stuff that matters most to us is sometimes the hardest to defend. We can't pretend to understand any other position, so we hold our inner truth to be self-evident. Though what evidence there is or isn't is only evident to our self. Sometimes. It's much easier to believe that there's a line and on the other side there be monsters.
I'm nauseated on the thought of constantly saying those who don't care about the people or situations or ideas like I do must therefore be evil. The very idea of evil is a distraction anyway; it's problematically inefficient and gets in the way.
I have the entirety of human knowledge—or close enough to it—burning up my fingertips, so if you're gonna ask me to care, we've both gotta admit I'm not gonna give you even close to my full attention. It's no excuse to simply say I can't. It's the reality. Most of our causes are founded upon impulses we become too quickly entrenched in to back out from, not some big logical treatise we took the time to research and consider from all sides. Not to say they're any less important, but rather that importance is of course subjective.
Really, the only things you have to do are those things you don't have a choice in, which makes them things you're not really doing anyway. We say have to do, but we always mean within a mutually assumed context. And yeah that context can be anything from "we feel like it" to "otherwise we die". There's not much point in pretending we have the freedom to choose if we're not willing to at least consider making higher stakes decisions.
Looking back, I cared way too much what people thought of me as a teenager. How many would say that's true of them as well? I wanna see hands raised. Great. We get eachother. But it's more than that. For how many of us is that still true?
I'm not gonna judge you and say YOU care too much. It's ultimately up to you. You've gotta base your sense of morality or even reality upon something, and other people are as good as we've got in our big, lonely universe. At least the feedback is semi-constant. Though it is true what they say that we think about what other people think of us far more than other people think of us.
Then again, that's only something I can understand if other people think about other people as much as I think about other people in comparison to how much I think about myself. From this blog, it should be obvious, I'm enormously self-centered. Still, I don't think that necessarily requires selfishness. If I'm to do anything for anyone else, I must first convince myself of some reason it's worth doing.
Maybe we just want to be the kind of person who does things for other people. Maybe we just want to be the kind of person who does things for other people in a way which suggests we get nothing out of it besides the doing. I think the pain and sacrifice required by the self-righteous in order to do real "good" is an oversimplification of human experience. You can't choose not to be in pain or to make choices which sacrifice something for something else. You simply choose which choices to make. The pain is existence. What you do with it, I suppose, is called character. Then again, there's too much about that, which again, requires the opinion of other people to be imposed upon my own sense of self worth.
Why must I have any sense of self worth? I don't much think about it when I'm too busy writing nonsense like this or drawing a picture or writing a song or walking down the sidewalk imagining up lives for the passersby. But I think about it, and to say that anyone who thinks about "why" thinks too much is only to admit that you don't think much. Again, that's me being self-centered.
Which is okay. Because I'm just a brain in a jar. Or maybe not.
Either way, you've read this far, so here's a picture from the last show. It's of me, of course, because if nothing else, I'm thematic.
(pic by Jonah from Bridging the Music)
Thanks for reading,
Odist
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