If Life is Tragic

And you can write whatever you want, but it might not really make any sense whatsoever. It might just be total gibberish, and maybe that’s all you can muster that day. So the day ends, and you delete it all because it’s meaningless trash that doesn’t really communicate anything. Not only that, it doesn’t even have any pure aesthetic value, it could be nothing but noise and yet be masterful in it’s word placement, alliterative or poetic flow, evocative power, etc. But it’s not. It’s just the dull and desperate scribblings of a midwit who can’t maintain his own standard, who can’t live up to his own shitty reputation. A reputation only held by a doomed few anyway, perhaps in their mind feeling privy to something unique and valuable — the ego hopes — but with no power to take the author beyond what he is. Maybe even desirous to keep him so; their little secret.

Demoralisation. When I first thought up the idea for this thing that will — if I don’t scrap this mess along with all the other failed attempts — fulfil the role I rudimentarily mapped out along with it’s twin last week, I actually thought I’d struggle to be appropriately miserable. Misery and Mirth, Merriment and Melancholia. I wasn’t feeling too good, cooped up and torn away from the life I hate but keeps me paid. I say hate, but when contrasted with my current state, my yearning to go back is truly great. Sometimes at least, I oscillate. That’s my point, I have held in my head since starting this job that it exacerbated my unreliable mental state, that days now were bad days or good days, whereas before there were mostly just dramatically dull days.

Now once again functionally hikikomori (NEET De Facto if you prefer), I’m reminded that the stability was a fiction. There are still only good days, and bad days; and it was bad days that halted my progress last week, that my post last week was a battle against. It worked, as I laboured I willed a bad day good. It lasted, the day after was also good. I was pleased. Every night for the last week I’ve watched a Studio Ghibli movie, I like to watch them just as it starts to get dark out. The ones I watched a hundred times as a kid, and some I’ve never seen. Ponyo is a personal favourite at the moment. How can anyone be anything other than completely and utterly content when in that world, at that perfectly imperfect cliff point house, the window letting in a breeze — cleaner than this city has known in decades — from the darkness? Nostalgy.

My favourite part of my favourite park is greener than I remember when I first fell in love with it all those months ago. The blossoms are bright as they catch the sunlight, so perfectly beautifully white. The mud has dried, the grass is green, the road alongside almost empty. Unfortunately the field itself is filled with people, busier than what I would previously describe as busy. I find it harder to block them out, and more than this I sense an ugly atmosphere. Walking the streets to get to my place I find that there are far fewer (oftentimes none) smiling eyes and twinkling smiles, and I’m not sure if it’s a result of my new 4am crackhead aesthetic — I haven’t bothered to shave in almost a month — or the deadly supervirus that no one I know has yet encountered but people assure me is out there, regardless it hurts my feelings. My feelings matter to me, I’m the only one who is willing to put up with them.

I sit in front of a screen, I want to write but it’s all shit. I hate it, I look at it and I read it back and it’s just… garbage. This is the third time I’ve reached 600 words under this title, but it’s been almost a week when I wanted it to be a few days and I can’t bring myself to drag that blue bar across it all again, to send it down the same memory hole. I’m not sure what I want to say, the grim and existentially dreadful is such a broad category. In it, you can go almost anywhere you want, which ironically leaves you in an almost stupefied state. Paralysed by choice. Instead of writing I hop tabs from this one I’m on right now; one, two, three times over; sinking hours into meaningless “discussion” with meaningless people who don’t have names because they’re only really me shouting back. Alone in a hall of mirrors.

So the perfect fiction of nights and days, workweeks and Sundays, disintegrates before our very eyes. The numbers on the calendar now a triviality, the artifice of routine — the sole standing pillar supporting the sanity of so many — is replaced with even flimsier substitutes. And I do it too. I design all these silly rules and patterns to follow to stop myself from falling completely into a state of chaos; read for two hours a day, go out for a walk in the park every day — but not on weekends lest I forget the ancient structure, wake up at 10 every day and then perform the same morning ritual, and so on. I also tell myself every day to write, and I open the “new entry” page and every day tell myself this time it’ll pour out of me like it has before. Alas, not. The thoughts come but I can’t make sense of them.

It all comes at a thousand miles a minute, thematically contradictory or just simply incompatible ideas for long essay-like screeds on all manner of totally distinct and diverging conversations I had with myself. I wrote a post, linked above, last week to break the boredom and live up to the standard I hold myself to. I can and should be able to express myself with frequency, it’s not like I can express anyone else. It was a lot of fun, composing the little poem particularly. In that I was inspired by a thread on /lit/, one which didn’t grow into what it could have but started strong, more than anything else. Poetry as an avenue for crude and juvenile humour I find much more easy to appreciate than long sentimental and sappy expressions of great seriousness. It reminds me of the only collection of the stuff I ever liked, a book of children’s poems which I’ve talked about before.

So the inspiration for, at the very least, the premising theme upon which this and last week’s titles were based, is a line of my own from an even earlier post. It was a line that has and had a lot of meaning behind it, in my mind when I first wrote it that is, but which I think is overshadowed by the primary thematic purpose of the… I’m not sure what to call it. I like the term prose poem, but worry it sounds pretentious. Either way, that thing that I wrote. At very first glance it might seem like a superficial and reductive thing to do, to reduce the potential overarching theme of life to those two ideas, but really think about it. When the time comes for reflection, when immediate emotion is out of play, it is always through one of those two lenses that we recollect.

The most fundamental switch in worldview and sense of self one can go through, is from being firmly in one of those two camps to the other. In a rather cringe line from a rather good film (in my opinion), it’s expressed pretty well. When you switch from seeing life as fundamentally tragic or cause for sorrow, to absurd or ultimately fit only to be laughed at — or vice versa — you undergo a change which will affect every decision and every quiet moment to come. Me, I’m still not sure what I think. That’s what I’m trying to express, and as always failing completely to do, here. It’s amazing how I can laugh, genuinely laugh, at my own misfortune today; and tomorrow be rendered almost immobile by the weight of my grief.

And of course I shouldn’t focus so much on my own personal little slice of hell. Because by “life”, I don’t mean the tiny portion of it that I occupy but the whole pie. The grand human experience, and beyond that even, far beyond that. All is change this I believe, but do you view this change as a ruthless struggle, an eternal cycle of destruction and pain? Or a ridiculous and senseless cosmic joke, an eternity of ever more freakish and preposterous contexts? Like my recent uploads… don’t worry, I plan to return to a simpler style of writing with my next post. I locked myself in to this, and I hate not to follow through with something after I commit.

On occasion I find myself giggling like a little girl thinking about events which I’ve written specific posts on this very blog despairing about. It seems to me to be a decision which we don’t really make, consciously that is, but rather just fall into eventually. Of course for the last few days I’ve been in one of my grim moods, at least I hope it’s obvious because I have admittedly hammed it up a little for the sake of being more literary. I know it’ll pass though, and if not tomorrow or the day after, then the day after that will find me once again simply amused by it all. And I guess the day on which, in our minds, we conclude against our will what life’s overarching theme is, is the day we finally grow up.

If Life is Comedic

I was about to start this entry — delayed I apologise, despite having more time to write than I’ve had at any other time since starting this blog I am finding it difficult to sit down and do it — with a statement to the affect of (I hadn’t yet settled on the precise wording) “in dreaming, we can finally bee ourselves”. I’m sure it hasn’t gone unnoticed by any longer term readers that I have a slight obsession with this phrase, every time mocking it as I do with the extra “e”, it’s just so exceedingly layered. The eternal onion, every time I return to it in my mind I find another sheet of meaning to be stripped off and examined. Yet at the same time there is a beautiful, truly beautiful, simplicity to the saying. I am sure it will continue to provide as we move forward, as it has so reliably done so far.

Anyway that sentiment (about in dreams) is not quite accurate, I realise upon further reflection. To say we can bee ourselves in dreams isn’t quite true, because unless you achieve complete lucidity within the dreamscape — which I have never experienced, though I’ve had moments which took me halfway there — then the experience is essentially an “on-rails” one. Pardon the vidya jargon, it’s just the most effective means of elucidation available. Of course so is waking existence, as I’ve written about before more than once, fairly recently. In “real life” there is the illusion of agency however, but in dreaming that illusion is removed. It could be said that in one sense dreaming is a more honest experience in that we simply follow along. Some people, one of whom I know, experience dreams from a third person perspective. They see themselves from outside.

I don’t dream in that way, my visual perspective is for the most part exactly as it is when awake. This was particularly clear the other night during the dream I had which inspired the point which I used as the prompt for this post. It’s a short one, but I remember most crucially being aware of my own upper limbs. I’ve always felt like a head above a body when dreaming, but my awareness of anything about my own anatomy beyond that has never really been something I felt worth paying any attention to. I’m not sure if I always have arms and legs, hands and feet, or if I sometimes sprout webbed alien flippers, large crablike claws, or cloven hooves. My attention is so taken by everything else, it’s something I don’t even think to wonder about, and after waking I’m in no position to examine a then faded experience.

So, the dream itself. Corona-Chan had had her way with the world, and work was back on the table, that is the premise. I was called in, for some kind of meeting, and it was announced that with the death or disappearance (not actual, thankfully) of unnamed once-colleagues a new team of replacements would be brought in to fill the old roles. These new characters, they were not right, they would shift and morph into new types in most blatant fashion. Impolite I think, to shapeshift as they did right in front of me. I believe the proper thing to do is to change out of eyesight and then somehow hold convincingly that they always appeared this way. That is the standard rule of dream, and they broke it. From a woman so tall and thin she towered over me, long nose drooping to form a sharp point, lank stringy greying hair; was molded a stout old world Turk complete with little red hat. The fez.

A few instances like this, a few such slippery characters, then appeared a more structurally stable seeming individual. Dark auburn hair held in a loose ponytail; a round, rather undefined, but nevertheless alluring visage; eyes, in colour and slight shine matching the hair atop her head, which expressed a certain acuity; delicately held atop a pretty plain — though difficult to tell, concealed beneath a woollen forest green jumper — figure, unremarkable if not for her fairly large breasts. I don’t include that last note of description in order to titillate, I don’t write for coomers (formerly cumbrains) and never will; in fact if you identify with that descriptive positively, that meaning in any sense other than as a state of being you wish to free yourself from, I want you to know you disgust me. That being said, I won’t pretend that feature of this fictional female wasn’t memorable, I am only human.

Drawn together like two magnets, we fell together and into the usual formalities. The handshake, the exchange of names, so on. There wasn’t much time for introductions though. My manager appeared, gave a rousing speech which I now forget the contents of along with the name of my mysterious maiden, and declared us back in action. A tour, of a new shop opening to mark the occasion. And like magic the cold glass prismatic canister on rails that would whisk us over there pulled in behind her. I’m sure you can figure out who was seated next to me, on my right hand side to be specific. It was an open carriage, empty save for our group, yet beyond her I saw nothing. We were in a bubble, her as much as me.

Her role in the interaction as an amalgamation of the noted movements and cues of numerous somehow-charmed ladies I’ve chanced to be stuck with in “real life” was not too unfamiliar, though still enough so as to rouse my full focus. My own part though, in the game of conversation we played, was something surprising. Again, note the total awareness of how I was merely along for the ride I was taking myself on. I’ve spoken before, on this thing I call a blog, about how in similar interactions that no doubt inspired this merely dreamed one I feel like I’m trapped in a bird cage of my own bones helplessly watching myself, through my own eye sockets, fail fantastically to demonstrate any charm.

Now the situation was reversed, from the first person I watched myself display a quick wit and casual confidence that is rather alien to me — there have been brief moments where I’ve distractedly stumbled into mimicking this “Chad-like” deportment, but the moment I notice the positive response I am always snapped right out of it — rhyming with her you could say. I’ve described it as a game, perhaps more accurately a dance. And it worked, the bubble around us gradually lost it’s transparency and the world beyond became a dimmer and dimmer thing. There was that rare genuine interest in genuinely uninteresting aspects of my life (I have no life), and, paired now, this encouraged a similar interest from me in turn.

This continued, and then somewhere along the way she looked me in the eyes, holding her gaze intently, and with a wry smile let go of the handle she had been holding to keep her still while turned to face me fully. I saw her about to crash to the floor, and immediately reached out to grab her. The smirk grew into a great grin, she purred playfully while still holding eye contact, I brought her back up onto her chair properly. As I was doing so, she instead leaned forward trying to pull me into an embrace. “Lucky me” was the last thing I remember hearing from her, my alarm crashing through the barrier between realms causing the train and everyone on it to dissipate almost instantly. What a lovely way to start the day.

The point in recounting the events of this dream? It was just a good dream. I need to improve my writing, I need to simply do some writing, and so now I have. No, that’s not quite true, there was the other thing.

On beeing yourself

One sentiment behind “yourself” Could be the simple fact of health, But one does wonder if perhaps Another meaning it might map. What if the moment you are you, However hard to follow through, Comes when you reach total comfort.

Now if this explanation is Correct, not a hit and a miss. It’s fair to say that in our dreams, Even our waking reveries, With all our usual social fears No longer there to interfere, At last we meet our fabled selves

Alas, the issue is not so Simple. No, I have to say no. You see, a dream is fantasy, We watch but have no agency. Without that waking delusion Now revisit our conclusion. This “self” we see is make-believe

What was the point of all this? Reader, I’ll level with you, today I just wanted to have fun. For a week I’ve delayed, hid that “new entry” page, but this morning again faced with a day that contained not a single aim I finally decided to push through the pain. Sometimes, most times, I do have something to write about specifically. With this lockdown, as alluded to already, despite the extra time I find myself in front of a wall. Writer’s block is a term, but I find it a rather presumptuous one in my case, can I call myself a writer? This is a hobby, and that’s what I kept in mind when starting today. I thought to myself, well if I’m gonna be sat in front of this damn white screen all afternoon then I’m at least going to make it enjoyable for myself. No moaning or whinging from me today reader, today I wrote for fun alone. Prose and verse, arts and crafts, I’m just here to have a laugh.

I hope that my humour comes across well of course, I make these public so naturally I want whatever I put into an entry to be felt by the reader. There’s no point asking for comments I know, but if you do feel the urge to tell me that you “actually really enjoyed this one man” then by all means go ahead. Bonus points if you can guess which author’s style I aped all day, all the good boy points you’ll ever need. I promise. If you thought this post was great, tell me it was great; and if you thought this post was pee pee poo poo, tell me that too. Regardless, I should do more like this in future. From time to time, I should just try to simply have some good natured fun.

There’s a rather woeful tone that clings to this blog like a bad smell, perhaps sometimes a little more mirth is needed to combat the melancholy. I think it’s important to step back and see the funny side of things, in life I do this all the time, but on this blog I have fallen into the unhealthy habit of mostly mining my most mopey moments. That’s probably not going to change a great deal, I like wallowing in my own misery too much, but it is a refreshing thing to engage with the side of myself which sees the humour in this absurd world. Don’t want to ruin the tone I worked so hard to create now though, that wouldn’t be a very funny thing to do at all. Thanks for reading, it’s night time for me now so I’ll end this by saying goodnight. Goodnight!