it is an adolescent delusion - one to which i am subject, i
hasten to add - that change can be effected or genuine influence
exerted on shitty websites full of idiots with opinions. i used to
think that the only way i could become a writer was to have a blog,
publish things, get feedback, improve, and hopefully get recognition.
what has actually happened is that i have developed an egotistical
fetish for being commented, and an obsessive compulsion with checking back to see who has something to say to me / about me. this whole
blogging community is a farce for the socially lifeless and the insufficiently talented. shit.
i'm not a great writer waiting to be discovered. i'm not even a good one. i'm just some guy writing pointless shit that clogs up bandwidth. realisation is a horrible experience.
and look at me, blogging about it! oh, the irony! consider this my notice of resignation. i'm not closing my site, and i might even post occasionally, but i am no longer a part of xanga's community. i recently acquired a TRUE badge as a reward for my persistent posting and commenting. what the fuck kind of life am i leading where i'm trying to tell people who won't listen and don't really understand about things i have taken great time to learn and explore? am i really prepared to concede that all my endeavours are undertaken with the intention of imparting them to uninterested parties? i'm fed up with getting riled by ignorance and inanity and i'm fed up with getting excited over twelve kind compliments on some mediocre piece of shit i scrawled.
if, in some extremely unlikely future, i do become a published writer, it won't be thanks to blogging communities.
YOU WILL NEED: ONE CHICKEN. TWO AXES. FIRST AID KIT. A TOMATO. SOME RUNNER BEANS. A CUCUMBER. PERI PERI KETCHUP FROM NANDO'S. OR SOMETHING SIMILAR. BACON. PASTA. CHEDDAR CHEESE. OR SOMETHING SIMILAR.
HOW IT IS MADE:
1.So, you got your chicken, right? Pat her on the head. Make her feel happy. Slash it to bits, leaving one breast intact. Skin it. Sniff it. Mmm. Lay some tin foil on a baking tray. Pre-heat your oven to somewhere between 190-200 degrees Celsius. Thump the chicken breast into it. Go away and cut your nails. Bin the clippings.
2. After, like, ten minutes or something, take the chicken out and put a little peri peri ketchup on it. Wrap it in bacon. Hurl it back in the oven. Start cooking a small amount of fusilli pasta. Get your runner beans ready to be about to be cooked soon. Cut up cucumber. Get a plate. Arrange cucumber around the edges like tree stumps on Jupiter. Leave the kitchen for a while to defeat some or all of your enemies.
3. After, like, fifteen minutes or something, take the chicken and bacon and peri peri ketchup out and put more peri peri ketchup and cheese on it. Cut the ends off your tomato and arrange them like eyes atop the food. Wrap the tin foil around it to make sure the alien spirit doesn't escape. Thrust it all back in the oven. Cook runner beans. When cooked, arrange them like a garden fence made of Jupiter sticks. Take the cooked pasta, drain it, and sprinkle it inside the fence like terrain spirals. Take the chicken and bacon and peri peri ketchup and cheese out of the oven.
4. OH BUT WAIT A MINUTE! IT'S NO LONGER CHICKEN AND BACON AND PERI PERI KETCHUP AND CHEESE! SHIT OUT MY OWN GRANDMOTHER! IT'S AN ALIEN! Put the alien in the garden on the pasta grass protected by Jupiter sticks from the poisonous tree stumps.
i've edited this a billion times. sorry to put you all through it again. it is going somewhere though. i never usually stick with a plan this long. any plan.
At an hour
usually reserved for drunks and dealers, he stood out clearly, in spite of his
efforts to the contrary. In a smart grey overcoat with pinstriped trousers
peeking out from underneath, he was not inconspicuous. His carefully shined black shoes clipped with each
purposeful stride. He had his collar up, clearly taking great care to keep his
head to the ground, disguising his features as best he could. As he passed
under a lamppost, the wispy clouds of smoke from his cigarette invaded the
light’s beam but, finding it to be resolute, soon relented and faded away into
the dark air.
Looking
cautiously over his shoulders, he removed a small cutting of paper from his
pocket. Pausing to check it, he bore left to approach a small
semi-detached house. Prior to knocking, he waited to finish his cigarette,
whose orange ember brightened gleefully with each greedy drag, glowing with sharp vitality. Whatever glee there may have been
was short-lived, however, as it soon found itself crushed beneath his shoe. He had
no time for metaphors. The young man hesitated briefly, nervous,
wondering all kinds of what-ifs. Nothing was safe. Fuck it, he tried to
convince himself, everything is a risk now. Still, the knuckles he extended to
rap against the door shook tentatively: bold self-motivation withers tamely
against true fear.
A middle-aged woman with insomnia crawling through her eyes
pulled the door open. Her kindly faced broke through its tired coating to force
a smile as she ushered him inside. Neither of them was sure how to act. Almost
overnight, their lives had been changed dramatically and unexpectedly by forces
beyond their control, and it was no longer clear just who or what they ought to
be. It showed. Eventually, he decided he ought to embrace his sister’s
mother-in-law with comforting arms. It was very awkward. No
matter, he held the hug stubbornly until too much time had passed, then
stumbled away to hang his coat on the staircase and clear his throat repeatedly.
“Do you think you were followed?” she asked him.
“No, I don’t think so. I mean, I’m not sure. It’s hard to
tell. I’ve never been suspicious before.”
She peered her head out to double-check. She didn’t really
know what she was looking for. Warily, she pushed the door shut.
“It’s good to see you, Anne,” he told her. “Circumstances
aside.”
She smiled again and nodded. “Do you think you have time for
a cup of tea before you take off?”
“I don’t know,” he replied, honestly. “Let’s hope so. You
don’t have any hot chocolate, do you?”
“No, I’m sorry.”
He sighed. “No-one ever does.”
Quietly disappointed at her failure as a host, she wandered
off to the kitchen to prepare the tea that nobody really wanted. Colin slumped
down on an armchair that looked far more comfortable than it turned out to be
and thrust his fingers into his hair. The early hours of the morning feel
surreal enough to those unaccustomed to them, with their unnerving calm and
conspiratorial air, and combined with the situation he found himself in, they were
really testing the boundaries of credibility. Everything gave him a sense of
déjà-vu, as if the world were echoing itself at every moment. Somewhere unseen,
a clock ticked away the seconds with an obnoxious regularity, each knock of the
second-hand reshuffling his thoughts as he tried to organise them into a script
he could understand. Soon, Anne trudged back into the living room carrying a tray of steaming
crockery.
“Here you go,” she announced, handing him a cup. “We’ll take
Joy’s up to her now. Follow me.”
You see
what happens when they try to create a world that makes sense, where fate and order
reign? To give us clear answers to complex questions? Reality has no such symbolism, it holds no necessary connections between
events, there is no providence either divine or fated. Yet, determined to find
a truth that fits his preconceptions, man ignores all evidence and, positing
his own viewpoint, states it as fact, condemning all opposition as inhuman.
Why meaning? Meaning holds us to ransom for some purpose we can not even know! The puppet may be central to the play, but
he is a puppet nonetheless, and receives no plaudits for the actions which were
never of his own device. How much worse it is to be a cog in some unknown
machine serving some unknown master for some unknown purpose – what is there to
rejoice in such slavery? Not even knowing what the meaning is, only that there
was one – is that to be desired? Poor
species that should find itself so desperate as to actually seek such an
existence!
nihilism is not relativism. it is not the belief in nothing, it is not a rejection of truths. it is a rejection of meaning. truths can be true without being meaningful. indeed, they are true without being meaningful.
ask yourself what 'meaning' means.
when you say you want your life to mean something, what are you actually saying?
what about when you say you want life itself to have meaning? what meaning can life actually have?
god? is that it? life is a brief zero-to-one-hundred-odd year test to determine how you spend the rest of eternity? god apparently has even weaker a grasp on the vastness of infinity and the delusion of limited perspective than we humans have. life is not meaningful in any meaningful sense under this condition: it is like being given a one-second test to determine whether you get locked up like the count of monte cristo or exalted like a sports hero at the end of two seconds of intense studying at school in an exam paper where the question is completely blanked out. actually, it's even more extremely arbitrary and cruel than that, but that's about as far as i could scale the analogy down. the point being that life is not meaningful in itself; it is the afterlife that is the meaningful bit, and life is simply the peculiarly irrelevant means used to attain that end.
or do you not mean an abrahamic god? more like the force, or something spiritual. we live, then return to a spirit sanctuary until our spirit is called back to live again? an eternal cycle of unknowing repetition? what does that mean?
or any other afterlife belief system. they all fall into the same trap of rendering this life meaninglessness - or, worse, arbitrarily meaningful; holding colossal repercussions with no good reason. when you say 'meaning', you mean 'i am greedy for something more because this shit is insufficient'.
so what of ideas that hold that life, in itself, can have meaning, regardless of whatever does or does not follow? well they have a pretty fucking tall order on their hands.
if it does have a meaning, and it is something ineffable, i.e. something mysterious about which we know nothing, then that's not a good thing at all. unknowing servants to an unknown purpose; molecules making up nuts and bolts in a machine built to do god-knows-what. and what meaning does that machine even have? what kind of meaning could it have? we get so lost in hypotheticals, each stage of which serves to destroy any lingering titbits of value in our being alive.
life is what you make of it? no, it isn't. good and bad fortune bestow themselves upon the good and the bad alike with no concern for desert. that's why people like to believe in heaven and hell in the first place - justice for the people who didn't get what they ought to have done. you can try and make life something, but sadly none of us is powerful enough to control the chaotic randomness of human and of natural affairs. perhaps people find that idea contentious, so i won't dwell on it. life can still be what you make of it, so long as you learn to weather storms, to navigate the tempestuous see, can't it? well, no. the world exists independently of you. your life is something that takes place therein, adhering strictly to its rules. whatever meaning you ascribe to your life must resonate beyond your own skull - it must hold to be actually true. but it isn't, you're just positing one for yourself. that isn't meaning. that's just a set of goals.
put it this way. let's say you believe your life has meaning if you can effect positive changes. most people would be happy with that. but do you know what happens to changes? they get changed too, over time. the consequences of the most benevolent of actions can, over time, be disastrous. it is rather myopic to talk about 'meaning' and then remain ignorant of the plight of humans who exist in a time period that just happens to differ to yours. even this is quite a cynical way to speak of things, i acknowledge that. just because you can't know how your actions will affect anything doesn't mean you shouldn't do them, right? but i'm not arguing that you shouldn't do them. i absolutely believe that it is of paramount importance to attempt to effect changes. that is what humans do. it is important. but not meaningful. what really changes, ask yourself? have we abolished misogyny after thousands of years? what about war? suffering? oppression? general ignorance? maybe we haven't abolished these things, but perhaps we've made them better than before, right? right? we have democracy now, it is all fairer, the people have power now, feudalism is dead, gone are the days of conquest, replaced with international diplomacy, life is safer and more comfortable for everyone, hence the flourishing population levels. there are, in fact, countless millions of positive changes that have occurred over time. there are, of course, new and often more terrible problems to replace the ones we solve, however. it is an endless battle, to create a better world, and any success is inevitably shortlived given the volatile nature of people and their environment. change is not meaningful. it is important. but not meaningful. when the earth tumbles into the black hole created by the burned out sun and every last record of our history is swallowed up into nothing, all endeavour will be rendered futile. even before that, when we all die out in however many tens or thousands or millions of years, everything we achieved and changed and were will exist only as interesting frames of reference to any intelligent beings that might inhabit the planet after us.
it is not meaningful. meaning is a weird fantasy. it doesn't add anything to the human experience. if anything, it detracts from it. when we have to justify meaning, we have to talk about ultimate futility, and if we don't, then we're not really talking about meaning at all. what do we really want our actions to mean? i'm not sure we really have any actual idea.
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