Free Form Friday

I am not having a good day.  In fact, it's been pretty bad.





When things go wrong like this, the mind can stray and furcate into dreams and fantasies.  Sometimes they are about revenge, the retribution you'd like to take on whomever brought such awfulness upon you.  Then you yourself would be wrong in doing so, wouldn't you?  Because even in these wistful dreams themselves, we still retain responsibility?  Or do we?



Are we good?  Are we evil?  The head can spin.  I don't get us.  And therefore by the transitive property of algebra, I don't get me.
Why?
Why do I do any of this?  "Chase after your dreams, paddle towards that distant shore," I've heard people say. These "dreams" so many people refer to, usually Americans with their fat guts stuffed full of Disney movies, they can become nightmares all too easily when they serve only to haunt and to taunt.  To hang on the horizon and dance like a teasing whore, "you can't have me."  Like the Boss asks: "Is a dream a lie if it don't come true or is something worse?"



It's all enough to drive you mad, make you think about that "final solution."  Like Nietzsche says: "The thought of suicide is a powerful solace: by means of it one gets through many a bad night."  Don't worry.  He never did it.  And I have no immediate plans to either.  But ask yourself this: are you already entombed and don't quite realize it?  Are you spending eight hours a day doing something you thoroughly loathe because it's what you have to do to survive?  There are people who would say that you are fortunate to do so.  I would say you're trapped.





"I hate people."  You've heard me say it plenty of times around these parts. "So you hate all people?" you might ask and be right in doing so.  In which case I'd have to answer "of course not all" and then dig myself out with a quote from Linus Van Pelt: "I love mankind.  It's people I can't stand."  I hate their ignorance, their narcissism, their warped sense of value in the world. It's enough to make me gnash my teeth in rage.  It cannot be forgotten, however, that we are capable of extraordinary things as well.  Acts of great compassion and beauty.

There are things that are definitely right and definitely wrong.  For example, I believe we can pop "genocide" onto the stack of "definitely wrong."  Such easy determinations are rare, I believe.  It's frequently not so black and white.  It's just one smudgy, smeared, wall of gray. "Good will conquer evil," I've always been told.  It was easier to believe that in grade school while watching Star Wars.

Maybe that's just it.  I...and perhaps the rest of you, gentle readers...are your own Darth Vader.  We're all really Yoda but there's that Sith Lord in all of us.  Just depends to what degree.  Might even all depend on what kind of day you've had.  Look at Anakin Skywalker.  What really set him apart from the Jedi and sent him on that downward spiral?  Really, it was just one or two bad days.  I've had plenty of bad days and done plenty of questionable things.  Why didn't I ever go that far into the deepest end of the pool?  Maybe I just didn't have a bad enough day.  Because it's in all of us to do so.  Yin and Yang.  The dot of black in the half of white. 



What else can bring out the bad?  I think Carl Jung hit it on the head: "Our blight is ideologies — they are the long-expected Antichrist!"  Just flip on any news channel.  Listen to the rhetoric from the left and from the right as they argue.  No, more like bicker.  Once "belief" in entrenched, people are capable of doing horrible things.  And all the while they may still believe that they are in the right.  Yet as Hemingway said, "Being against evil doesn't make you good."

So hands up.  Why should we even bother?  I wish I had a good answer to that one.  Right now I don't.  You might call it nihilism, I call it exhaustion.  Where is this "hope" I'm supposed to have?  Or is it just another four-letter word like "love?"  Again, I have no words of hope the way I feel today.  Instead, I'll carry on like The Terminator.  Pieces of me blown off, torn to shreds.  But still moving forward.  Still going and going and going.  Hoping to reach that distant shore.  I probably never will.  But the delusion...perhaps even the insanity...of having hope acts as the electrical current of the AED that keeps my necrotic tissue moving.







Graymalkin: "I think it's kind of funny, I think it's kind of sad. The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had."





So stare into that abyss that is your own soul.  If you have the fortitude, that is.  Examine all that you are...or the lack thereof as the case may be.  Look at all you've done wrong and really see it for perhaps the first time. And hope for an end. Hope to go home.





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