I Doubt…

Sometimes, when I am very tiered or merely feeling existential, I’m given to periods of doubt.
We try so hard to be liked, to be respected, we try for hours and hours everyday to achieve this. But how are we to know?
So I doubt.
Do people actually like me or are they merely tolerating me. I can’t know. I shouldn’t care. There is a part of me that knows this however it is the part of me that does the being tiered and at moments like this it is forced to acknowledge that the world has never, and will never, be the way it should be.
And so I sit and appeal to the God of the modern world, this creature of the sky that is invisible yet all knowing and omnipresent.
The internet.
Us.
My fellow man, as it were.
When I wish to speak of the things that cannot be said to a human face I turn to you. And together we are alone in the cold dark places of my mind where I doubt my ability to ever truly succeed. And I wonder if you are here doubting too.
Do we all do this? Are other people like me?
More things I can never know.
How typically human it is to be fascinated, not by the incredible things we have so far discovered, but by what we do not yet know.
Rowling said ‘it is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness’ but I am not sure this is true. Don’t we fear one day knowing that we where right to worry we were doomed. Isn’t it worlds better to know you failed that to sit and wonder if that little voice in your head was on to something.
The greatest tortures are suffered in broad daylight when the monsters can see what they’re doing. In the cold dark places we are safe.

the Way the Future Works

It’s tragic isn’t it? The things we leave behind while growing up. The things that become remote and irrelevant dispite once being so clear and bright. I was just reading a little of Glen Dunken’s ‘I Lucifer’, which, if you have nothing to do and a reasonable flexible sense of morality, I highly recommend, and I came to a passage which I really felt I just had to comment on to the spaceless, un-judgmental void we call the internet.
He was describing the relationship of a small child to a balloon his mother had brought him which had inevitable escaped his grasp and floated off into oblivion and the thing is, I remember that. I haven’t thought about it since I don’t know when but I remember helium balloons.
As a child I never blamed the universe at large when I would look up and see my new toy escaping me. I always understood that what was happening was my fault. I had been holding it. I had let go. Now it was gone.
So I tried harder. And with time a practice and strict attention I learned to hold onto my balloon. I even have memories of cheating god by tying the string round my wrist so it could never, ever, get away. Then I would get my balloon home and put it in my room where there was a ceiling and I would watch it slowly shrivel and die against my ceiling.
And after that the challenge was gone and I stopped asking my parents for helium balloons. Years later, as part of my formal education, I watched what happens to the helium balloons that escape small children.
Funny thing closure.
When I was about five my family moved far away from my grandparents and cousins and so every second weekend or so we would rive for two hours to go and see them. My brother and I would sit it the back and ask ‘are we nearly there yet?’ and then, maybe one day or maybe over a course of them, it became a sign of weakness to ask that question, so we would sit and try to see if we could outlast the other, and then there came the incredible time we both lasted all the way to our grandparents. And then there came the time this wasn’t incredible any more. Neither of us has asked in years. I don’t remember who won. I don’t think he does either.
Just after that move my mother made a doll for my sixth birthday that looked just like me, so I gave her my middle name and I played with her and loved her for years. And one day, I don’t remember how old I was, I realised that this would always be so. One day I would but my doll away in a box and forget her and probably never play with her again.
And the thought was so sad it almost made me cry.
And then I had another though, of a certain indisputable truth that I knew to be true that and can attest to now.
When that day came I wouldn’t care, it wouldn’t be a sad thought, it would just be life.
That’s how I know the world will never end, that dispite global warming and world war three and over population the end of the world will never come.
Because by the time these things happen there not the end of the world anymore, they’re just life, they’re just everyday life.
I can’t decide if that’s a blessing or a curse.

Basically Good

It is a sad truth of humanity, and perhaps our greatest shame, but we are not born good; we aren’t.
Children may be sweet and soft and small and precious beyond measure but they are not born good. Children are not born kind and do not inicaially care about others. They do not want to share they’re toys and cannot empathise with other children. When you try to hug them only to have them run away and you make a sad face to sho then they have hurt your feelings they simply look confused.
Humanity is not born with kindness or love. Every religion has its own take on this phenomenon. Christianity calls it original sin but by whatever name it is the same sad truth. We may not be born guilty of evil but we are not born good.
That it learned.
We teach our children to share they’re toys with one another and not to hit or bite. We teach pre-schoolers that bullying is bad and that if you see a person hurt another person you should tell somebody. We teach our teenagers that racism is wrong and homophobia is naïve and that we must accept refugees into the country dispite any potential disadvantages it may cause to current Australians because that it the right thing to do. To help one another. To share these ‘boundless plains’ of our. To protect one another and not to make others feel different, unloved or unwanted.
We fail time and time again.
We put people of different beliefs in concentration camps and steal the children of other cultures. We rape and abuse and murder and then we stop. We make peace. We apologise and we continue this endless struggle to find the right way to live. The children teach the old that words like ‘nigger’ and ‘poppy’ and worse then any cuss word and then our culture simply forgets them. Daughter’s tell their mother’s they can dress how they like because their body is their own and they have a right to be proud of it. This beautiful that is not for anyone else. Woman say that men should have more rights to their children because ‘courts almost always side with the mother’ and men tell one another to ‘have some respect.’
We teach ourselves to be good and kind and generous. We invent words like morality and ethics; we invent the ideas they describe. So no, maybe we weren’t made this way but we chose it. We chose to be good.
I rather think that’s worth more, don’t you?

Fabricated Happiness

There are times when, in the words of Ferris Buller, I ‘stop and look around.‘ They are few and far between. I have learned I do not really like looking. Because when one looks at the world one is inevitably faced with a question. What is the point?
I don’t mean to sound existential but what is it we ware all trying to achieve here? You word hard at school then you work hard at work. Are you make a lot of money with no time to enjoy it. And a lot of people like you because you can get them places they want to go but that isn’t really friendship now is it?
Or you don’t. You flunk out of school and spend the best years of you life to stoned to see them getting away from you. And then at some point, provided you don’t O.D. or come to some other nasty end, you ‘pull you head out of your ass’ as the saying goes, and work a low pay job just until you get your big break that never comes. You make plans for things to get better that never go right and you spend your life wishing you have been smart and worked hard like your boss who isn’t really your friend but could get you places.
So when I look, when I stop and take stock of the world and my place in it, when I ask myself that all important question one might think I am at the very bottom of the pit.
Strangely I am not. Despite the fact that I am doomed to misery no matter what I do I do not despair. Quote Glen Duncan ‘I do not despair.’
Because, whilst our brain are hardwired to spend an average amount of time miserable, we are also programmed to spend as average amount of time happy. Our odds are not great, but they are not bad. The rich person who has worked hard may be happy knowing that if they wanted they could spend the day sleeping in and the poor person who has not may be happy thinking that they are going to work hard and get rich.
Are both know they are kidding themselves. Somewhere deep inside they do.
But their happy places, despite being fabricated, can fabricate genuine happiness.
So the answer I propose to that all important question is simply this.
Trick you mind.
Beat the odds.
Take this life we have for no apparent reason and work to make you dream, weather achievable or no, real.
And in those time when you stop and look around do not forget.
The happiness was real.

Death and Reality

They say that reality is a stream, or a construct, or an opinion. I tend to think of it like a book. But I guess that metaphor doesn’t really imply the colour I intend. Reality is by no means black and white.
Hhmm…
But regardless of the metaphor with which I say it what I’m saying is that time is linear and that therefore the perception of it we call reality is linear. There is so much to be perceived at any given moment, so much entering our sensory memory but only a fraction of that make it to short-term memory so that by the time you retrieve a face you haven’t seen in two years from you long-term memory it is nothing but a vague impression. That day, that time, that chance is gone forever and no amount of wishing, no amount of hope, no amount of daydreams concerning the invention of time travel and its unlikely applications will change anything.
That past is utterly untouchable.
I guess it makes me wonder about death. I gave up the fear of dying when I was a child, I still experience the usual arousal, more commonly known as adrenaline, when standing in very high places or similar but that actual desire not to die is no longer there. Maybe I just got tiered. I do feel sad at the idea of leaving things I want to do unfinished or that what I have done so far would be useless. It seems cruel to have to experience VCE and get nothing out of it. But this would is such a dense thing. I used to think I as just doing life wrong but I’ve come to the conclusion that the world discussed in literature exists there only.
Whoever said man could not improve on what God had made never read John Green.
I fear Oblivion, (to quote the aforementioned deity). It seems to me infinitely better to exist, to experience, then do vanish.
I could quote to you many different pieces of almost substantial evidence that might almost prove that there is something more, but the truth is there is no real evidence. If there were don’t you think you’d no about it? And yet I hope. I don’t want go out. I want to be more than a collection of atoms held together by natural selection. And while I know that my wanting can change nothing. That time and reality are linear and the past is lost to us. That the universe does not care how I feel. Still I continue to want. I stand naked against all of science, against all the laws of nature, a child trying to lay siege to Mount Olympus, and I continue to want. And despite my knowledge of science, despite all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Dare I say I hope…

Sitting in the Dark

I guess there must be something deeply appealing to me about the concept of talking into the void of cyber space because I can’t think of any other reason I’d be doing this. Why does anyone do this? Talk to strangers on the internet about there lives instead of the real people in those lives. I guess there a certain comfort in the idea of friends that can be turned off at will.
I’ve decided for obvious reasons not to tell you who I am or where I live. Or why I’m sitting I n the dark typing out a message that few to nobody will ever read. All you need to know about me is that I’m a black hole shaped like a person. A silhouette. But I’m not going to try say that’s why I named my blog that. I can be honest when I’m alone. I named my blog-website-whatever silhouette because it’s hard to spell and I was thinking about it once a while ago…
But it makes a good metaphor doesn’t it. That’s the truth about literature. Your teacher swill tell you that Shakespeare was trying to convey this or that but nine times out of ten the writer meant something totally different to what you are reading, this is especially true for Shakespeare and when you start to take production context into account you’ll understand why.
The art is mine the meaning yours.

Sillouette

A word nobody can spell. but I guess that’s kinda the point isn’t it?