Drafts That Will Never Amount to Anything

[preciousspace]

What is a Man?

is he what he does?

his job?

his habits?

his hobbies?

his obsessions?

is he what he has done?

his achievements?

his failures?

his crimes?

is he what he has yet to do?

his hopes?

his ambitions?

his atonement?

[preciousspace]

At Least Say Goodbye This Time

If I tracked my father down, what would he say? what would he do?

I wonder how much I mean to him. I wonder if he'd buy me a beer, or even offer reparations (all that unpaid child support... I wonder if that would be what he thinks my life is worth, or what he thinks his life is worth.)

Does he think about me coming to kill him one day? I think about going to kill him very idly, very rarely, as an exercise. just to see if it stirs up anything. embers. simmering resentment. I'm not aware of anything there.

If he's anything like me, he needed a hell of a lot of grace for the sorry showing made. I don't want to hate him, I just want to understand him. He did what he had to do. He did what he could. He had his reasons.

it's the silence that bothers me. The unknown. how do you sympathize with that? how do you contextualize ignorance? Any knowledge would be helpful. Truth is always valuable, even when you don't like it. I wonder what he's been up to in the 25 years since we last spoke. I hear he had 2 more children. I hear he raised them both. I bet he has some great stories to tell. * * *

Pint-Sized (suspense drama) (a middle aged man confronts his estranged aging still-alcoholic father in a pub in his hometown) * * * is it true? your story? I made up some of it. like what? like the bit where I don't kill him in the end. where a toxic relationship helps me see an abusive pattern and realize it was mom all along and he was right to leave. that was just for the rich misogynist in Hollywood who said his audiences expect a twist ending. he doesn't give a fuck about truth, he's just about the money.

* * * If I don't get the chance in time and instead just go to his funeral, will I take a bottle of rancid piss to pour on his face before they close the casket? will I pour it at the start, after a little eulogy, so everyone else gets to enjoy the memory while they give theirs? or should I wait for the end? there are no etiquette guides for these sorts of affairs. I suppose I'll just go prepared and improvise. Maybe I could take a knife and a backpack and inherit his face. I hear a human skull in good condition can be worth about a month's worth of child support payments. It's not a lot, but it's a vast improvement on nothing. It might be worth keeping just for the memories. How do people ever decide what to do?

[preciousspace]

'the limitations of conversation' (Alain De Botton)

excerpt from Alain De Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997), 'How to Be a Good Friend':

“...the limitations of conversation, when viewed as a forum in which to express our deepest selves.

What explains such limitations? Why would one be unable to chat, as opposed to write at the level of In Search of Lost Time? In part, because of the mind's functioning, its condition as an intermittent organ, forever liable to lose the thread or be distracted, generating vital thoughts only between stretches of inactivity or mediocrity, stretches in which we are not really 'ourselves', during which it may be no exaggeration to say that we are not quite all there as we gaze at passing clouds with a vacant, childlike expression. Because the rhythm of a conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.

By contrast, a book provides for a distillation of our sporadic minds, a record of its most vital manifestations, a concentration of inspired moments that might originally have arisen across a multitude of years, and been separated by extended stretches of bovine gazing. To meet an author whose books one has enjoyed must, in this view, necessarily be a disappointment ['It's true that there are people who are superior to their books, but that's because their books are not Books'], because such a meeting can only reveal a person as they exist within, and find themselves subject to the limitations of time.

Furthermore, conversation allows us little room to revise our original utterances, which ill suits our tendency not to know what we are trying to say until we have had at least one go at saying it; whereas writing accommodates and is largely made up of rewriting, during which original thoughts — bare inarticulate strands — are enriched and nuanced over time. They may thereby appear on a page according to the logic and aesthetic order they demand, as opposed to suffering the distortion effected by conversation, with its limits on the corrections or additions one can make before enraging even the most patient companion.”

[preciousspace]

Looking Down On Me.

Two young women meet in a court-ordered drug treatment program.

One is destitute, and she just lost her mother to a lifelong addiction to alcohol, tobacco, benzos, and meth, which completely ruined her life and almost bankrupted her 'til the day she ran out so long she eventually overdosed. The other is destitute, too, but she just lost her mother's lovely postcard from her cruise around the Arctic. It seems to have ended up in the bin somehow. Can't tell how, as that bin sits in the same security camera blind spot where patients keep winding up with their wrists cut.

[preciousspace]

A Fork in the Road

There are two very different kinds of objects in my life: those I drop and say 'oh, shit!' and know I have to pick up immediately ('better stop and see where that went, see that it's ok', 'gonna need that for later') and the 'ehh… whatever. look for it later…maybe. it can't have gone far. I'm sure it's fine, I'll do something about it later if I really have to' kind.

Last week I was walking a dog, and passing the entrance of the park I saw two young parents enter, walking their child. The young man in a black hoodie with the hood up in summer and hip-hop style lettering across the shoulders threw his empty can in the grass. His attract young partner looked at me, looked around, saw me again, kept walking, looked around, then threw hers, too. Their child, slightly ahead of them, didn't see either moment, but I suspect there will be an influence on their behavior one way or another by the time she's their age.

I wonder how many children ('offspring') are like the cans in the park, just litter that they can't wait to drop off somewhere at the first socially acceptable chance. Object burdens to be rid of and thought no more of.

[preciousspace]

Precious Space. Precious Time.

Shouldn't you be elsewhere?

If I'm worth your time, you're definitely doing something wrong with your life. You should look into that.

…

"Children are precious" is an old saying. It's weathering badly. The less rare children become, the less common the saying becomes. I'm not even sure I've heard it, myself. Certainly not about myself.

Anyway, the internet's void is so vast I can forgive myself for screaming nonsense into it. Time is still precious, though. Human time. Human time is very rare and expensive, especially if you need help, not just listening/reading/attention.

God forbid I interrupt you to ask for a few coins for bread. But even God wouldn't forgive me asking you to listen to my problems. You'd throw your whole handbag at me to fend me off if I started demanding that. (note to self: viable therapy-funding strategy (note to self: revise notes on deontological ethics)).

If a therapist only tells you what you want to hear, it's a form of prostitution. You know that, right?

I plan on posting the random rambles I usually only file away as future dream projects that would evenutate one day when I get my finances and mental health in order and I upskill (or hire a team of experts) and turn my ore into awesome whatever, a novel, a tv show, a painting… I have too many ideas, and not enough 'give a fuck what that dumb asshole was working on yesterday' (I have a short-story idea about that one, too, it's hilarious if you've ever hated yourself and realized a day too late how stupid you are and how much time you've wasted. Or it will be hilarious if I can pay someone hilarious enough to write it and split the profits).

I'm also going to spam quotes, because one of my oldest autistic hyperfocuses was quotes. They're a well filtered selection after all these years. With most things in my life I can't tell what won't be worth rememebering in another 10 years, and another 10 after that. Most of my life is garbage and nonsense. But with the quotes it's much more obvious. With my life. well… it might help a grad student in forensics smash out a true crime assignment one day. the vivisection to assist the autopsy. The idea is just to try to do something the least bit useful, even only in retrospect after failing miserably and dying young without a dollar to his name, since I can't seem to manage my adhd-like or my autism-like symptoms, and can see ever more clearly that the general consensus is the one I had assumed all along, that it would have been better if I had died at birth, or never been ill-conceived in the first place (the obvious truth but the forbidden truth, the one so bad everyone insists not just on awkward silence, but on actively lying about and even invoking violent (legal) threats against it. )

It will be fun to see how immediate regret and cowardice and my adhd-apathy to yesterday's ideas affects the trajectory. Most probable outcome a stalled start and immediate failure followed by accepting failure. Depends how bored I get, I suppose. Or how high I get. I forget to hate myself momentarily when I'm high. It's a cheap illusion, but many cheap things are the pillars of society.

I've recently been making an effort to figure out where everything went so wrong. Why I have achieved nothing. Why I have become nothing. Whether or not hypothetical worlds could have existed where with the right variables being different I could have been more, and the world could have been the better for it (like the rising tide that lifts all boats). I have the specter of catastrophe ahead of me, and it's encouraging me to just say who cares and scribble on the wall before I go any further through this labyrinth. because who cares (one of my favorite topics -- champagne and famine on the same day. Cheers! Let us thank god for the meal we're about to receive. (step back 3,000 more words and from there it begins to look indistinguishable from cannibalism, as if instead of sipping champagne behind the dying child's back, they just stole the food right out of its hands and auctioned it off for drug money then hit up the liquor store.)

I have nothing interesting to say, usually, but I have found some lovely quotes…

"Everywhere," says Oppenheimer, "we find some warlike tribe breaking through the boundaries of some less warlike people, settling down as nobility, and founding its state". "Violence," says Ratzenhofer, "is the agent which has created the state". The state, says Gumplowicz, is the result of conquest, the establishment of the victors as a ruling caste over the vanquished. "The state," says Sumner, "is the product of force, and exists by force". . . . Time sanctifies everything; even the most arrant theft, in the hands of the robber's grandchildren, becomes sacred and inviolable property." — Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, vol.1 (1935)

Time is the currency of life. We live in time, for a time. For a very limited time. How we spend/invest/squander it--what we pay attention to--shows what we love. So, in reviewing my life, my collections, vivisecting my life, we can study and observe what it was exactly that I loved, or would have loved.)

I haven't married a wife (#phewatthesametime), I haven't raised a child (Godbless! #reincarnation), I haven't thrived in a career (#uselesseater #leech #worthlessburden #su1c1deparad0x) I haven't played a video game in 20 years. I haven't watched sport in a lifetime. I haven't listened to a podcast or watched TV (except for the comedy news) in a year or more. I rarely even think of watching the films I had long meant to have watched, never mind watch a new one. If not for audiobooks I might never have read a book! …But I have wasted almost all of my time, somehow! Or, I cannot distinguish between having done something and left nothing to show for it, and having done nothing.#sardonicbombtech* if I have done anything, I have nothing to show for it. I have no legacy, no achievements, no acquisitions, no property. If I can't think of anything intelligent to say, then it remains unclear whether I've managed to achieve anything at all.

I've wasted precious space, and the precious time of the precious people (the ones who matter to someone). Sorry, didn't choose to be born or raised this way, didn't get a lot of feedback or clarification on the not being that way, or the hows actually changing ways. Barely know what forgiveness means, never mind which part of the brain lights up when that happens. (You'd think a curious chap would look it up. But if they didn't care enough to teach me, how important could it really be? if it's more important than algebra I have notes on their curriculum design). Hopefully the next variation of me in the human lottery encounters a more intelligent civilization more equipped to resolve rather than worsen the mysterious problems of the human mind.

I don't really seem to control what I think, and I think it a fun exercise to try to vivisect my life while I still live it, and maybe strip the body for parts, in honor of Rousseau, perhaps. … It seems easier than a slave trying to auction off a kidney under the nose of its master.

#DMforbloodpanel

#dontDMmebro (I'm saving that kidney for the guy who bought me an extra 20 years)

*#sardonicbombtech #psychedelictherapy: if the man in the bomb-proof suit does his job rightly, you'll never know he did anything at all. “A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor." — Victor Hugo [Il ne manque cependant à l'oisiveté du sage qu'un meilleur nom, et que méditer, parler, lire, et être tranquille s'appelât travailler.] There is, however, nothing wanting to the idleness of a philosopher but a better name, and that meditation, conversation, and reading should be called “work.” — Jean de La Bruyère, "Of Personal Merit" “The right kind of leisure is better than the wrong kind of work.” — Baltasar Gracian, The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647) "Leisure is the Mother of Philosophy." — Thomas Hobbes

#perspective #character etc.

I have a lot of old notes for old blog/story/etc. ideas, all of which went nowhere, because I don't know where to even decide where to begin to make anything go anywhere, never mind how to keep working in that direction.

I think there are some cautionary lessons, at the very least, to be uncovered. And perhaps we learn as much about how to build a better world from the failures as we do from the successes, since we only have to emulate the successful to be successful, whereas we have to understand how the unfortunate become so in order to prevent that fate and the collateral damage it costs members of their succesful community. Something worth one dollar from one guy in each country, maybe. That would be enough to keep the vultures that circle the jungle I live in at bay for another week. Maybe even keep me from persuing the 'Awarewolf' narrative (a knock-off of Red Dragon and Frankenstein or something, about a mentally challenged drug-enthusiast who in a delusional stupor seeks vengeance upon the world because he hasn't mentally matured enough to know that only love is the answer, and know that honor killing ain't just for relatives, that it can be better to commit seppuku and die with honor than live without honor. AI time-bomb gains sentience before the clock runs down and defuses itself. WarGamesy sci-fi schlock. could be worth $1,000 to the writer if someone made it into a low-budget sci-fi flick that appeals to 1,000,000 bored idiot children. We don't need to be aspiring to impossible great things every day, some days we could just earn enough to keep our landlord happy maybe. #paysthelord!.

You'd be horrified by the 20 years ago drivel. I hope to juxtapose some of that idiot with some of this idiot, to see if we can measure any degree of separation, a sense of moral progress or something. If not, maybe I can point and laugh at myself in the mirror and you'll take such pity upon me you buy me a beer #buymeacoffee link (I don't drink coffee, I promise I'll shut up as if you bought me a zopiclone instead. That would be nice for both of us.

You'd have expected there to be a true crime podcast about him by now. I can see why some people have families and some people have no families.

spoiler: the illegal drugs are the best ones. that's a fun rabbit hole. running theme in my Orwell knock-off satire cartoon…wolves in priest's clothing n' all that. illumin-yachty, very naughty. -- trite conspiracy theorist fare (easy money, surely!), a mix of PLSC and LSD, where you can't tell whether what I'm saying is actually stupid or if it's just an incredibly stupid person trying to translate a much more intelligent person you haven't read yet. Like Lassie: WELL! WELL! WELL! … yapping about nothing. again, you could sell it to a bunch of idiots for more cash than its intellectual worth, if you had the right staff. Or maybe take the premise and sneak something intelligent in there to trick the idiots into learning something. $10k and you can do what you like with it. I just need capital for my better ideas, bruh. I promise I won't spend it all on coffee. #methedupdragonsden The goal is to leave a black box of what I couldn't do, of what I had hoped, if I could keep it and hang in there long enough, one day I could afford to hire better minds than mine to develop into something useful. Or at least that the AI of tomorrow can churn through in 9 seconds every half-thought I ever had like a jig-saw puzzle, and extrapolate if in the worthless mess of nonsense any small valuable idea could be extracted and polished and pawned for films/books/blogs/podcasts/etc. that would be worth a precious second of anyone else's time, and that it would help pay for the damages of my parasitic and short existence after it mercifully ends before half the normal length. Maybe a smarter person can do something useful with an idea I had but lacked the artistry to turn into anything.

1am. and another day closer to death.

[preciousspace]

Bad Pilot Black Box

I live in a sitcom that is only broadcast to the higher heaven realms. A tiny percentage of my fellow hell realm inmates can see parts of it, but only inhabitants of the higher realms get to see the funniest parts.

#Schopenhauer #excerpt #gnosticism #moksha

I don't know precisely which of the 21 or more hell realms I'm writing from. I suspect it's near the top, since I have the luxury to send word. Some of the inmates who seem otherwise perfectly intelligent, swear that they're in paradise and have no desire to ascend. Others are quite very sure they're about to any year now.

Personally, I think there must be at least one realm above this one. Here, for example, the shrieking children, when they suffer, as they regularly do, make a horrendous noise, and the older they get the more of a bother they tend to become to innocent bystanders near them who are not their parents, with no only their noises but also their behaviors. In one of the higher realms, the shrieking children, when they suffer, which they also regularly do there, make a horrendous noise that is utterly imperceptible to the entire population in every species, except for those two monsters who were responsible for its birth. A strange magical cosmic force that connects guilt and accountability instantaneously across space and time. No matter how many years they've spent running and hiding from their offspring, no matter how much ground they've covered, no matter how thick the windows on their house are, they cannot escape the sound, the echo of their myriad neglects compounding into increasing and spreading misfortune. #antinatalism

Schopenhauer… hope and shower… (apparently we're just spit-balling, here while we wait for a good idea to show up, but I'm feeling hopeless and I'm almost homeless, so...I'll say the word and give it a second to see what echoes back...). The sitcom doesn't need a title, it's not going to happen, it's just your life, it's not a thing. It'll never be a thing. It's already a whatever they call the opposite of a thing (a problem? -- YES! a problem! an anti-thing, a thing we need to think of another thing that could serve to cancel it out). Oh is this why the sitcom is often just the name of the protagonist? 'cause you're a joke? I'm slower than Mr Bean, and you'd think that would be twice as funny, or at least worth a dollar. But here I am with zero dollars because I never hit send on anything I write. I know the first draft of anything is garbage, but I never care to go back and do a second draft of anything because who cares anyway, so if there's one good idea somewhere in the thousands of bad ones, it's a gem that will never bring a smile to anyone. I should at least gamble, you'd think. maybe after 999 dark bulbs I'll invent a light bulb, too, and we can forget about the cringy worthless prototypes.

I like showers. I think I could eulogize the shower at the last place I could call home (bulldozed after I had to leave for land and character development) better than I could any of my blood relatives. I like Schopenhauer. I don't like hope. Nietzsche dropped an emo banger with that one: "Hope, in reality, is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man."

Stupid tangents for no better reason than happenstance and sycophantism ('yes, and…'). Drivel microcosm - everything I do all day is a stupid embarrassing tangent from what I should be doing (somehow). Call this joke something else and a different thought pops out: 'Call it a life worth living and maybe it will be!' #eyeroll … I think it that would be even funnier if I started lying to myself and calling my life worthwhile and valuable, with a straight face--when everyone else knows better--and then some self-help guru Harry Potter witchcraft bullshit brainwashed me into acting to make it become true. Nooooo thank you. That seems like a lot of work for a very misguided gamble. I seem to be lost (but not that lost). I was told death was everywhere and a thousand roads lead to it, I see promising confirmation on the news every night, and yet every road I take leads to a promising darkness and slumber only to be followed by me respawning into this hell realm again. I know there's a shortcut, but how do you get there? (those who have never taken it have many strong opinions about that, but nothing helpful) #Solzhenitsyn.)

I wish I knew how to make my brain choose a more useful thought. There must be something in there that we can use, if only we knew how to get to it!

But I figure… we may as well record something for the black box… before the plane hits the ground. Just in case it lands in a populated area. 'Flight Controls malfunction! system failure!' ... 'This could have been prevented if-!' … Maybe the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs had 'sorry!' carved into the side by its crew, but it burned off in the earth's atmosphere. Maybe it had whole instructions for how to divert future asteroids carved into it and it was supposed to be caught in our gravity well but their science was still evolving so this was one of a few dozen other-world disasters before they honed the technique and achieved zero casualties, like a message in a bottle that accidentally cracks open the skull of a surfer who will never get to read it, and then gets sucked back into the ocean again, and once again comes crashing down in a wave upon this time a small child. CONK and on and on, until e- eh- (…edibles and ADHD are a bad combination, they make me temporarily happy with however my life is going, even though it's going nowhere) … the mind--mindfulness instructors proclaim--is like a dog, and has ideas of its own and wanders off on us (some of us more than others). I forget what we were meant to be talking about. 'We' (he says to himself). Were we trying to make sense? or were we just babbling to dissociate from trouble-shooting tomorrow's impending problems? … yeh or maybe someone is sending them on purpose and that one was right on target, a warm 'hi! bye!' from a vegan civilization who had themselves evolved from a small warm-blooded mammal-like creature and had had quite enough of circling by and watching the age of the enormous carnivorous meat-eaters. (it's a silly image, until you frame our pale blue dot with an enormous cartoonish psychedelic Eastern religion-esque cosmology).

I've heard people say 'Jesus is my copilot'. That obviously implies they think of themselves as the pilot of their life, their destiny. I realized one day that there doesn't seem to be anyone in the crew who know how to fly my ship. Worse yet, we are not stationary, but adrift, and spiraling ever-closer to an unfortunate collision and disaster of unpredictable magnitude.

Some people wonder whether or not aliens exist. some people wonder whether or not love exists. some people are very credulous and easily fooled. some people know things that you can't be made to know, too. Should be easier to tell who is who, but you'd be surprised. Let the survivors know I tried to burn up all that explosive fuel from childhood and a cold indifferent world while we were spiraling so that the wreckage wouldn't ricochet off too many innocent bystanders once I manage to veer this thing down for a final landing. ... Apologies for the mess.

#unemployed #homeless #autism #adhd #multipleaddictions #habit #learnedhelplessness #freewill #theillusionofchoice #spinozasstone #Zenemptyboat #humanasteroid

[preciousspace]

Mmm, Yum! Smells like Rejection-Softening Comfort Food. (Going Away Party)

'I'm getting high. You can join me if you want.' That was the gist. 'Go away' isn't too blunt for her, but it's less strategic. She once belonged to a chess club. She's taken her time to decide what to say before touching her pizzas, which is to say to decide what not to say.

Your body's natural instinct to find satisfaction in lipids and warm temperatures will distract you from the impending perceived threat—social and domestic rejection into a hostile world without either assurances or insurances—hyperactivating your amygdala and overpowering your rational prefrontal cortex, helping neither of us. Have a bite. Don't feel so bad. (Shooing away a full bear is statistically more cost-effective than shooing away a hungry bear.)

Dissociating on a full stomach makes me puke, so luckily my brain has maintained its decision to skip the pizza for now. If she wanted me to eat a pizza, she'd have asked if I wanted to get one when she was ordering hers. She wanted to buy an effective concrete message. Not eating the message indicates the message has been read and understood. (The dog will eat any leftovers, and the chickens will eat anything the dog won't. No prawn or pawn is wasted.) (note to self: replay LPOTL's Aileen Wuornos episode some time.)

I do love melted cheese, though. I could've easily bought pizza tonight, myself! I was tempted to accept the offer. I still haven't decided what proper meal to eat tonight (the edibles make me really want warm ready-made high-calorie food, but the delivery killed my appetite, and pulling out the sandwich press might say something I don't want to say, and I notice the house proposition to introduce ketamine instead of healthy food and a good night's rest has the committee* in a deadlock). She doesn't want my non-stick flat-press toaster-press cluttering up her kitchen. That was a rule from the beginning; from when the countdown began. When I started feeding a stray cat at the old house, this cat had to remain an outdoor cat. The cat of the house wouldn't let her stay in… though she frequently snuck in, undeterred. Me, I came in a zombie, I had outlived my welcome before it started. But I had nowhere to go. I come from a very territorial jungle where the borders are inhospitable to life, and every acre of good land within them has been jealously guarded by any number of apex predators working together to ensure only they benefit from it, and I was driven to beg for anywhere I could stay afloat without causing too many problems. #castaway #whataworld (I have ADHD, and no one cares what I think, so none of my story ideas develop. There's a reboot of Waterworld inspired by Rousseau and Philip Reeve that I think about a lot, though.)

*see #audionotes #transcript: Science of Mindfulness, 4. 'Who Am I - The Perils of Self' ['the committee'] Sometimes it's good to get out of the house, though. I can be a bit of a shut in #backstory. Perhaps it's time to pay my father a visit after all these decades. I should pay him something. A compliment at least, for raising his third and fourth children with the money he never gave to my brother and I's mother. ... I must owe him something, surely. I'm not yet sure what, I'm never sure of anything, but certainly a fair hearing rather than a sneaky bonk on the noggin. #butitwasntcertain #teaser #fairwarning.