T |
When someone falls in love or breaks up with a lover, the gossip mills churn, and the surrounding environment becomes a more interesting place to dwell. But when a couple is happy and doing well, or when a person fears intimacy and lives as a hermit, the story isn't worth telling. Their friends feel safe but bored and soon seek excitement in drugs.
The concept of "happily ever after" is a recurring one in Western culture, perhaps best exemplified by our idea of "Heaven." It is presented as a bland ordinariness, a coma of satisfaction perhaps akin to the Hindu state of Nirvana. But within my own paradigm, such a state must be resisted at all costs. It is death. I want to save that state,
Happiness, you see, isn't happiness without something to compare it to. If I was "happy" all the time, then my mildest downturn in spirits would have to understudy for my greatest misery. I'd soon find them as unbearable as any other misery I've endured.
Misery is to evil as happiness is to goodness.
Meanwhile, there is Hitler himself, presented as the ultimate evil the world has ever known. It's a blaspheme against our culture to consider him endowed with any humanity whatsoever. What is easily ignored by history is the fact that Hitler had no more of a role in the evil of Nazism than the nation that carried it out. And how can a whole nation be evil if humankind isn't itself evil? I'm sure I have been good friends with people -honest, caring tender people- who, given the charisma and the times, would surely have plugged right into Hitler's role, and history would have ended up the same. Should I hate those people? Should I hate humanity?
I |
Still, I wonder, what happens when the news isn't so good?
I've sort of been unprepared for actually having a sex life, if you know what I mean. So today at the Seven Day Junior, I picked up some condoms along with a six of Beast Ice and a little container of machine oil (for my squeaky bike). The cashier held up the oil and condoms to show a friend and said, "Now this is the combination." I insisted, "But no...my bike is squeaking!"
B |
Matthew Hart was up, hanging out with Monster Boy and Deya. To save her job as a Country Club hostess, Angela has moved to a later shift and now comes to Kappa Mutha Fucka at 2am every morning. Matthew has changed his schedule accordingly; he takes a nap at about the same time I take my prework nap so he'll be up and rested when Angela gets off work. I never see Angela at all anymore; she comes in while I'm sleeping and leaves while I'm sleeping and hangs out while I'm at work.
Here's another journal to recommend, the very aptly-named Going Through the Motions. This guy has an amazing ability to string together choppy little sentences full of simple, bland observations seemingly calculated specifically not to enlighten. Gabby was the first to bring this journal to my attention, Alan of heinovision the second. Alan says this guy is "damn weird, whether he wants to admit it or not." There is something vaguely surreal going on here, I'm only now realizing. But it took Alan to chase it out so I could finally see it.
Get a sense of what I was like exactly eight years ago and one year ago today.
1A full explanation of this relationship can be found in my August 21st entry.