I kind of miss being apathetic.
I mean, not really. I would rather be alive and in pain than numbly content. That contentment might seem like a good deal, but it comes at a terrible price.
Because if you can’t feel the bad things, you can’t feel the good things either. And people need nourishment in their lives, not just a lack of toxins.
Man (and woman) cannot live on safety alone.
That is what taught me that there are things far worse than pain, like being dead inside, and that the cold circuit of the brain cannot sustain a healthy mood by itself.
So I don’t truly miss my apathy. It’s just a thought that passes through my mind from time to time when I am feeling overwhelmed by all that jangling chaos inside my head.
Nowadays, nihilism has replaced apathy. I’ve gone from not caring whether I lived or died to defensively declating that I don’t give a shit about anything as a way to overpower all those crazy voices in my head.
Because seriously. Fuck that shit,. All those voices of multifaceted aversions and emotional perversions and the million and ten neuroses all shrieking for my attention at the slightest provocation can go die in nuclear fire, because I am sick and tired of their crap and no longer willing to put up with it.
I’ve tried to be smart and civilized about the whole thing by listening to what the voices are trying to tell me, and I am not giving up on that, but before any of that can happen, I need some fucking peace and quiet in my head so I can think.
And, more importantly, feel.
As you might have guessed, I am still mad at the world. And my life. And life in general. And everyone who ever hurt me. And the list goes on and on,.
And that’s fine. I am not looking to calm down. This rolling rage of mine is just fine by me. It’s burning through prodigous amounts of the random bullshit and stinkingly septic psychological scar tissue clogging up my pipes, and I could not be happier about that.
So fine, I will stay mad. I’ll stay mad till Xmas if that’s what it takes. I’m enjoying the feeling of being truly alive that comes with the rage.
It might not be easy or fun, but at least it keeps me warm for once.
I recently realized this about the upcoming American midterms : I feel about them like I would feel about upcoming major surgery.
A surgery that could very well cure the terrible illness that has been devastating me for the last two years, but could also do nothing or even make things worse.
So I view it with a kind of sick anticipation. It’s a potent cocktail of hope, fear, dread, and an overwhelming sense of immensity of events verging on awe.
We live in interesting times. These are the days that will feature prominently in the history books of the future. So much is in flux and the pernicious influence of the old crazy mean and stupid of the world being manipulated by pedagogues into their preferred state of outright terror into voting in people just as horrible as themselves all over the world continues to erode the values upon which civilization is based.
The real ones, not the bullshit panoply of prejudices and public neuroses the social conservatives call the foundational values of civilization.
It’s ironic. They are quite right when they sense that civilization is under attack byt eht forces of chaos and barbarism.
What they miss is that it’s people like them who are doing it. People who are freaked out by the changes they can no longer absorb and have fallen into the trap of thinking it is possible to turn back the clock to a time when they understood what was going on.
And sure, they weren’t filled with bliss back then either. But try telling THEM that. The long lense of nostalgia can make even the worst of times seem like a simpler and more innocent time when life was better.
Myself included. Although my most intense nostalgia is for my preschool (and pre rape) days, when my mother was still home taking care of me and I felt loved and cared for and safe. When I was a little redheaded kid with oodles of natural charm and cute as a heck and a knack for beguiling and bemusing everyone I met.
Things from that era can unleash tsunami level waves of nostalgia in me. I think the nostalgia is all the more potent for my having suppressed it for so long.
Why did I suppress it? Because when I was a child, I saw people claiming that the days of their childhood were the happiest days of their lives, even when they clearly weren’t.
And my childhood was absolutely horrible. So I decided that I would never fall pray to this madness called nostalgia that made people think things were far better than they had ever been.
Basically, I said to myself that if I ever make the mistake of thinking these were the best days of my life, shoot me in the fucking head, because either I have lost my freaking mind or my life has gone so very poorly that death would be a mercy.
I can see the ignorance in that view now. I still feel the same way about my childhood and that is unlikely to ever change.
But I can see how making such a decision is an example of the exact kind of dehumanizing emotional brutality based on, perhaps, an excess of confidence in my own judgment that has left me such a fucked up adult to this very day.
Kids shouldn’t be left to raise themselves. Even if they are crazy smart, talk like an adult, and seem like they know everything already.
Because despite all that, I was still just a kid.
And I was all alone.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.