Status: comes and goes.
Me, My Prussian Blues (and That Guy With the Horns)
The Thoreau Challenge Part 3
“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.” (Aldous Huxley)
So I sat down for an hour and I thought.:
Of course I pursued the religion of solitude before forced to in high school; I'm the most powerful mind I know. And I'll tell you why I did, too.
In the wee, sleepless hours of night between elementary and high school, I found that I hated all human-bred noise. I hated when they spoke, when they laughed, when they sneezed. I hated when they walked in front of me or tried to communicate or in any way contact me or each other. And at lunch, at dinner, when they chewed and made politely worthless inquiry, I would make a very fervent wish that I could somenight tear off my ears and drain out the soft tissues of my brain and replace them with molten gold. Behind my eyes the gold would settle into soft goldenrod sand that glittered and burned on my skull, and I would tip my head in a daze of pain and a scintillating aggregation of gold dust and clotting blood would ooze out of my aural wound to spill down my shoulder.
Sometimes, later, I would imagine I was not the victim of this peace but just a shiny swathe of gold; to pour from my host's poor temple and slip away, that they may not need me again, and be glad to offer some relief. Like a twisted, extra-dimensional sort of self-pity. Sometimes I am the discarded ear. I had a purpose and I was perfect, but not all purposes are wanted and not all perfection is recognized. Most of the time I am the brain, drained from the sovereign cranium till the last vestiges of intellect were shaken loose; because always the ignorant, dumb animal is happier than the poor prophet. And my destruction was just, because without me there is happiness, more importantly there is content, where I would only bring guilty awareness.
That's why I would be alone. They disgusted me, them and their unholy noise.
I'll never forget the image of solitude. The uncomfortable spinny chair and crowded desk, the thrum of radiation emitted from my laptop, and it's just me and the graphite and that's all there'll ever be.
Newborn maple leaves are breathless, limp and pale in morning's cool light.
I don't turn to nature. That's just a way for the weak-minded to project their emotions onto things emotionless in order to feel part of something bigger. And I don't do that emotional pree. It's for pansies. Nature's just an unfortunate reality, that's all. It feels nothing for me, so I return nothing. It doesn't give me anything, I merely exercise my capability to take what I want from it. I drink the tears of its inevitable obliteration like the last of a sweet syrupy vermouth in dread celebration of something I knew I thought I'd denied I thought of but knew anyways.
My solitude was a bitter, bitter silence that stilled the new pulse of my adolescent heart. You know what they say; people get old when they're alone. I'm so old. It's not that I'm incapable of interaction, it's that it is very hard to look at my fellows and see anything more than zero potential. For what? I dunno. While sometimes it makes me hate them, they haven't done anything wrong, you know? I don't want anything from them (except maybe a child's petulant desire to see everyone admit their inferiority). If they were all as fantastic as me, no one would be fantastic. Am I content to remain superior if it means ultimate detachment from my generation? Sure. It's like one-upping everyone in a world no one knows of, in a way no one recognizes. A secret, unsatisfying, narcissistic victory that will keep me going till the end. It is relentlessly futilitarian me and the graphite. And we're all alone, we always have been.
And you know what's funny? My job is cashier at a bagel shop. I have to make tips based on my charm and alacrity with strangers. Lucas told me, the other day, that I did really well; I really made it look like I gave a toss. Lucas is 26 and he knows, doesn't he? He knows I'm tragically misplaced from my time (behind or ahead, no.). Solitude sucks. It ruined my life. And I'll never get that time back. And now childhood is so far away and so fuzzy that even the old photographs that aren't so old won't let me remember them. Aldous Huxley did this to me, then. He told me I was powerful.
So I sat down for an hour and I thought.:
Of course I pursued the religion of solitude before forced to in high school; I'm the most powerful mind I know. And I'll tell you why I did, too.
In the wee, sleepless hours of night between elementary and high school, I found that I hated all human-bred noise. I hated when they spoke, when they laughed, when they sneezed. I hated when they walked in front of me or tried to communicate or in any way contact me or each other. And at lunch, at dinner, when they chewed and made politely worthless inquiry, I would make a very fervent wish that I could somenight tear off my ears and drain out the soft tissues of my brain and replace them with molten gold. Behind my eyes the gold would settle into soft goldenrod sand that glittered and burned on my skull, and I would tip my head in a daze of pain and a scintillating aggregation of gold dust and clotting blood would ooze out of my aural wound to spill down my shoulder.
Sometimes, later, I would imagine I was not the victim of this peace but just a shiny swathe of gold; to pour from my host's poor temple and slip away, that they may not need me again, and be glad to offer some relief. Like a twisted, extra-dimensional sort of self-pity. Sometimes I am the discarded ear. I had a purpose and I was perfect, but not all purposes are wanted and not all perfection is recognized. Most of the time I am the brain, drained from the sovereign cranium till the last vestiges of intellect were shaken loose; because always the ignorant, dumb animal is happier than the poor prophet. And my destruction was just, because without me there is happiness, more importantly there is content, where I would only bring guilty awareness.
That's why I would be alone. They disgusted me, them and their unholy noise.
I'll never forget the image of solitude. The uncomfortable spinny chair and crowded desk, the thrum of radiation emitted from my laptop, and it's just me and the graphite and that's all there'll ever be.
Newborn maple leaves are breathless, limp and pale in morning's cool light.
I don't turn to nature. That's just a way for the weak-minded to project their emotions onto things emotionless in order to feel part of something bigger. And I don't do that emotional pree. It's for pansies. Nature's just an unfortunate reality, that's all. It feels nothing for me, so I return nothing. It doesn't give me anything, I merely exercise my capability to take what I want from it. I drink the tears of its inevitable obliteration like the last of a sweet syrupy vermouth in dread celebration of something I knew I thought I'd denied I thought of but knew anyways.
My solitude was a bitter, bitter silence that stilled the new pulse of my adolescent heart. You know what they say; people get old when they're alone. I'm so old. It's not that I'm incapable of interaction, it's that it is very hard to look at my fellows and see anything more than zero potential. For what? I dunno. While sometimes it makes me hate them, they haven't done anything wrong, you know? I don't want anything from them (except maybe a child's petulant desire to see everyone admit their inferiority). If they were all as fantastic as me, no one would be fantastic. Am I content to remain superior if it means ultimate detachment from my generation? Sure. It's like one-upping everyone in a world no one knows of, in a way no one recognizes. A secret, unsatisfying, narcissistic victory that will keep me going till the end. It is relentlessly futilitarian me and the graphite. And we're all alone, we always have been.
And you know what's funny? My job is cashier at a bagel shop. I have to make tips based on my charm and alacrity with strangers. Lucas told me, the other day, that I did really well; I really made it look like I gave a toss. Lucas is 26 and he knows, doesn't he? He knows I'm tragically misplaced from my time (behind or ahead, no.). Solitude sucks. It ruined my life. And I'll never get that time back. And now childhood is so far away and so fuzzy that even the old photographs that aren't so old won't let me remember them. Aldous Huxley did this to me, then. He told me I was powerful.