It isn’t inspiration. That’s not what I’m feeling at the moment. It’s closer to desperation, but it isn’t quite that either. This feverish blend of desire and improbabilities, the urge and knowledge of action, mixed with the bewilderment of the next best step. Or at least how to not have anymore, or fewer missteps.

But then again, if it weren’t for all this failing, what little I would end up knowing.

Been drunk on destiny, self-prescribed. Or perhaps it has just been being plain drunk too much in my younger days. The ancient podcast bro Seneca might think me a waste and call me a loser, squandering time and energy all throughout my timeline. But I don’t think he’s some source of purity on such matters. At least I wasn’t Nero’s tutor. Dropped the ball on that one, pal.

There was something that I pulled out of his philosophical pamphlet I read the other day. A line admittedly stolen from elsewhere, though not specifically attributed to an individual.

‘Life is short, art is long.’

The question then becomes, or has always been- is any of this art? And has it ever been?

Well, whatever it is, the addiction is set deep, hoping that this all works out being one of my better bad habits.

But these thoughts have been dull or dark, lately. And it is my instinct that something must be done about it, lest we prove some dead Roman stoics right. This all needs to be set alight again, but caution must be taken to assure that integral parts of my identity and spirit are not used up as fuel.

Have I been pulling my own fangs out of some sense of obligation? For some sort of safety being maintained? Protection against the tides, so contemporary and all consuming? Neutering my own neurology to meet demands and align with large social trends, is that what this has become, after all this time? For if that is the case, I know, truly, that no amount of appeasement will hold back the forces building against this, certainly not while I grow duller, standing beside this unattended philosophical whetstone.

So that’s that, then. We are set to sharpen up, and steel against the entropy, carving out a vantage to subdue the disadvantageous circumstances that seem ever-present and growing.

But this feeling of being discontented, though not always in specifics, seems to be so widespread these days. At least in all my asking and listening around. There is something off that needs correction, but the good and honest folks seem to lack in answers while the zealots keep shouting out about everything that we certainly shouldn’t do. Tough spot to be, were you to ask me.

Seems that only the worst of us are feeling certain purpose, pretending itself divine. It is never a good thing when the rapture people are getting hyped up. You’re not supposed to be looking forward to the end of the world, don’t they know that?

But for most of the folks I know, it seems all we can do to keep our heads above water. Bombarded each day with the same old, brand-new conundrums, and that is just referring to the news cycle, catastrophic mess that has been while seemingly getting messier.

To be fair, though, for as far as we can tell, this species hasn’t quite faced what it has been in this unprecedented and unpredictable era. Sure, there are always vying despots and overcommunicated fanatics, but never have we had such constant inputs on a brain that has not developed all that far past the instinctual issues of thousands of years ago. Rough go for this lot of folks who haven’t evolved as much beyond berry picking and simple story telling as we’d like to think. Certain not up to par with dealing with constant information, or better yet, content, as information is a tricky subject these days, wild as that might seem.

But content is a traded commodity, dealing mostly in time spent, and lost in increments and leaps. The lack of traditional and trusted stewardship of information leaves us in a chaotic field of overwhelming ideological conscription, pushed and peddled upon us by those who sway influence most easily and irresistibly to a population with a real bad instant gratification habit. Myself included, dear reader. Though I am working on my recovery.

It is no wonder that charlatans seem to so effortlessly gain favor and impact, and attempt with that at reigning in some sort of supremacy.

So, I’ve been thinking about what to do about all that.

It’s going great.

I don’t like the idea of being at a loss, but it is important to admit when you are. The denial of it, I think, leads to these overzealous personalities that so seem to dominate public discourse from all sorts of sides and angles and only seem to work to pull people further apart. It alienates and isolates us from each other in order to gain some sort of profit, be it currency or something more akin to something falsely prophetic.

I might suppose that, vaguely enough, that is where it all has to begin. The best means to stifle movements of human separatism, or maybe even defeat, even if temporary- it to continue to find means of community. Hard as hell, sometimes, or really a lot of times, when everyone has instant contact with all these divisive forces. And when not used for that, so easily set to squander time with mindless distractions, which end up being a great force of isolation, as well.

But the wildest part of all this, still has to be that I think myself capable of doing anything about it. Somehow, even with seemingly microscopic confidence, as of late, there is still this hubris, this almost arrogance, that there is more that I need to be doing. And within that, the mounting guilt each day, each moment, that it appears, even if only superficially, that none of what it truly needed is being done. Or even attempted.  

But it might be the specifics that are damning us, socially, at least. The lines drawn since tribal times of grouping, not necessarily for unification internally, but rather for the defense against those that are outside of that unity. That when discussions become the regurgitation of bullet points, where everyone is talking and not a soul among them is listening to anything aside the inner monologue made up of all their preconceived notions, we only get ourselves further away from whatever that light is.

Same goes for when we huddle with those that blindly agree on all perspectives being made. You learn nothing if all you know to be true is all that everyone else around you knows as well. Echo chambers make sonic schisms against the outside world, and perhaps even within ourselves. The effort to fit into some grouping of ideas and beings, crushing something truly believed out of fear of retribution.

But it isn’t all that.

There aren’t really tribes, even if plenty of the world believes that there are. We are not separate from this ecosystem as a whole, no matter how much we might think we are. We are not out of nature, even if we live in cities and suburbs and such. And we are not on our own, even if you currently reside in the middle of fucking nowhere, like your humble narrator. This is the species we’ve got, at least for the foreseeable few millennia. And this is the only rock we can call home, for at least a century or few. And our stewardship of ourselves and our environment, not just meaning the kind that granola folks talk about, but the big whole human environment of governments and nations and so on- has been less than impeccable.

So, what to do?

Well, fuck if I know. I guess you can start by, on occasion, discussing something of substance with someone you disagree with, without losing your cool. Or at least trying not to, even if they have already lost theirs and are prodding to get you on the same level of outrage or anger to serve as some sort of foil. I wouldn’t expect a miracle from it, or at least not a big one. But I know that waiting around for big miracles is the sort of thing that leads right to a life unfulfilled, if gone on for long enough in a single timeline.

I’m still working on sorting out my own personal existence. It hasn’t been going perfectly, but it is going. Some moments are easier than others, but it isn’t the easy moments where the impacts get made, right? It takes little effort to be optimistic when already happy. It is a hell of a lot harder to not be pessimistic when things are going bad. I am closer to the latter than the former, but giving up is not in any future that I can conceive of, even when I feel like there is nothing to do and nowhere to go and nothing but waste ahead as there is behind.

Apologies. Been spending a lot of time with a ghost this week, just talking. He don’t talk back, like he used to, but I can generally guess at his answers when I go about throwing questions around. I guess I just miss him, is all. And I have to get used to that, even though I know that I don’t want to.

Anyway, in the meantime, I suppose we should try and make tomorrow better than today. At least in some little way. I’d bet if everyone did that, just a little bit, each day, we might start getting ourselves somewhere.

But, as always, easier said than done.