So here I am, again. Or we are, but as I sit alone in this room that I find myself with on these evenings, I must act as though I am the solitary character in all of this. And perhaps, I am. Might be, that’s all we ever are. Just a mass of alone beings, interacting and bumping into each other in various degrees, trying to make sense of something that never asked to be sensible to begin with.

But anyway, ever onward.

So, fighting through phases of futility, in feeling if not in actuality, all the while remembering, even if slightly inaccurately, that freedom is a prison of its own. Not that I would particularly know, if any of us ever really do. Being that each of us are confined, for the time, to a singular life, all this sentience housed in flesh and such, all someday soon enough, and already on its way to decay.

Or are these just the sounds of some walking autumn waltzing towards winter, in this abundance of thematic self-indulgence? But hey, give the people what they want, right? He asked, to no one but a keyboard echoing in these empty castle walls.

I talked about what this, what these weekly rambles are meant or intended to be, to a friend as we went about engaging in some reasonable ethanol consumption. And about what I hope these aren’t. Sometimes, that helps. Better than knowing what something is, or what we wish it to be, it may be more pragmatic, and dare I say, more healthy, to know what something isn’t. A philosophical process of elimination. Writing as chipping away at the marble of larger thought to get to some internal essence as opposed to the conglomeration type of sculpture, applying additives and additions until whatever it is the core is meant to be is no longer visible.

I’d like to aim for the former, seeing the latter of something performative and lacking, both in the moment and eventually, entirely in substance to make some sort of spectacle. For all the terror that the idea inspires within me, I still believe I would rather shave away the non-essentials to arrive at some simplified truth, rather than explain away in circles to create some fabricated expression of self that becomes more unbelievable the deeper the dive into it this all goes. It may take a lifetime, but my morality would seem to agree that the regular shedding of the superfluous aspects of identity serve a far greater good than the accumulation of aesthetics that serve the flimsy ideation that any worthwhile introspection would so easily do away with. All the masks placed on top of prove to embrace the falsehoods. The honest one is what remains when everything else is cast aside. The last mask left, being the man in the mirror. The face from which I can never hide. Not really. And not for lack of trying.

The trouble is, and maybe this is something that you, dear reader, might know well enough yourself. Once all the finery and affrontery is scrapped away, I don’t always like the guy that is left standing. But the truth of the matter is, if he is the one who is left, perhaps that is the man that truly resides within the chest and skull cavities that make up the bio-organics that house this identity. And if I don’t like him, I should at least grant credit to the moral compass that I judge myself with greater than any other being. My empathy can always seem to find an explanation for most of the commonly occurring defects that this social species regularly holds. And just because I don’t always like the fellow left when all the act fades to nothing, doesn’t mean I don’t love him.

And if I allow myself to shy away from the more self-deprecating criticisms being enacted here, I must admit, I’m really not that bad of a guy. In fact, most people I encounter seem to rather like him, a good few of them, like him a lot. Even the folks that I care little to next to nothing for, and even those that I harbor an adversarial approach towards- well, hell, plenty of them like me too.

But before I get all lovey-dovey upon my own character, I should rectify the direction of this. For as I was explaining to a friend earlier, I never really want this to be about me. Hard as though that might be for you to believe. I know that this always has to be selfish in at least some aspect, but the reason I pull myself to the blank page each week doesn’t have to do with what I am attempting to find within myself, at least not entirely. For me, at the core, at the essence of this whole endeavor, is always something aiming to be more universal. Because if I wanted that, I could just lock myself away with the masculine form of a diary, what I call a journal, and never put an ounce of this out beyond my own skull and some ink scratched words upon some pulp derived page. Something to be read after whatever life is left in all this organic home has since faded away, and whatever secrets I penned out are no longer mine to hold. But these rambles are not for that. These are for us living, while we are going about all this living and thinking and feeling business.

So, what is it that you would like to talk about?

Apologies, but I cannot quite hear you, so allow me, if you will, to make some pragmatic and vague assumptions.

It’s life, right? That’s the big question. So big and all-encompassing that we can never really find the words for what it is that we aim to ask. Yet, ask it we always seem to be doing. And even with the multitude of ever-expanding explanations and distractions, and disagreeable opinions, we all always arrive at some similar yearning. And maybe it might not sound the same from person to person, but it does always rhyme, right? Or, at least, it always often alliterates.

It is the specifics that always damn and divide us. But if you would permit enough of a zoom out, all of us, or at least most of us, all strain our hearts in the quest for the same sorts of things. You know, like sense, or understanding, or community, or love, in all its vast and varying forms. Or purpose, or purity, or the perpetual quest for, if not happiness, at least some semblance of acceptance of self and our stance and structure for a society as a whole. That we seek understanding, in ourselves and others, especially within confusion. That we crave belonging, even when impossibly isolating. That we seek some destiny defined fulfillment, even when we know that all these ideas that we live for can be broken down to the dressing that fits upon the cellular driven desire to survive, and pass as much of our person as is worthy, to go on in some delightfully adulterated form after these particular biological housings we call home have faded away. So often, it gets guised as a quest for greatness, and may often be confused for that, with your humble narrator not being an exception- but that isn’t really it, is it?

Because sentiments like greatness are vain and fleeting, and not really the origin for the drives that end up bringing something like that about. It is not even the permanence of being, because anyone not totally deluded will understand whatever might or meaning we might arrive at in this life, will be gone as far as we know, as soon as who we know ourselves to be regarding the physical manifestation, ceases to be getting at all that being a being nonsense.  

I was talking to someone about how things tend to cycle back in this life. Sometimes, only in our perception. And sometimes that is enough. But in other ways, the cycle back is more actual and profound, and in those moments, I believe that it speaks to a truer nature than we ever really get to understand. That when we continually arrive back at ideas and feelings and relationships, that there must be some kind of truth being sought within those, whether we ever understand it or not. And though the past is often the favorite plaything of the human mind, it is always the present in which we must perform. And it is in the future that we will always be getting onward towards.

And trust me, I understand how terrifying that can be. As a shit soothsayer myself, I can tell you that whatever expectations you might have in this life are likely to be devastated in direct correlation to how rigid you choose to hold them. That a commitment to inability for growth is very far from being the same as having a stalwart resolve. That obsession and determination are not bedfellows, but rather adversaries. And that the dynamics of life has to do with malleability and that any perspective that cannot adjust to new input and information is not a stature of ingenuity, but ignorance.

That isn’t to say that I adhere to any of this in absolution. I am riddled with bad habits and unquenchable desires and longings for what is lost and what can never be. But the effort is always aimed, as best I can, towards what it is that I have yet to know and feel and be. And I still profess that growth is my favorite addiction, and that as great as so much of my past might be (and don’t get me wrong, there is also a lot of horrible bullshit- grief, failure, betrayal, abject dependance, habitual malignance, and so on, etc.)- that what is still to come is the sort of stuff that excites me and invokes the invigoration towards another day more than anything else.

And, I’d bet, if you’re here reading this- you might think, or feel something along the same lines. If, you would permit me the assumption. And if you don’t, well, I did it anyway.