Delirious enough to dredge up dogged drivel, or something scrape the soles of something sacral and divine- here we are. Behind a bit, but still not fully faulted in the finite feature of self-imposed deadlines, I sit now, to think, to write.

You see, the child has the week off from school, so while she finishes reading before the lightbulb switch off until after dawn in her room, I figured I might as well get started here. I had hoped to bring more cohesion and perhaps even a bit of foresight to these hebdomadal rants, but that hope will have to wait at least another week. It’s going to be off the cuff, again, dear reader. Or, at least, sort of. Since I have been thinking all day. All week. All my life, really. So, I might have pondered a bit in premeditation, if this ever makes it to court, your honor.

So, these thoughts- where have they been? Always hanging about the same cosmic neighborhood, I suppose. The very same that I may never escape. I think of life, which always means the thought of death is never too far from each darkened corner. As well as there being thoughts of faith, meaning that doubt is always hanging around too. And of purpose, which always invokes the horrifying idea of pointlessness- perhaps the greatest fear confined permanently to this mind and soul I’ve strung together to cast outwardly this idea of identity. And altogether stitched and intertwined to create or conjure a sense of self, a personal light in all this oblivion.

I suppose I forget, at times, all this life that I have already lived. Experiences abundant enough to draw a haze over certain parts of my particular timeline. However, just because I have lived so much life in such a short amount of time, there is little about me that ever feels quite satiated. So naturally, or maybe entirely artificially- I think of all that there is still I wish to do. To see and sense in all the kinds of otherwise. To be. Until, of course, I begin not to be. If that even is the question.

My arrogance continues to beckon about the idea that these times in which I live are historic. And whether that is true or not is something that only the future gets to determine once all my present becomes the past. And as with all of those whose present my current future claims as past, the value of whatever it is I am or end up being is not for my determination. All these words could just be destined for digital dust, just as the countless pages I’ve scratched ink upon will deteriorate and return to their elemental forms and all the wisdom and/or folly produced within fade along into the long lost forgotten as so much we’ll never know already has.

I ponder combat. Not in the realm of physicality (I hope), but within the kingdoms and empires of empirical and contemplative conundrums and cohorts. Because any mind with some central sense of serenity wonders what to do with the ideas that deviate their way into varying forms of madness. And it would be one thing, and no easy task at that, for the battles to be waged within the cardiac and central nervous systems combining in societies- but part of what troubles this narrator so is the addition on certain ‘thinking’ systems of digitization and machinery the likes of which all the accessible accumulations of huma knowledge up to and including these moments has yet to know. And were all this instantly access technology be used in the most benevolent of fashions, there would still be much to inspire concern. But that idealistic state is not what is at play. The truth of the tools currently tending and treading on our civilization are so often founded, funded and fermented upon the will of beings whose malevolence isn’t necessarily new, yet still finds means and methods that have yet to have an even near direct resemblance to anything historic. I’ve read enough about the impact of the printing press and information projected by vacuum tubes and the like to know how decisive and divisive those advances have and continue to be. But at least in Guttenberg’s day, the gate keeper of literacy confined the insidious invocations to a slower processing speed. Yet, in today’s day and age, I have been told by those who have not read a book in years or decades to do my research. With the a reading level that shouldn’t have gotten them out of elementary school, the screen based dogmas and misinformation have certainty flowing in the minds of those who can barely begin to perceive how manipulated they have become.

And that isn’t to say that those that would exemplify ideas of being of a higher echelon of book learning are without their falsehood and misconceived misconceptions. In one of those many naturally occurring ironies of existence, some of the smartest people I know believe some of the dumbest shit, in addition to the more apparent vice versa.

That said, I do not wish on this particular evening to go about trying to explain the current state of things this species struggles with. Not that I haven’t already and might still do so again. Tonight, for what little is left of my day’s conscious cognition, I would like to approach an ideological alleyway even more daunting. I would like to think a bit about the future. And what the hell there is that can be done about it. Both within my own measly metric of might, and further as far as whatever combination the present parliaments and posses of people could convoke to cease our civilization’s cessation.

So, I wonder how to go about swaying hearts and minds when already so far made up in their own or some algorithmic manufactured madness. And I must acknowledge that perhaps my own is just as trapped. Meaning mind. As I have no heart, or it is made of stone, etc.

But how might we supplant these sinister sycophantic systems and all the overtly abundant ideological slavery acting to divide and set this human spirit asunder?

So many institutions have earned much of the mistrust held in the eyes of the beholders of this republic, if we can still call that claim kept. And beyond this space, still more mistrust is ready to burst forth feverishly and ferocious. While the retinue of these arbitrarily assigned titles of leadership have sown so much justified suspicion themselves. And patience with the rhetoricians’ repercussions among the common folks isn’t as easy as I had so foolishly hoped it to be. And still, the overwhelming amount of superfluous entertainment and distraction seems unable to satiate the often times inexplicable ire found so vast and varying in much of our societal sentience.

So, what then? And how dare I, whose own life is so riddled with faults and failures, find the audacity to even attempt so conception at remedy?

Well, I suppose, it all comes down to that human factor. The very same that ferments hate and violence both physical and spiritual, must be the source of hard-fought salvation. That it is up to us to try and fix us. If not for our own tides and times, we must at least pave a way for those that will succeed us to advance onto the problems of their own eras and epochs. And that starts, I’d reckon, with the acknowledgement of the beauty within all our faults. And that mistakes will always be made, so we had best learn something from them. That way, those that will see our present as their past can at least forge their own way into their own failures, once we step over the failings of our own times.

And something like that, might just be vague enough to work.