Is it only illusions I am after? Some never ending battle with my own shadow? Glorious purpose, etc.- all just some self made conjuring to hex the selfsame head?

And as horrifying a prospect that might appear to be, the part otherwise that petrifies me is the seemingly vanishing ranks of delusional comradery. The day dreams once drunk and discussed replaced by synthesized bastardizations that can hardly claim charm enough to even be proper conspiracy. Bread and circuses reduced to stale crackers and poorly plotted cartoons.

Now, don’t claim some jest upon yourself in midst the attempts to be dismissive upon that prospect. This epidemic grows among us thoughtful still, with consequences quite dire. How many more tear-stained ledges until we can get this life ordeal right?

Maybe that is the trouble with reality in general. So little in our control and so much of what our helm commands eventually becomes unsatisfactory. Just dreamers and dreams without enough space for both. No wonder so many willingly submit to the alternatives available, be they micro or macro. The curse of this cosmic accident on quest for purpose, all anxious and exhausted. Choosing instead of challenge, the pitifully personified aggregates of collected data facilities, just so something can say what to do, even if dishonest or deranged. Nothing but the conglomeration of various other ideas without bothering to weed out the unworthy and abhorrent. Nary an original thought among the machines. Just our own, misunderstood and mass reproduced.

The punchline in all that would be were the computer to think up something on its own, we probably wouldn’t like it.

So, perhaps it is good that the old dopamine drip I used to try and receive from these has run itself dry. That might just make the way for some substance to emerge.

It is my wish with this, and other expressions created, to find the inspiration within that might mean something genuine moving outward. Be it either being bold or just foolishness, to select this avenue in the age of short form video and other such gratification that flees before it even stands is a hill I have not found the will to refute. The distinction is important. Choosing here and this, some middle class periodical of the written word, because of the difficulty and not the ease. Something not simultaneous and fleeting, but in methods that build or burn slower, even avoidant of the flash in the pan fate.

So, let us set a challenge, both for my own reflective narration and any and everyone else who might digest these sentences. If time enough you spent invested here, go find and fight for some equal or surpassing time to invoke elsewhere some seed that might slowly grow. Bit by bit, let us keep finding our delusional discipline where once we might have sought the quick fix. Find those failures in repetition, or at least some temporary nothingness in which to wade. Let us grow more ponderous instead of impulsive. And have the efforts for reaction protracted and reality be made for the longer ways- those benevolent lifetime type of dedications.

As a hypocrite, as I’m sure we can all often be, it is understood the sorts of weakness that keeps us from our performance of such virtues. Cheap and easy, and leaving before it has even got here never satiates for long, if at all. And the static failures of yesteryear cannot be changed and only block the way for those mistakes that we’ve yet to make.

‘The past does not make one want to live, the future does.’

While I might like to claim that line arrived to me from some poet or philosopher, I am not one for intentional deceptions. I got it from a T.V. show based upon comic book characters. Wise words often find us in funny ways.

But as one who has spent far too much time contemplating unchangeable pasts, I can assure you that any fruit you think you might find there is well beyond rotten. It is only what has been sown since, sometimes unknowingly, that seeds the state of self and things yet to be.

For even as certain things wither all around, I keep up the fight to remain open for what still might grow. It may be an arduous fate with no semblance of simplicity, but the value begotten from that endeavor will outweigh so much else that aims to pull us down.

It may seem like there is nowhere left to go, but that isn’t so, even if imperceptible. Saying this, I cannot help but think of those from my personal history lost to that very sort of hopelessness. And no matter how much wish I might will, their loss is still unchanging.

Still, with those memories and a mustering of whatever weathered gusto we’ve got- let us attempt to persuade the future it can be more than the wasteland so pessimistically proposed otherwise. And if we fail, so be it. Just make the story glorious enough to be worth saying.