One. Down here on planet Earth, we are running out. Space. Energy. Food. Materials. Money. Patience. Purpose. Creativity. Challenges. You name it, the supply is dwindling.

One planet is too little room.

I hate listening to people who think space exploration is a waste of time and money. The people who think that investing in space vehicles, exploration and colonization is a waste are smoking crack. It’s all there is! It’s not the wrong choice–it’s the only choice. If I could fool myself, like these activist idiots, that human nature could ever be satisfied with what it had, I’d be happy to put all my energy into seeing to the needs of of people here and now, into creative solutions, into doing more with less. You name it. Because, ironically, I can be satisfied. I’m a socialist and a minimalist anti-materialist. Things–objects, possessions–annoy me. I like ideas. Knowledge. But only good ideas. Only true knowledge. No fairy tale delusions posing as good ideas. No wishes posing as truth.

Societies, like all things organic, do either of two things: grow or die. There is nowhere else to grow down here. Earth is full. Past full. Overloaded. If we keep on this course–wasting what little is left on toys and lawn furniture, watching TV, trusting the market to solve our problems–we are screwed five ways from Sunday.

I don’t think it’s going to come to that. We will figure it out. By which I mean, someone in charge will figure it out and make it happen. The question is only how long we sit around with our thumbs up our collective asses worrying about interest rates and unemployment statistics, research polls and retirement plans.

There is no future here. Not worth having. We have no frontiers. We have no challenges. Social justice is not on the agenda. People are greedy and selfish. The only way to get them to stop stealing from each other is to point out to them a bigger, shinier thing that they can covet.

If we don’t get in gear, pretty soon people will have to resort to eating each other. Figuratively, of course.

Two. What else is there?

Exactly what do you have to hope for in your life? And who are you? Maybe you’re satisfied with a few short steps up the ladder. Or maybe you like it just where you are. There are six and a half billion people on this planet. Do you think that they’re satisfied with where they are? I mean, people have needs, and much more than just material. More than social, too. They need to feel purpose, and for some, that means more than just making a living. They might not know it. Although, from what I hear, they do know it. People are listless. Depressed. Detached. And these are people in the “developed” world. The “rich” countries.

Some people will tell you that these people need God. Lies. They need God like they need mercury poisoning. Like they need a dose of methadone. Like they need a pat on the back and a hole in the head.

People need a challenge! They need a purpose. A direction. A reason. A goal. If they can’t find a challenge in their environment, they will, mostly, look for it in competing with other people. They’ll gamble. In casinos or on the stock market. Or they’ll find pointless games to play and meaningless risks to take. They will, in short, waste their lives for lack of a sense of where their horizons are. Because, since the Earth is a sphere, and has few secrets left, every horizon leads right back to where you started.

The only other direction to go now is…

UP.

Why can’t you idiots admit it? By which I mean, you smart people.

This is the responsibility of the smart. Smart people have given the rest of humanity fire, the wheel, moveable type, air conditioning, electric toothbrushes and the Internet. Probably a tenth of one percent of human beings are responsible for the ideas, the science and the technology that drives the world forward. The rest just get their paycheque, spend it on stuff, and eat it up. I’m just talking in terms of the economics, here. Their appetite just keeps growing. Every day they want more, but every day, we get closer to running out.

And when it finally dawns of Joe Average, when he gets laid off from his job bolting tires on Priuses or digging turnips out of some exhausted field, he’s going to look at all the stupid crap we wasted our time on, and he’s going to blame the smart idiots who invented all of it and ignored everything important. What does Joe Average know? He knows what’s in front of him. He’s got his everyday wisdom. It’s not his place to figure it all out. It’s the smart people who are letting us down. Who only know just enough to make their Googles and their Enrons and their Mortgage Trusts.

Well, you smug bastards, eventually you’re going to wake up and realize what a bunch of idiots you’ve been, when you have to face all of time you’ve been wasting, and it will be too late… for you, and Joe, and everyone else who’s going to get screwed.

Time is running out. And knowing we got the kerning just right on the signs that point to Hell is not going to make it OK when we get there.

Moved into a new place, with Kim, beginning of the month. Can’t remember if I said anything about that. (I don’t journalize. Though sometimes I summarize. And frequently tangentialize. And make up words.) The bored one grows up. Or something like that. Nice place. Good location. Spacious. Quiet. Room for dinner parties. Maybe have the boss over some time. Oh, boy, I’m middle class. Wasn’t I supposed to be different? Make a difference? Change the world? Does anybody change the world? Does the world change? Does it ever stop changing? Do I ever stop asking rhetorical questions?

When you read this, you have to read slowly. Leave long pauses between sentences. Or you won’t hear what I’m saying. It’s true: I speak the words in my head as I write them. I’m an orator, a speech writer. The sound is important. The delivery is important. You have to hear the words. If you read them, and don’t hear, them, you won’t understand them. You will not discern the import amidst the vacuous.

I think that some people are born paying close attention, while others, though sure that they are focussed, are in fact oblivious to the important things: to what’s going on around them. To their surroundings. To their context.

Moreover, I’m sure that there are different kinds of people in the world. That is, there are different kinds of minds, even brains. That, perhaps, the brain, as a complex organ and information processing—nay, a signal processing—machine, is composed of different components, or sections, and that the relative dominance of these vary from person to person.

I’m not saying that people are fixed in who they are. I don’t buy into that. But there are limits of some kind to what we can become, based on the patterns we make in response to our experiences. People can change, but only within the boundaries of their ability to observe, to interpret, and to understand what goes on around them. If you can’t see in the dark, then you can’t avoid the chair placed in your path.

I’ve met perfectly good atheists who nevertheless believe in something or other that they’re too self-deceived to admit to themselves is God. Love. Family. Truth. Justice. Pleasure. They seek the holy, the sacrosanct, and the spiritually transcendent experience as avidly, as desperately, as any religious believer. They may mock the facts of faith held by others, but they have the same sacred cows. If you need it, you’ll find it, somewhere, in the pattern-making pathways of your brain. So, in that way, I think we’re all alike. It’s an indelible part of the human condition to seek an answer to a question. We just all phrase the question differently, and in large part, if not wholly, it is shaped to fit the unique character of our self. We all believe in something. And it’s all our own invention.

There’s a great DVD store near my new place. Within a good walk’s distance, just off Eglinton, West of Yonge Street. I spent an hour in there on Friday after work (at home), soaking in their exceptional collection. Movies are, to me, part of the answer to whatever the question is for me. Books and computers, too. And lots of things, but mostly, those things. I love the way that the questions posed by others come out of these things, through their answers—in the form of their actions. I love what they reveal, and the promise they offer of what more there is to learn. Understanding. Interpretation. Experience. First or second hand, in stories: in histories and fictions.

So many people. So many viewpoints. Not quite so many viewpoints as people, it seems sometimes. But then, how many people give their real point of view, honestly and transparently? That’s not exactly encouraged. Not amongst that species we know as the middle class. But every stereotype is the same: they all have their official line. They all have their list of goods and evils and their list of acceptable topics about which it’s allowed to argue. And everybody strays a bit, in their way. We conform, and we rebel; the pathways of our minds don’t all follow the ones agreed upon by the majority to be the right ones. And the majority view changes.

What’s right, what’s wrong; what’s good, what’s bad; what’s real, what’s imaginary; what’s true, what’s false; what’s sacred, what’s degenerate; what’s just; what’s unfair. No two people agree on everything. Why not? It’s like we’re this vast experiment, but the whole world’s the lab. It’s random, but it’s statistical. We choose, but we’re predictable, nine time out of ten with a five percent margin of error.

It’s just crazy.

An intellectually provocative question brought to you by Sklatch.net. Just look. Better than anything you’ll find around here, currently.

Perhaps like many, I live my life, in part, through art. Perhaps not “live”, but “interpret”, as part of understanding. Perhaps not art, but story, whether in books, movies, or songs. I need those comparisons to make, or at least have the illusion of making, sense of my experiences.

I just watched a movie which has a certain resonance. It was popular with a certain class or group of people, a kind of self-loathing snobs. High Fidelity. And while the book was better, for many reasons, it was also harder to identify with the protagonist, as it was British, and the movie is American, and while, as a Canadian, I wish I could be more like the British, I’m not. American culture, and especially popular culture, is, by and large, what I’ve been surrounded by.

The movie is about a guy who loves music and goes through a break up and has to consider his life. A common story about the listless urban wandering soul. I’m not so much a music lover, but I have my moments. In truth, art, high or low, popular or obscure, is for me mostly a jumping off point for my own fantasies. My own dreams of how life could be, should be, would be, if only…

Rob Gordon, the hero, through the pain of (almost) losing his best, truest hope for love (there’s that word again), realizes that he’s been sacrificing the joys of real life for the fantasies of his own invention, and that he will stop it, since he’s been given a second chance.

A long, long time ago, I had fantasies about love, but they were without words and without pictures. They were only feelings, and thus can never be shared, but only guessed at. It’s an unknown how much I sacrificed for them. Love was, however, probably a minority theme in my dreams, most of which were driven by anger and a fascination with knowledge, technology and power. I sublimate. Or used to do so. Now, I just channel it into work and study. Or sleep.

Art doesn’t work so well for me any more. The truth is that, usually, I find myself bored and irritable part way through most books and movies, and I tire of albums within weeks that started out fantastic. Because …. I don’t know why. I’m reading the wrong kind of books and watching the wrong kind of movies and listening to the wrong kind of music. (Although Metric’s Live it Out is maybe an exception.) Because, by and large, the books and movies and music are selling a picture of the world, of life, which I cannot stomach, because I know that it is not real. And, for all John Cusack’s cute monologues and Jack Black’s clever wit and the sprinkling of self-satisfied I’m-so-hip profanity, the movie is ultimately bullshit about swallowing the American Dream whole and not choking even for a second. That shit makes me sick to my stomach. It makes me want to puke and rub peoples’ faces in it.

Life is not about getting what you want by admitting you really want what you’re supposed to want, what you’re expected to want. It’s about not getting what you shouldn’t want because if you got it, you’d be a monster. Life is about denying yourself to get along in society and not end up in prison for not having the self control you need. Human beings are animals. But we are also gifted with foresight and the ability to predict what happens when we give in to our natural urges. Humans are influenced more by fear and hatred than any other emotions. Love is just a side effect. Love is how we feel about people and things that help us escape that which we fear and destroy that which we hate. And, being human, and prone to abstract thinking, many of the things which we fear and hate are symbolic, and thus our loves are also, by and large, symbolic. That’s what the mind is: a collection of symbols. Our feelings respond to them, often more strongly than to real physical stimuli.

But so little art, so few people, admit to this essential truth of human experience. We live lives not in touch with reality and real things, but in a murky fog of dream which surrounds and penetrates the banal truths of our lives, and it is the symbolic nature of our dreams, the subtle deformation, the transparent distortion of the mind’s warped lens, which enthralls us. We are tricked, fooled, and bamboozled constantly, by our own minds, and through the encouragement and prodding of others, fraught with their own delusions, and longing for confirmation that they are in fact not deluded at all. Everyone wants someone, or many, who can help to solidify their certainty in their own world view.

Thus, movies like High Fidelity are born and can so readily captivate the minds of even the most hardened cynic.

I am not a cynic. Cynicism is just another kind of bullshit; a pose, usually adopted by ignorant children attempting to appear sophisticated. An attitude of the same ilk as the casually provocative, those types who like to show off their comfort with sex or violence or other socially awkward subjects in an attempt to prove their worldliness and cool.

I am a bullshit detector. And while I was amused by High Fidelity (on the second viewing), it is still a bullshit movie.

What makes me miserable like nothing else in life is the sheer endless mountains of bullshit that fill the landscape and blot out the sky, crowding in on me and cutting me off from the broad vistas of reality which I might otherwise have to enjoy. Bullshit like newspapers are full of, bullshit like advertising is full of, bullshit like culture is full of, bullshit like so many people I used to know are full of, and know it, but won’t admit it. Because they wouldn’t know how to live without it, or wouldn’t want to, because then they’d have to find something else to justify their sad, pointless existence.

All I want is to be rid of it. But the truly sad thing is that I don’t know how to live without it, either. Although, unlike most people, I used to keep it very separate. That’s the way with nerds: bicameral thinking. Real life is stark and cold; the life of the mind is fantastical and completely absurd. But we know the difference. We nurse our admittedly hopeless dreams, secretly or otherwise, ashamedly or proudly, because there has to be someplace to escape the obvious emptiness of the “real” world and the smoke screens blown up by other people.

For myself, though, I’ve outgrown all my old imaginary toy worlds. Their faults and seams are too obvious. The scaffolding reveals itself. The marionettes strings’ reflect too much in the harsh light of experience. I need new fantasies. Only I’m not sure I’m ready for what that means. There is darkness there. I’m talking about deathly darkness. Despairing darkness. Vile darkness. Blind darkness. Bloody darkness.

And there is light in that dark, too, but it is harsh light, burning light, brutal and unkind. It is the light that the universe throws on the pretensions of men and women and burns them and reduces them to ash. It is a power, and it is friendless, heartless, and pitiless. And it whispers. And it promises.

Not magic. But immunity to magic: to tricks and illusions plied by charlatans and actors. It offers a weapon with which to annihilate fools and their foolishness, and bring an end to the disappointment of discovering that all the promises they made were just a dollop of Vaseline on a photographer’s lens.

)0+

A city full of cowards is this
We’d give ‘em just enough rope to commit
But there’s been too much wine under the bridge
And my eyes have become immune
To everything I take from you

You wander around on a crutch
Why don’t you just lay it down and shut up
With thoughts as pure as the driven slush
And a cool insanity
From everything you take from me

I often find it impossible to communicate my thoughts. It’s a shame, because unless I can make them known, I can’t even begin to know if they are anything more than absurd nonsense. Most of what I “think” about is probably just a pastiche of ideas that represent emotions, which would never make sense to anyone else. That’s always made me sad, to know that no one will ever know me well, since they can never know the most important part of me.

I also know there are people who wouldn’t even agree with that statement, although I don’t know if they could claim to understand it, in that case. So many people have a groundless confidence that they know others, while barely knowing themselves. Being able to describe your emotions is not the same as knowing yourself: your inner workings. The best one can manage is to know part of oneself with another part, the mind being a collection of different faculties and types of awareness which sometimes contemplate one another.

Perhaps it’s best not to try to know people too deeply. That kind of empathy can cause you to lose yourself to some extent. That sounds good, but it makes you vulnerable. Just knowing someone doesn’t ensure that they know you.

I’ve never felt that anyone knew me very well. Sometimes I feel like a stranger even around people that I’ve known for many years. They may know me outwardly, including my appearance, habits, personae, superficial likes and dislikes, but do they know my most fundamental character? Do they know what things in the world resonate in my mind, and why? Do they even care? I’ve been extremely intimate with people who knew virtually nothing about my deepest thoughts and feelings, although they seemed to assume that they did.

I suppose we’re all just too wrapped up in ourselves most of the time to see one another. Those few times I’ve attempted to get beyond myself were extremely informative, but ultimately painful, and perhaps not worth it, considering the depth of betrayals to which they led. I think all people are alien to one another, and being exposed to the extremity of it is more disturbing than anything else. There’s always a few parts that even those closest to us cannot bear to know or think about.

Then again, maybe this is only true for some people. Maybe most people are very similar, in their desires, their fears, their dreams and wishes, their satisfactions and disappointments. Maybe I’m just a little more different. Or maybe I just like to think that I am.