Pot-Healer

This is how it gets you: it makes you think that what you are typing matters. None of it matters. The point of this exercise is to stop caring and to open the throttle. No one will read this again, not even you. You just move forward with the thing. You will reclaim your soul millimeter by millimeter.

Lack of hours put in to work is the secondary problem; the primary problem is actually discouragement. I have the energy and the desire — but also a sense of futility. When nothing you produce feels good enough, you get no sense of accomplishment. When you overindulge in humility and disregard the positive qualities of your product, you restrain your ability to make more and to improve.

You have to allow yourself some pride. If nothing else, you can feel qualified pride in the time and effort you put into something — if you’re that averse to liking what you actually produce.

I don’t know why I got this neurology in this lifetime but hey.

That was a nonsense one-sentence paragraph but I’m leaving it in because fuck you.

I like to imagine a vast intelligence of some kind reading this ten centuries from now and trying to make sense of it. It may make more sense of it than I can. I have too much of an aversion to believing anything positive about myself.

Fun fact: I always choose a title for these entries once I’m done. I never have any idea where I’m going with any of this.

Do you think you can get yourself out of this mess? Is it more tempting to think all is lost so that you can go back to not trying? Is it more fun thinking you have nothing to lose?

I’m running through the possible next steps for this entry because I keep trying to make sense of it. It’s early — the sun hasn’t come up yet — so I don’t see the need for this to make a whole ton of sense. I don’t even think I need to make much sense at this hour.

I don’t know what they could possibly want from me other than to kick it off and just slam it against the wall so that we can find out what’s inside. There’s nothing I hate more than falling short of what I feel I should have done. I hate going out on that limb and fighting for what’s barely defensible. I hate screaming into the void. Some people may like it, they may find it liberating — I find it futile, trying to win a fight by swinging at the air.

You can never get yourself closer to what you need by screeching about nothing. You find a straight line, an arrow, pointed at a purpose. If you want to write something worth reading then you must have something to communicate.

You have to keep moving. No human can tolerate standing still. You sink into time like quicksand, you find yourself halfway buried before you realize what’s going on.

Insanity is choosing the harder path — the unnecessarily harder path. You could do something now, work on it every day, and make it easier on yourself. Or you can wait until it’s almost too late and have to scramble while you’re weak and in bad condition. For some reason you chose the latter. Too bad, but at least it’s only almost too late and not actually too late.

Any insinuation that hope is lost is just an excuse to quit. That’s the automatic bin into which any such thoughts should be thrown.

A bee rescued from a swimming pool has to dry its wings off and get its strength back up before it can fly again. That’s what I have to do at this point. I forgot how to write. I have to reset myself and figure out how to say what I mean all over again.

They say that “done” is better than “perfect.” Real is better than theoretical.

A little bit every day is infinitely better than nothing.

The rest of this is going to be stream of consciousness for my own exercise:

I don’t know where they get the gall or the impulse or fight in their minds to lift off and face down whatever it is that they think they can defeat. The point of this message is not to make sense or to express anything of any value, it is to keep the author’s fingers going on the keyboard so that he recovers his abilities and remembers how to fly.

I don’t know whether it’s worth going to the end of the page just for this. I think I have what I need and the point can be gathered and broken down into the spaces I want. I don’t know if there are spaces at the bottom for all the little things I want to keep. I don’t think it matters. The bottom is deep underwater space, the Mariana Trench of the mind. Strange creatures live down there in the eternal darkness. They float and drift and have no need for eyes.

You can always get yourself out past the deepest point if you squeeze past and remember the reason you dove down this deep to begin with. But most of us have amnesia; we don’t remember the time before this one. Wittgenstein said that the purpose of the world does not lie within the world. The purpose of your life does not lie within your life. We’re always trying to remember what the hell we were meant to be doing here.

I can make things before me work the way I wanted them to work. I cannot get a purpose lined up for my ascent into whatever lies beyond that blinding light. Maybe it’s chaos, because perfection would be oblivion. There is no time without entropy. Without decay there is no existence.

I don’t need italics anymore — italics are an excuse. This whole damn blog is unrestricted, unfiltered free writing.

I had something important that I intended to talk about, which I forgot, and all of these words are incantations to try to get that meaning back. If I stumble around in my darkness for long enough I will find it.

Wasted years. That’s what I’m thinking about lately. I look in the mirror and see an older face, and I think about what he’s done along the way to this point. The answer is, not enough. Something, some stuff, but not enough.

I cannot be the judge of myself. What I’ve done is never enough for me; I could always have done more. I just have to do everything I can and lay it out there for other people. It cannot be done for me or for my sake. Put it out there for the others, put it out there for the other people.

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All the knowledge I have, the skills I acquired, will become obsolete in no great while. It may take less than a decade for skills that took that long to acquire to become pointless. Better to devote oneself to developing skills that will still hold their relevance — therefore better to try making a living with them.

I don’t know what those are, and I don’t know where I’m going with any of this. But that’s the point of this dumb little corner of the internet I made for myself. I don’t have to go anywhere in particular, I just have to focus on writing for some short period of time until I can’t stand it anymore and have to move on to the next brief, instantaneous amusement the hyper-connected world has to offer me.

It’s so hard to focus. Focus is what matters when it comes to making the most of the limited time you get to do anything well.

Why any of it matters, what the point of any of it could possibly be — is not a question I have to answer. The purpose of the world lies outside the world itself; I’m just part of the machinery. True faith lies in the ability to let go of questions you’ll never know the answer to, and to move forward with what makes you feel good.

The point, as far as you need concern yourself, is to do what feels right and to pursue what your innate senses insist you need. Live first and ask questions later.

How far do you think you will get into this before it all turns out to be for naught? How deep into this thinking until it turns out to be pointless? Some good things may come of it. It’s an instigating moment. It will stir up other sediment, other things that needed to be dealt with will have to be dealt with. You cannot go on as you are forever. Things change, everything changes. You move past it and you keep going. Even though you really don’t want to anymore.

It is true that I don’t want to. There’s nothing further out there that I can do or hold onto. There’s nothing really more that I want from staying here. There’s no consequence to leaving. I’m only trapped insofar as I care what other people think.

I have to think about all the rest of it at some point. There’s too much built up and I have to tell people what I’m actually thinking.

All the pieces are taken care of for you. All the fight that’s left in you is what you have now. All you can hope for is the gentle unwinding of the fight while you generate what you can from the spin of the Earth. Nothing else really matters; no one else really cares. This is all just spinning and spinning in no direction that will really get you anywhere. What matters right now is not the quality of the work, but that you do the work. What matters is that you adjust yourself to the problem in whatever way you can.

These may be the last relatively normal days for a while. What comes after this may really kick you in the balls. What gets to you in the end will likely be a problem you never saw coming. The end of all of it. The end of what you can squeeze from the worst parts of your life. None of it comes together for you.

Three paragraphs. Three paragraphs always. I’m not going to let you get away with not posting this even though it’s nonsense. The point is that you type it and that you post it. Its quality and its literary merits are nothing, its existence is all that matters. One or zero. What matters is that you have brought it into the world and now it can go somewhere. And tomorrow you will do the same thing — and the next day, and the next day. Life is a problem we’ll all get out of eventually, the only difference is what we occupy ourselves with in the meantime.

None of it makes sense, but none of it has to make sense. The world does not have to make sense to you, one of its creatures. You’re thrown in here with a smattering of hope, torn from the void and ignorant about everything, and if you’re lucky you’ll understand some of it before you’re cast back into that void. If there’s a Greater Purpose and a reason for all of this then you — even if you’re part of it — are not in the loop. No one had to CC you on that email because you’re just a part of the computer that’s calculating the meaning of itself. There’s nothing to tell you right now anyway; the Creator is just as in the dark as you are.

We’re all trying to sort this out, so you will just have to be patient. You will just have to find something purposeful to do in the meantime. The gliding fingers and singing voices of the great organic chorus will create beautiful music, which you can hear if you listen for it.

But beneath your skin you feel nothing. Under the Great Axe we will all go eventually. You may or may not be able to cope with the changes, but they will happen anyway. Rotation stops for no one, the relays keep relaying and the transistors keep transisiting. Computation continues. Components wear out and get replaced. The pattern changes — a new pattern that retains none of the previous pattern, but which would have been impossible without it. And eventually the next pattern, and the next one. Meaning lies in its forms and its changes, but that meaning is a mystery. Would you understand the meaning, even if it were explained to you? Probably not. It would seem like nothing.

That’s all the fight you have left in you. That slow and dreadful winding down of the clock, that deep and deadly disdain for something else that starts with a “d.” You can push yourself past this point in your life but you don’t know what comes next.

There’s basically nothing bouncing around in my neurons. But the important thing is to keep writing. They say that the muse has to know where to find you. You have to wait patiently for her. The keyboard is your shrine; you have to sit there for long hours and perform the ritual of banging away at the keys. Eventually she will come.

“How long will you wait?”

I answer: What else is there worth waiting for?

Step one, before you do anything else, should be to plan hour by hour what you’re going to do today. Let optimistic ambition guide your thought process. All you have to do later in the day (when you run out of ambition) is to follow what your better self told you to do. All you have to do is close in on what you thought was a good idea in the first place. It’s worthwhile and it’s sitting there waiting for you to do it.

I waited to long. I shouldn’t wait to do a single damn thing anymore. I shouldn’t waste a single hour of any day. Everything matters now. I thought for a long time that I could quit — I thought I would have quit by now. Instead I’m stuck with a worse situation than when I started, and I’m not quitting. I can’t quit anymore. Other people depend on me being here. I may find all of this pointless, but it’s not pointless to other people and I can do some good here. It’s not a burden for my existence to be important to them; it means I have something of value to do and that’s just about the best thing you can get.

I’m just going to free write for a little while because I want to:

You have to get to the point that failure no longer matters to you. If nothing matters — if you’re such a good little hedonistic nihilist — then failure doesn’t matter and the long-term high-reward pleasure of getting shit done is what you should spend your effort seeking.

I pushed this too far. I kept it together way longer than I should have. My sentences no longer make sense. But that’s the exercise. Nobody reads this anyway. That’s my excuse. You can push past it and make something better of it. You can squeeze it all down and what comes out will keep you alive. You can get yourself closer to the point that you can actually feel the breeze. That’s a good word: “breeze.” I can use that. Something fun.

You really do have to think about writing this all out as exercise. It will be somewhat painful and you will not want to do it. But you will make yourself stronger. It’s exercise.

Aren’t you tired of this yet?

I could ask myself that every day. I probably do ask myself that every day. I keep going, though, to find out what comes next. I know I don’t know what the hell comes next… That’s what keeps me going. There might be something better just ahead. Strange optimism coming from me, but that’s how it is.

Strange to think about obligations to others if nothing in life really matters. Strange to think about nothing mattering — while you’re alive everything matters. Nothing may matter outside of life — when you’re dead — but within life it’s all of consequence. Purpose, meaning, mattering are all properties of life.

Wittgenstein said, though, that the meaning of the world must lie outside the world. He thought of that while sitting in a trench in WWI, so he’s probably right.

I’m too tired to tell you anything more today and I’m not going to waste your time with garbage.

The dreaded feeling is that of sitting down to write with nothing to say, nothing particular in mind. That is why we do this exercise. That is why we keep this up, every day. Subject yourself to what you cannot stand.

“We.” “You.” “I.” I don’t know who is who anymore.

You can pick yourself up and move forward. You can stretch yourself past what you think you can do. All your dreams and ambitions were delusions of grandeur, but what you can actually do is more important than what you imagined to be important. What will really come out when you sit down to write and put your soul on the line will be better than what you thought you’d do.

You’ll produce nothing unless you struggle. It won’t come out well unless it hurts. All great heroes are the result of a painful birth.