Pot-Healer

Effort, effort, effort. That’s what it’s got to be, but it has to be organized. I have to zoom out sometimes and get an overview, I have to point my strength in the right direction. I have to go but I have know where I am going.

Every trip is a little death. I don’t want to be on my way, I don’t want to go. For a few days I’m trapped, unable to work on what really matters to me — and then I come home and I can’t work on what really matters. It’s too staggering, too imposing, too monumental. It’s the white whale and I’m just a tiny human on the deck of a tiny ship in the ocean. The disproportion is immense.

I don’t know where to put myself other than beneath its shadow.

Typing feels right, though. I know how to do this. Run, run, run. A waste of energy, maybe. Certainly directionless — but no movement is a waste because you end up somewhere other than where you were before, and only that way can you get any idea about whether it’s the right direction or not. Sit still and you will only be confused.

What is this feeling that I have to be somewhere other than where I am? It’s what the little ant feels when the parasitic fungus infects its little brain, inspiring it to climb upwards toward the light so that the fungus can complete its lifecycle. The spore of something greater infects your soul and moves you toward a greater purpose.

Two possibilities:

1. You will never be happy except by choosing a purpose outside yourself.
2. Choosing a purpose outside yourself is a way of escaping from what really matters.

I’m not sure which one it is. Probably some strange combination of both.

Years get behind you, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Make use of the time — you will lose it anyway. It’s less of a loss if you at least moved yourself forward.

Move yourself… Nothing else moves you. All other motion is just drift, but everything drifts around you as well and so that motion all cancels out.

Zero in, focus, laser-cut your purpose out of the plain background of everyday life with beams from your eyeballs. The purpose is yours if you can find it.

Sometimes I think long paragraphs are not for me. I get a certain rhythm going like a poem and I just don’t have anything more to say on one subject and need a new line. Doesn’t matter. I just want to get out of the habit of using all those goddamn ellipses. Those… things… are… indecisive… poison. Pick a punctuation mark and stick with it?

The problem is that I’m trying to carry on a conversation at the same time as I’m writing this. The flow isn’t even necessarily the point, although it’s nice to get into that state. No, the purpose is to push yourself forward when there isn’t necessarily a clear way. The point is to wade through the muck of a blank screen and find some reason you want to slam these keys early in the morning and see what you have before you. It’s a lot of laughter, it’s a bit of enjoyment that comes as a byproduct of imagining something on the other side of this swamp that you want to obtain.

None of it needs to make sense to anyone else. None of it has to come together for you, it just has to speak to you and sound nice to you. It can be a joke that’s only funny to you, it can be a meaning that only attracts you. Your personal meaning is a bug zapper tuned to the frequency that resonates only with you, drawing you and only you to your individual fate.

“All death is certain, the only thing is to live well.”

Too bad I have to end it on someone else’s words but there you go.

You can always move on past the point that you cannot go back — that is what we wall do no matter what. That is how it has always worked: entropy moves in one direction. You lust for the younger while you move ever onward toward death.

Keep moving.

You cannot keep yourself together in this way. You cannot scrape together the points that want you here. You cannot create if you do not first destroy. All the old garbage must be taken out; space must be made for the new if you are ever to squeeze together all the things you want into one lifetime.

Lifetime. Life-time. Life and time. Time keeps moving, relentlessly. It runs us all over in the end, we are all its roadkill. We are all its smashed and broken children. Even the works and influence we leave behind are erased — they either disintegrate if they are physical, or dissipate through time if they are in the form of influence and change. Change continues, the winding down of the great cosmic machine continues.

Whether it’s all for nothing is not your concern. You did not build it and will not be around for its heat-death. You are a spider spinning its web, hoping for something to eat. Just do your dance and take what you can get. The rest will sort itself out.

I had added more than I thought to this blog. This is encouraging. I can’t stand starting from scratch, going over all the basics from the beginning again and again. I really shouldn’t fight it but I cannot keep myself in line. I really cannot kick the pants of all the rest of those bastards who can fight the deep fight.

Even on here I revert to using the same words I used to scribble all the time. “Deep” and “fight” are probably the most commonly used. They’re single-syllable and mean something important. They’re full of something I cannot imagine. They’re all just crushing my balls, man.

I have to get three paragraphs out of it all. I have to get something out of it, not for me but for whatever alien civilization discovers this on a rotting disk somewhere. Whatever it’s stored on, whatever it’s kept on. They will have to try to make sense of it, just as I am doing right now. I’m not hitting return because I want to keep it at three paragraphs. I haven’t got anything further today. All out. But the point is to keep going when you think you’re done, that is how you push yourself further than you previously could go.

Fuck it, fourth paragraph.

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.