Pot-Healer

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.

Choosing the title is always the last thing I do. The number-one mistake anyone makes in writing is believing that the first thing that comes to your mind will be a good way to open. You always have to just get started and then go back to the beginning and fix it. The beginning always needs fixing.

Unless you’re writing a stream-of-consciousness blog, then it doesn’t matter.

But I do have to go back and give this post a title, like all the others. And that’s what I’m referring to. That’s what got me started with this waste of three paragraphs in the first place.

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This whole blog is the front line in my fight against the internet distraction machine. That hungry beast is probably best visualized as a parasitic brain-sucker, feeding off your brain waves and making you a hazy-minded zombie in the meantime. You don’t just pull this monster off your head, you get rid of it by focusing very hard on some task and completing it. Divert your mental energy to something useful and there is none left over for it. It simply starves.

You have so little time and there’s so much more you could be doing. You have to focus on those things. Every day, five percent more work. It adds up. It gets more done than you realize. You’ll dig yourself out of that hole faster than you think. You can really shred all that horrible nonsense and get closer to the place you want to be.

All of this devolves into free-writing so I’ll just let it go:

You think you can escape bullshit. You cannot. It’s crazy to try to escape from bullshit, which is everywhere. You can escape from your own bullshit, though. You can pay attention to the excuses you make for yourself and stop making them. You can listen to your own thoughts and put a stop to the useless ones. You can align yourself with something better. You can stop drifting and propel yourself toward something. That’s the point of all of this, after all.

Keep resting your mind gently against the problem. Remember it always, think of it often, and you’ll gradually crack that safe. It will open for you if you are patient with it and with yourself.

Patience with oneself is hard but it is the only way to sustain effort for long enough to get something really important done.

I’m doing the thing again. I finally got up early so I can actually give some proper attention to the thing I’m supposed to be doing — writing. I still regard that now as “the thing I’m supposed to be doing.” I don’t know why life is so much more bearable for humans when we have a thing we’re supposed to do, but it is.

This blog for me is my heartbeat. Its sole purpose is to just keep going, so I cay say every day that I at least wrote something. I really should write down more, even small pieces during the day.

I should do a lot of things.

I should keep up that schedule I keep trying to make for myself — that daily list of “shit I have to do — and get it all done. I can get a lot done today because I didn’t drink last night and I feel relatively fine. I can haul a lot of junk out and get it all to the dump. Clearing things out is the name of the game for me lately, out of my physical space and also out of my mind. There’s too much floating around in there, too much clutter and fog when what I need is space and clarity.

I repeat myself a lot when I’m just writing. I think maybe we all do. It’s no matter because no one will read this. It’s just exhaust, it’s output. It’s just a thudding heartbeat. Nobody minds how fast or slow it goes.

I’ve got this impulse to do some free writing, like I used to do. So I’m going to do that now and let the italics be my excuse:

Dead weight and a lively conversation, sunlight bouncing off a killer fight that you have no business adjudicating… Word salad from the brain of someone who’s not supposed to be senile yet. You can really get yourself into the shitter if you need to, can really screech about something that is not the matter when there is no point beyond what you have told yourself. You can screech all you like about the weight underneath you and make light of something that lies at the bottom of a deep gravity well. But you cannot joke about the possibility of life on other planets or the point of keeping yourself alive long enough to see something beautiful. You have to understand that you might not live long enough to understand what the point of all of this was — you might just have to strain yourself less deeply and keep it all together the way you wished.

The point of writing that sort of thing by hand in the past is gone, but I did improve my handwriting a lot. Maybe I should keep that up for that purpose alone. I can dump all that paper in the recycling, though. It can go on to convey information of some value; for me the only purpose was to absorb a ton of garbage from my brain.

Recycling the electrons that this blog is made of will be just as easy. You can stretch it as deep as it can go and never have to worry about it. You can keep yourself going as deeply as you care to. Words, words, words… No one cares because no one reads it and it does not matter. All of it is matter — matter does not matter. The screech comes to a halt.

The point is just to go, and to keep going. If you get traction, if the muse comes back to you after all the time you’ve spent cheating on her, it will be while you are sitting faithfully at your keyboard ready to take down what she has to tell you. Otherwise you will be struck by no important ideas while you’re driving or showering or swimming. It’s like John Cleese said: you have to keep your mind resting against a problem in a kind but persistent manner, and then the solution will come to you. But you cannot do that unless you are actually working on the problem, you cannot do that unless you’re actually trying to solve it. If you fuck off and give up then you will solve nothing. You have to be working. You have to rest against the problem like a dog waiting to come inside.

Perfectionism is a type of arrogance, I’ve decided. One expects perfection from oneself because they’ve tied their work to their ego. They see in their work a reflection of themselves, and can’t stand it if that reflection isn’t as perfect as they want themselves to be. Every way in which their work falls short mirrors their own shortcomings, an imperfect job is a portrait of their own incompetence — when one thinks in this way.

Eric Hoffer said that the true creator creates something that is entirely separable from himself. A petty author will leave territorial markings all over their work; the work becomes a monument to the ego. This is the wrong way. The right way is to build something that is separate and complete, something that stands even if your name is removed from it.

A good example would be all the sayings and expressions we repeat endlessly, to which no author can be attributed. These linguistic nuggets capture such a permanent part of the human experience that they’ve taken on a life of their own as units of wisdom, no attribution needed. They’re so important that they’ve entered the public domain. The people who came up with these sayings created real work: something useful that exists independently of themselves. The work may not be perfect (“perfect” is theoretical) but near enough for humans. It is not a reflection of them. They may have done nothing else noteworthy in their lives. The work is separable.

Perfectionism is ego. Ego does not belong in your work. If you never feel that you deserve much praise when you get things right, you deserve no condemnation when your work falls short. At most, your work product is a snapshot of your skill and effort at that time — and to some degree your luck.

What should your goal be, then? Not the product of the work but the work itself. We like to think that we enjoy the beautiful, finished product — but we enjoy the beautiful, finished product because of the work we put into it. Also, that joy fades with time and the product is eventually taken for granted. The only enduring joy you can return to again and again is the work.

Of course, we all eventually become decrepit and senile and can no longer do the work. That’s when death is close. But that’s a topic for another entry.

Distraction is Hell. Distraction is the black hole which vacuums in all your precious time, swallowing it forever. It’s a hungry beast to which you feed years, in return for only a moment’s amusement.

It takes so long to grow up now. I could not explain to the previous hundreds or thousands of generations of humans what it is like to live without the hardships that formed us. We were suited to the world once. We changed the world, we removed all the pain that made us what we were — and in doing so erased our place in the world.

What happens when your psyche and your body are meant for toil and hardship, and all of that has been removed? You ache for it. You create it where it does not need to exist. It’s true that we play up minor problems and pretend they are monumental challenges, but something worse happens too: minor problems are monumental challenges to those of us who have faced nearly nothing. Our perspective is lost.

Our invented problems today don’t satisfy our need for something more important to be wound up about.

What am I doing? I’m sitting back comfortably and complaining about having nothing to complain about. Very 21st Century.

There’s plenty of hypocrisy in it, too. I could go somewhere harder and do meaningful work. I could face real problems if I wanted to, as could many other people. We don’t because we don’t want real problems. We refuse the medicine; staying sick is more comfortable.

7:21 AM. A fight breaks out. You can only handle dragging yourself along for so long. You can only deal with this crap for so long… I feel tired and isolated. I feel like I wasted a huge amount of time. Precious years. There are many more but you lost some. You cannot just continue like you have been. You cannot keep yourself together in this way.

Do you ever get tired of talking to yourself this way? I get tired of talking to you this way. Your whole scratch pad doesn’t have to be an endless pep-talk. You can try other things — if you can think of anything else to do. You can come up with a plan for squeezing yourself out of the stupid situation you got yourself into. You need to bill your clients, and you need to finish your work. You need to complete it all. You can’t keep trudging through the jungle like this. You counted on quitting early but that’s not going to happen. Now you have to try pushing forward and finding something worthwhile. You have to imagine that someone else is not going to judge you the way you have judged yourself. You have no idea of your own capabilities, you have no understanding of your most basic potentials. Pessimism has grown so deeply into you that you have no idea what you can accomplish.

There’s a certain faith you will need to have. If I am wrong, if it really was pointless and you never stood a chance, then you will have the comfort of knowing that you did not bend to fear. If you succeed, the purpose is obvious.

“But it sufficeth that the day will end, and then the end is known.”

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I would tell myself that there are no rules when it comes to this scratch pad, but I hate it when there are no rules. You have to play tennis with a net. Constraints provide resistance, and resistance engenders effort. A rule, even just one rule, creates focus. So the only rule is to stay on target and try to write something that means something. It doesn’t have to mean much but it can’t be garbage.

I’ll struggle a bit in this regard — which is the point. The point is that you will not always have something to say, that your relevant thoughts will not always be at the front of your mind and you have to draw them there. The way to do that is to sit down at the keyboard and keep going, just keep going until you figure out what the hell you’re driving at. Nobody else is going to do that work for you. There’s no one else in that Venn diagram overlap area, people who both care and are able to do something about it. You’ve got hardly anyone who cares at this point. They’re all busy with their own lives, as you should be. That’s your problem. You’ve been able to do just about anything, and as a result did nothing.

Wrap up your old projects. They take only a limited amount of time. They only require effort. Anything that requires only effort should be done.

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You are too serious. Life is either not a big deal, or it is such a big deal that it must not be wasted by taking it so seriously. If these years are so precious then they are too precious to be spent stressing yourself about every small thing. You have to balance it, like everything else. The real enjoyment is in the effort; the purpose of the effort is enjoyment. Hard work does not have to be without fun.