My Year in "Realizations": Nihilistic Sententiousness Edition

1. Nobody likes to admit that they are a bad person. Somehow, even as one's failings are being described with a tedious Socratic inexorability, in the absence of mysterious self-condemnation, it's easy to think: I can't be all that bad, and in fact, I'm not that bad. There are two reasons for this: first, and most obvious, you simply can't give up on yourself; even suicide is an expression of a perverse self-interest. And beyond that, the whole concept of “bad” and its corollary implied framework is nothing more than vague nonsense. On some intuitive level, we comprehend the flexibility of moral concepts. As for me, I shake my head, tell myself that I'm an idiot, tell myself that in the future, when things change, I won't make the same mistakes, that's all, they're just mistakes, not an expression of a deeper and more inevitable problem, some moral hideousness. It's just a few lapses in judgment here and there, bad habits, forgetfulness, non-problematic humanity, even at its worst, nothing more than the pitiful eruption of stupidity at the junction of desire and frailty, perspectivelessness and headlong motion.

2. a harvard education is ornamental

3. Life will never be solved. How deeply do I wish it were, somehow, a problem, a puzzle, something amenable to understanding and contemplation. Instead, understanding and contemplation are merely beautiful within themselves, hobbies (in a sense), lovely little habits, but, in themselves with nothing to do with the larger thing, because nothing has anything to do with the larger thing, there is no larger thing, nothing to be done, nothing to be said (with the possible exception of do your work, but, still, workers aren't guaranteed anything).

4. me: you know what I realized?
the people on seinfeld often
Brandon: what's that?
me: should lie
they should lie.
Brandon: they should lie to whom?
me: but they don't.

5. i just realized that it is destructive to your typing score to backspace and change the mistakes you make.
lowers your score, and it still counts it as a mistake.
i'd say my normal typing speed is something like 50 or even as low as 40
i can crank it up, you know, but,
typically i don't.

6. while postmodern critiques are very important, they aren’t salient to the point that everyone should throw everything out the window. postmodernism is like the last and least important thing that a person really needs to know about.

7. most critical decisions one makes in life are made a). without real comprehension of the import of the decision on the part of the decision-maker, and, b). without a real interest-in or an awareness-of the complex variables that motivate the decision.

8. realized that a life lived for oneself would end up with hopelessness, or even more meaninglessness, above and beyond the baseline level of ontological meaninglessness that everyone has to deal with. But at this point, I can't remember my actual reasoning behind that conclusion, if there was any.

9. Satisfaction is ephemeral at least, and irritatingly glutting in large doses. But dissatisfaction chafes; you must balance a view of your life between regrets-averted and dreams-yet-to-be-fulfilled. It's not easy. Post-ironic happiness is an exceedingly rare bird.

10. if you're ignorant, your ignorance annihilates even the possibility of awareness of not-ignorance, the strange pleasures of complexity and distance at the end of a pursuit of awareness.

11. Laziness precedes hopelessness; not vice-versa.

12. The most important "realization" I've realized, the truest truth I think I know: Change—be it for good or bad—is the seat of feeling. Written here, it seems small and tautological and pointless and possibly insane, if not obviously incorrect. In my mind, though, with an elaborated, almost infinite definition of "change," it looms over life and mind as both axiomatic and practical.

13. Realization-I-had-years-ago-and-also-now: everyone is more or less childlike in their essential psychological simplicity; even apparently powerful "individuals" are powerless, that is, determined etiologically.

14. Crappy realization about myself: my urge to listen to new music directly correlates to the existence of other people for whom I can play this music. When there's no one in my life I wish to impress or educate, when there's no one with whom I wish to share special things, I don't tend to seek out new, socially useful stimuli. When in absence of people-I-wish-to-cultivate, I don't feel the artistic impulse to self-expansion. I'm crap.

15. No life is static; even lives oriented actively against the flash and crumble of change are pushed inexorably. The bare fact of change is met with the flexibility of mind on every level: researchers probe the mental mechanisms that enable us to differentiate between our family pet and a thousand junkyard dogs; things retain their continuity in our minds, if seen or imagined, if standing or walking, in the afternoon light or the morning, when the dog is a pup and after it attains its majority. Contemporary philosophers, these virtuosi of the self, are similar, interrogating their experience, sorting through stimuli, mapping memories as they are formed, charting their minor mental earthquakes; weighing epiphanies as they occur, trying to find common-denominators for incidents of wonder and beauty.

16. The inevitability of motion is the identified culprit for many deep pains, manifesting in tragedies as a longing for the past. We are wrenched as our constructions crumble; we feel dread, the tearing of the roots of the mind from thousands of days packed hard underfoot. The obverse is equally apparent: the inevitability of transformation is the last hope when life goes awry; when the momentum of everything that we cannot or did not control heads us off the road and into various ravines; the possibility of escape remains; the inevitability of failure is balmed, if temporarily—the sky is glimpsed through prison bars. The mind lurches against the flat facts: remembering the limitless freedom of childhood, returning to the thoughtless contentedness of lolling dogs laying in the living-room sun; we remember love and moments of unfolding possibility, in a floating twilight of vague fantasies and an amazing foreknowledge of future success and the unlimited freedom that we have, our own, for one or two moments.

17. The highest expression of the dynamism of life is the urge to freedom. In America on a Saturday night, streets dry and wide between buildings, the kids stream from bar to bar to hot dog stands and taxi cabs, young and attractive, looking at their friends, stunned that they’ve come this far, happy or at least available to life's wonderful possibilities.

18. Paltry realization #1: we're in the real world.  STDs and meth teeth.  If you don't believe in causality, you don't believe in anything. 

19. We are all very deeply within our own lives. This means that we aren't capable of seeing with our emotional eyes, so to speak, the ultimate emptiness of most of our concerns. “How good we have it” is the least accessible “true” "fact," 99.99% of moments. Most of the time, we are just people. Living our our lives. I understand this.

20. Two parts: 1.I had a strong sense of shame about myself and my life.
2.I was had paranoiac delusions and/or philosophic beliefs about myself and others to the effect that I “knew” “immediately” that “everyone is alone in life” and is “floating” on a “sea of pointless desire.”

21. Annoying realization about myself: I have been capable in my life of an astonishing paranoia, hyper-vigilance, which I'm constantly controlling, the way one contains some kind of animal, a beast, an opponent in a wrestling match, an abnormally large industrial dump-truck, a wheelbarrow full of bags of cement dust going down a hill, a boat with waterskiers behind it in a crowded lake. I wish to seem off-hand, breezy, and indifferent, and in fact am, most of the time, and have succeeded via indifference and exuberance and a kind of intellectual condescension about decorum to occupy this blessed state of indifference most of the time, except for moments when I'm not breezily indifferent, but in such moments especially I work to remain socially indifferent, which doesn't work: I'm sure I'm widely understood as sensitive and easily slighted and, by way of consequence, am known as weirdly insecure: another one of those smash-mouth judgmental lunatic pussies.

22.Am always presenting schema or vague proofs or entire new vocabularies by which I intend to show that the concept of “friendship” or "love" or any social term as it is used shorthand is hoopla, fallacy, weakness, nonsense. And the interesting irony of this is that at the same time I want deeply to love everyone and express this love: I have a deep joy before them, I want to possess them, want to understand them, want to abuse them, cajole, argue, watch, dominate, ignore, leave unexpectedly; I want to convert them, play them music, take them into locked buildings, drink alcohol, share cigarettes, dance, create out-groups, analyze out-groups, destroy out-groups, moonwalk on the fringes of out-groups, articulate our vast mutual superiority over these out-groups.

23.I don't think about them when I'm gone.

24. realize that if I don't finish Swann's Way by the time I'm old, I can safely say that I wasted my life. Not that I won't waste my life on many levels. Practically everyone wastes their life on the level of risk and art and time. That's fine, kinda: things being what they are, ontologically, everything is wasted inasmuch as everything is arbitrary, or inasmuch as everything passes away. But, unfortunately, I've wasted my life on the level of basic human interaction, which is different from any grand collapse or Van Gogh ear slicing or small-business bankruptcy, a happenstance much more tragic, because the failure is so banal, because everyone should have happiness in the world of people, everyone should have the habit of vulnerability and fun and time and mutuality, which I never have, and never have had, mutuality, I mean, and by that I simply mean: I never seem to be with people equally in the same place feeling the same things. Or something.

25. Imagine the saddest and most profound novel, with a collection of phenomenally brilliant and tragic characters, a thousand poems, fragments, sheaves of thoughts, observations. Well, what's even better than that superlative collation of distilled beauty, is that it all came from one person in the world, a writer, one who struggles in the world, through weeks and hours, arranging, collecting, considering, making money and spending money, yearning, within the world of desire, power, hierarchies, reading book reviews, saturated in the world, inescapably one's own self.