one or the other

"There is no greater sin than desire No greater curse than discontent, No greater misfortune than wanting something for oneself. Therefore he who knows that enough is enough will always have enough." — Lao Tsu: Tao te ching

I am hypnotized and lost in the haze of retirement. This is the fifth year since my father was vanished across the planet to spend the rest of his days in the desert instead of our front yard lawn or backyard garden, maybe followed by watching Westerns on the television. I'm in my early twenties and am still considered far too young and excitable to take it easy. My mother who’s still around will call me religiously at 7 o'clock in the morning and spit and curse and damn the idiot North American bandwagon lackeys that think them so brilliant.

My closest ones will talk to me about politics and we'll agree and disagree and I'll lose my cool and I'll shake my head and we will yell. And when the phone rings sometimes I'll pick up the television remote and try to answer it. Sometimes I get it right and pick up the phone. Then again.

I have found it hard to sleep as of late, lots of counting seconds and minutes and hours. The sheep have unionized making it impossible for me to count to fifty without them demanding a half hour. So I am left with a magnificent collection of gin and ice cubes. Oblivion is something grand once in awhile. So let it be undertaken in a like manner.

It is questioned that Internet may be reducing our literacy skills. Noticeably reducing young people’s proficiency in thinking critically and writing cogently.

“Talk of decline was old news in academia even in 1898, when traditionalists blasted Harvard for ending its Greek entrance requirement. But today there's a new twist in the story: Are search engines making today's students dumber? In December, the National Center for Education Statistics published a report on adult literacy revealing that the number of college graduates able to interpret complex texts proficiently had dropped since 1992 from 40 percent to 31 percent.” - read more

I sit at my desk in my office, the sky grey and the windows sealed. I yearn for the time of day for music to play and ascend my spirit if but only slightly. Aside from the trivials of day to day life...we all have to blame the weather, right? For too long, and I’m not sure why, it has been easy to blame the weather—particularly the winds, which have seemed so often to come from the wrong quarter—but perhaps it’s simpler than that. Perhaps I’ve been away from the outside world far too much. In the evenings, I’m watching films (Thumbsucker was a great film by the way. I recommend it) exploring ideas, and blogging. Maybe I simply haven’t been where I should be for many of the good evenings when I could have sat out there, doing nothing in particular and so much that matters. I’ve been elsewhere a good quarter of my life. I’ve said, I regret none of it.

Now spring is here; yet with winter beginning to stretch its shadow across the land towards winter again. It’s likely I’ll have few of these evenings left to enjoy. I’d like to share sometime with my old friends; here, squinting across into the sun after another day floating and spiralling and scanning, falling and rising.

It’s hard during these few weeks for most; for those I know personally, we’re faced with the prospect of work the next day, and a relaxed session has to compete with a decent nights sleep and it’s easy to say, “let’s leave it for the weekend” usually meaning Saturday. One day of seven. It seems wrong. A life is so precious and so ephemeral that to waste any of it seems an unbearable tragedy. No...to think of it, it is an unbearable tragedy. Yet so many of us do bear that tragedy; most days getting up reluctantly and heading off to a job we often dislike; a job where we find ourselves most often stressed; most importantly, a job that seems largely trivial and sometimes unimportant, without real meaning emphasized.

What can be done? Well, you can either change your circumstances or change the way you think. Occasionally, changing your circumstances—for example, switching jobs, going elsewhere—can work. Often it doesn’t. Conversely, changing how you think can always work—the catch is that it’s far harder. All I can say, from my own experience, is that it gets easier with practice.

Returning to that sad thought about how so much life gets wasted, I think about the recent sale of this one online auction and the response to that. A small company developed on the internet sold for millions and the news was full of the story of cofounder named Sam, who, only a few years ago, was a trying to keep warm in a shared flat. Now he’s banked something between $200–300 million and is fielding numerous offers of marriage. Good luck to him. I have no complaints about Sam—what disturbs me is the sort of thinking (if that’s not too generous a word) the story has encouraged. Suddenly it seems everyone wants to know how he did it so they can do it too. That, or something equally successful. The tragedy is that, yet again, success is measured as money.

Sam’s either hailed as a hero to emulate or he’s envied because, well, he got rich quick. That is what is considered significant; that is what we should strive for. What seems to have been ignored or downplayed, even when Sam pointed it out himself, is that he enjoys what he does.

To me, that’s his real success.

I wonder: what if we all found a way to make $200 million within a few years? Would we be happier? Would our society be better?

If I were rich I would be on a terrace on the far side of the river where a stag roars: a deep, drawn-out groan full of lust and aggression. I would be at it up in the hills too, wandering about, setting up territories, herding hinds, challenging interlopers. In that state I want to be. It would be easier to hunt the more vulnerable teens who have sex in my woods seasoned in mists and mellow fruitfulness.

But today, my ass hurts. I sit back in my chair with the sun-rotted. Realizing how hormones and testosterone poison our soul of understanding. The ability to understand fractured into the assumption of it and the reality of it. Exactly how convoluted has it become? For all the advances made in the last 100 years, consider the complications and stresses amplified in the pursuit of conveniently and expeditiously understanding. It is, in a way, the accumulation of confusion that distances you from yourself. Would you say that in ages past people knew themselves better or worse than we do? That unspotted by the white noise and the low hum of a million emancipators they knew the peace of their internal selves better or worse? Was there once a greater respect for that inward honesty that we judge ourselves with in private, or does it remain unchanged within us? And how does misinformation and the bombardment of our minds with useless information about useless things effect that inward state and the truthful notions of ourselves?

In a world in love with live broadcasted casualty free wars, television stations devoted entirely to celebrities-their whereabouts-their wardrobe-who they're fucking, and the outcomes of 'reality based' television shows, can we even honestly answer those questions?

Probably not.