Ant Farm. Because Aliens.

There is much speculation about whether or not life exists on other planets.

Mostly, we wonder if these super-advanced beings are so bored with their own planet that they're willing to travel thousands of lightyears to stick objects into the orifices of Earthlings. Because we're entirely self-absorbed and are too lazy to imagine ourselves developing a way for us to find them. We're saving our technological prowess for developing toilets that flush themselves. Yeah.

I couldn't imagine how these presumably highly intelligent life forms would find us entertaining. But then again, we are considered an advanced civilisation, and there are plenty of people who give me reason to doubt that claim. For reasons beyond comprehension there is actually a sport called Worm Charming.  Ranking right up there with watching paint dry and grass grow, the object is to charm the worms from the earth by using water and vibrating the soil. Yes, these people live among us. So it got me thinking, maybe the aliens that deign to visit Earth are not the cream of the alien crop? Maybe the aliens that visit are not the same ones that invented space travel back on their planet? You know, ordinary did-you-buy-milk-and-bread kind of aliens. Just look at the people you drive past on the freeway; how many of them could have invented a car?

There is so much of information available about alien abductions and UFO sightings on the internet. People who have 'actual footage' of these events that they were lucky enough to witness. And all these grainy images resemble saucers and garbage can lids. What are the odds that so many garbage can lids are flying around without our notice? It's just so much more likely that the skies are filled with unidentified flying spacecrafts. Well-played, aliens.

I think we can logically conclude that the photo evidence are accounts of visits from other life forms. That begs the question, where are they from? The popular view is that these creatures are from a distant planet. This assumes three things about our aliens:

1. They are capable of intergalactic travel.
2. They are capable of finding us in the vastness of space.
3. Their stealth technology makes images of their ships resemble grainy pictures of garbage can lids.

As plausible as this may seem, we must consider my theory on the other logical alternative: There are already aliens living among us, they are just smart enough to stay hidden from the general population. Consider: is it easier to build a spaceship capable of intergalactic travel, or hide behind some trees? I mean, look at fuel prices. 

You may have noticed that our world harbours many people who are smarter than others. For example, the average IQ of the general population is 100. On the other side of the spectrum, we have the Byron Brassels and Marilyn vos Savants, who tip the scales at around 200 on the IQ scale. From their perspective, there is little difference between the average individual and a dog, except maybe the dog is cuter. Who do you think they'd rather spend time with?

I'm guessing they wouldn't want to hang around with the plebeians. Being super-smart, they would find an alternative. They would find a place where they could live among one another, and create an elaborate cover story to keep the plebs away. Maybe such a place exists on Earth. And the people who live there are the aliens. 

Naturally, these aliens would be distinguishable from the public by these simple measures:

• They would not partake in wars.
• They would carry with them very, very accurate pocket watches.
• They would appreciate fine chocolates and coffees.
• Their pocketknives would be extraordinary.
• They would have the highest standard of living.
• They would understand all my jokes.

Every other weekend, when they aren't feigning a living by constructing intricate mathematical functions and defying gravity, they take their hovercrafts out for a spin and go trolling for people with cameras. It's a game, see. And my hypothesis is that after years of progressive evolution, these super-smart beings would have evolved into skinny, grey creatures with huge eyes, but by then, the plebeians would all have nuked each other, and then they would have no reason to hide. 

You may think I'm jumping to conclusions here, but is this not what we fear from them? Total world domination. This is my theory, and in the future you will see that I am right. 

Need I Say More?

Schadenfreude

Once again, my mind wanders to the mystery that is humanness. What is this human condition we are so quick to blame for our lapses in rationality? What is this unfathomable notion we allude to our primal behaviour?

Curiosity is the lust of the mind. We are inquisitive beings. Thankfully, along with this penchant for discovering the depths of ourselves, we have a sense of rationality to bind us to sanity. People like to believe that the power lies in the majority, and yet, we are NOT a democratic entity. How is it that what we deem right and wrong has been based on how many believe it to be true?

Schadenfreude. This beautiful word is a truth we choose to avoid.
It ought not to be secret that it is 'human condition' to derive pleasure from the pain of others. And we succumb, openly. I have been known to disregard euphemisms on the principle of being honest with myself about the person I am to become. But what has language taught me? Synonyms. I have pride in the fact that my vocabulary is immense, but again, why is it so? Why do we need words that are similar to other words?
It is because we are afraid of being the animals we despise. So we mask our treacherous deeds and intentions with a seemingly amiable motive.

Form follows function.

A person who has been known to give themselves up for the goodwill of others is praised as a martyr, as an admirable soul. Now think of this in context of our natural beings, our primal purpose, if you will. It is our instinct to beat opposition and seek first for ourselves. So technically, there is nothing we do for others out of pure good will, because we seek something, anything, in this bargain.
"You make my dopamine levels go all silly."
Is it inconceivable to believe that people would 'do good' in order to feel good? Empathy is not natural. It is, reader, another of these blasphemous euphemisms.

It is the irony in sterilising the needle before injecting a person on death row. How utterly human of us to shield ourselves from ourselves. And to what cause? Does this make it any more palatable?

Perhaps there is a critical age for learning how to empathise. It's like language, which linguists have discovered will not develop spontaneously or correctly to a child that is not exposed to speech before the onset of puberty. Something to do with lateralisation of the brain, maybe? In any case, it is my opinion that empathy is a result of social conditioning. There is a cut-off point where what you have never learnt becomes an emotion that you can only imitate. You are forever denied the human experience.

We become what we experience. It is not an easy task to be a muse.
Think, to have inspired that, to have known oneself to be the object of an irrational and glorious desire, the source and instrument of love, a thing of beauty...

It has been so profoundly disappointing to be an observer of the human experiment, to see with such clarity, but to be so unmoved. Beating out a shout that echoes unanswered and forever in a dark cave, for a life to be driven by passions so fully regarded.

Is there even one modicum of evidence to suggest that we know the difference between right and wrong?

You Are What Answers You Get To Questions You Didn't Ask

My attraction to misunderstood underdogs has led me to peculiar fandom.

Charles Horton Cooley once said, "One who shows signs of mental aberration is, inevitably, perhaps, but cruelly shut off from the familiar, thoughtless intercourse, partly excommunicated; his isolation is unwittingly proclaimed to him on every countenance by curiosity, indifference, aversion, or pity, and insofar as he is human enough to need free and equal communication and feel the lack of it, he suffers pain and a loss of a kind and degree which others can only faintly imagine, and for the most part ignore."

It's a big deal to not feel part of something bigger than the selfdom we subconsciously create. It's the human condition to assimilate in order to be appreciated, or at the very least, acknowledged. No one wants to be the Forever Alone guy.

We are artists experimenting with new styles. We are two lovers inventing a new form of singular relation between us. How daunting is it that what we create is most probably not new to the world, but just to ours?
Let's discuss the wilderness of being.

How do we decide upon which factors aid us in judging one another? Truths always come from elsewhere. Are you constantly evaluating yourself? Why are you?
Consider the function of your time and the eternity of your present. So much potential. We never begin from scratch. There is no clean slate. All we are is stored in the great database in the sky, and people hold grudges. When is resorting to one's primal desire for affection a negative? Why do we crave adoration and acceptance, even from lesser beings? It is the human condition to make us fall prey to the notion of power. We encounter the desire to police, dominate, subordinate, and render subservient. Don't give in.

BE A CREATION OF CONCEPTS.
These things never fall readily into one's straining arms. They must be constructed. We want to be towers. We want to be the focus of the panoramic view. Concepts are not ideas (unpopular opinion). They are tangible. They are tools. It makes as much sense to ask "Is this concept true?" as to ask "Is this pencil true?" But this is the kind of question few, like myself, would find an engaging topic of conversation. What everyone wants to know is, "What does it do?"

So, what do you do, my little concepts?

Answer things in silence.

Oops, I Forgot To Take My Meekness Pills And Inherit The Earth

No one succumbs to a temptation they find unattractive. What is it, this compulsion to scrawl things on blank pages? Why this boundless out-flowing of words? What drives me to it? Is writing some sort of disease, or - being speech in visual form - is it simply a manifestation of being human?

Language is lyrical. I become offended when people don't make the effort to understand what I say, and why I choose the words I do. Why is no one curious? I don't understand how someone could not be bewitched by language, enthralled by linguistic propagation, the miracle of inventiveness that can spawn such gems as 'cyanosed' or 'perspicacity'. When I wrote essays in school, I was chided for using words that are less commonly known among people. This confused me. People don't savour the gift of a sentence, or delight in how a word defines the object and becomes forever inseparable from the concept. And this, of course, the very essence of humanity, is the universe I set out to conquer.

Sometimes I fear that I reduce language to a quantifiable process. I peel back the skin to examine semantics and split seams to make sense and extract the logical clauses. I conduct autopsies to excise its tumourous ambiguity, classify and grade the natural exuberance, demystify the miracle, bag it up and explain it away. It's a deflowering of sorts, this desire to harness the fundamental power of language - and it's entirely preposterous - it is tantamount to a rejection of language as irrational, illogical, inexplicable, impure. Perhaps it is a response borne out of fear - a fear of the inexpressible, all that cannot be explained. For all my efforts in understanding language, I do see that mystery is closer to love than familiarity.

I am a theatre of processes. I am the prey to an imperfect vision, to the grandiose colossus that is language.
It is a process of demystification that creates the illusion of control.

The Semantics of Murder

"The difference between a crime of evil and a crime of illness is the difference between a sin and a symptom."

I've never understood why people have an affinity for living. Why would you want to survive?
Survival, not death, is the real mystery. The instinct to cling on gasping and serve your time is a concept that is both underrated and under-explored. Even in the face of unending pain and inevitable death, humans beg for the chance to live in the world they've done nothing but complain about after having destroyed it. I've never understood the appeal.

Recently, I've had the pleasure of discussing the semantics of murder with Cavie and Akshar, and they've helped me realise what's so beautiful about murder. A particular method of murder, incidentally.

I am stunned by the intimacy of strangulation.

The act of stifling the life force of a person, somewhat absorbing them into you, gaining strength from their growing weakness and thriving off their futile willingness to survive... It's thoroughly engaging.
It has none of the distance of a gun shot or stab wound; none of the impersonality of a weapon. It is a passive way to kill, and an almost feminine way to die. The act of murder is a calculating decision. It is not acted out for the moment of death, but rather for the process of dying. It is an act of real and complete engagement, for it is intensely personal. This is how you kill when love meets hate, when you become so consumed by your victim that your body must become the weapon. It's an intense desire to crush the fragile windpipe and feel the warmth ebbing out of a body before it becomes inanimate in your arms.

And then, the quiet aftermath ensues.
Introspection. Time for both the killer and the victim to reflect on how they could both have avoided this outcome. Time to consider their flaws. It's a brazen opportunity for pure remorse as the victim experiences a final expiring embrace. Now can you see how little there is that separates love from hate?

You've watched the grand finale. There is a certain romance in dying in front of an audience. You wish for a beauty in death, not unlike Juliet or Cleopatra. But in reality, death is an ugly affair. Stay ugly.

All that's left is the rest of your life. Don't make a fool of yourself by trying to escape. Endure the purgatory of waiting and take the consequences without objection. This is the story of your life. You've spent a lifetime enduring the mundane plot with predictable twists, and you're about to experience the short-lived peak of another. This is why you live. This is why it has never occurred to you to end it all - your life is a vigorous and persistent search in the hopes that your story will end differently, and not merely confirm the absence of something essential and elusive.

When I imagine death, it is rich in its anticipation, but so utterly barren after delivery. It becomes very quickly anti-climatic to me. If I cannot fathom love, then I cannot experience the agony of loss. I do not feel your pain. I am only able to observe the gaping void within me where the stem of my humanity must have withered and died before it could blossom. 

The Cognitive Condition Of My Brain Is Currently Compromised

How could anyone be sure if who they are is what they see in a mirror?

Memory is a wonderful selective. We cling to the peripherals in moments of stress, little slivers of reality that construct a defence against the trauma. But what is not of any certainty is the memory itself. Memories change because how we want to remember them changes. People who feature in our lives never play a consistent part. In this manner, we are all storytellers, because everything we witness becomes fiction in a retelling. We remember people and their actions in context of how we feel about them in a particular moment. Experiments! We are all each other's experiments in an encounter.

Why do we ask questions? If you just listen long enough, you hear everything you need to know. Observation is a rewarding conquest. I've watched people absorb each other's pasts until they could no longer distinguish between beginnings and endings, between truth and falsehood, ownership and possession. It's actually a great dissolution of privacy as they raid each other's lives in order to make sense of their own.

'Whoever has eyes to see and ears to hear will be persuaded that mortals can hide no secrets. He whose lips are silent speaks with his fingertips; betrayal threatens from every pore. That’s why the task of making conscious the most hidden business of the soul can be certainly resolved.'

What do we know about ourselves?

I have made some leeway with distinguishing between three commonly misused words: Emotions, Moods, and Attitudes.

I've concluded that emotions have physiological correlates – it can be seen from gestures, facial expressions. They often lead to an action, and result from a specific event. They beg the attention of an audience. This, readers, is what we practice in front of a mirror, because this is all we can control.

Moods are seemingly more complex. They have no sense of time or direction, and are not necessarily expressed physically. They also seem to have no apparent cause or source. A result of hormones, perhaps?

Attitudes definitely have a more cognitive, conscious component. It's a switch.

Reactions are not as appreciated as they ought to be. So much can be read in a glance. We need to learn to listen with our eyes. What do you despise? By this you are truly known.

“No amount of observations of white swans can allow an inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.” – David Hume

Certainty is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences the certainty must have a feeling of the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional certainty will destroy a man.

I want my past transposed into an extravagant storyboard with the reassurance of plot. Like you, the reader, who demands the story, a reason to turn the page, I want an ending so that there could be a beginning.