When I Arrive, I Bring The Fire

‘There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace – those qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush or the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move toward death.’
                                                                                                             (Excerpt from 'Dune')

I have done some light reading on the Greek philosophers of old, and their perceptions about the nature of the world, how it fits together, and why it works the way it does. Here are a few of them that still resonate in my head:

Empedocles believed that there were only two forces in the world – Love and Strife. Love brought things together, whilst strife pulled them apart. He claimed that this explained how things could change and yet the world could stay the same.

Thales said the world floats like a log on endless water, and that all things are full of gods. But when people think of things that are full of gods, they always think about death, and sunsets, and the Niagara Falls; never of doorknobs.

Parmenides was conflicted about reality not being real. He made the beautiful observation of noting that reality could only be understood by thought – which is a disastrous notion in itself. The rational mind is a terrible tool for the job, as it only seeks logic. It searches for justice, and never considers that there may be none. It has this notion, which it clings to, that the truth would save us, though it is quite obvious that precisely the opposite is often true.

Heraclitus was bothered by the fact that everything changes. This perpetual change in the world happens whether or not we notice it. He concluded that since fire changes everything it touches, fire is to blame. Everywhere we look, the world is on fire, burning invisibly, changing before our very eyes.

What senses do we lack that we cannot see or hear another world around us? How do we know we know what we think we know? And if we find that after all we don’t know what it is that we once thought we knew, how do we know we are who we think we are, or thought we were yesterday? You follow?
The thing about being alive is that we have a false sense of control. The world works, whether or not we are an active part of it.

Newton’s Third Law states that for every action, there is an equal but opposite reaction. I’ve taken this out of the mechanical physics context and applied it to what we know as karma. Let me clear something up: It does not work in the future tense. It works pretty much as Newton summed it up – everything you do to me is already being done to you.

I Want To Breathe

I want to breathe as I want to write.
I need to write as I need to feel.
I must feel as I must live.

I hope things are beautiful. And when they're not, I hope to remember this moment in which they are. Someone you haven't even met yet is wondering what it'd be like to know someone like you. Can you understand? For all my despair, for all my dejection - my life is still a myriad of colours that I cannot comprehend. As soon as you think you are done, you are. So keep learning. Never be done.


What does it cost me to share my life with you?
What do I lose by giving you all that is me? You may have my name, share my knowledge, bask in my humanness. This will seem precious for all of three seconds, but then what will you do with it? What will you die protecting?

We feel that to reveal embarrassing or private things, we have given someone something. That, like a primitive person fearing that a photographer will steal his soul by taking a picture, we identify our secrets, our pasts and their blotches with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or deeds somehow makes one less of oneself.

But it's just the opposite. More is more is more - more bleeding, more giving.
When you find someone with whom you feel you can share your words with, you stop in shock at all that you are - it all feels rusty, feeble, everything you are seems meaningless from having been cramped in the small, dark recesses of selfdom for so long.

"Life has been some combination of fairy tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning."  ~ Sylvia Plath

Who you want to be is not nearly as important as who you are right now.
I see skies that aren't there, and I read words that were never written. To have a mind that is so beautiful and full, it is annihilating. I need to breathe so that I may share myself with you. All of this so that you may have a part of me in you, and I will never die.

Paint

People make me angry.
So incredibly angry.
I am a temperamental being, and am easily frustrated or irritated. But anger is new.

It gets to a point where my internal rage is at risk of exploding.
But I am very rarely outwardly angry. You've not experienced my anger.
It would hurt people, I know this much. So what do I do? I keep pushing it further down, searching for more crevices in the deep, dank recesses of my mind. Thus far, it's been an effective shock absorber. That is correct; I absorb the aftermath stemming from tumultuous earthquakes, violent eruptions from the blood lava that brings me to life. Each day, I find myself ebbing in and out, bleeding into myself.
It scares me to think that someday, someone might see all that is raw within me. The putrid stains left on the wallpaper of my brain, the ugly remnants of my own insanity having feasted upon me. It makes me cry, because of what my anger is insidiously doing to me. I cry because I keep myself alive so that I may destroy.

The Hierarchy

There is an unspoken hierarchy of readers. It is determined by the way in which they tackle a book.

At the top of this imagined pyramid are the purists – people who read to soak up the elegantly constructed literary style and savour brilliant metaphors, inventive characters, breath-taking imagery, and sparkling dialogue. These are people who appreciate words, in themselves. The story is beside the point. In fact, many of them believe the plot is a mere distraction from the art. They see the wood beyond the trees, as it were. I dare count myself among them.

Not far behind are the academics – readers whose infatuation stems from the classroom, perhaps the first novel they were made to analyse and never got over it. They’re often underlining or highlighting, turning down pages, looking up words they’re not familiar with, and scribbling pithy comments in the margins. These readers are those that appreciate by thorough dissection and analysis.

The book worshippers are next. They ensure all their books are covered, preach about bookmarks, and absolutely NEVER let a book touch the floor. They look at the book as a sentient being, a living, breathing object of desire that must be treated with utmost respect. They make a point to read every word, every footnote, every single detail.

And then there are the readers who just want a good old-fashioned story and make no qualms about it. They skip over long descriptive paragraphs, skim through digressions, and zero in on the who-what-where to the nth degree. A subcategory of this is people who read books for sex, violence, or any other particular proclivity, and speed-read passages that don’t interest them or don’t stick to the canon.

How about them multitask readers, hmm? Those who read while cooking, cleaning, talking on the phone, or driving. Which is stupid. These people often boast about their vast collection of e-Books. THOSE ARE NOT REAL BOOKS FFS. Nothing can compare to the sensual feelings paper between your fingers can evoke.

The bottom feeders come next and include the status readers, a group of wannabes who don’t really want to read the book at all, but want to be seen with it – like arm candy, the proverbial young blonde on the arm of a famed tycoon. They skim the book for plot and carry it around like a designer bag. For shame.
Even worse are the people who listen to audio books, the new version of condensed books, or read novelisations of current movies. These people consider themselves readers, but they’re not. They’re just hopping onto any old bandwagon in the hopes of being included in conversations. Know this now; I will not endure you. I ought to group the narcoleptics in this category of non-readers. People who’ve had the same books sitting on their bedside table for months, and also the bathroom readers; you know, the ones with magazine racks near the toilet that hold dog-eared collections of outdated YOU magazines. You disgust me.

But let’s not forget the hopeless unfinishers – people who like choosing books, buying books, starting books, but the only thing they can’t seem to do is finish the book. They continually deceive themselves, thinking this is the one book they are going to read all the way through, and I do think they are well-intentioned, but like diets and New Year’s resolutions, the will to persevere usually fades. Alas.

However, in my opinion, the most frustrating category is the people who read a book, and JUST DON’T GET IT. I hate when I have to point out a most obvious lack of comprehension to one of these.

There are hundreds more subcategories. I might delve into those in my next rant.

You're Stupid

Interacting with people is a difficult process if you're nothing like them.
This is because most people are stupid.

Typical conversational question: "How do you come up with such cool ideas? Please tell me so I can be as cool as you." Now I don't know how to answer this enquiry without insulting the person. I don't want to say, "I'm sorry to report that if your brain does not create ideas, you are dead." And I can't say, "Everyone gets ideas. If you're getting bad ideas, it's probably because your brain is defective." My most likely reply would be, "I'm far too busy to be bothered with your ludicrous and insignificant question. But thank you for asking." The truth is, there's just no graceful way out.

In fact, from now on, I'm going to charge anybody who gives me their opinion. People are idiots. If I have to listen to their opinions, I deserve compensation.

Now let's consider why people are stupid:

1. Stupidity doesn't hinder reproduction.

Humans are a rapidly growing element of Earth's ecosystem. There are more and more of us all the time. As species go, we are incredibly successful. But stupid people have been around since the beginning, right? There always has been stupid people, and there's no dearth of them now. We like to allude our evolutionary success to the fact that we are able to survive longer than our caveman predecessors, hence the increase in populace. If that were so, then cockroaches rule the world - they have the numbers, and they're not stupid enough to believe that it's because of the size of their brains.

Stupid people breed. Exponentially. Stupidity actually enables the growth of the population quite a bit. Think about people who get married, have kids, and say - "Now why did I do that? Oh yeah, I was stupid." Not thinking clearly is very helpful in making the whole mystery of chemical attraction seem worth pursuing. The bonding process, which is essential for human survival, doesn't give a damn about what we think of as smartness, it cares about irrationality and chemicals, both of which it highly values. None of us would put up with each other for a moment if it weren't for the saving graces of stupidity and bonding.

2. Nothing shocks us anymore.

Many times I see people doing something stupid, and I'll proclaim to myself as such. That emotional jolt I experience is my brain's way of reminding me to never be as stupid as the person I just saw. This is my body mapping out what I should and shouldn't do, and making it stick by attaching it to some emotion (usually disgust, because people are disgusting). In modern times, however, it has become socially acceptable to do stupid things. Think of something like Jackass that commends stupidity. People witness such idiocy with reverence. They're way past the point of being disgusted because their brain no longer recognises the difference between stupidity and humanness. They never will experience the profound visceral stupidity reaction that heralds intelligence. Sigh.

3. People are sheep.

And I don't mean they taste good. Okay, maybe they do.
What I was referring to was the inability of Other People to make informed decisions for themselves, mainly because they lack the desire to actually attain information. Instead, they are led almost willingly by others.

Technology magnifies the ability of one person to have a big impact on other people. Sadly, these positions of power are held by the people who are equally as stupid - but have a larger ego. This explains why stupidity is immune to education - all the educated ones are holed up together, getting infinitely more intelligent (refer to previous blog post), while the rest of humanity tends towards the other extreme.

I assure you, the limit does not exist.

In fact, it is my belief that scientists will eventually learn how to convert stupidity into clean fuel. It is truly the only unlimited source of energy.

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?