GAME OVER

Life is a game, often a "team" sport, where you arbitrarily get born into one social group or another and spend the duration of your existence in a competition for resources and rewards.  At this point in my experience of this engagement, I'm pretty much ready for the coach to come in and tap me on the shoulder and say it's time for me to hit the showers.  In this case, the "coach" is wearing a long black robe and carrying a scythe.  To carry the analogy a bit further, I've been benched for a while now and will likely never be called in to play again.  I'm worn out, injured and unable to perform at the level necessary to compete with the younger, more talented players on the team.  Going out on the field is pointless as no one is going to pass me the ball and I simply don't have the drive and energy to fight my way into the fray to get my hands on it.

The point here is that, while I have no immediate plans to quit the team just yet, I would not be resistant to being retired.  I know where I'm at in this scenario.  I know that there just isn't any more for me to contribute and, frankly, the game is looking like a washout for all the teams involved anyway.  The truth about this tournament called humanity is that no one's going to end up winning anything.  Sadly, we've all spent the last few eons evolving into this magnificent creature only to slit our own throats just as we're about to hit the goal line.  

It all comes down to motivation and there simply isn't any left when you know what's coming and know there's no avoiding it.  Whether or not I even have the ability to contribute to this world anymore is irrelevant since there's just no point in even making the effort.  There's nothing I could create or communicate or instigate that would have the power to deflect the juggernaut of self-destruction humanity has unleashed upon itself.  The inertia of ignorance and stupidity that is dragging us down into the abyss of annihilation is too massive to counter with any degree of intellect or activism.  The willingness necessary to assail the halls of power and control in order to right this course does not exist within our species.  The heads of state and industry must roll.  There is no avoiding this truth.  They must all be pulled down by force and smashed into dust.  But humanity is too distracted and set upon false rivalries between races and creeds to recognize the real enemy and turn on them.

But it is or no consequence since the time for that drastic action has already past.  Pundits who talk about how we have X years to make changes before the effects are too late are all overly optimistic.  As the stats of what's really happening keep rolling in, the shocking results are that the degradation and imbalances within our ecosystem are far more advanced than anyone had predicted.  It's already too late to fix anything.  We should have been on this in the last century, but we're still debating whether it's even real or not.  We're still giving voice and credence to cretins, liars and criminals as if their thoughts are worth consideration.  They aren't.  They should have been shut down and muzzled long ago so that the work of people who understand the physics of the world could get on with the business of not shoving the planet down the toilet.  

I wish I was wrong about this.  I would be so gloriously joyous to discover the flaws in my assessment and predictions.  I would also be just as happy to be wrong about religion and faith and to discover there is a just creator and the evil in this world will come to a reckoning.  But the only reckoning to come is the failure of our species to survive and, while there may be some rough justice in that, it's a shame to see all the goodness be taken down with the bad.  We are capable of goodness and creativity and inspiration, but the math simply doesn't work out.  Though individuals have made great strides in advancing us from the muck of our ancestors, the tidal wave of ignorance, greed and fear has ultimately won the game in favor of nihilism. 

This, I will be told, is "wrong thinking".  I should be "positive" and "optimistic".  I shouldn't give up or admit defeat.  The system has placed all sorts of triggers and reminders into our experience that tell us that it's the worst thing of all to admit to failure.  I know there will be people who read this and think that I should "hope" for a better future and have "faith" that the good will ultimately prevail.  But I've spent too much of my life living in that bubble of false optimism and found that it has only been another distraction and kept me away from the outrage and anger that I should have had and maybe could have used when I was younger and more able to take action.  If we all felt the despair and  betrayal we should have instead of wrapping ourselves in the security blanket of "positive thinking", we might have taken to the streets and pulled these fuckers out of their seats of power before it was too late.

So I'm still here on the team, but I"m just gonna sit on the bench and watch the game until my little light flickers out.  I won't cheer for anyone anymore, however.  There's no "rah-rah" left in me at this stage.  But there is still a comedy of errors to observe and it makes for some dramatic viewing. 

IF I COULD TURN BACK TIME

If I could go back in time and give my younger self some advice, I'd tell that young boy some things which would change the way he'd live his life.   You see, from the vantage point I have now, I know that the world he's going to live in is far different from the one he thinks is ahead.  Back there, he was thinking about a world based on romantic notions of progress, potential and possibilities.  But what is really around the corner has nothing at all to do with any of those things.

Firstly, I'd tell him that, above all else, money is the most important thing with which he'll ever need to concern himself.  Acquiring it, keeping it and increasing it is the holy trinity he should be focused on to the exclusion of all else.  Money is power and influence and security and control.  Money is a passport to any lifestyle one chooses to live.  Money can buy whatever you need in any circumstance.  Money paves the way and makes all things possible. 

This, of course, means that the very first thing he needs to put aside is any inclination towards the arts.  My God, what a colossal waste of time and effort is contained in that pursuit!  I would regale him with terrifying tales of years spent pouring physical and emotional fuel into creating piles of useless expression never appreciated by a single soul.  I would horrify him with the hopelessness of trying to communicate with a world completely indifferent to every effort.  I would crush his hopes by painting a pallid picture of tossing great pearls before a world of porcine ignorance and swine incapable of appreciation or comprehension.  No, no, no!  First and foremost, forget all about that.  

Instead, I would suggest real-estate as one profitable pursuit.  Property ownership in the right areas is paramount because when you control property, you control people.  But there's also much to be done in the speculation and investment markets.  In fact, a good con can move masses into unleashing great gobs of capitol into your disposal.  The main point to remember here is that one need not be concerned with legalities or ethics in any way.  The acquisition of wealth is its own end and any means to that end is justifiable.  The only consideration is that, if you're going to play outside the rules, be smart about it and don't get caught crossing the lines.  However, if you do find yourself afoul of the law, be assured that money has its privileges and that "greasing" the right palm can go a long way to avoiding issues.  

As for people and relationships, I would counsel to view them as resources and always consider them expendable.  Other humans are merely there for your convenience and should be used unflinchingly and thoroughly and, once exhausted of their value, discarded with as little consideration as one would give a piece of soiled tissue.  Anyone who would be unwise enough to attempt to thwart your objectives or interfere with your plans should be dispatched as quickly, efficiently and mercilessly as possible.  Again, one should endeavor to avoid legal complications, but be cognizant that there are always means by which individuals can be cleanly "eliminated", particularly when the price is right.  

Romance is a trap and should be avoided at all costs.  Romantic entanglements will only ever compromise your standards and dull your judgement.  Indulge your sexual proclivities as freely and frequently as you like, but maintain authority over anyone whom you would involve in such activities and be prepared to dispose of that relationship the instant you detect any attempt to influence your actions or interests.  All such efforts by others are a distraction.

The future is only that time in which you expect to live and anything beyond that span is of no concern.  Therefore, plan only to secure your own comforts for as long as you can reasonably foresee your survival and no more.  What state you leave the world when you die is irrelevant because you won't be around to experience it, so don't worry about it.  It's unlikely that you'll leave any heirs behind anyway, so you don't need to make provisions for them or any other descendants.  

These are the core values I would impart to my younger self in the hopes that he would avoid the wasted life I have lived.  These are the true values of the world he will have to live in.  These are the codes driving the most successful people he will encounter in his life.  Look around and find a single example of "success" in this world which does not rest atop these very principles.  Look no further than the current leader of the free world to find the most perfect expression of these truths in action.    Don't tell me that there's another way of living, a "righteous" way where people don't trample all over each other to secure their success.  I don't see that world anywhere and I don't see any evidence it will ever manifest.  

No, this is what I would tell that boy before he set off on his journey.  This is the roadmap I would place in his hands and this is the future for which I would make sure he was prepared. 

DON'T BRING ME DOWN - THE VEIL OF DEPRESSION

 

I've lived with periodic depression, to varying degrees, most of my adult life.  There are times when I've wondered whether or not it was "clinical".  Recently, I requested a referral from my doctor to a psychiatrist to see if that might be the case.  After two sessions with him, he concluded that I did not appear to be suffering from any particular pathology and that I would likely benefit more from counseling rather than medication.  The premise here is that my emotional state is based on my world view and that by changing my perspective, I could alleviate my symptoms.  Thinking about this, however, I began to wonder why the onus was on me to change my attitude and why my environment and the world around me had no role to play.  Why is it so unreasonable to think that the world really does suck?   Why wouldn't this be a fair justification for someone to feel depressed?  Why am I not allowed to feel negatively when the world around me is in a tailspin, hurtling into an abyss of annihilation and catastrophe? 

Depression has recently become perceived as a symptom of mental illness or else the result of simply having a poor attitude towards the world around you.  I never see any health professionals cop to the idea that maybe things in the world really are awful and that responding with negative emotions is actually a healthy reaction to an untenable situation.  We're always being told that we must have a "positive attitude" towards life, yet my direct experience of it is that this approach is more likely to create psychological discord than responding honestly with anger, frustration or disappointment when surrounded by situations where injustice, inequity, cruelty and criminality are the order of the day.  

I feel like I've been mourning the death of the world ever since I was old enough to perceive the fatal trajectory upon which humanity had thrust itself.  Nothing that I've seen around me during that time has done anything to assuage this perception that we are all plunging at terminal velocity towards an impact which will leave us with no out.  For nearly 40 years now, I've borne witness to one atrocity after another, stacked upon a mountain of madness laid down long before I ever existed.  

I can remember quite distinctly a day when I was no more than 13 when I was suddenly overcome with this sort of grief at the realization of the hopelessness of humanity.  It was the quintessential "existential crisis".  The Buddhists refer to this as the "trance of sorrow" and see it as a first stage of enlightenment.   But it also ties in with the classic description of the "five stages of grief"; denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.  When I look back over my life, what I see is myself going through each of these stages as I've matured and aged.  

What I've also realized about these "stages" is that they don't occur like people think, as discrete steps where one goes through each and then leaves it behind for the next.  It's not like passing through a series of rooms where each response remains distinct and separate.  It occurs to me that it is much more like the building up of layers, like when sediment settles at the bottom of a river or lake.  You don't move beyond these reactions, they just get buried under the next.  My anger is still present, but it's hidden under the layers of bargaining and depression that have built up over top.  

In my youth, I struggled against the inevitable finality looming off in the distance.  I latched on to idealism and fantasies of a future where technology and science would solve our problems and propel us to the stars.  Then, the angry young man took over, rebelling and bucking against the restraints of the society of which I was a part.  Eventually, I became a part of that system and tried to work within it.  Through years of pursuing a career and achieving some success, I felt like I could work out some kind of a deal.  As I began to slip into greater maturity and dealt with losing my career and my health, the depression took hold and drove me down into the depths of despair.  Now I face the inevitability of this doom and feel the sediment of acceptance, or rather, resignation, building up the final layer.  

Yet I'm supposed to "think positively" and be optimistic about tomorrow.  Despite the visions of doom and destruction that lurk in my mind and parade themselves across every vista I observe, I'm supposed to pretend they don't exist and that it's all going to work out somehow.  That is what is considered "mental health".  To me, it feels like delusion and self deception.  In my core, I know that this approach is a lie and the kind of stupidity which lays at the root of the cancer growing within our species.  I'm supposed to pat down that top layer of "acceptance" and smile while the weight of it crushes me, but what I want to do is dig up that dirt and uncover my rage and my denial again.  I want to rail against this acceptance.  I want to scream out my refusal to give in to this hopelessness.  

I don't want to feel good about this world because this world is a disaster and a crime scene and it needs to be called out for its abuses.  I don't want my emotions to be a deception or a mask covering up the truth of my existence.  I want to face it honestly and truthfully.  If I'm feeling depressed, it's not just because of some chemical imbalance or unfounded attitude.  It's because I'm seeing the sadness that surrounds me and I'm responding to it in the way which nature intended.  If there's even a slight hope of escaping this nightmare, it will only happen because people truly become horrified by what they're witnessing and are no longer willing to "accept" it. 

We shouldn't be asked to tolerate this.  We shouldn't have demands placed on us to be "positive" in the face of the desecration being perpetrated against this wonderful, beautiful planet and all the amazing life that resides on it.  We should feel awful about it and express those feelings. And if that makes some people uncomfortable, GOOD!  They should be.

INTRODUCTION - WHERE DO I GO FROM HERE?

At the ripe old age of (almost) 56, I'm spending what feels like my remaining years doing little more than waiting to die.  I don't feel driven by any desire to accomplish anything, I have no goals, I have no sense of a future to plan for.  All I have is a sense of finality, that I've reached a point where I simply have nothing left to contribute and no one left who would care if I did.  I shouldn't say "no one".  There is a handful of people who would lament my passing, should it occur any time soon, but that's not the point.  The point is that, for most of my life, I felt like I was at least "in the game" and there was some possibility of accomplishing something.  In the past few years however, that feeling has slipped away into a dim memory.

What I see in the world around me is a civilization hurtling towards disaster; economic, social, political and environmental.  I don't see any indication that humanity is evolving towards anything better than what we've had in the past.  What I see is a general intellectual  decline into a culture of ignorance and stupidity.  The knuckle-dragging thugs are winning.  The criminals have the edge.  Nothing I find within my grasp seems to have any potential to counter that trend and, indeed, very little seems to be within reach at all.

Internally, I'm feeling stuck like a fly in amber.  I feel paralyzed and impotent.  I can no longer provide for myself in terms of earning a living.  My health has failed me on many levels within the last 6 years.  Where I was once gainfully employed in a rewarding career with a respectable title and ample remuneration, now I feel like no employer would ever consider taking a risk on investing in me.  And beyond my inability to earn an income, there is the death of my creative spirit which lead me to conceive of myself as something of an "artist", an identity which provided a sense of purpose that took me through my adolescence and well into my middle age.  

Creativity seems futile now.  It's just shouting into a void.  There's no one there to hear it and nothing that will come of it.  People say I should keep creating just for my own satisfaction, but they don't seem to understand that self satisfaction is the most fleeting feeling of them all.   It has no more substance than a fart.  It has no more value than patting myself on the back.  And the reason for that is because creative expression is, above all things, a means of communication and that process requires both a transmitter and a receiver and one cannot be both for a message to have any value.  The whole purpose of communication is to transmit information from one place to another.  

If all I'm doing within the process of creation is communicating with myself, then it is no more than a dream, without form or function.  It is redundant to provide myself with information I already have.  I cannot empathize with my own feelings when empathy, by its very nature, requires more than one entity to experience the same thing.  I feel what I feel and I know what I know, but if there's no one else to share that with, then the creative process has no purpose.   

So that brings me back to the hours I spend alone wondering how much longer I have and thinking that I have nothing to work towards and no hope of things getting better.  My health will continue to decline, my financial situation will continue to become more dire and my ability to cope will become more strained.  Everything is on a downward trend with nothing able to reverse the direction of any of those indicators.  My only hope financially is to try to get classified as permanently disabled, which would increase my government income slightly and take the pressure off in terms of the expectation of looking for "work".  For all practical purposes, I am unemployable.  My condition means I could have a heart attack or stroke waiting around the corner at virtually any time.  All those take to trigger is enough stress.  If I do manage to get classified as "PwD" (persons with disability), then what?  Continue to struggle to survive until I keel over?  How many years will I have of that?  

At this point, there is only one outlet that still offers me some satisfaction - the written word.  I haven't tried to create new music for over 2 years.  I haven't wanted to do any video, photography or graphics for nearly as long.  I think I've managed to knock up a couple of stupid memes for posting on line, but who cares.  They never go viral.  Why that would be valuable doesn't even matter.  But I keep writing things.  Somehow what's left of my creative urge has settled into the medium of text and I keep writing things; opinions, reviews, commentary, critiques... etc.  For some reason words keep coming from my fingertips and people keep telling me to write more, so here I am, trying to get these thoughts together in one place.

To that end, I'm starting this little blog.  I don't know how this is supposed to work.  I don't know what I'm supposed to do to get anyone to read this.  I guess I'm just going to figure it out as I go along and see where it goes.  They say, if I get enough traffic, I can monetize this thing and get paid something for it.  Wouldn't THAT be a laugh!  But it doesn't matter anyway.  If I'm going to be compelled to write, I might as well stick these messages in this particular bottle and toss it out into the sea of the internet and maybe it'll drift onto someone's shore.  Maybe they'll even read some of it.  At this point, I have nothing to lose by putting this out there and seeing where it goes.  I don't have any specific direction I plan to take this.  It's just going to be whatever comes out of my fingers at any point in time until my fingers don't work anymore.  That may be sooner than I'd like to admit these days, but that's another consideration.

So if you're finding this and feel like following along, well then you're welcome to and you're welcome to share your thoughts on whatever I write as long as you're nice about it.  I'm not here to take anyone's abuse, so if that's all you've got to offer, no thanks.  Otherwise, I'll always do my best to respond in kind and offer anything I can if you have a question or two.   

Now, where do I go from here?