Cry, cry, cry silver tears / This is the song, of wish you were here
What’s on the menu today? Well I thought I’d start out with a little self-referential flagellation, move on to a full course of emosity (a new word from across the seas) and finish off with a sprig of apathy. That’s enough menu analogy for now. There are very few ways of drafting a post like this without it seeming like a syringe full of angst to the eyeball, unfortunately for you dear reader, this is precisely how my brain works.
My writing has always been contentious and I don’t think it has ever once brought gleeful looks and words of adoration from others. From using the names of people I knew when writing in high-school, through to crossed-wires with a previous partner, through to my latest debacle whereby people from my place of work “found” this tome of scattered thoughts and unfettered boredom. I have elucidated before how I don’t write for others, thankfully the visitor statistics (or lack thereof) back up this statement but more than my solo writing, it allows me to ramble near incoherently for paragraphs about nothing in particular other than coagulated thoughts from throughout my day. Even the titles are taken from songs I’m currently listening to. What I’m getting at though, is that fundamentally, this is all about me. Oh of course, ostensibly this is about anime, or programming, or a different country, but really, this blog is just a big ego jerk for me. My own little space where the black and white text forms the furniture. Grotesque and deformed furniture with no overarching colour scheme but furniture none the less.
I have flashes where I believe that I’m somehow ill-suited for living, that the desire to close myself off from others is a tell-tale sign of acute introversion and I should just submit to it and be done with things. That is not how I operate. As one of my friends said, I am “uncompromising”, which my sister put in a slightly more flowery way: “you don’t do things by halves do you?”. It’s not stubbornness, but and unrelenting desire for grander; that idea that something greater and more elegant can be obtained is what drives me. This is where I’m supposed to say that I lack empathy with my fellow man and it’s a character flaw I endeavour to fix. I don’t. I am critical of things because without knowing what is “wrong” or “broken” (relative terms without elaboration) then I can’t fix them; and if I accept the sub-standard, then I have lost to myself.
So what does this have to do with my writing wounding those around me? In a tangential way, very little, but it circles around (and meanders a bit along the way) to the idea that people are flawed. That in reading something it becomes about them, the idea that perspective defines the world rather than the other way around. What I’m saying is that anything here is all about me. My angst, my anger, my flower language coating a distinct lack of substance; I don’t write to hurt people, just as I don’t write to make people happy. This is neither the place or the context to do that because this is my space, not yours. The fact that this is “on the wire” does not make it public domain, it doesn’t make it fit for human consumption, I could well have scrawled this on scattered napkins around my home, or into a word processor, and there is no good reason why I shouldn’t have if I worried who would read this. But I don’t. One makes choices in what they do, what they read and how they react and by those metrics the measure of a person can be had.
Others though would weigh you up according to what you say or how you look, and perhaps that is really what I’m rallying against. That the disconnect I think I feel is simply the idea of half-truths and white-lies is like putting on a mask, an illusory barrier between oneself and the world at large. Perhaps not being able to erect such a façade is my most glaring of deficiencies, and the thin veneer I have managed comes tumbling down while I sit at a keyboard. I always wonder about retrospect and whether in many years time I will look back at these, as I have looked back on my imported DeadJournal entries and see myself as a better person, someone who has “grown up”. That idea of growing up keeps changing with me; that being an adult simply means you have the flotsam and jetsam of life swirling around you, and at a critical mass you are suddenly born anew as an adult.
Such vitriol flowing forth seems like the purview of a troubled mind, dots on a line towards a macabre end-game; an orgy of media fuelled revenge for “ills borne upon me”. How trite. As with life, none of this has any meaning to anyone but myself. This isn’t for you.
