Survival of the Fittest

Before computers, before wireless communication, before multinational companies, before airplanes, before banks, before industry, before cross-Atlantic travel, and before a million other things that have been classified as 'progress', people used to understand that the sickly, the weak and the mentally disturbed were not meant to survive, and used to be not the least bit surprised when these people died young: simple survival of the fittest—even before Darwin coined the phrase, the lowliest peasant understood that most weak people were not supposed to die of old age.

Now, for some reason, in our disgustingly rich society, everyone needs to be 'saved'. If there is something seriously wrong with you, the government will take the money of those who are, in fact, of sound enough physical and mental health to make it in this world, and use it to fund a legion of health care workers trained to try (and often fail) to make you a contributing member of society (again).

LET THEM DIE. Their lives are not some holy thing—the earth is overpopulated as it is, and the weak will breed more weaklings, growing up to often lead unhappy and tormented lives.

You Just Have To . . .

If someone starts a sentence like this, I don't even want to listen to the rest, no matter how well-meant their intentions are. It betrays such ignorance of another's issues and such a lack of empathy . . . Besides, assuming the other has never even thought of your 'solution' is plainly insulting. What's easy for you, may seem like the tallest of mountains to another.

Lucid Dreams

Many days, lucid dreams are the only thing making my day somewhat tolerable. During such dreams, I can actually still experience happiness, if there is such a thing. At least I feel content, and any problems that arise I am actually able to overcome, because I am generally skilled or powerful in some way, bestowing upon me a sense of pride in my abilities, a welcome change from the daily self-hatred of real life. But, while they provide an amazing experience, they cause the day to start with by far the best part, so it can only get worse after I wake up fully.

In lucid dreams there are infinite possibilities. Often there is some action element, and fighting, but I can also fall in love and experience the girl as if she were real, even though she doesn't have a face. (At least none that I can later remember.) When I wake up I can remember all the feelings I have felt with such intensity that leaves no doubt that they were all real, even though I know every bit of it happened inside my head.

Blank Slate

I wish I could format my brain, erase everything I've ever learned, and lock myself in a windowless room so that I would never know anything but darkness, and fully embrace it as my only friend and my only truth, remaining blissfully unaware of all the horrors of the world.

Oh, how attractive the return to a state of innocence is. And how tragic that each child must learn that their beautiful innocence will get them killed or worse.

What kind of world have we created that the most precious, joy-inspiring thing on earth will be each person's downfall if not treated as if it were a disease . . .

Fear and Hate

I fear fear and I hate hate, but I hate fear more than I fear hate. I own my hate and my fear owns me. I fear love and dare not hope for it, but do not hate it; it is the fear of love that I hate. I fear and hate hope, but do dare hope I will someday soon stop feeling hate and fear through death. I love little but I would love the end of fear and hate and hope and love and life.

I fear any possibly rekindled hope and any other regeneration, because it will make the inevitable fall all the harder. This fear of hope renders moot any and all efforts made by me and others to get me 'better' again. I am already lost. Only the fear of the pain and fear of dying is preventing my death. I fear this is the only fear preventing the loss of all other fears, and I have never hated anything as much.

Prisoner

Not only am I a captive of society;

I am a prisoner of my own body

This is what I have been given

Including the mind, this most hated mind

I seem free, unchained

But even in apparent freedom

I reside in a torture chamber

Me both the tortured and the torturer

My mind: my enemy

Betraying me at every turn

Making me unable to handle anything

Some disappointment, some pressure

You name it, and it will shut me down

Madness

“The truly awful thing in madness is that we sense a total and irrevocable loss of life while we are still living.”

-- Emil Cioran

A Long Agony on the Road to Death

“Whoever has not experienced the awful agony of death, rising and spreading like a surge of blood, like the choking grasp of a snake which provokes terrifying hallucinations, does not know the demonic character of life and the state of inner effervescence from which great transfigurations arise. Such a state of black drunkenness is a necessary prerequisite to understanding why one wishes the immediate end of this world. It’s not the luminous drunkenness of ecstasy, in which paradisal visions conquer you with their splendour and you rise to a purity that sublimates into immateriality, but a mad, dangerous, ruinous, and tormented black drunkenness, in which death appears with the awful seduction and nightmarish snake eyes. To experience such sensations and images means to be so close to the essence of reality that both life and death shed their illusions and attain within you their most dramatic form. An exalted agony combines life and death in a horrible maelstrom: a beastly satanism borrows tears from voluptuousness. Life as a long agony on the road to death is nothing but another manifestation of life’s demoniacal dialectics, in which forms are given birth only to be destroyed.”

-- Emil Cioran

Silence

I keep thinking words are so inadequate that I should never write nor utter one word again. Yet even in their inadequacy they prevent me from thinking even more when expressed on paper – it prevents the words from being stuck inside my head like a swarm of locusts, so I write them down anyway . . . Better would be never to have thoughts ever again. That thought is the only alluring one.

Absolute Listlessness

I feel like I’m ninety years old. Every little thing seems to cost way too much energy: folding a towel, walking a few paces, making some tea . . . Even moving my fingers across the keyboard to form words, and keeping my eyes focused. Writing a few paragraphs without slumping down to the ground is the most active I've been all day. Yay, me . . .

Why do I seem to age dozens of years overnight sometimes? I’m not like this all the time. But when I am, the only thing I want to do is close my tired eyes, collapse and sleep forever, so that I never feel this way again. So listless, so feeble, so drained . . . Half a corpse, stumbling on stupidly, aimlessly. I can think of nothing at all to do that would bring me joy; nothing at all seems appealing. Nothing. It’s like all the world is suddenly coloured a dull grey, making anything and everything uninteresting, and it seems my limbs have turned to lead, dragging me further down with every weak step I take.

Giving Up

Most working days now the thought that crosses my mind every couple of seconds, on average, is Just give up. The work is terrible, undoable. I cannot imagine ever finishing it. A monkey could perhaps work faster than I can now, the monkey probably being in a healthier mental state than I am. Screw intelligence, screw training, screw humanity; if you're crazy, a monkey is probably better than you.

As I try to get my work done, and fail, I feel inferior to monkeys, to birds, to hippos, to otters, to every goddamn creature known to man. I wish I were an otter. A simple life. I'd like to build dams all around, until they are so high no one will ever find me. But I'm a lousy human, with millions of thoughts and emotions vying for attention, and I fail at my work, at everything, and I just sit down against the radiator  in cursed winter, and write some bullshit no one reads, thinking: if only this warmth against my back could be with me forever, it might give me the strength to make it.

Blank Suffering

Sometimes all poetry, all stories, all 'beautifully' written words seem stupid, meaningless. Then the simplest expressions suddenly appear to take on a truer form, and everything else just seems to have become redundant. Sometimes "Life sucks" simply says it all.

Loss

Loss is the greatest of teachers. It's a shame the lessons are nothing to look forward to.

On the Edge

I open the fridge with shaking hands. Writing doesn’t help, black metal doesn’t help, screaming doesn’t help, punching the pillow doesn’t help. I don’t want to go for the beer but I am out of options. Look at me, I think as I open the bottle, hating myself. Look at me, I’ve only been awake for three hours, thirteen to go before I finally die an eight-hour death, all I long for, and already I’m boozing. How am I going to make it?

“Shut up and work,” a voice inside keeps saying.

All I want to do is scream at it. “Shut up, shut up, shut the fuck up! I can’t do all this shit! I just can’t fucking do it!” Cursing doesn’t help either.

The voice ignores me. “You’ve got to do it,” it says. “Without money you’ll die. And these are your biggest clients you’re working for. Screw them over and not only will they not pay you, but they will never hire you again.”

“Don’t you think I fucking know that?!” I scream at the voice. “Stop reminding me, goddammit!”

Lost in an Alien World

I cannot even remember what my people look like. It has been so many years since they left me here, for some purpose unknown to me. For years I told myself they had a plan, that perhaps they wanted me to spy on these human beings I have come to despise with all my heart. But why then would they just fling me from their ship, naked and alone? I can no longer convince myself they must have had a good reason to leave me here. They must have just hated me to leave me with these pathetic, barbaric, greedy, self-centred creatures. Perhaps I was wrong about my own people; perhaps they are more like the creatures that dominate this planet than I had ever before cared to admit.

The truth is, I no longer know. I remember little from my childhood on my own planet, among my own people. ‘My own people . . .’ What nonsense. I don’t have a people. I am alone. Thanks to my shapeshifting abilities I could at least blend in wherever I wanted, and, having taken the likeness of one of them, I am accepted here on earth, to a degree, but I am not and will not ever be one of them.

Unremitting Pressure

Why do we allow this pressure onto our shoulders? 

Why continue if this is what life has to offer?

I feel burdened constantly, unremittingly

An anchor pulling me down, through the floor,

Through the core of the earth, through hell

I feel all the people in the world standing on top of me

And someone building a house of bricks on my chest

My shoulders slump, I can’t get up, cannot breathe,

My only thoughts of sleeping, hiding, dying

Anything to escape this ceaseless pressure

Placed there by realities that find me wherever I go