(Author's note: this one will be a little heavy. I'm going to be talking about death a good deal. It will be largely theoretical but you'll be forgiven if you want to skip this episode and tune in next week instead)
"And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood."
-Aubade, Philip Larkin
Lately things have been going well, or at least, not bad. Maybe that is a weird way to start this but bear with me. Things have been going well enough that the days seem to be going by without me noticing them. Each week, I find myself giving my girlfiend her hormone shot or at my weekly dinner with my dad and thinking "Oh, we're back here again." Somehow this steady placidity is terrifying me.
You hear people say that time goes faster as you get older. That seems to be true and I hate it. I've been wondering about the cause of it. The answer I've seen most often is that each moment is occupies a lesser and lesser percentage of your lived time. Each moment is naturally less significant to your life. Now, does this mean that my actual moment to moment perception of time is the same but it feels as though time is moving faster because of how my memory works? Sort of like the drugs they give you for minor surgeries that don't knock you out but keep you from remembering? Or is it like existence is like a computer monitor where your refresh rate just slows down with time? (I don't know how monitors work, don't @ me)
I don't know which scares me more. The latter, I think. The former I believe I at least have some recourse for. To try to make days of my life more significant through experiences with things that keep me on edge. I believe part of what is making time go by so fast is that much of my day is taken up doing a job that is largely known to me doing things that do not excite me with little variation in what happens, beyond what is playing on Audible.
"For I have known them all already, known them all: Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with audiobooks"- TS Eliot, probably
At the core of this, is my own fear of death. It's always been there, I've always been conscious of it. Perhaps everyone is but it's been a persistent anxiety for me for much of my life. I was told at a young age that the sun would swallow the Earth eventually and for week and, when I closed my eyes, I would have intrusive visions of the planet engulfed in flames. Most of my favorite poems (I've quoted two of them so far) deal with death in some capacity. I spent my adolescence researching different religions, trying to find one that would allay this anxiety. When I gave up on that, I fell into a bleak nihilism that I could only temporarily fix by promising myself to some earthly cause that might give me a legacy or something that would live beyond me.
But, honestly, I've never had any real follow through. Maybe that's a character flaw but I think my anxiety always told me it was futile, hamstringing any plans I make. The expanding star in our sky still looms, promising annihlation.
So I've grappling with two problems which are really the same problem. "How do I engage myself day to day so that life does not feel like a carnival carousel that is slowly increasing in speed?' and 'How do I find meaning in an indifferent Universe?' I say they are the same problem because I think adequately solving one requires a solution to the other. Finding meaning without being engaged seems almost paradoxical, as does being engaged without finding meaning in what I'm doing. I'm left feeling like I'm trying to design a tensegrity structure. (I don't know physics, don't @ me)
I would like to end this with a conclusion that neatly wraps this up. Ultimately, I wrote this stream-of-consciously, fueled by nervous energy, in lieu of the therapy appointment that I missed this afternoon. And I guess I do feel a little better having written it out. So, thanks for existing, potential reader.
From here I guess I'm going to keep reading philosophy and think about how to keep myself busy in a meaningful way. I'm in the middle of 'Ethics of Ambiguity' by Simone de Beauvoir and I may do a write up on later to compose my thoughts. It's pretty relevant to the problems laid out here. And I'm thinking I may try to read up on mindfulness.
later kiddo.
-Eve
Haven't really used this part of the site in a while. Part of that is because some people in my personal life know of this site so I made a seperate blog to yell my feelings into the void. Beyond that, though, I think I haven't written anything here because I'm more or less in the same place I was when I wrote the previous serious posts and too distracted by feeling sorry for myself about that fact to even muse on the more banal parts of my life.
I'm still trying to figure out what the next thing is for myself. I think I've been working on that for half a decade now, more or less. But now that I have a foot firmly placed into my 30s, it's hard to ignore the fact that time is passing. There is this anxious feeling growing in my chest that is hard to pin down. I've spent a lot of time trying to define it, diagnose it. It is something about being lost and something about being scared that my time is finite.
I've written some variation of "How do I figure out what to do?" over and over in my notebook. Hoping each time that, having put it on paper, some answer would come. It's a ritual I think may be counter-productive. It is, at least, the wrong question to ask. I think I've come to believe that you never really figure it out, not really.
I made the decision to start working towards something yesterday and part of me is already working to undo it. It's the scariest choice, the one with the odds stacked against me, the one that takes the most hard work. It is also the one that seems to be the one I want most.
What I need to remember is that I'm deciding on a direction to take because it is healthiest for myself to move on. I'm not choosing it because it's the correct path but because staying where I am is the wrong one.
Also I'm trying to think of how to renovate my site. I'm growing increasingly tired of the current layout but I don't know that I have it in me to redo everything. I may just build over it and leave this part here as a time capsule for people to find, like some boarded-up and forgotten Burger King in a mall.
-Eva
I just asked someone on a dating site what streetlights made them feel. A few hours prior, my dad had told me that he associated them with a sad loneliness. Growing up he would camp out in his yard and think about the streetlights and the people as he looked out at the town for hours. He'd think about the lights and the people. I can feel the echoes of this when I look out at the evening city skyline.
Growing up, I had a quasi-streetlight (it lit an alley way) in my backyard and I associate solitary sodium lights with nights in that yard. We looked up at Saturn in that yard, we saw comets. That lone light gives me very human feelings, lone amongst the dark. Again, just echoes.
The lights were also there as I was being driven home, making a frustrating pattern of illumimation for my Gameboy. They would be absent as we approached my house, letting me imagine monsters in the woods at my sides.
Years ago I fell in love with someone because I felt they saw the same things. I was drunk, which made love come easily. They asked me, passionately, what the streetlights meant. I asked them later about and they had no idea what they were getting at. It honestly hurt to hear that, as I had hoped they and I were on similar wavelength, that we saw the same loneliness, that ancient desire.
There is no satisfying denouemet to this. It is a whim. Asking strangers their feelings on streetlights is only good at putting people off. I won't ask that they feel same echoes as I do. If this has any purpose, it is to realize that maybe we all have our own streelights, that we make symbols out of our lives.
keep day-dreaming, kiddo
Eve
(struggling with line-breaks, bear with me)
I hit three weeks sober this morning. I feel like I should have some philosophical thoughts cooked up or something but I really don't.
Honestly, I'm tired of thinking serious thoughts for the moment. Give me your silly, your irrelevant, your favorite games as a kid, the mundane moments of your life. Send these, the little joys, bright and airy, to me.
Going to grocery stores makes me wonder if having most sorts of food available disconnects us from time a little. Would it be different to eat a strawberry
knowing that you only get so many strawberry seasons? The mulberries from the tree out behind my house seem a little more special since I have to wait for them,
even if they're not just amazing to eat. I wonder what it'd be like if other things had a season. When would gummi worm season be? My vote would be for the end of Fall.
stay sane out there, kiddo
-gummi rancher Eve
I've spent the last year or so being a total piece of shit. "But Eve," you say "You seem like a goddess brought to Earth. You represent all that is good in us."
Well, you're wrong. I was a piece of shit. And I knew it while it was happening, told myself I was working on it. I even wrote motivational posts on my whiteboard.
But I just kept. being. shitty. I think I've finally broken out of it but it took nearly ruining my and other's lives and a short stint in a jail to snap out of it.
In case you're wondering, going to jail sucks. I promise you it's nowhere near as glamourous as it seems.
For personal and legal reasons, I won't go into what exactly I did.
I did my best to use the time to think, like it was a Kafka-esque meditation retreat. Truth is, I refuse to believe that Bodhidharma actually stared at a wall for 9 years.
It's really fucking boring.
It's trite but the first lesson I took from this is not take things for granted. I spent a lot of time just wishing I was at home in bed with my cats.
Spending time with people this weekend, I kept thinking "Goddamn, it's good to be here, in this moment, free to do what I want." I plan on using my interest in photography to just
put myself out into the world and just sensing and feeling all the things there are.
The other major lesson is related and gets into what I said in my previous post. I haven't come up with a concise way to put it yet. I think I forgot my humanity, that my day-to-day, moment-to-moment actions matter.
In fact they are far more important than any lofty ambition of mine could ever be. I think it is good to have plans, to desire to leave the world in a better place than you found it. I want to be a capital-G "Good Person."
Maybe someday I will be. But instead of thinking of being Alexander or Diogenes, I need to focus on being Eve, the person. Acting selfishly to achieve Goodness does not make you a Good Person. At best, it makes you a misguided asshole.
I've got a lot of work to do in the coming year. I did before this but now the roads on the map have completely shifted. I hoped that writing this would help clear up exactly what this lesson is and maybe it has but I will be working on this for a long time coming. Forever, probably. For now, I'm going to enjoy what life has to offer and to make sure I don't make it harder for other people to do the same.
Stay out of trouble, kiddo.
-Eve, the person
I suppose I'll use this page as an ersatz blog. For now at least. I want to completely overhaul the website AT SOME POINT. I don't like how the content is organized right now. I'd like it to be a little more loosey-goosey, ya know?
I don't know if it's fair to say I have New Year's resolution. It's closer to a...New Year's Life Map. I've got a lot of shit I need to figure out this year. My dad gave me a planner/journal-thing to help plan it out but I'm already
falling behind filling it out. I have this feeling of being blown dangerously off-course and despairing over the uncertainty of any direction. How useful are the stars when you are lost in the expanse of things? Maybe I should read
the Odyssey for thematic help. As it stands, that Life Map is both too vague and too specific. Like a treasure map made by a pirate who is unsure if he wants anyone to ever find it.
I've had that apocryphal story about Diogenes and Alexander the Great meeting running around in my head lately. The one where Alexander, proud to meet a reknowned philosopher, asks Diogenes to name anything he wants and he will grant it to him. Diogenes just asks him to stop blocking the sun. Later, Alexander remarks that if were not Alexander, he would be Diogenes. I think for so long I have been trying to be Alexander, to put myself beneath the wheel and render what is sweet and useful of myself out into the world. I tell myself "Hoc igne gladios facimus," 'With this fire we make swords' but maybe I should strive to create light and warmth.
I do not know. What I can do is think, and wait, and fast.
Also I'd like to start eating better and maybe start going for walks.
Right now I'm working with a game environment called Pico-8. My friend recommended it to me when I was talking about Neocities. It's simplistic and intentionally retro. And you can put the games on your website, which would be heckin' cool. Right now all I've managed is to make the music composer play the Tetris theme and Greensleeves. Minor victories sure but I'm still pretty tickled about it.
Stay safe out there, kiddo
--E