mahiwaga

I usually know better than to hinge my hopes on someone else being around, and yet I still hoped that I’d get to hang out with [redacted] this weekend. Wishful thinking as usual.

I’m reading The Infinite Book by John D. Barrow, and he explores the different kinds of infinities that we run into in every day life, and all of the sudden I think of “Groundhog Day”, my life caught in this infinite loop of nothing-ever-changing, except that I just keep getting older. Of course, this brings up the older story of Sisyphus condemned to roll a stone up a hill only to watch it roll down again. And I fantasize that this is it, that the rest of my life will be all about rolling this stone up the hill, then chasing it when it rolls down, cycle upon cycle, with nothing new under the sun, and I realize that I am once again under the fog of depression.

One of the most illuminating things I read about the mental illness known as depression is that the patient begins believing that things will never change, that things will always be this way, unchanging, no matter what you do.

Realistically, this never happens. Quantum fluctuations alone will ensure this, but practically speaking, history moves at a break-neck pace anyway. A year from now, who knows in what kind of situation I’ll be in? Just because I can’t envision finding some sort of happiness and fulfillment doesn’t mean it isn’t possible.

The only thing that I need to remember is that tomorrow will be a different day. I’ve learned not to have expectations, but, for now, this will have to pass for hope.

Originally posted on Starlight and Gravity

I’ve been living by myself for two years now, and I think it’s starting to wear on my soul. In the past, I’ve at least had roommates (despite the fact that I have wanted some of them arrested and/or shot by the cops) and this ensured a minimal amount of human contact.

The solitude has allowed me to drop my expectations pretty low. In some basic ways, I’ve let myself hit bottom, and no one really gives a shit. I’ve wallowed in my crapulence for months now, and it doesn’t change a thing.

The thing I miss a lot about having regular human contact is being able to bounce ideas off of someone. These days, ideas materialize in my mind, and they either end up on the ether (like this), or sometimes just written down, or, more often than not, they just evaporate. And given the state of things, I have no real feedback about my ideas. No one gives a fuck, really. Is this ludicrous? Does this resonate with the truth? Can I refine this idea and come up with something useful?

What I need is someone to critique my life, either positively or negatively. While I’m not a big fan of negative reinforcement (and find that my performance actually degenerates/deteriorates in the face of getting yelled at and beat down), I appreciate it when people can be honest with me, when they can actually tell me when I’m being a dickhead, and, more importantly, tell me what I can do to stop.

Instead, all I’ve got is my conscience, which I find is sometimes wary about self-judgement, because of past experiences of being too hypercritical, and thereby plunging me into an inexorable spiral of depression. So I find my conscience lets a lot of things slide (mostly for the better) but there are probably a lot of things that I’ve stopped caring about that the average human being would find mildly to moderately important.

I was watching “I Heart Huckabees” and dug the simplified dichotomy of relentless interconnection and infinite meaning versus eternal alienation and complete senselessness. The main character rightly discovers that one cannot exist without the other, and that both simultaneously operate. In essence, it was Taoism redux. There is no life without death, no creation without destruction, and all that jazz.

The other thing that I found a little haunting was Albert’s realization that Dustin Hoffman/Lily Tomlin and Isabelle Huppert, who now espouse opposite philosophies, seem to have worked together in the past, that there was some sort of miscommunication, and this lead to the fracturing of their philosophies. Each half is an occluded mistruth (to steal some pseudo-Gnostic terminology from Phillip K Dick.) Interestingly, this echoes some of the cosmologies of ancient African people: in the beginning was One, that by some trauma or dysfunction, split into Two.

I especially liked his use of the term “fractured.”