Marsh/Dismal

"Facts of human arrogance, we barely know a fraction."

There's an old Soviet joke that goes a little like this.

A man goes to a local newsstand every day. When he goes, he only looks at the front pages of all the newspapers. He doesn’t scan them thoroughly, he just glances at each of them and walks away. This carries on for weeks.

One day, the guy behind the counter asks him what he's looking for.

"An obituary" the man explains.
"But comrade, obituaries aren't on the front page!" he responds.

"The one I'm looking for will be."

“The mind of man is capable of anything, because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage... who can tell? But truth. Truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder, the man know, and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet the truth with his own true stuff, with his own inborn strength.”

within the next few months, i’ll likely be completely removed from most forms of social media. if i have it my way, by the end of the year, i’ll be completely removed from the internet altogether. good riddance.

i don’t think i’ll ever really forgive myself for spending my formative years becoming a brand instead of a person. more embarrassingly so because it never even really worked out. i’m just some fucking guy.

years spent overanalyzing every photo. overrefining every passage of text. making sure every post “fits”. making sure i “fit”. looking at life through angles and compositions. “it’s okay if it’s not your best because it’s your resume and you get better”. perfecting the vapid and limited. just to remain imperfect. instead of just fucking living.

the worst part is that it feels like begging. all of the pebbling you do, broadcasting how alone you look to the same five or six people. overcommunicating to about twenty other people you haven’t had a meaningful conversation with in years, who will likely not respond for weeks, if not months, if ever. not because they’re busy. not because people just don’t talk to each other anymore. but because they just don’t want to. which is fine, if we would all just stop pretending.

but that’s not fair. we all have lives. we all have lives. we all have lives.

i also just kind of can’t fucking take it anymore. all of this “being studied” shit. being advertised to every goddamn minute. every goddamn action i make, cataloged and scrutinized, just to sell me shit i don’t want in the first place.

t-shirts, gadgets, subscriptions, courses, more gadgets, holsters, stripper nice profiles in languages you didn’t even know existed, more t-shirts, more more more. i can’t pick up my phone without being made to feel like a mark. every silence filled before i even get a chance. its just insulting. i’m worth more than this?

when i originally started this draft the next passage started with “feds killed another guy the other day. other countries’ media outlets aren’t even trying to pretend we aren’t publicly executing our own. their normal moral indignation replaced by the realization that we’re executing our own, and there is very little we can do to stop it.”

then on a friday morning the last fifteen or so years made a lot more sense in the worst possible way. arguments we thought belonged to us. who would’ve thought, eh?

i don’t know what to do with what i have left.

"was pompey lucky when he pulled back the curtain and found nothing?"