ex nihilo, fio nihilo.Wednesday, December 16, 2009
at 12:45 AM;
\\paracetamol
You know she’ll be there today. Always the small motions that get you; the crossing of too-smooth legs, a little smile, a quick laugh; and you cannot stop smiling to yourself even as your constitution fills with melancholy. You speak no words, throw no gestures; only glances, lingering just slightly too long on the thin line between admiration and voyeurism, like the feeling you get staring down a wishlist toy in a store window, going out of your way just to check it’s still there, just to grant some respite from yearning. There is only one of her, and every instance in which you see her laughing, see her glad for anyone else’s company other than yours becomes an occasion for anger; the irrational, inexorable, inexplicable jealousy that arises from selfishness. You want her for your own, and your own only.
Take as necessary. Do not take more than 8 tablets in 24 hours.
What are love and lust but concepts - opinions, ideas given form and structure by the physical shell of language? You lust after her just as you wish that you could take notice of something other than her sweet, sweet body, that you could engage in the neoplatonic love so oft extolled in fiction; and, like fiction, that same reality eludes, escapes, excludes you from its assurance. And hence you find solace in letters and words, music and pictures, in all trappings of artifice. Even the insentience of sleep is a godsend. You occupy yourself with other people’s woes so that you do not have to face your own.
Take as necessary. Do not take more than 8 tablets in 24 hours.
All you can care about nowadays is apathy. And like lens-flare halation, all outstanding situations become marked, manifest, yet meaningless, as obscured as they are conspicuous. A plate of food, a cup of liquid, they all become escapes; so palpable, so tangible, yet immediately forgotten after being consumed. All you search for is the next great consumption; the next great assumption - consumer culture at its best and worst, because the pursuit of the new numbs now, numbs past, numbs future.
Take as necessary. Do not take more than 8 tablets in 24 hours.
Routine has become unusual. The same boring desk job for the next 40 years of your life seems such a daunting, scary thing, so you run away from the sameness that is your family, your friends, your house, your country. You run away to another place, waiting for your aimless peregrination to satisfy this wanderlust, yet it is all the same anywhere; same friends, same job scope, same whitewashed concrete, the flickering of fluorescent lamps just beyond perception yet still perceptible as an annoying presence; gaudy, greasy, ghastly wallpaper. Colors so repetitive you could have sworn the whole world shares one palette, repeating repeating.
Take as necessary. Do not take more than 8 tablets in 24 hours.
Pain as perception - if you cannot perceive, you cannot feel pain; if you are blind, you cannot experience ugliness. Even while your insatiable thirst for new content reaches outward, your discernment retreats inward, to a place where it cannot be hurt by any judgement it makes; a place where it makes no such judgements, makes no such attempt to relate the world around to your condition, to your situation. Juxtaposition has become a far-off memory of an abandoned practice, no longer used, no longer needed, like an old museum piece; arbitrary, arcane, asinine.
Take as necessary. Do not take more than 8 tablets in 24 hours.
End of school zone; you look back and wonder why friends have left, why new friends have come, why some friends have slowly slipped like backwash into the peripheral static as the years have gone by. You walk the same streets you used to, and wonder just how much everything has changed - the city has become distended, disconnected, dispiriting. There is no place for you here; just as there is no place for you anywhere; there is no quiet, no rest as the soundscape of decadence surrounds you wherever you search. There is no peace; what was previously background silence has become background noise; discontinuous stories of war and celebrity mixing and marring the concept of knowledge.
Take as necessary. Do not take more than 8 tablets in 24 hours.
Like incessant radio chatter, the speech and laughter of others nags at you in the corner of your head. Unreasonable frustration comes over you as you realize that the people around you are having fun; enjoying their lives, unaffected by the fact that you do not share in their mirth, and slowly you begin to question what part you play in their world. Do you add value, or are you simply sapping their recreation; an additional user decreasing, diminishing, diluting overall utility? At times like these, you feel like another brick in the wall; part of the superstructure, yet superfluous.
Take as necessary. Do not take more than 8 tablets in 24 hours.
Sitting alone, you feel most alive, because in that single moment, you do not revolve around anyone - you are your own, you are a single entity, anchored to none but your own consciousness, free to observe, free to simply exist not as part of something, but as something in itself. It is in this lack of purpose that you feel most useful; utterly unassailed by any concern. And as you bask in this lack of contemplation, you inadvertently begin to contemplate; unable to shut the world out of your being even as your being is shut out from the world. Sitting there, the creeping awareness of futility begins to take hold - in the end, for all your freedom, you are not free.
Take as necessary. Do not take more than 8 tablets in 24 hours.
You have a choice - you always have a choice. Despite the oppression from all that is around you; the seams hemming in your thoughts and actions into linearity, choice cannot be suppressed, stifled, smothered. You - you are a slave to choice, you decide where your boundaries lie, you outline the epistemology of sanity - the knowledge of when to stop choosing, even as you step forward into choice after new choice. And as you go about this endless pursuit, you slowly realize that one day, you will finally be forced to accept that choice is infinite, that choice is omnifarious, that when there is no restriction to unbounded choice, it becomes rampant. Discernment is impotent when nothing is defined, distinct, discrete; as the painkiller begins to numb everything, all becomes nothing.
Take as necessary. Do not take more than 8 tablets in 24 hours.
Overdose may lead to confusion, loss of consciousness, and death.
the rest is silence;
\\paracetamol