To get us to the end of time.
If people were not kept alive indefinitely on tubes and machines, the average life expectancy of a human being would drop by six years. Secrets learned from NICU nurses. And given that that isn't, well, life, by any measure I'd care to have, I've been forced to readjust my expectations. To consider the world, and the human mind, and what it means to be alive. To be conscious. To be functional. To be happy.
And it's not difficult.
If you can accept your vices, your joys, your identity, life becomes enjoyable more quickly than you could ever imagine. Than I could ever have imagined.
I can get drunk on anything. On music; on conversation; on spinning around rooms to no sound outside of my head; on touching animals; on sex; on fashion; on meaningless flirtation; on pain; on deprivation; on religion; on knowledge; on fragrances; and on substances, too.
When I was young, I would play music at agonizingly low volume. I was always worried about losing my hearing, blowing out my ears, and not being able to hear when I was old.
Music is important, you see. It might well be the most important thing, for me.
Now it blasts. It blasts through headphones, half of the time, and it's so much more enjoyable.
Neil Gaiman wrote, in one of his works of fiction, that music will never be as important as it is to a fourteen-year-old. But I'm twenty-nine, and it means more to me than it ever has.
But then again, everything does.
When I was a teenager, life was meant to be lost. Beautifully, quickly, artistically, with meaning behind it. But lost, all the same. That was the point.
I'm older now, and I believe in living. In enjoying things. In savoring every goddamned moment that can be enunciated and analyzed and felt in our brief, trivial existences.
So music blasts. And I do what I like. And that's not much.
But the secret is that I don't see much to life. Distraction -- that's how I used to phrase it. The purpose of life. Devotion was, I would claim, the highest form of distraction. But distraction was always the goal.
Now, mea culpa, I have been forced to admit that my entire pursuit in life has been the acquisition of various forms of drunkenness.
And I see Dionysus, and have a great deal of trouble discerning how that pursuit can be anything but a form of devotion -- the highest form of distraction, the meaning of life.
Moral turpitude, or insanity. And it's all I can find, when I assess the world with cold, logical vigor. Or, for that manner, when I asses it with all the emotion and purpose I can muster.
So what then?
Living is distraction, is devotion, is enjoyment.
Morphine is put on level with the relief one feels after a genuine confession.
Sex is equivalent to flagellation.
And I'm not trying to be incendiary.
Welcome to my brain. It is a carnival, with a church at the edge.
I'm not a sinner, I'll confess at the end, but don't trust a single word I say.
<3
And it's not difficult.
If you can accept your vices, your joys, your identity, life becomes enjoyable more quickly than you could ever imagine. Than I could ever have imagined.
I can get drunk on anything. On music; on conversation; on spinning around rooms to no sound outside of my head; on touching animals; on sex; on fashion; on meaningless flirtation; on pain; on deprivation; on religion; on knowledge; on fragrances; and on substances, too.
When I was young, I would play music at agonizingly low volume. I was always worried about losing my hearing, blowing out my ears, and not being able to hear when I was old.
Music is important, you see. It might well be the most important thing, for me.
Now it blasts. It blasts through headphones, half of the time, and it's so much more enjoyable.
Neil Gaiman wrote, in one of his works of fiction, that music will never be as important as it is to a fourteen-year-old. But I'm twenty-nine, and it means more to me than it ever has.
But then again, everything does.
When I was a teenager, life was meant to be lost. Beautifully, quickly, artistically, with meaning behind it. But lost, all the same. That was the point.
I'm older now, and I believe in living. In enjoying things. In savoring every goddamned moment that can be enunciated and analyzed and felt in our brief, trivial existences.
So music blasts. And I do what I like. And that's not much.
But the secret is that I don't see much to life. Distraction -- that's how I used to phrase it. The purpose of life. Devotion was, I would claim, the highest form of distraction. But distraction was always the goal.
Now, mea culpa, I have been forced to admit that my entire pursuit in life has been the acquisition of various forms of drunkenness.
And I see Dionysus, and have a great deal of trouble discerning how that pursuit can be anything but a form of devotion -- the highest form of distraction, the meaning of life.
Moral turpitude, or insanity. And it's all I can find, when I assess the world with cold, logical vigor. Or, for that manner, when I asses it with all the emotion and purpose I can muster.
So what then?
Living is distraction, is devotion, is enjoyment.
Morphine is put on level with the relief one feels after a genuine confession.
Sex is equivalent to flagellation.
And I'm not trying to be incendiary.
Welcome to my brain. It is a carnival, with a church at the edge.
I'm not a sinner, I'll confess at the end, but don't trust a single word I say.
<3