Help

 They say that if you ask for help
Then you will receive it.
Who can help me stop staring
Into the void in my soul? 

    I'm writing both this post and Thursdays post on memorial day, a day that doesn't mean much to someone without a "real" job. I don't want to pretend that I don't think those fighting for America aren't doing a great service, even if I no longer believe in the concept they're protecting, but I can't help but wish that we didn't worship the military as much as we do in the United States. There's this idea that guns and warfare will solve whatever problems we face, be it poverty, hunger, or the sense of loneliness that consumes everyone. This isn't true of everyone, but we all know that there is a group of people so devoted to the art of warfare, they don't know how to live peacefully anymore. 

A Search for Joy

 They say that sadness is painful,
Ice forming in between cracks in your memories,
They don't mention that sadness can be freeing,
Falling into a sea of calm.

There is no meaning to suffering,
So why do we endlessly suffer
As we search for a way to escape the pain we feel inside.
Are we giving into our worst impulses,
Or trapped with no way out?

I've been told being happy is easy,
Just look for things that bring you joy.
So than why am I so empty inside?
I have nothing but the pain of my yesterdays
To feed my hungry soul.

I want to find joy,
The happiness that should live inside me.
But it was killed in my youth,
Murdered by cruel parents and unfeeling peers.

How does one bring back the dead?

     I remember a moment, back in 2021, when my mother and I were talking about life post-pandemic. She said that life was going to go back to normal soon. I claimed that life was never returning to normal at all. I think, with hindsight, that we were both wrong. I can't really say that we're far enough away from the pandemic to be certain, but I know that the world is clinging to 2019 far to much for my liking. My mother, from the sound of it, wishes that more of life would go back to what it was. As for the rest of the world, in my highly unprofessional opinion it seems to be split into three groups: those who think we need to move forwards, those who think we need to move backwards, and those who don't care where we end up as long as we end up somewhere. 

    I just got back from what was supposed to be a fun adventure, a break from the mundane everyday. It was a break, but not in a relaxing way. I'm tired, and I can barely think straight. I don't remember going to fairs/festivals being this overstimulating, but then I don't really remember what it was like to do things pre-pandemic either. I know that I ought to remember, but thinking about the past, trying to sort out what was and wasn't real, leaves me dizzy and exhausted. Moments like this make me look back and wonder; did I ever have any fun at all? 

Can you Believe

 That I did this every day last year.
Writing a few words, yet saying so much,
Why did I let my skills atrophy away?

    You ever just sit outside, in nature of any sort, and just think to yourself, "Life could be so peaceful if the world didn't insist we should always be at war." 

To be Special

 They say that to be special
Is to have something to offer
A world that needs your help.
They say that to be special
Is to be more important than one
Who simply fits in.
Do they tell you that to be special
Means spending your life chasing
A reason to exist?
Or would they rather pretend that to be special
Means that you're above needing one at all?

    I don't like to be negative, but I wish life had more days when you could just live in the moment and appreciate the world you have, rather than spending all day trying to keep it from falling apart. 

A Universal Fear

 Alone at night, we see what we fear most;
Darkness, emptiness, the sense that everything that matters has already happened
And there is nothing we could do to change it.
In daylight, among our friends, we look for fear and find nothing
Believing that we had imagined it we go about our day.
One day our world collapses
Falling to what we felt but could never say,
For fear of ridicule.
The loudest beg for a return to what was right and good,
The quietest claim it was never there to begin with.
And still, late at night, we stare into the void that will someday claim us.
All of us.
Every Atom,
Planet,
Galaxy,
Everything that ever is, was, and will be,
Doomed to fall,
And be forgotten by all.

    The world is complicated, messy, even cruel at times. From a distance, it's not a bad thing, and we take pride in those who learn, little by little, just how complicated real life is. But when you experience the complexity of the world firsthand, there's a moment where everything you thought you knew stops making sense, and you don't know which way is up and which way is down. When it's over, you think that you're alright, but you're not. You aren't someone who only feels one thing about the world. You've seen it break, for no clear reason, and you can't even find someone you can blame. When you experience the world up close, you realize that it isn't complicated, not in the way a person could understand. It just doesn't make sense. 

    I never thought to appreciate just how lovely Washington is in springtime. I always took it for granted that Washington was a land of green trees and clean rivers. I know it's not a new observation to say that we should learn to appreciate what we have, but what I sometimes wonder is whether I appreciate the world that I have too much. The Washington I grew up in won't last forever, the internet I grew up with is dying fast, between climate change and the decline of capitalism, all of us are seeing the world change in unpleasant ways. Appreciating what you have now is easy. It's right outside your front door. It's appreciating what you might have in the future that's difficult. 

Who Cares

 Who cares
About the writer without a voice?
Who cares
About the person without a choice?
Who cares
About someone without friends?
Is there someone out there
Who can love me without end? 
Could there be someone I know
Who cares? 

     For as long as I'm alive, I will champion a future where nobody has to work in order to live. 

A Selfish Person

 If the only way to make people happy
Is to make sure that you never feel welcome,
Then why would anyone choose to be selfless?

    I don't care what anyone else says, anyone who's alive deserves the right to live, no matter how powerful they are. The fact that some people admire evil because it can win power, but despise kindness that doesn't, is incredibly disturbing. 

My Life's Philosophy

 Society belongs to the rich.
Culture belongs to the poor.
The future belongs to the Dreamworld,
And the Dreamworld belongs to us all.

Whether or not you think
That the world outside is real,
You can't deny that all that we see
Is contained inside our own minds.
With that in mind, how can we ever know
Whether what we see is real.

Influence always goes both ways.
It is our destiny to shape, and be shaped in turn.
All of us know that our time here is limited,
But within our limits, we'll grow to be mighty.

Whether or not you think
That a Dreamworld is real,
You can't deny that everyone
Thinks that they matter.
With that in mind, how can we ever think
That the things that we can't prove aren't important?

    If I recall correctly, my mother's cruise should start today. If not today, then tomorrow. Thinking back on other cruises, the first day always sucks. You have to try and figure out the magical incantation needed to make the Wi-fi work, everyone is busy, and you're exhausted from the epic journey you needed to take just to get on board the ship. By the second or third day things are better, but I never feel fully relaxed until I'm back at home and in my own bed. I think it'll be all right, without me there she can relax whenever she feels like. I tend to up the level of stress in a room considerably, to no one's surprise I'm sure.  

     As I'm writing this, my mother is on a plane to Amsterdam, where she'll get on a cruise ship to go to Norway for a month. I'll be at home, where it's warm and sunny, and my schedule isn't dictated by other people. I'm sure that we'll both have fun, but I'm glad to be somewhere with access to snacks. 

A New Me

 What happens if I wake up tomorrow
To find that I'm not who I used to be?
Should I thrash and struggle against the tide,
Fighting so hard to break free?
Can I learn to accept that the world I once knew
Will soon no longer exist?
Can I be brave enough to face the fact
That my future lies in the abyss?

    I want our world to be a future where you can succeed without being powerful, or at least a world where success isn't a prerequisite for getting to live. I know that people mean well, but there will never be an objective way of measuring success. All we'll ever be able to do is try and convince other people that we're better than we really are, in the hopes that we can fool them into letting us live for a few more days. We're fortunate that most people are willing to be fooled, but I'm watching that willingness shrink day by day as our leaders demonstrate how lost they truly are. Unfortunately, it's the people at the bottom who are suffering the most, the people who couldn't afford to lose what little trust they had in the first place. Don't get me wrong, even I like to believe that I'm better than everyone else, but every time I see someone begging for cash outside of a grocery store, I'm reminded of the price everyone else has to pay. 

A Jar Full of Buttons

 A Jar full of buttons,
Never to be used.
It sits on my shelf,
Waiting for someone
To give it meaning and purpose. 

     I know this isn't a controversial opinion, but it would be wonderful if our leaders could accept that they aren't omnipotent, or at least that they aren't any closer to being omnipotent than the rest of us are. If there's one thing that running a blog no one reads has taught me, it's that anyone is capable of delusions of grandeur, regardless of how much external evidence there is to back that claim up. I feel like this should be the part where I sing the praises of those who don't succumb to the urge to think highly of themselves, but as someone who needs to delude herself just so that she can keep writing, I'm instead of the mind that the world would be a better place if more of us deluded ourselves into thinking that we were smart. At least then the world would know what we actually want. 

Answers

 Why doesn't the world want me?
Why doesn't the world care?
Why does everything I love leave me,
Forget me,
Abandon me?
Why am I destined to die alone in darkness? 

These are the questions that have haunted me
For as long as I can remember.
They've shaped me,
Changed me,
Turned me into something less
Than human.
My head knows they can't help it,
But my heart hates it nonetheless. 

Does it mean that you love someone
If you want them to be yours
And yours alone?
When they say that you're 
A monster,
Should you listen to them
When your heart says that you're just doing your best?

Is it true 
That if I knew
The answers to the questions
That I'll never stop asking,
I'll find the peace that I dream of?

My world is crumbling
And I don't know how or why. 
I'm alone
But I don't know
If they left or if I pushed them away. 

Why was I born a bad person?
Why is it so hard to do the right thing?

Please,
Someone,
Hear me,
Help me.

I just want to be happy once more. 

Where is Reality?
What is the truth?
How do I know where my mind ends
And the world begins?
How do I know this isn't just 
Another one 
Of my dreams? 

These questions are raging
Through my mind and my heart,
Shaping me,
Changing me,
Turning me into someone that no one
Would recognize.
My head doesn't know what's going on
And my heart doesn't want to know what happens next.

I don't know if I can love someone
The way they're meant to be loved,
If I can share what they have
And know what they know,
But if I stand still and wait
Then I'll never find out
Where my boundaries are.

I don't know if I'll learn anything
From chasing the question, 
But if I don't stop asking
Then I'll never find the answers that I seek.

My world may be crumbling,
But I know there's a reason,
A how, where, and why,
And if I find it,
Then maybe I can put it all back together
And make us whole once more. 

And somewhere,
Out there,
I know there's a world
That's meant just for me,
Me and all of the other outcasts
Who will never find their place
In any world.

If you're one of them,
Join me,
Come together,
Let's build a world that will let us be happy once more. 

     Have you ever thought about how it is we know that what we're seeing is real? It seems to me the only way we know is that we hear other people verify what we see and feel, but how do we know we're not just making them up? Could it be that our brains are working over time to hide the fact that, deep down, we're all completely insane? 

Society's Playground

     Do you remember when you were little, and you used to play with other kids? Do you remember what it felt like to be with a group of near total strangers, bound only by a desire for playmates? Do you remember meeting with them, day after day, in a place without rules and restrictions, until, as if by magic, you fit into each other’s lives? 

     I’m sure I’m not the only person who misses her childhood, who misses the days before I knew just how difficult and lonely life could be. I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m a writer, so I have more protection from the pain of reality than simply pretending that my past was perfect. That doesn’t mean that I don’t reflect on those times, on the moments when friendship felt so easy and the only people who wanted to see you suffer were monsters, unless you were a monster yourself of course. I was thinking about this, and suddenly I wondered; why is it so hard to find a space to do that as an adult? 

    Adulthood means work. Work means that you do what someone else wants you to do. Work means that you sacrifice time for yourself for the betterment of humanity, or so I was told at least. Work means that you don’t think about what you want, don’t ask for what you need, don’t press for things that would make your life better. Work means you stop being yourself, and instead become something else, devoured by a world that doesn’t notice you. To transition to adulthood, you must stop asking for help, for love, for anything that would make you happy. To have someone look after you would imply that you’re still a child, and all children must face the fact that one day they’ll grow up. That, or be cast out. 

     That’s what our world is, at least, and it’s been that way for as long as I can remember. They say it’s been that way since the beginning of time. Look far enough in our history, though, and you can see something different. A time when adults had time for themselves, a time when growing up didn’t mean giving up community or your caregivers, a time when you didn’t have to be self-sufficient in a world that was supposed to bring us closer together. I won’t pretend the past was perfect, I’m the first who will say that we left it for a reason, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t learn from it. We can see what our ancestors did right while acknowledging where they screwed up. 

     I say it’s time to build a playground for adults. A place where you can go to be with near strangers, bound only by a desire for friendship and fun. A place to meet others, day after day, with only a few rules and restrictions until we, once again, learn how we can fit into each other’s lives. 

Round Up

 How long should I wait,
Before I declare it to be close enough.

    Am I the only one who feels like society was built to increase conflict? Everything you'd want to do costs money, you have to work for approval in order to do anything, and when you point out that we're fighting for resources that aren't actually scarce, people act as though it's natural. It's not, though. We built our world to be like this. 

Poetry List

 It's amazing to see
My list of poems,
Growing one day at a time

A Writer's Worries

      Theft. When someone takes something from you that you worked hard for. That’s the thing that society says that I should be concerned about, that and the possibility that a new idea that I’ve been working hard to make will be published by someone else before I get a chance, meaning that they get all the credit, and I go down in history as a copycat. Society doesn’t want a writer to write for the joy they get from writing a good story with fun characters, they want you to make money from your work, to write something that someone else could, perhaps, turn into something that will make someone else millions. That’s not what I want though. 

     I’m a writer. Unless you’re an absolute novice with no meaningful skills, writers don’t worry about theft all that much, because there are a functionally infinite number of ways to arrange words on a piece of paper. Writers share ideas, plotlines, worlds, everything they can. If they didn’t, Tv Tropes wouldn’t exist. I write constantly, what ends up on the blog is only a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of my output, and my dream is to write a novel. Well, eventually I want to write a novel series. But I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not anywhere near good enough to do any book that I’d want to write justice. I can barely keep up the discipline necessary to write enough poetry to keep the blog going. 

   Recently, however, I’ve been seeing more and more people advertising AI services to do what writers have done for millennia. I know, it’s common to see artists complaining about art theft, copywrite, whatnot, but the truth of the matter is, I don’t think I should have to worry about someone, or something, stealing my ideas. Because the only reason I’m even remotely concerned about this is that I live in a world that expects you to make money, and views art through the lens of monetization before it sees it’s worth to the culture that made it. I can’t help but think that if we lived in a world where we didn’t need money in order to be granted the right to live by our overlords, things would be so much better. Not just because we would no longer be at risk for starvation. 

    I write about the Infinite last week, and the reason I did that is because everywhere I look these days, I see a world that’s in trouble. Whether you value imagination or not, you can’t deny it’s massive impact on our world and the lives of those within it, and one thing I’ve always thought is that most of our brain power goes towards picturing the world that other people want us to see. Increasingly, I hear people saying some variant of the phrase, “I can’t figure out what I’m supposed to see anymore,” or, “I can see what I’m supposed to want, but if this is where I’m supposed to live now, then I want nothing to do with it.” That isn’t a good thing. Whether you believe in the Infinite or not, we all know that society only exists as long as people believe in it, and right now most people don’t believe in the world we live in, and worse, they don’t have the tools they need to make a world they can believe in instead. When they try, what they end up with is something that would make their lives and the lives of everybody else worse. 

     People need to be allowed to create more things in order for us to have a future. Right now, because of our world, be it capitalism or the will of those who want power to remain theirs and theirs alone, the right to create the world of our dreams has been stolen from us. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t take it back. If you at all think you can, I implore you to do so. Maybe you don’t have the answer, but one thing I know is that humans are, for the most part, not all stupid in the same way. If we argue, debate, and fight long enough, we’ll eventually figure out the answer. But we have to be willing to fight for it first. 

A World Made for me

 I want a world made for me.
And only me.
I want a world where the sun always shines,
But the plants never die.
Where there's water and electricity
But you never have to pay.
Where there's nobody but me
But I never need to notice.

Somewhere far beyond our finite lands
Is a world made just for me.
I've seen it in my dreams
When I'm just about to sleep,
I have everything I want
And my needs are always met.
There's no need for money,
I don't have to try,
And there's nobody else to displease.

If I could only convince people 
That my world is just and fair,
Then I'd have the world of my dreams.
I've tried, all my life, to convince them it's real,
I grumble, I cry, and I scream.
They all hate me now, but it's still not enough
For them to give me a world meant for me.

Can't they see it's a perfect world
Both for them and for me?
They get to live in a world built for everyone
Where nobody's voice is heard,
And I get to live in a world where I'm safe
From the voices who won't stop complaining.

But they insist that I stay 
In a world meant for them,
A world in which I will never belong
No matter how hard I try.
Why is nobody focused on what I want and need?
Even if it's not meant for me
So many people want somewhere else to go.
As bad as things are, I'm now almost certain
That if I could just find one person to help me
My dream could become a reality.