Peace

 Deep within the bowels of society,
Where the poor and forgotten live,
People cry.
Desperate to be heard.
Desperate for someone to save them.

Those in charge keep insisting,
"Follow the rules, and we'll all live in harmony.
The only way to have peace
Is if all of you do what you're told."

Young and innocent, it was easy to believe.
But as bosses grew richer and family grew poorer,
It became obvious that peace wasn't worth the price. 

They spoke out,
They yelled,
They cried,
"You who stand above us
Listen to what we have to say.
We are hungry,
Desperate,
Lost.
All we thought we would have has vanished before our eyes,
But you promised that
So long as we followed you
We'd be safe.
Why are we trapped?
Why won't you let us leave?
Are your money and mansions that important to you?
More important than those you were meant to support?"

Those in charge do not answer
For they cannot hear the people yelling,
Crying,
Desperate to be heard.
All they hear is dull thudding 
As people bang on the walls.
Not wanting to lose all that matters to them
They yell back,
"Stop it. Can't you see that if you break the walls
The whole world will collapse?"

Why won't our leaders listen?
How much louder must we yell?
Don't they know that if they would listen
War could be avoided?

In the end, 
The people have no choice but to confront the truth.
The leaders aren't evil,
Merely blind and stupid,
Unable to see anything
That's not in front of their faces. 

War doesn't happen when people hurt each other,
It happens when they no longer care.
When people become nothing more than numbers
In a spreadsheet,
A line on a graph. 
I've heard it said that if you want peace
You must give up who you are,
But until we see what we really want
How will we be able to stop fighting? 

     All of us have power. It's just a question of whether or not those in charge want us to believe in ourselves enough to use it. 

    I don't often give into my delusional side, but I need a day where I give in wholeheartedly to the idea that I'll someday be famous. 

Powerless

 Should there be a moment 
Where you feel powerless,
Always remember;
While it may not feel like it,
Influence always goes both ways. 

My Conundrum

     It's hard to feel silent when something's bothering you, but it's hard to admit what your issues are when you aren't even sure they're real. I've heard a lot of people speculating that we live in a simulation, but for me it goes much deeper, as I've explained already. I just don't think that reality as we imagine it exists, and over and over again we keep seeing instances of a world we thought was real and unchangeable just being another collection of things moving against each other in such a way that, from afar, it looks to be whole. 

     I keep worrying in the back of my mind that one day I'll discover this is all a lie. What if science someday shows conclusively that the external, objective reality that I don't believe in anymore exists? What I find scares me more, and I keep thinking about it as more and more things break, is that one day science could prove that I'm right. As I was writing this out, it occurred to me that plenty of book characters know that they're book characters, and plenty of theater people have made careers out of writing plays mocking theater conventions. One could argue that if we lived in a simulation, we'd know that we were being simulated, so we'd know about the reality that's simulating us. That we don't know about such a reality, with our telescopes and philosophy, suggests that either we're a real place, or that reality doesn't exist at all. 

To be Nice

 Is it true that 
In order to be nice,
You have to care about nothing
And no one? 

The Downfall of Twitter

    I'm writing this post on Monday, the day after Elon Musk decided to rebrand Twitter to being just X, like the button at the top right of your browser. Presumably it was a nice subtle way of warning all of those still on the platform to turn off the app for good, but so much of his life seems steeped in stupidity that I don't think he thinks at all. There's not much I can say on this, and his idiocy has infused Twitter to the point that stuff like this doesn't even shock me anymore. 

    I will say this, though, not because it hasn't been said but because it can't possibly be said enough at this point. Why, exactly, do we live in a world where everyone in power looks and acts almost exactly like Elon Musk? It's easy to point the finger at Capitalism, but a lot of our democratically elected officials also act like entitled idiots. Are we intentionally choosing the stupidest people to run the country, or are we just trapped in a world where it's better not to think too closely about the flaws? Remember, society is a Dreamworld at heart, and like all Dreamworlds it's only real as long as people believe that it exists. Isn't it possible that many people live in a world where the flaws have gotten so obvious that you can't ignore them anymore unless you're stupid, so they've chosen to hide behind the stupidity of a man believed to be God himself? 

     I won't pretend that the gullible, the narcissistic, or the just plain evil don't exist, but looking at the world as someone who doesn't believe in an external, objective reality, but just a world where people have to work together to build a Dreamworld strong enough to protect them from the Infinite, I see a place where people are trapped. They don't have the tools to build a Dreamworld of their own, all they have is the world they were born and brought up in, a world that's rapidly falling into irrelevancy. I don't think this is a religious issue, because plenty of educated people who were brought up in cities are struggling with the same problem. 

    The fall of Twitter isn't just about one mans ego, it's about a world in which people want more but have, so far, not been allowed to have more. They've been told to just blame the other, or their false friends, or family who doesn't support them. Many know that the blame rightfully rests with our leaders, but I often think about the people who elected them, those who saw someone actively stripping them of their rights, and decided that was an appropriate sacrifice to keep their Dreamworld alive. I think about leftists insisting the answer lies in politics, or those on the right saying the answer lies in god alone. To me, the answer lies in both. We need politics and leaders who understand that they form the backbone of society, but we need a culture that understands the power and value of belief. Belief may not be magic, but it forms the lifeblood of every Dreamworld that people live in, and without it we're doomed to suffer as our Dreamworlds die. 

      The bottom line is that it's true that Twitter died because of Elon Musk's neglect and malice, but until we accept our world for what it is we won't be able to stop it from happening again. 

The Bottom

 They say things could always be worse
So how much worse do we have to let them become?
How many of us must suffer
Before we abolish suffering completely?

Am I wrong for wanting to be happy?
Am I wrong for wanting more?
Why do people say I'm whiny
For saying the things I want to say? 

Good enough isn't good enough anymore.
I don't think it ever was.
How much further must we fall
Until we reach the bottom? 

I Believe in the Universe

    I have no idea how yesterday's post read, but I'm not sure I care. I just really, really needed to feel like someone could hear me even if that someone was just a server at google storing yet another blogpost no one will read. I'd call what I'm feeling depression, but it doesn't feel like every other time I've been depressed. Normally depression comes when I'm not doing something that I really don't want to do, but now I want to do something that would, if not fix the world, at least give the new one a head start, but I don't feel like I'm getting anywhere. If anything I feel like the world is actively stopping me. I've mentioned before that I don't think any of us want to know that what we see isn't real, and I suspect that's because the Universe only exists because everything within it, atoms and planets included, believes in it and the laws of physics.

    I believe in the Universe, of course, but I also believe that there will come a time when we know enough about it for belief to falter, and when it does then we'll need a backup plan. Even if humanity goes extinct, there will be other intelligent species in the Universe and it's entirely possible one of them will be born on earth. One way or another, someone is going to break the boundary between us and physics, and when they do we owe it to our descendants to grant them some way to fix their mistake. And if it turns out that I'm wrong, we'll still have a useful tool for building society, one that reminds us that no matter how much science we discover belief will never go away and we can never quite be sure that what we're seeing is real. 

     What I need is something to believe in, and I believe in a world where people will always have something we call magic within them, and there will always be a spiritual world that everyone know about that science will always disprove. I believe that we will never stop believing in the silly, the impossible, perhaps even the outright dangerous, not because we're evil or stupid but because it's what we were meant to do. I believe in a species of apes who believes in everything they see and quite a lot of what they can't see but can only speculate on. We are a species of Dreamers, and so long as we live in a world that's desperate for meaning, that will never change. 

A Scream from the void

     What am I meant to do with my life?

     I'm painfully aware that fate has no plan for me, or anyone else for that matter. I know the world doesn't have a vendetta against me, it's just ignoring me like it does everyone else. I know that I shouldn't take it personally when I have mornings when I wake up and just whimper, wondering what the point of it all is, that it's not my fault that I live in a world that wasn't made for me with people who wish that people like me were dead. 

     Why, then, am I not the only one who feels lost and dejected? Why am I not the only one who appears to be done with waiting for the people we elected to change and now just wants to build a world for herself? Why does no one seem to care that we live in a world that can adequately support about twenty percent of humanity? Think about it. We have women, people of color, LGBTQIA+ groups, and groups with varying disabilities/mental illnesses all saying the world was in no way meant to support them or was actively made to oppress them. You know what happens to a bridge that can only support twenty percent of the load it was meant to support? It collapses. Yet our leaders keep insisting that we should drive on metaphorical bridges they didn't engineer for our use and put no effort into maintaining. 

     On a personal level, I want a lot of things. I want a world where I can be an artists who posts for free, has a small following, and doesn't have to worry about criticism because no one thinks that I'm worth criticizing. On a more practical level, we need to stop pretending that we can put people in a room, have them throw punches at each other until most of them are dead, and call that a society. Even if we know next to nothing about what causes people to believe a world is real, we could be doing so much better than we're doing right now, if only by instituting a system where countries judged one another's system and where we work to make sure there isn't a wildly imbalanced power dynamic between countries so we can discuss what isn't working more honestly. 

     I'm trying to push for a world where we can talk about society as what it really is; a figment of our collective imagination, one that doesn't exist if we don't look after and maintain it, and one that can be doomed if we aren't very careful about how we build it in the first place. I believe in a lot of crazy things because I don't think a world that doesn't let us believe in crazy things is one that will last very long. I can't prove that physics will fall apart the way it does in all of my stories, but for our purposes I don't think it matters. We don't live in reality. We aren't smart enough, and there are nowhere near enough of us to construct an analogy that's even close to what reality is, assuming that an external, objective reality exists of course.

     I can't help but feel like I'm being thwarted, because I live in a world where climate change, a thing that's been warned about for as long as I've been alive, still isn't being fixed and people are now boiling alive because of it. I live in a world where when a global pandemic was said to have ended, our government did nothing to help us recover mentally or spiritually, nothing beyond a few candle lightings. There were no proper discussions about how to help the country move on, or even discussions of how to keep the corporations from screwing us until we'd gotten back on our feet, and when the corporations did screw us, all we got was talk about how inflation had gotten really bad. I live in a world where fascism has gotten so widespread that the democrats are platforming a fascist candidate, and all I hear are people saying that he's not likely to win. As if we didn't say the same things when Donald Trump was running, and now look what's happened to the republican party. 

     I'm trapped in a dying world. Everything I loved is slowly vanishing, and it seems as though nothing new is coming to take it's place. There's nothing to distract me from my sense of helplessness but to write endlessly and to look at things left over from when times were better. It does help to remember that even things you didn't like can go on to become fond memories, but they don't replace a sense of purpose and engagement. Even if things weren't awful right now, I'd still be a blogger on a platform no one uses screaming into a void, and I'd still have no answer to the question I posed at the beginning; what am I meant to do with my life? 

The Lottery

 A ticket to greatness,
Or a mark of shame.
A slip of paper filled with hope
That tomorrow will be different
From today.
Can I ever hope to win big? 

    There's no good way to process the end of your world. We weren't meant to be aware of the Infinite, or the fact that we can't escape it. Even so, I know there are better ways than the comfortable form of denial that I've settled in, less a sense that everything is fine and more a sense that everything will turn out alright in the end. My brain keeps settling in this comfortable reality where our world has collapsed, and everyone is happy now that it's over. I know it's crazy, and I know it will be a lot messier, but it's the only way I'm staying even remotely sane. 

Adulthood

 I swear that I remember 
A time when adulthood
Meant something.
Work, responsibility, new and interesting play.
I swear I remember
A time when adulthood
Was special,
So why haven't I found it yet?

     I'm in a mental state where "Everything sucks" has now become an unchangeable fact, like gravity or the laws of motion. Recently, though, I've learned things that made me realize just how bad things are, and how bad their likely to get. I think I need some more time to process this, but for just know that if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wasn't running as a Democrat, I don't know that I wouldn't be concerned, but I wouldn't be feeling the deep seated feeling of horror that comes right before something horrible that you can't avoid. 

The Curse of Success

 The more I look at success,
The more it looks like a curse
Then a blessing.
It seems we spend a lot of time
Addressing the shortcomings of those 
Who have everything
And are beholden to everyone.

Progress came at a cost it seems,
For when we built cities we lost
Touch with nature, and the world
That had been our home.
Somewhere along the way we crossed
The line and became the rulers 
Of our world. 

So many have to pay a price,
To make sure the world is nice to us
And to our families.
If we had stopped to think twice
About what we wanted
And how much we were bound to lose,
Would we have done it?

     In America, everyone has a two month break during summer to mark the time between one grade and the next one. Even now, I still associate summer with transitions, the calm moments before the craziness that is the months between September and January. I realize that it isn't a calm period for most, but I keep seeing signs that things are about to get a lot crazier, and a lot worse. I hope that I'm wrong, and that my brain is imagining things that aren't there, but I suspect that I won't know until September comes, the time when, in Washington at least, we have to begin the next year. 

   Am I the only one who's finding that she's regressing more and more the worse things get? Maybe it's just because I'm not suffering as much as everybody else is, but I feel like a toddler without any toys to play with. It's probably just a sign that I need to get out and help people, rather than isolate and hope that the store blows over. 

Ghosts

 Where do you find the ghosts
That live between people who meet?
How do you find the truth that's hidden
Far from our mind's eye?
Is it true that with the right magic 
And luck,
We'll learn to see what's within?

     I'm not an expert in running a society, but I think that if our leaders want us to be invested in the success of our world then they need to grant us the ability to influence them, either directly or indirectly in a way that we can easily see cause and effect. As it stands, the poor and the rich live in two distinctly different worlds, and the poor have so little that they're pretty much denied the right to exist. Think about it. No one who isn't obscenely rich has access to fame anymore, and if you don't become famous than not even your family will remember you once you're dead. For most people, seeing is believing, so if nobody sees you, or hears your name, than the world will never believe that you exist, even while you're alive. 

Memorable

 Why would you choose to be good and forgettable,
When you can be evil and leave an impression? 

    Is it just me, or does it feel like the internet has become a desolate wasteland? I only ask because I've been finding it so hard to find meaningless distraction that I've taken up housecleaning as a hobby. My younger self would be so disappointed in me. 

Don't Look Down

 I feel no love for society,
But I can't seem to escape.

The pain and sadness of life
Are omnipresent,
And my heart would break
Were it not for those who 
Remind me that no good can come from 
Looking down into the abyss.

I like to think that the answer
Isn't that we shouldn't think at all,
But is instead that we should think
About how to shoulder each other's burdens
So that we don't crumble under
The weight of the world.

For when we are pressed against the ground,
What else can we do but look straight down?

         There's no doubt about it, climate change has come to the state of Washington. I know you should judge the climate by the numbers the scientists give you, but let's not pretend that any of us thought that climate change was an issue until the climate went screwy where we live. I know a lot of people are saying that we need to at least ease up on the gas, but I'm wondering if it's time to buy a new car, figuratively speaking. 

    We need to normalize wearing accessories purely for their expressive value, not because they're expensive. I say this as someone who enjoys wearing jewelry that's flashy because it wasn't made of expensive materials, mind you. My mother paid for me to get my ears pierced for my birthday, and I keep looking at the starter earrings I got (titanium with rhinestone in the middle) and asking myself, "What's the point of diamond Jewelry if it looks the same from a distance?" I know that jewelry is mostly about status, but I feel that status and money are just ways that society limits who we can be and how we're allowed to present ourselves, and I despise any and all parts of society that keep me from expressing myself to my fullest potential. Which is a lot of it, incidentally. 

Conspiracy

 Everywhere I look,
I see a truth that no one else sees.
Have I gone insane?
Is the world collapsing 
Around where my soul used to be? 

My Birthday

     Today is my twenty-eighth birthday. It doesn't really feel like I've accomplished a lot for being a decade into (legal) adulthood, but a lot has happened since my eighteenth birthday. I went to college. Fascists took over. I got an AA degree. I started Blogging regularly. Twitter collapsed. And now I'm writing about how I think the only way forward is to accept, on a global level, that society isn't inherently real and we have to find ways to keep it real, and that means accepting that the Infinite exists and that it's up to us to protect one another from seeing it. 

    The way I see it, when your world collapses you can either fall into depression and stop believing in anything ever again, or you can come up with the thing that you believe in and fight with all your heart to make it a reality. I'm fighting for a new reality because I can fight for a new reality. I'm a writer who studied science a lot in college, loved learning about scams, dabbled in economics and anthropology, and has a fascination for the world of magic and psychics. Ever since I was small, I've been obsessed with the line between reality and fantasy, and I've devoted most of my life to figuring out how you can tell one from the other. Anyone who's even glanced at a quantum physics textbook knows that the line between reality and fantasy is a lot thinner than we like to think that it is. 

      I'm no physicist, but I truly do believe that the drive to make a world real connects everything in our Universe together. Every atom, every star, every planet, sentient or not, is trying as hard as it can to keep the world around it real. I can't prove this, but I genuinely believe that one day we're going to discover that the only thing keeping physics together is some strange atomic version of belief, that gravity, speed, and space time only work the way they do because at some point the collective consciousness of our Universe decided that the way that things are made some sort of sense. 

      I could be totally wrong, and a lot of me hopes that I am. I'm still human, after all, and like anyone in a Universe I want a world that will stay real without my involvement or input. I want to be able to do what I want to do without hurting anyone or making the world worse for everyone else. The problem is that now that I've figured this out, I see it everywhere I look. All around me are people trying as hard as they can to keep their world together through any means necessary, and until we grapple with that fact I think we have no way of getting out of this mess. 

      Right now, I think the only thing that we can do is try to imagine a future that we want, and then talk about that future to anyone we can find. If we want to go somewhere, we need to figure what, exactly, it is we want first. We need to figure out who wants to keep the old system, who wants to tweak it, and who wants to discard it altogether. Then we need to push. We need to push like nothing else. We need to sacrifice what we have now so that we can push for what we want, if anything. I know that it won't be easy, but we need to believe that the more we push for a world that's shaped like the one we want to have, the more the world around us will be shaped to our will. Because it will. Our world is only real so long as we believe that it exists, and everyone knows that. So they'll change. They'll let themselves be shaped by us, so long as we let ourselves be shaped in turn. Our future depends on us taking our reality back from those who will never know our names. 

Important

 The one thing that matters to us
Is that someone thinks that we're important. 
We live our lives waiting 
For someone to see us,
For someone brave enough to care.
The only thing that matters to us
Is that someone knows we exist.
Without that,
We're nothing. 

The Fourth of July

     It's the fourth of July. Independence day. The day, supposedly, when Thomas Jefferson signed the piece of paper telling our British overlords to take their dumb taxes and shove them straight up their collective asses. This is the day we celebrate the notion that we are a free and fair country, a country so devoted to the idea of liberty and equality that when a man tried to tax people without consulting them first to see if it was okay, they got pissed. Strange, then, that from what I've heard only about a third of the population of the colonies wanted to break free from Britain. We have no official records, of course, because the founding father's didn't really care what the country wanted, they just wanted to rule the country as they saw fit. I suppose that we're just lucky that what they wanted turned out to be a pretty good idea. 

      As I watch a party of increasingly unhinged monsters stomp on any and all opposition, even if they're just imagining it, I have to wonder if maybe it's time to have another revolution. Why, exactly, are we letting Republicans take all of our power for themselves? They clearly don't respect due process, so I don't see why we should let due process stand in the way of justice. Let me put it this way; I grew up in a world where equality was valued and it was made very clear to me that a world where minorities had a voice was a just cause that all of us should stand behind. The vast, vast majority of Americans aren't actively choosing a world of suffering, most are just apathetic because they have to spend all of their time working and looking after their families. So we have to change that.

    Make a world where people have room to fight, and I guarantee they'll fight for what they want in the world. That's why our evil overlords are working us to death. That's why any option that might give people more room to breath or think for themselves is branded as immoral. Do you think it's an accident that being a jobless loser living with your parents is vilified? They did that because they knew the moment you stopped working, you'd see just how much the system is stacked against you. You aren't working to bring great things to the world, you're working entirely as a means of distraction. You work so that you don't notice just how horrible your life is. You work so that you see your coworkers working, so that the CEO of the faceless conglomerate you serve can build an enclosure around hundreds of thousands of people, trapping them in an illusion of value and trust. The CEOs of every country in the world work tirelessly to keep you as busy as possible, to make you think that you're valuable, but they show just how much they care about you every time they hand you your pay stub. Those of you working, and thus contributing, to this awful world, I must ask; are you happy?

    Things need to change. When 2020 obliterated our world, we should have let it go and moved on, but our leaders wouldn't let us, and too many were only too willing to let them get away with that because they were too frightened of seeing the Infinite to fight back. They didn't care that they had lost everything, nor did they seem to know that it was the fault of their leaders that they didn't have the means to fight back. What will it take for us to finally see that the world we live in now, a present we can't flee from no matter how hard we try, is completely inexcusable? How much more must we lose before we finally accept that the only thing this world has ever done for us, and all it will ever be able to do, is force us to see the Infinite up close? 

A Way to be Normal

 Sitting alone in a room
Forgotten
I write page after page,
Hoping that within my sentences
Is an answer to the question
I never dare ask.

How can someone like me ever be normal?

How can I manage to do
What so many do so easily,
Freely, 
As though talking and moving and living
Didn't really matter
And was just a given from birth?

If I look at them one by one
I can understand them,
But together they confuse and confound me.

So I write
Page after page,
Within my words I look for meaning,
For a place within the society I shun.
Someday soon
I hope I can say
With honesty
That I'm just a normal person.

     I miss the days when a casual game could be just as fun and interesting as a big budget AAA title, if you weren't very good at video games that is. 

     You ever wonder what's going to happen when the Republicans strip all of our rights from us, or are you hoping people get sick of their crap before that happens?