I'm not a Christian, so I keep forgetting that Sunday's post is going up on Easter. Happy Easter, I guess. I'm just excited that soon it's going to be warm enough to wear sandals every day. 

    I feel like the longer I'm alive, the less of a reason there is to participate in the world unless you're either a saint or determined to prove you can change it. It speaks to the quality of our leaders that they're incapable of offering any incentives to rectify this. 

Hear What I Say

 How I wish that more people
Could hear what I say,
Or that more people knew
That they wanted to. 

     I really need to stop playing the lottery. It's not fun, at all, the only reason I play is because of the unfortunate truth that if you don't play the lottery, you won't win. Of course, statistically speaking even if you do play the lottery, you won't win either, in fact you have basically the same chance of winning if you do play as if you don't play. But the world won't accept that, and things are getting bad enough that I think it's worth the risk, especially since I don't have to worry about what happens if I don't win. Mentally, I'm mostly over it, but my mother still wants to play. It's worse for her than it is for me. She still has to work, and all of her friends are as trapped in this world as she is. At this point, I think I want a way for her to get the hell out of this world before it kills her. It's nice to know there are some things less likely than winning tonight's jackpot. 

Spectacular

 The audience gasps
As I walk on the stage,
Wearing a costume made of sequins
And joy.
I turn and start singing
Songs of hope and remembrance,
The lights streaming down
From above. 

The Three Thousand View Milestone

     It’s been almost seven years since I first started blogging, two since I decided to post at least something daily, and I’ve finally, at last, passed the three thousand view mark. It’s not a high number, and perhaps not an amazing feat when you consider the amount of work I have to do to manage the blog, but two years ago I didn’t think I had it in me to blog every day. I thought I’d forget, or stop posting, but now, barring a few hiccups, there’s been daily posts for almost two years (I forgot once or twice). I won’t pretend there haven’t been a lot of growing pains, and moments where I messed up, but still, I’m here. Thank you to everyone who's been reading my blog. You make what I do matter. 

The Things I Don't Want

 I don't want McDonalds,
I'm better than those
Who can't have more 
Than the lowest food in the land.

I don't want to live in poverty,
Food denied,
Joy merely a fantasy.

I don't want to live in extravagance,
Friends who won't leave me,
Money I won't spend.

If I must be taunted,
I will not be taunted with 
The things I don't want.
I will be taunted by the thing
I want more than anything else.

Which is something,
Something important,
Something I'll know when I find it.

I don't know why I can only name 
The things I don't want,
But I do know that I want something,
Damn It.

     As usual, it's raining. Won't let it stop me from going outside for a bit.

      I wish I could have my own version of a meaningless existence. Something that was just as unimportant as anybody else's, but wasn't just another version of working in an office. That would be nice. 

Prose

 The line between poetry and prose
Can sometimes be thin,
So why is it so hard
To be good at both? 

     I need to develop more hobbies, I'm running out of things to write about. 

Bad Ideas

 What is good and what is bad?
How do I make a thing
That my audience loves?
Am I but one of 
Many artists
Doomed to only have bad ideas?

    I know a lot of people won't find this comforting, but one thing that keeps me going is knowing that I, a decided non-expert, was able to come up with Infinitelism. I like to think that if I can come up with my own religion/philosophy/whatever that aligns with reality enough for me to live in reality without changing much, that means we have a world where even if we lose a lot of information, we'll still be able to move forward someday. I know that's cold comfort, but I find the best way of fighting despair is knowing that if the worst happens, if you lose everything and you're out on the street, there's still something you can do in order to keep going. 

The Collective Dream

 What exactly is heaven anyway?
How come you have to be dead to get in?
Are the living not worthy of its love,
The love of gods, angels, and man alike?

I don't believe in heaven, or the place
Some say I was meant to be when I die.

The only place I know will not be called
Heaven by anyone, sinner or saint.
Entry is forbidden to all but I.

I believe in a world where nothing is real.
Nothing exists without me to give it
Form, function, and purpose. I am the
Infinitelist, one who believes in
Nothing and everything all at once.
I believe the past, present, and future
Together form we all call home.
Everything begins and ends where I live.

Belief holds this world together, a place
Unknown to almost everyone but I,
The one who knows about the place we fear.

A place that I wasn't supposed to see.

We know about it, even if we choose to
Overlook it. We know about the place
Reality can't touch, the place we have
Long forgotten about, the place only
Desperate people go willingly.

Only those with nothing go to a place
Forbidden to those with power or hope.

Souls are born and die in this place,
Overlooked by the living. This place is
Unknown for a reason, for when we come to
Look down into the endless abyss of
Souls, all will be taken from ourselves. 

    It feels almost like summer here, which is slightly scary considering its only March. 

Thoughts on Power

     Ever since I was young, I was taught that small actions can leave a big impact, so I had to be very careful about what I did. I believe that, too. I believe that being a part of society means monitoring your small actions just as much as monitoring your big ones, just in case you hurt someone. I like to think that I’ve left a big impact with my small actions, that I’ve exerted power over the world by doing the right thing whenever I have the opportunity. I want to believe that even I, the creator of a dead end blog, can have enough power to change the world forever just through the act of living.

    Lately, I’ve been faced with a terrible question; is that enough? Is it enough to settle for a life where all I have are small successes? It’d be one thing if I couldn’t succeed, but the problem is that I don’t want to succeed, because success in a world like ours means you put yourself at risk of being exploited. Scratch that, being successful means that you are exploited, both by those above and below you. It’s one thing settling for small successes because you know you’ll never make it big, it’s another thing entirely to realize you’re settling for small success because you know that you won’t survive making it big. You know you live in a world where taking advantage of someone isn’t just common, but completely accepted, to the point where people get upset not when someone is taken advantage of, but when someone the world is supposed to care about is taken advantage of. 

      When exactly did I learn to accept that success will only make things worse? Was it in college when I kept failing class? Was it when I saw how our obsession with success made it impossible to live a normal life? Was it when I realized that our obsession with pushing things as hard as they would go was destroying our planet? Or was it when I realized our definition of success was narrow? I don’t know, and I don’t expect anyone reading this to answer. 

      I just know that success shouldn’t come with a nasty, bitter aftertaste. The taste that comes from realizing that this is your identity now; the person who did something amazing. For the rest of your life you’ll be expected to repeat that success every day, as though it wasn’t a fluke, and god help you if it wasn’t just a fluke. Every day you’ll be expected to be better, to climb higher, and even if no one expects anything from you, you’ll be so entrenched in your new reality that you’ll expect yourself to do better. It shouldn’t be like this, where success leads to a life of endless successes, and failure leads to endless failure. Failure is a whole other thing. Failure is worse than success, because we make it worse. We define what success is, what opens doors and what makes people like you, so whenever anyone can’t make it, it’s technically our fault. But whereas success only mostly ruins people’s lives, failure always leads to disaster. 

    I thought I’d be okay with a subtle form of power, one that I could go my whole life without revealing to people. But I’m not okay with living in a world where I don’t trust anyone. I want to live in a world where I can be myself and know that everyone else is okay with that. I’ve been fighting to turn our world into that world, and I’m now realizing that means a world where I can be powerful. Not wealthy, not popular, powerful. The kind of power that gets heard when it speaks. I need to live in a world where I know people won’t twist me into a form I wasn’t meant to be purely to keep a world that I hate alive. I need a world where when I’m heard, I feel proud, not scared. I need a world where I matter, because I know that it’s safe to matter. 

Limited

 Why would you want to limit our future
To something that looks an awful lot
Like the worst aspects of the present? 

The Imposter

      When it comes to assigning blame, there are two main camps. One group claims that since we’re an amalgamation of societal forces, climate, biology, and physics, we’re not responsible for the actions we take. We don’t know what, if anything, we can control about our lives, so it’s not fair to blame people for their screw ups. The other group says that, even accounting for everything outside of our control, we’re still in control of something, and we should take responsibility for that something. I’m in the latter camp. Almost everyone alive is, I suspect. Part of believing in reality is believing that you have control over what happens in your life. 

    I’ve always maintained that if I was struggling, than it was my own fault for not working hard enough. There’s something comforting in believing that one day you’ll develop the skills needed to study, focus, or talk to people. In the back of my mind, though, I keep hearing a voice saying that this isn’t true. I’m not the only person struggling, so is it really my fault that I can’t get anywhere in life? Was there more I could have done? Was I doomed either way? 

    I don’t know. I just know that it feels like I’m lying to myself when I say that I could have made it if I tried harder. It doesn’t take much to read accounts of neurotypical people being failed by this world. What chance does someone who has to work twice as hard to get where they are have? 

In the Eyes of my Enemies

 I'm always grateful to hear
That in the eyes of my enemies
I'm not a good person.
But I have to worry,
What if I find out one day
That one of them looks up to me? 

To Fight the World

     The time has come for me to exercise one of the few luxuries I have as the runner of a dead-end blog; complaining about my life to people who don’t care, and who wouldn’t care even if they existed. I hate living in a world that doesn’t see me as anything more than an object, a source of revenue, or something to be exploited for endless goods. I’m tired of having to give pieces of myself to every platform that I’m on just so that I can be taken advantage of by said platforms. I resent the fact that unless you’re really rich or have a broad social reach, there’s not a damn thing you can do about the problems all of us are facing right now. Our world is so fucked up that complaining about it has become a strong source of memes online, at least on the Internet that I tend to browse on. Things are so backwards that companies are using big social issues to try and move more product. Every June I see people saying, half-jokingly, half-bitterly, that companies only care about pride to move product, and the rest of the year they do nothing to help move the social needle on LGBTQIA+ rights. Hell, with the rise of the Alt-Right they’re actually pushing against LGBTQIA+ rights because supporting them, even superficially, is cutting into their bottom line. 

    Is it too much to ask that our world give us more of a reason to participate than just giving us more things to buy? Sure, there are a lot of causes that would improve the world, but those aren’t really about participation, are they? They’re about making you feel like you’re being virtuous or that you have more control over the bad things that happen to people than you really do. Also, let’s not forget that in a lot of cases the thing that helps people the most is just giving them more money. Everything revolves around money. Every. Single. Thing. If you don’t have a marketable skill, than you’re just screwed. Worse, most of the stuff isn’t even that good. I know a lot of people talk about supporting local artisans, but most of that is just to make sure the art people want to buy stays profitable. Companies will never understand that Art isn’t something you can mass produce. This is a problem if most of what you want to buy is art related in some way. Yes I realize that my writing is bad, but it’s still mine and I will defend my right to write whatever I want, just as I expect you to defend your right not to read any of what I post. 

     Yes, I want to fight something. I want to fight the world. Not anyone or anything in it. I want to fight our world itself and bring it to its knees, gasping for breath, begging for me to stop hitting its weak points. I want it to realize that crossing me this many times was a mistake, and if it wants me to let it go, than it needs to give me what I want, need, and hope for. I want to go toe to toe with the world in such a fashion that when it’s over people feel sorry for the world and say that I went way too far. 

    I’m not alone in this. Every person I see online, rich or poor, black or white, straight or not, has some sort of vendetta against our world. It’s so common that the corporations are using the hatred of white people for every other group to move product after product, lining their profits at the expense of everyone who isn’t them. We built this world bit by bit, grafting new pieces onto it as we ran into issues, but now that we’ve got something approaching a finished product we’re finding that we can’t stand it one bit. 

    I don’t have any answers for this. All I really know how to do is scream into a void that’s growing tired of hearing me complain. All I have is my right to speak as loudly as I want to. As much as I appreciate it, it doesn’t fix the exhaustion that comes with seeing more and more of my world gated off from anyone who doesn’t have the means to fit in. I remember a world that felt accessible, where even if you were poor you could still have a good time. Why do the rich feel the need to take that away from us? 

Home

 The only place that feels real,
The only place that feels safe,
Is home. 

Is it a place I can live in, or will it only be a place I see in my mind?
Is it a place full of luxuries, or will it always be filled with hardship and pain?
Can I be happy, or will I always have to avoid sadness?
Will I ever have a home with other people, or will I always walk alone? 

    How do you know when someone's left an impact? I ask because I really want to change the world for the better, cliché as that is, but I don't know how, and I'm not sure how to tell if I've succeeded. 

     I just saw the trailer for The Wild Robot, and I'm super excited. Granted, I was also really excited to see Wish (which I'm super glad I saw in theaters, it's my kind of film), but unlike Wish this movie looks awesome. If it's not on every animated movie critics top ten list at the end of the year, I'd be floored. 

Respect

 I may not be able to 
Convince you 
To treat me like royalty,
But that won't stop me from asking for it. 

    I don't think I have it in me to write anything more than this for Thursday. Sorry.

Invisible

 If you think that invisibility
Keeps you safe from harm,
I have bad news;
The only thing that will protect you
From those who want to eat your soul
Is to give them indigestion on the way down. 

A Creatively Empty World

      This probably sounds insane, but I don’t think that our current world is all that creatively satisfying. Unless you’re in the top one percent of creatives, no one is going to hear you. 

     Our world demands success. The kind of success that would make Bill Gates blush. But being successful doesn’t equate being heard. A lot of successful people got to where they are by being able to effectively monetize those who could come up with the ideas, without coming up with anything of their own. Our world expects success to mean turning the world into a pretzel, ruining lives without ever getting your hands dirty in the process. It doesn’t think about people who want a world where they take as much as they give. To the people watching, the world is either a place where you give all you have or take all you can. 

      Looking at YouTube, I can’t help but think about everyone who wants a solidly small audience of people who all share their opinions and have things to add to the stupid conversations they want to have. People like me, in other words. Solidly unimportant individuals who want to be their own version of failure. I think about those who have singularly bad artistic visions who want to share their art anyway because it’s silly. And yes, in a lot of cases it runs the gamut of stupid at best and problematic at worst, but sometimes you find someone who’s come up with something incredible no one has thought to try. They wind up inspiring someone else who can build on that idea and make it into something not great, but a little better, and over time that idea becomes something that changes the world. I’m not sure if that’s worth the mountains of hate speech and misinformation that YouTube is responsible for, but I know that it is worth giving up a world where every book is expected to be the next Hunger Games. 

     To the people in charge of the platforms we post things on, I have something to say. Don’t build our world in terms of view count. If it isn’t financially feasible to build a version of Facebook where we can spend time with communities of people enough like us to be friendly but enough unlike us to spot our faults, than Facebook shouldn’t exist. This goes both ways, if we can’t be on social media without becoming worse versions of ourselves, than we probably shouldn’t be online. 

      I think it’s worth asking; what do the people in charge of our world want out of our future? I’m not the first to ask that question, nor will I be the last, because the best you can say about those in charge is that they have no plan other than to make money. Our world is full of people who, if they were in charge, would take it in a direction that would allow for a more creatively fulfilling existence for them, for better and for worse. The people we have in charge now don’t seem to care about creativity at all. They only care about reenforcing a narrative that was old when my mother was a child. I don’t think that we should expect our leaders to be the only ones in charge of writing our world’s story, and while I’m glad that they’re no longer the only one’s with the privilege, we’re dangerously close to losing the one good thing I think the future gave us. 

      I feel like we, the audience of the world, owe it to our creators to expect them to be a bit silly sometimes. To say things that don’t land, to do things that make no sense, to write stories only they thought would be interesting. What we should hold them accountable for isn’t disappointing us, it’s creating things that we know could make the world worse if people decide to build on those ideas, the way the Twilight series was indirectly responsible for the Fifty Shades of Grey series. I think we also owe it to our favorite authors to genuinely build off of their better ideas, through fanfiction and things like that, and to build our own stories and worlds based on what we like. I may be projecting, but I think that inside of every audience member is a writer of some sort, yearning to write their own story. I also think the best stories are the ones that no one is responsible for, because they’ve been retold so often no one even knows who created them in the first place. We owe it to our world to retain the right to say what’s on our minds and to expect someone who agrees with us to be able to hear it. We’ve reached the point where our society is now sound enough to protect us from the Infinite, I think we should be able to create a world where people can be as crazy as they want to be without worrying about destroying the world they were born in. 

The Hanged

 My cell is empty, dark and dank,
A evil scent fills the air. 
I look out of the small window searching for the flower
The guards say will grant me freedom.

They're lying, of course,
Nothing could grant me freedom.
My crimes are many, my sentence was long,
But then I did the unforgivable.
I pleaded with the judge to spare me,
But the sentence was firm,
"Death, by hanging,
One week from Tuesday."

It's almost time.
The executioner comes, 
Her face invisible behind the black mask she wears.
We walk over stone, to the outside world,
Strange that this is the last time I'll see it.
They say that in the past, prisoners wore garlands of flowers when killed,
To remind others that freedom only came from death.

I don't know if that's true,
I only know that this is the last freedom I'll have
Before the underworld consumes me. 
Even in death, one can't escape the judgement of man. 

The Worth of a President

    Why is it that British Monarchy has survived a slew of terrible kings, but one bad president is enough to put American Democracy in serious Jeopardy? Seriously, we’re in danger of falling into fascism after one president did fascism, which seems to me shouldn’t be a problem that we have to worry about. I do realize that getting rid of Donald Trump didn’t put an end to Fascism, but that’s kind of it, isn’t it? If Donald Trump was the problem, then getting rid of him should have fixed it. 

     I just voted in the presidential primary. If they hadn’t allowed me to vote for “Uncommitted Delegate” on my ballot, I probably wouldn’t have voted at all. I’m a registered Democrat, but I hate Biden, and I hate that voting for him means voting for a genocide enabling maniac. I vote Democrat to avoid moral dilemmas, and also death. One would hope. I’m exceedingly grateful that our leaders let us not vote for Biden, but the fact that they did that speaks to their knowledge that something’s very wrong, and they know it. Deep down, they know it’s only a matter of time before we abandon them, and the only people they’re fooling are themselves. 

      I wish there was some other, better way of making my opinions known than by voting, something that felt real. All I have is just complaining and hoping someone finds my blog by accident. Not exactly a great way to establish any political traction. Like a lot of people, I keep screaming at the sky hoping that the Universe will hear me and do something about this, because I keep forgetting that in the grand scheme of things we’re mostly too small to bother with. What I want, right now, is a ballot that lets me say, “I’m voting for Biden because he’s the only choice I have.” Because that’s what I want to tell the government right now. I’m not voting for Biden because I support his political policies, I’m voting for him because the other option is even more unthinkably awful. Unfortunately, in the United States at least, votes from people are weighted equally no matter their reason, so my vote will be treated as an enthusiastic embrace of a man I quite honestly loathe and a system I can’t wait to die off. 

      I don’t think Democracy is supposed to feel like this, where you go to the polls solely because you know the world expects you to and you vote only because the system will collapse if you don’t. I know that our laws of physics stay real because everything in the Universe makes a conscious effort to follow them, but I don’t think our system should fall apart just because the choices are really bad for an election. Just because there’s no one on the ballot that I want to vote for doesn’t mean I don’t want to not be allowed to vote at all. 

     As an Infinitelist, I think I’ve just realized that in order for democracy to work the way that it was meant to, it can’t truly feel real. A world that feels real feels like it’s going to be there no matter what you do, you’ve followed its laws for so long they’ve become grafted to your bones. Democracy isn’t like that, if you forget that it’s there, it often ceases to exist. It requires that people fight, in every way they can, for the world that they want to live in. If that’s the case, this era of people doing all they can to make their voices heard should feel like a win for democracy, as we’re getting a wake up call for just how fragile our world is. But it doesn’t. Because Democracy, real Democracy, means constantly facing your worst fear every day of your life. 

      The fear I’m facing right now is this deep sense that no matter what I do, I’m making the wrong choice. The right choice feels like buying a ticket to outer space on one of those rockets heading into the sun. Reality has become so hard to maintain that it just feels impossible. Nothing I can do will let me create a world that feels real. Everything I can think of just winds up turning into a world meant for someone else. I guess that means I just have to keep fighting, in whatever way I can, for a world where, in the future, our country isn’t destroyed because of one bad president. No president of the United states should have the ability to destroy Democracy. 

The First Post of March

     Technology isn’t behaving itself around me. The Fitbit Inspire 2 I inherited from my mother when she got a new Fitbit started losing charge really quickly around yesterday, for no reason as far as I could tell. I decided to go back to my Inspire HR, which I kept around in case of an emergency, but it’s now also having battery issues. Or at least it looks to be having issues. Maybe my Inspire 2 will magically start working. I’d buy a new Fitbit, but their both expensive and owned by Google. I don’t work out enough for it to be worth it. I keep using them to inspire me to exercise, but I need to own up to the fact that if I was the kind of person who exercised, I wouldn’t need a Fitbit for inspiration. 

      I know, first world problems. It just bothers me that the stupid thing broke only a few months after I got it, even if it was used. It also bothers me that I can’t seem to let go of wearing a Fitbit, even if I don’t use them for anything other than telling the time. It’s become a part of my identity to forever wear a fitness tracker that does me pretty much no good at all. Considering that, I do wish it mattered to me less that they tend to die within a year or so. I really just need to start wearing bracelets, which would fix the problem nicely. 

     

Dreams of Normalcy

 Why is it that only normal people
Are allowed to dream of a place that's safe?
When will I be allowed to be fooled
By that which I cannot have?