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?