First Day

The boring writer sat in his chair, perched listlessly in anticipation. The moment of triumph had come and his fingers halted like the tentative steps of a polio victim (but victim implies intent and there was none to speak of). There existed a desire, a longing for long forgotten words, a lost menace of caroming syllables, rampaging along the spokes of his neurons.

That grand beautiful shape burned in his mind's eye. That beautiful, almost erotic shape of the main body, that sexy axon, those tiny dendrites. He thought of the yellow colouring the artist had given the drawing. Was it a true colour or just a stain, an artist's twisted fucked up distorted view of the world? Was all of science just a massive thesis, one man's solitary lusting work, a great ejaculatory piece of wisdom, with the depressing fate of being churned through the paper shredder of popular culture? It could probably be proven, but nobody would read the results, all they would care about would be the headline: “Average Person Doesn't Know Shit and Is Proud of It!” A lurid, tabloid-ready headline, printed in fifty point font for all the huddled masses to easily ignore. They would gloss over it like a celebrity magazine, where the flash was the substance.

The ultimate plight of a creative person is to be shocked into inaction. Fill them up, drain them out, make the whole fucking PROCESS so nerve wracking, so exhausting, that perhaps they'll forget their purpose and expend themselves too early to actually contribute anything. Tear down the work with well-founded criticism, but in the end all criticism achieves is design-by-committee. A novacaine porridge of salty mediocrity and cereal blandness. I am talking about the absolute mind numbing terrible culture we are being spoonfed. Then, as soon as we decide we want something with a little flavour we realise that we forgot how to cook. The greater tragedy (look: another meaningless phrase) is that we never learned in the first place.

Perhaps we could blame ourselves, but that would be too easy and wouldn't solve anything. Self-recrimination is the enemy of true progress. There is no goal in blaming yourself. You can't make placards against yourself, unless you're a post-modernist, but then you're committed to another category of sin. You'd take five minutes just understanding the nature of protest. However, nobody is going to teargas you for yourself, so you throw yourself at corporations, other people, governments, these gross entities that resemble the other. They are just the accumulation of petty human desires, assembled brick by brick, each piece of petty bullshit, greed, ignorance and bliss all piled into a pyramid of shit. We are all slaves to the pyramid and the new Pharoahs don't even have to demand their buildings anymore. The slaves have taken over the kingdom but they forgot how to be free. Unable to grasp the idea of green pastures, they build pyramids. The laugh of the Pharoahs is filled with irony.

The memetic process is a horrible rotting fungus. Have you ever looked at the language of a time period? The expressions, word for word, repeated past the point of nausea into a zone of petty utterance. The grotesque self-satisfaction of the pseudo-intellectual repudiates the previous advances of our opposable thumbed species. The writing of our times shows how even the intellectuals have become as common as the sheep they write about. When you have hundreds of thousands of wolves and millions of sheep, the sheer scale renders each individual interaction tragic with meaninglessness.

I am talking about (another meaningless phrase). Any sentence that starts with “if” falls into a flushing toilet of language. All the clean water of potential coalescing with bacteria colonised infectious material. Deceit is such a wonderful convention. The obfuscation of easy answers denies the necessity of actions. It necessarily makes the process of deciding on an action more costly than the action itself. It is another way for our small poisonous reflections to sting and paralyse.

A list of issues is a writer's due diligence; organisation is the key to advanced behaviour. The destruction of meaning in language, the lack of action and sluggishness in our individual lives resulting in domino ramifications. Paralysis of language, paralysis of action, paralysis of thought. A total (oh look another meaningless phrase). The clue lies in originality not for its own sake but for the sake of meaning. In the days of apathy, even struggling is boring.