As if my mind were in any shape in summer, this winter has left me realizing that I have actually lost my mind. I am not sane. I am rambling, ranting, lost and mumbling. Sometimes I wonder if I'll turn petulant in my frustration and become violent. Sinister scenery slides through my psyche, and frighteningly easy irreverence for life, lives, living. The only thing that gives me any comfort is thinking about space, stars, black holes, the beginning of the universe, gravity, magnets, the aether, and that sort of thing. It makes me feel better about feeling so exiled from the way the television paints life; the way the news presumes a morality that I don't have, and can't even stomach, the assumptions and pretensions of the newspapers that make me realize that I'm no citizen and I have contempt for the lot of it -- only the vastness of space, matter, energy and time seems to make sense, to be for me. The notion of the enormous scale of time is the only ally I know. I creep other people out, depress them, or make them angry. I suppose if I found someone that agreed with my insanity, we'd be left with the age old question: "Now what?"
So I will collect my images of the role, the empty customs, and try to breathe life into a character that is employable, that does not frighten or disgust, that can hold a conversation. I feel like I once wished, when young and sentimental, that I would know what exile felt like, and god, the governance of this universe saw fit to meet that prayer in classic irony. "Exile and the Kingdom" was a Camus book I never finished. Perhaps now is the time. I feel like that fucker and I could sit and smoke cigarettes in a tabac, drink little black coffees, and smirk at the drama and clashes of expectations and entitlement and random, meaningless reality as customers came in to buy their cigarettes and newspapers, lighters and porn. Unfortunately, that indulgent daydream isn't crediting me any money. Money seems to be a consistent theme to my agonizations.
Wilson's Outsider needs to be finished as well; maybe one page a day. "Exile" -- what a word. It makes me think of exodus and refugees, being held at borders and scanned by police for warrants. They're all just doing their jobs, the police, the managers at starbucks, the judges and the executives at walmart, the social workers and the drug dealers, the doctors and the junkies. It's just the way it is. No it's not fair, but life isn't fair. I don't fool myself into thinking I'm innocent or noble so much, but "I would not feel so all alone -- Everybody must get stoned." I've spent my outrage, and natural and pure rebellion has given way to nausea. When I think about the thousands of years of men, women, love and magic, food, drug, sailing, fishing, dreaming and wishing and then try to find an identity in this city and country, on this television station and programme, with these characters, cultures, gold and wars, I am at a loss. I don't feel right about it.
So, I've realized that I am insane. This is why I can't make sense of it. Unfit to reproduce -- a bad egg. I'm stupid and selfish and that's why I don't love America and the romance of wars and cars. I'm lazy so I don't like to do an honest day's work for an honest day's pay. I'm depressed, the doctors say, and that's why I'm sad. I'm a sinner, so god won't even throw me a bone and the devil doesn't even need to bribe me. I'm an ungrateful son, nephew and so on; I'm a conceited, disloyal zero. -That- is what's wrong with me. I'm insane, unclean, dirty, sick.
They don't have insane asylums like I thought they would when I was a child. I mean, there are dismal, horrible places for the sick and sad, but I can't cope with these places. If they were nice, surely lazy bastards like myself would have monopolized it long ago, burdened the good citizens of their taxes, and drawn away from spending on national security. Once I tried to explain to a therapist that if I were a lesser primate, a monkey of sorts, my monkey gang would kill me, maim me, or chase me away. In my insane mind, it goes on now. The sick and stupid, poor and untaught fill prisons and hospitals today. The wise elder citizens don't just kill them because they're civilized. Well, they kill them sometimes, but not a whole lot, and they're good enough to explain why it's ok. I'm insane, but until recently I've managed to go uncaptured for the most part.
When I watched a documentary about a man tortured and held in Saudi Arabia who could only defy them by standing naked, smearing himself with shit and refusing to bathe for 2 years I understood him and admired him. In my insane mind it is more beautiful to defy oppression at the cost of one's comfort and life than to bend and take it to preserve the self, the pieces of hope for a future. I have been trained to accept life as a captive animal as necessary, when it is as perverse and wrong an experience as any I can imagine. I participate in the perpetuation of the practice. I'm insane, though.
I have lost nearly all faith in man. I've lost the great reverence for life and the implication that life is more valuable than that which a subject assigns to their own. Still, the idea of killing in war, justice, rage, or greed makes me sick in my stomach. It is because we need to justify killing that we let ourselves ride swells of righteousness clothing fear, hate, jealousy and greed. That only some of us stop and feel out the truth, choose to decline the safety of the herd, the security of identity, the consensus when it is wrong, these things sadden me. When I think of those tens, hundreds of thousands of years, I can't imagine that it has been different when any group of us grows in number and endures generations of a communal notion of self. I'm insane, but I don't trust men. I'm insane, and I'm uncertain. It's not just homicide; that's just the taboo, dogma, and example of my own exile I point at.
