Lunatics and Love

I am a lunatic. This is not to say that I am afflicted by any particular delusion of being a werewolf or Napoleon Bonaparte but rather that the onset of the full moon seems to bring with it an enhanced anxiety and desire to be in motion. A craving for action adventure and sex leaks into my fevered imagination and sleep becomes a distant second to the need for the intangible quality of being that the French wuss out on by calling je ne sais quoi which literally translates as “I don’t know what”. How lame is that?

In any case on this particular moonlit night my mind is bringing forth images and memories of you. Some painful most happy. All filled with a sense of longing and a bit of regret. Being of an analytic mind is a curse all its own. Did I do the right thing? What is the right thing? If there is no right thing did I do what was best with the information that I had? My life seems to be a combination of intuitive leaps fearful gestures and hindsight recriminations.

Romantic comedies are a bane upon human existence. Worse than fairy tales and more destructive to the popular myth than cartoons are movies that give us an idea of some ideal romantic convergence in which two people can meet…overcome some laughable obstacle and in the end realize that they are truly and deeply meant to be together on a level so cosmic that the audience has known it since the first reel. Life is nothing like that.

My romantic history bears a much closer resemblance to a series of horrible accidents than to a cosmically ordained fairytale. I hope things are going better for you but they probably are not. Sucks doesn’t it? Fear is of course the problem. It always is. Fear takes on so many forms that it would be silly to even attempt to list them. Fear of being weak and vulnerable is a big one of course. Fear that the person you are with is just who you have settled for because you are tired and your one true love is out there somewhere but you just lack the emotional wear withal to keep looking.

The truth is that this is a fairly legitimate fear. After all with 6 or 8 billion people on the planet it seems like there might be someone better than almost anyone you're with. Love is not buying a car. Life is not a matter of finding the perfect place or time or person. Life is just living and making the best you can to be the best you can. And life is short so stop putting it off.

How to justify your rebellion.

The irony of logic is that it leads to illogic. Logic, when applied to the unknown, leads inevitably to skepticism. Skepticism followed to its ultimate conclusion with sincere honesty about what is known leads to the realization that nothing is actually known. Descartes argued that thinking was being. Nietzsche said "what is thinking?"
Without even the presumption of selfhood as a basis to build on there is no proof of anything. All our information comes either from the physical world through the senses, which cannot be trusted, or through the intuitive and imaginative powers of the mind which cannot be tested.
So skepticism leads to the conclusion that not only does nobody know anything in any absolute sense but that nobody can know anything. Without that essential foundation of knowing we are left at the mercy of faith. Indeed faith becomes the foundation of all belief even that of science. We don't know that we have free will or that the universe holds any purpose and so all beliefs and conceptions of the universe become a matter of faith.
The justification of actions made so often in the last century that 'we know better than them' is complete nonsense. No one knows anything so all knowing is equal. Still...you have to do something or you might as well just lay in bed and rot.
So create a view of the universe that makes sense to you and set aside the fact that you are a completely ignorant and indeed unproven entity and just get on with living a bit eh?

Internalized Discipline

When we are children, if we are fortunate enough to have parents and the opportunity to go to school, we are made to get up and get ourselves cleaned and dressed and off to school. Later there is work. Same thing as school really your doing work for someone else without always completely knowing why you bother, and still you get up and do it every day. The voice of the parent waking you is replaced by the klaxon of the alarm clock and you groggily make your way to the shower and try to massage life into a body that would much rather be sleeping since you pushed the amount of sleep you get to a bare minimum for the sake of a some late night television. Cleaned up you head out the door towards the nearest caffeine and sugar and wolf them down on the way to The Job whatever that might be. Forty or fifty years pass by in this way with occasional interruptions for weddings, births, deaths etcetera.
What about being fired? What happens when you go on vacation? Without that little tug of fear to wake you and without that overhanging sense of responsibility what motivation besides urination is there to get out of bed? Is taking a shower and having a cup of coffee any less useful when your time is your own instead of someone elses?
Perhaps the enforced system of fear works fine. Maybe there are not many that view the world as operating on these lines. Wouldn't it be nice if we had a genuine desire to get up and meet the world?

Fiat Lux

It often happens that I am taken by a fit to write upon whatever topics come to mind in the wee hours. The discovery of Blog (a term whose meaning still escapes me) seems to offer an opportunity for responsive dialogue. So if you have any constructive replies to whatever I write feel free to reply. I have no notion of how popular this service may be but since its free...what the hell eh?