Alcohol bores me; it’s the liquid TikTok. Been there, done that. For ten years, age 17 to 27. Now I’m 40 and I don’t think about it anymore. What’s the point? It’s all been seen and done, the blackouts, the women, the violence, the punk rock, the drugs, the moving, the traveling, the psychopathy. I stand, now, at the very edge of a new cliff, looking down, no longer frightened. Below sits the canyon, thousand-foot-high vertical walls. I feel the vertiginous fear. Fear and trembling. (Tall, skinny, awkward, with a bent spine and always carrying a cane. Soren K.)
Jack,
I always think, God is dead. And then I think of how Nietzsche said that. Then I think about How [Christopher] Hitchens said, of Nietzsche’s phrase, How could God be dead since he was never alive to begin with? Indeed.
God is reckless. Life is reckless. Time passes like sand quickly sifting into the bowl, going too fast, too fast, absurdly, inanely fast.
What is existence if not a pointless bowl of anarchic joy? Life is a failure. I am a failure. No, not a failure in the conventional sense, but more so in the sense of being different to the point of alienness.
I am an alien.
Not really. I am not special or unique, though I certainly like to think so. I have an ego the size of Texas, and an insecurity the size of Europe. It is what it is, as they say. (Who is ‘they’?)
Death doesn’t scare me: It ruthlessly terrifies me. The total black cessation of consciousness??? Think about the fact of your one day eternal non thinking, eternal non existence. Exactly. You see my point.
There is no God: There, I said it. There is only yourself. There is no inherent purpose or ‘meaning’ in life; we create our own illusory, superficial sense of meaning and purpose. (Sartre taught us that. Ditto Camus. Before them: Kierkegaard.)
Against the massive, unmoving boulder that is the cosmos—the vast, mysterious universe—there stands billions of human beings, wretched, foolish and dumb, living and dying, over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. Earth: A freak, unexpected accident post-Big Bang, the elements all coming together in the right formulation. Magic. Metaphysical hatred. Beauty, from almost nothing. Empty, rocky space. Stars exploding across the night sky, popping and bursting with glory, like Kerouac said in Road.