Wind/Stopping/Depreciation.

30.EPILOGUE.32: January 1, 2003.
"Wind/Stopping/Depreciation."

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create
And time for all the works and days of hands
-- T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock."
I don't need a cure!
I don't need a cure!
I don't need a cure!
I need a final solution!
-- Pere Ubu, "Final Solution."

23rd.
        Wandering around town, I bump into a guy I haven't seen in years. I remember him wanting to be either an accountant or a software designer, I remember him wanting to live in Silicon Valley. Now he has dreadlocks, and a goatee, and he smells like marijuana. We talk about nothing of importance and then he begins to complain about Christmas, and then he asks me if I observed Buy Nothing Day on November 30th.
        "No," I say. "It's stupid."
        (I'm very forthright with him because I used to know him quite well, in University.)
        He seems shocked.
        "I had to," he says. "It's my duty as a global citizen."
        I shrug. "The way I look at it, being told not to buy something by a faceless collective is just as offensive as being told to buy stuff from a faceless corporation. I want to make my own decisions."
        "But a collective isn't faceless if you're a part of it."
        "Neither is a corporation."
        "I suppose, but we have to show them we're not going to be pushed around."
        "How, by being pushed around by other people? Being forced to buy stuff is the same as being forced to not buy stuff."
        "Nobody's forcing you to not buy anything," he says.
        "True," I say, "but nobody's forcing me to buy anything, either. I choose to spend money. And I choose not to spend money."
        He sighs.
        "I'm an Adbusters guy," he says. As if that explains things. (And, actually, to a certain degree it does). "I'm in favour of the little guy."
        "So am I, and if people stop buying stuff, small businesses will suffer."
        "Even for one day?" he says, snidely.
        "Even for one day," I say. "I worked in a small business. We had to make a certain amount of money each and every day in order to pay rent, power and wages, and many days we didn't clear that amount. Thankfully, some days were better than others, so the store always just barely got by. For some businesses, a thing like 'Buy Nothing Day' may mean the difference between paying crucial bills or going out of business."
        He looks skeptical. But, then again, he also looks like someone who's rich enough to be able to afford to look poor. And so has room to look skeptical.
        "This is a capitalistic society," I say. "We need to spend money or we'll collapse."
        "Maybe we should collapse, then. The world would be better off without money."
        "Why?"
        "Look at hunter and gatherer societies," he says. "People hunt for a few hours and then get food and spend the rest of the say lounging around." He sweeps his arm around for maximum effect. "It seems like paradise compared to this smoke-clogged wasteland."
        "Sure, except when the game isn't there and they have to spend days tracking it. And sure once they kill it they get to lounge around-- sure-- except for the women who have to spend the rest of the day cutting, gutting, skinning, preserving, and otherwise processing the carcass. And do you really know how long it takes to hunt with primitive tools? Days, if not sometimes weeks. And as far as the 'gathering' part is concerned, you have to scour the land for food. And, again, that's the women's jobs. So, on top of spending all day day cutting, gutting, skinning, preserving meat, the women also have to forage for berries, and probably fashion garments if they wear them. And when they deplete the land around them, which happens pretty quickly, they all have to move on. So they're always trudging around, spending their entire lives looking for food. Yeah, that sure sounds like a lazy man's utopia to me...."
        "Hmm," he says.
        "And then there's all the tapeworms and lice," I say. "And the greasy, itchy hair. And the general stinking and sweaty grime that comes with 'living next to nature' and 'being the guardians of the land.' That also sounds totally super-duper!"
        "Well, anyway, Adbusters says that Buy Nothing Day was a success-- there were culture jammers puking in unison in malls in London-- and so maybe next year we can have a Buy Nothing Christmas."
        "We're already having one of those. And the economy is collapsing. And, frankly, I think that people who have nothing better to do than purposely vomiting in malls to protest a society that gives them running water and heat and Adbusters magazine, are just a bunch of bored rich white kids who need to put away their hash pipes, get jobs, and grow up."
        He looks at me like I've just slapped him.
        And then he starts laughing:
        "You never change, do you? Even in the face of the apocalypse, you'll always be everybody's favorite lovable, wacky cynic...."

24th.
        Christmas eve. Spending it with my parents.
        Night, reading Impossible Exchange by Jean Baudrillard.
        Baudrillard says because we cannot step outside of the "world" (read "reality") and duplicate it-- which is what is required in order to prove something scientifically-- the "world," the totality of reality, therefore cannot be proven scientifically, and so does not exist. And yet it seems to. This is an impossibility. It's an old bit of sophistry, but it holds Jean in good stead. And when he applies it to politics and the media, the writing really starts to sing.
        Politics does not exist. It's just an effect created by the irreal.
        The media creates the world, and without the media, there would be no real.
        Economics is a lie.
        It's nihilism, sure. But, for some reason it makes me laugh, it makes me feel good.
        Maybe that's all that's left, nihilism.
        Whatever it takes to keep me going.
        Dreaming of Santa Claus.

25th.
        Christmas.
        Spent it with my parents.
        Spent it with a bunch of cousins I can't relate to.
        The younger cousins all ran around, hitting each other and screaming. The older ones just talked about their families, '70s classic rock bands, and nothing much more.
        One of my younger cousins said something about Role-Playing Games and comics. I interjected briefly, but he looked at me like I was insane.
        I watched a cousin playing something on the Game Cube.
        My mom talked with my aunt about mutual friends. My uncle talked to his son about sports and home repairs. My dad sat more-or-less alone. I joined him, and then I fell asleep.
        Came home. Went to bed.
        A dream:
        I'm in an old rundown house. I've just moved there with my new wife. She's young, and pretty and funny and smart.
        However, the previous owners of the house have not cleaned out their possessions, and the house itself is very dingy and musty.
        I wander though rooms. They are small and cramped and sometimes there are puddles on the floor.
        I eventually find a small room I determine was once the bedroom of a young girl. Like the rest of the house, this room is cramped. There is a small bed, a chest of drawers with a tarnished mirror, a tiny closet and a night table. There are drawings on the walls, and scribbled notes, poems, pictures cut out of young girl music magazines.
        There are papers strewn everywhere:
        And, on the night table, I find her diary. I open it. She has been writing about God, and love, and how her mother and father love her, and how God loves her, and about how she liked to walk in the trees and sing. Reading her diary makes my eyes and head burn and ache.
        And, because of the strain of reading, I feel my vision beginning to fade.
        And, I stand up. (And I can only make out vague shapes, now.) And as I stand, I see the blurry shape of my wife looking at me. She is wearing a blue dress, and, even through my failing vision, I can see she is crying.
        And it is at that point I realized that I will never, never, ever know the joy of watching a little girl of mine grow up. Never be able to give love to a daughter-- or any child-- of my own. Never be able to read a diary, or walk talking with her during the day or evening, feeling a mixture of bliss and awe. Never know what it's like to make new life, and see the world through new life's eyes.
        I wake up, curled in a ball and moaning (my neighbours must love me). And consumed with a type of deep, aching sadness I have never before experienced. Ever.

26th.
        Watching tv. Cartoons, mostly.
        Thinking about Lien Wen-cheng.
        He was 27 years old and on October 20th, 2002 he played videogames until he died.
        He spent 32 hours in a cyber café in Taiwan playing on a computer. The only breaks he had were when he got up to pee.
        Eventually, someone found him on the floor of the bathroom, bleeding from his nose and foaming from his mouth. They took him to the hospital, but he died.
        Apparently, he died because of exhaustion and sitting in the same spot too long.
        At least he died doing what he loved.
        Playing videogames.
        Not bleeding and foaming.

27th.
BREAKTHROUGH:
        Amazing, really, how when you see the world for what it really is people just accuse you of feeling sorry for yourself. Is it my fault that they want to hide behind their little petty delusions of hope and meaning? And yet it infuriates me that they're so blind to the futility and emptiness of it all that they accuse me of being pretentious, or of simply just wanting attention.
        When in fact, they are the ones who want attention.
        They're the ones who go to school, get jobs, meet other people, marry and have children all so they can go lookit me lookit me lookit me to whole wide world and seek approval from their peers or the deities of their choice-- and in so doing convince themselves that their lives are not all just complex webs of self-referring lies-- over and over telling themselves that what they're doing will have meaning, or purpose, that they haven't lived in vain. And they say I'm being ridiculous.
        When all I want to say to them is that everything they believe, everything they hold dear, is, when you get right down to it, all just some crap that some guys made up.
        Religion is all just some crap that some guys made up.
        Philosophy is all just some crap that some guys made up.
        Art is all just some crap that some guys made up.
        Science is all just some crap that some guys made up.
        Politics is all just some crap that some guys made up.
        Truth is all just some crap that some guys made up.
        Beauty is all just some crap that some guys made up.
        Hope is all just some crap that some guys made up.
        Here's the scam:
        People think up some junk and then try to convince other people that the junk they thought up is "true," and if they do a good enough job, the other people will believe them and then start repeating this "true" junk to even more others, and so the ball gets started rolling and that's how a "true" idea proliferates-- when in fact there's no proof for anything. And you can call me a relativist, or a nihilist, or a cynic, or whatever-- but when you get right down to it, everything you hold dear, everything you've "thought" or "felt" is Good and Right and True-- it's all just your opinion, and it rests on nothing-- there's nothing that can back it up. Nothing! And even if you say I should just experience life though your eyes, and that if I do that I'll see what "truth" really is, all that means is I should enter into your own fallible, easily tricked mindset and experience the crap that you think is "true" as the so-called "truth" you believe it to be.
        You can lecture me on Platonic forms, or God, or the beauty of science all you want-- but the "truth" is Plato just made up some stuff that you believe to be "true" because you believe it to be "true;" the "truth" is a bunch of people got scared one night and decided there was this thing up in the sky called "God" that was just a bigger more frightening version of themselves, and because that idea seemed reasonable at the time they decided it was "true" just because it seemed like it should be "true;" and the "truth" is a whole bunch of guys all looked at the world one day and extrapolated some ideas they convinced themselves were universal (and therfore "true") by using something they dubbed "experimentation," simply because some of their so-called "experiments" actually seemed to synch up with stuff that existed in the real world thereby creating a measurable, repeatable effect. It's funny how we can take coincidence to mean we actually learn something.
        You can talk to me about beauty all you want, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder and that means it has no real concrete existence beyond the opinion of the individual, which means it doesn't exist at all.
        And as far as love? You can talk about love all you want, love being able to tear down boundaries and move mountains, but love is just an abstract concept-- it can't ever really effect anything directly-- and besides, it only resides in the brain, in certain neurochemicals at certain times of the day, and can be easily simulated with a pill, a sweet-tart, or a pound of chocolate.

28th.
        In North America you're told that angst and despair are things you grow out of.
        When you're young you're supposed to be worried about things like death and the inevitable meaninglessness of life, and then you grow up and get a job as a lawyer or doctor (or hippie) and everything is all right.
        As you mature, you're supposed to find your niche and realize life isn't so bad after all.
        It happens to every generation: at first they question everything and then they get corporate jobs or find "God" or Socialism or some other centre and then-- presto!-- life becomes filled with meaning. It happened to the hippies and it sure as shit happened to my generation. Not that there was much actually dangerous or rebellious about my generation to begin with-- but what little that was there quickly faded away.
        The reasons for this are many, and I'm tired, and so I don't want to go into them right now.
        But, in Europe (okay, mostly France) you're actually allowed to be depressed into adulthood.
        In Europe you're allowed to think, encouraged to not buy into bullshit like God and Country and Family. Encouraged to stare into the void and spit at it, not just ignore it, not just lie to yourself and fabricate an illusion of a God or a government who's your buddy, your best pal who'll never steer you wrong nohow. In Europe, if there is a God, this God is distant and alien and beyond comprehension. Not a hamster in a cage or a trained seal, like in the USA or Canada. In Britain, if there is a God-- the God of England is an officious prick. Snooty, cold, and filled with disdain.
        If there even is a God.
        (American Science Fiction is the same way-- all the aliens in space are essentially just like us. There is nothing truly alien out there, in American Sci-Fi. And, of course, we humans are still at the top of the heap. So, in American SF the universe can be understood, and conquered, and ultimately is our friend. In Europe, the Science Fiction is very different. It's cold, distant and alien. The universe isn't our friend or our enemy-- it's just different, alien, ultimately incomprehensible. And this is because we're just humans. We're not at the top of the heap and we probably can't even get there. Or even get near the top. Because we're just humans and ultimately understand nothing. If there's even anything to understand. If it's not all just meaningless and neutral. And, probably, this is a far more realistic picture of the way the universe actually works.)
        This is why no good philosophers come out of the USA. They all think they can meet the universe on their terms. They all think it's all understandable. They all think they're the beginning and end, be-all and end-all. Or, they think that if the universe can't be understood, hey, it doesn't really matter-- as long as we got lotsa Twinkies and cheese and football on Sundays.
        Either way, it's bullshit. Empty, naive, childish bullshit.

29th.
        A dream:
        It is very dark. I am in a room somewhere. I have been there forever.
        I sit, I walk around, I try to see something, anything.
        However, whenever I try to see, all I can make out are two burning, red eyes. The eyes are like two dots, and they watch me. They follow me around, and watch me.
        They never hurt me, they never help me, they never make an effort to communicate.
        They simply watch me.
        They are neither benevolent, nor malevolent. They simply watch, neutral and numb.
        Somehow, this is worse than being menaced by an evil.

30th.
        Of course, in Europe (and not just France), politics is viewed as being the Saviour-- which is also naive bullshit. So they're not really all that perfect, either. They try to put country, citizenship, "duty" before everything-- before the nothingness of the individual. And that's retarded, too.
        And, of course in the USA it's trendy to distrust the government. But, that's all it is.
        Distrust of the government is, by and large, just entertainment now. But, then again, so is trust.
        I go downtown.
        I walk around.
        I look at buildings.
        There are helicopters circling this city, now.

31st.
        Watching cartoons. Anything at all.
        Braceface. Samurai Jack. Clone High. South Park. Powerpuff Girls. Simpsons. King Of The Hill. Life With Andy. Mission Hill. Ripping Friends.
        Anime: Arjuna, Fancy Lala, Evangelion, Urusei Yatsura, Excel Saga, Lain, Niea Under Seven, Ceres.
        Playing Final Fantasy X. Dreaming of Spyro.

Jan 1, 2003.
        I wake up. I feel sick. My eyes and head ache.
        I go to the window.
        I look outside and the sun burns my eyes.
        I haven't been drinking, but I feel hung over.
        The cars in the parkinglot below me are stark and dingy.
        My head spins and I sit down. My legs are shaking.
        I hold my head I my hands. I run a hand through my hair.
        I think:
        "For the love of God isn't this horrible Epilogue over yet...."

Next: A sinking ship....

Epilogue 33.
Epilogue 31.
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