Today as I write this, my connection to the Information Superhighway has been severed for several hours. So, my full attention turned inward on myself, leading to massive overload. For months, I’ve busied myself reexamining various aspects of existence to the extremes. In between my intense studies, if I don’t find some external stimuli to distract me, I grow evermore lost among the dark pathways deep within my subconscious. It comes to a point where the simple act of reading hard copy literature becomes impossible. If I don’t have multiple sources of outside stimuli, my intellect short-circuits. Then even my physical self begins to shut down and I can go catatonic.

Right now, my emotional integrity is practically nonexistent. I daily walk a tight rope between self-destruction and ranting all my raves. I’m so angry at humanity for devouring what’s left of itself and extinguishing what little good may redeem it. Many evenings, and even some mornings, I often lay in bed for hours, motionless and bewildered from overanalyzing all the idiotic things that people let dictate their very lives. When will folks pay more attention to what’s really happening and overlook the blatantly obvious distractions that should have no hold on them?

People say that I don’t pay attention enough, that I live within my own little world of imagination and theory. No, the reality is that I’ve paid too much attention to the wide world of hypocrisy and lies that human society has created and I had no choice but to cut myself off from it. All I remain connected to is whatever tools aid me in expressing sometimes garbled and jumbled thought processes, and the distractions that often take the form of audio or visual stimulation that gives me a stream of alternate idea paths to consider.

I’m greatly reluctant to turn the full force of my intellect onto my individual plights. It’s not so much a lack of words that I have, but rather a lack of focus and a unifying purpose that gives my words meaning. Before my monumental cleanup, my archives were full of circular arguments, directionless lamentations, and memories of things that if not erased would dissolve what’s left of my self-worth if those whining passages continued to exist. I must constantly remind myself that as much as I despise the truths of linear existence, the major advantage of being trapped on living in a straight line on a continuum leading to eventual entropy is that, eventually, all the pain will inevitably end, and whatever good remains will one day be entirely forgotten and pointless. That is, there’s no point in worrying. Eventually, it will all be concluded, even if that takes the entire annihilation of the universe collapsing in upon itself or expanding so far that the very forces that bind the elements and their constituent subatomic particles grow too strained to any longer function.

There’s good news within all this hopelessness, however. Each day we live is an experiment. As the world spins round, galaxies spread further apart, stars continue to suck down as much hydrogen and helium as possible burning as brightly as they can. Senseless as all our existence may seem the more you think about it, someone is watching. Someone is taking copious notes. All of what we experience now will be helpful to the beginning of something better, another go at creating a universe truly in harmony and perpetual order with itself.

I’ve long believed every action we take does affect the universe in some significant way. Most people know this as the butterfly effect, but that’s an oversimplification of what I mean. When death seems senseless, keep in mind that most of the time, life itself seems senseless. Death is not really an end as much as it’s a terminus of a particular experiment. The universe does not forget where a single atom has been and what it has done. The very star stuff that makes up everything, I have long believed, is constantly charted, mapped, and analyzed immensely by forces we can’t possibly comprehend.

By this is what some religious types would call “God’s will” or “predestination,” but I don’t think that the course of the universe is at all static. Keep in mind that most of the universe, at least what is visible and understood to humankind at present, works well enough, operating on universal physical principles of which we only barely understood. Nature herself would probably be very much glad to see humanity extinguished so She can go about Her business not watching us butcher one of Her happy little planets. And yet, it is we, this chaotic element that evolutionary theories can’t at all fully explain; our very mutation is a sign that greater intelligent forces than ourselves put us here. Sure, we emerged from this ecosystem; everything on Earth is somehow related, and yet, we have become the driving force of chaos in what would otherwise be a well-ordered and well-oiled machine of natural beauty and vibrant life.

Of course, I believe there is other life out there. We simply don’t yet have the ability to see it, and even if we did, we would be seeing reflections of it from centuries, millennia, or eons ago. Time dilation effects are quite real, after all. I’m fully aware that extraterrestrial influence is becoming more of a well-supported theory all the time, and too much of human history seems guided by an invisible hand. It seems inevitable that there’s a mastermind plan to all the unexplained interventions throughout the history of humanity, because most of human existence seems to be headed towards an ultimate end by which it either extinguishes itself and possibly the very planet it inhabits or finally evolves in a meaningful enough way to realize the vast possibilities of human potential.

It is incredibly ironic to me that when whoever is studying us looks back upon the rise and fall of humanity that one of the most well-documented parts of history will be the 2020’s. While there has certainly been a huge dilution of the intellectual capacity and attention spans across the human race over the past two decades, the very existence of the Information Superhighway and its petulant offspring of Social Media has created a digital self-portrait of human collective consciousness, granted quite incomplete but much more telling of the state of human existence than Jack or Jill on the street could ever fathom.

In fact, there are still many intelligent and thoughtful voices that can be heard, lessons that can be learned, art that can be still seen, that only is accessible to the majority of humanity through this worldwide connectivity. When that connection is broken, and we are left to turn our attention solely to our own small existence, we recognize how insignificant each of us truly are on even the global scale of our tiny little rock orbiting a relatively insignificant star. Yet, the great irony is that as insignificant as each of our little souls is on a cosmic scale, the very chaos we introduce by our very breathing is being measured in some way.

I know this because it’s the only thing that makes sense, and this is where my spirituality has grown too intellectualized to any longer support most forms of human religion. I don’t need to worship an invisible man who lives in a skybox seat within the limited imaginations of petty oligarchs. I worship the very order and beauty that exists within the very physics of the universe itself, and while I appreciate much of the achievements that humanity has somehow made in spite of itself, I don’t need to fictionalize or belittle the forces that set all of this wondrous universe of mathematical uber-genius into motion.

…

While brief glimpses of the full force of my intellectual capacity for philosophy has been on display in certain measures within often rambling excuses for essays, I have continued to hold back. Again, it’s not that I’m incapable of producing the necessary verbiage; it’s more that I have failed to see the point in actually explaining myself because most of it is going to go far over the heads of the general populace and even scholars will spend decades, if not centuries, debating the finer points of my word choices and implied themes buried between the lines. I do not want to be a curiosity of speculative literature, but rather a catalyst for igniting paradigm shifts that will hopefully change the course of human history.

So, these are the reasons for my hesitance in opening the floodgates of my overactive imagination. Still, I have worked far too long and hard to oversimplify things for the sake of the lowest common denominator dragging down the average intelligent of our fellow homo sapiens. Now it’s time I just put it out there and let the little green scientists floating around in flying saucers pick it apart once humanity has inevitably ceased to exist. Otherwise, the weight of my own intellect will collapse in on itself, leading to an inevitable explosion of brain matter which is going to make a hell of a mess and require the carpets to be ripped up and the walls and ceilings to be repainted.

This is, sadly, not a joke, but rather a dry, perhaps humorous analogy for why most days, I am fairly certain I will no longer be able to keep my skull from imploding. Yes, implosions are much worse than explosions. Any who, where do I begin?

The beginning is perhaps not the best place to start. From my very conception, I do believe it was in the mind of my own mother that there was something a bit off about me. However, I don’t believe those who took me into their care were fully aware of what responsibility they were taking on, and would ultimately fail in nurturing properly. Try as they might, they would ultimately fail miserably at attempting to calm and contain the inexorable tides of intellectual torment I’d endure from even my earliest days.

I’ve long stood as a wonderful enigma, both a gift and a curse to any poor soul who wanders across my path. I offer so much, and yet, others have so much to lose once they meet me and hear what I have to say. In my very presence, it seems others feel so inadequate that they must immediately begin to plot on ways to bring me low in order to give their own pathetic lives meaning. The sad and obvious irony is that I could easily give their lives meaning by helping them find that meaning for themselves. But sadly enough, most people are too damn lazy and incompetent to give two shits about human progress, never mind their own.

Perhaps it’s my fault that I come across as much too intense, but the truth is, I have not been nearly intense enough. Hyper-intelligence is not something that you can measure out in bite-size portions; you take it in its full glory and find yourself bleached by the insights of the experience or you run away as fast and far as you can so you keep some sense of ignorance, living blissfully to eat, drink, fuck, and die.

For all my efforts in giving actionable advice in bite-size portions, my efforts mostly fall flat. In fact, my most popular essays have to do with entertainments, and not even intellectually charged and relevant ones. Mere diversions garner more attention than universal concepts that could actually change one’s life for the better. But no, I need to know what card I’m missing from my deck to win a meaningless online tournament or I need to know which hex codes within my game cartridge will give me the best chance to win at dueling pocket monsters. It’s all brilliantly absurd, but I grew weary of writing so densely on diversions. It never made me enough to make me a living, so I became branded a failure, as my “professional” efforts were mostly ignored as well, thanks to lacking a piece of paper from a prestigious institution of bum-fuckery.

There are much worse ways to curtail one’s freedom than imprisonment. The very threat of imprisonment is often misused, as three walls and a set of iron bars create an unintended, but very obvious consequence of enraging the beast as it lays biding its time in its cage. To lock someone away should require a certain degree of circumstances in which there is no hope for rehabilitating the accused. It’s a much better strategy to keep a close watch on those who continue to do ill towards others, if there is cause to believe their life direction can still be shifted. Unfortunately, many of those who should be correctly imprisoned, those whose sociopathic natures daily crush spirits and render innocent souls lifeless for their own gains, often are not only left to roam free, but instead rule proudly over others.

Much of my daily thought processes are spent in theory-crafting, working with ideas as they cycle through my gray matter. Only recently have I returned to my preadolescent fascinations with world-building, as anything I can concoct is sure to be more enlightening than the rapidly decaying society of this twenty-first century breakdown of common sense and decency. Goodness is becoming a rare commodity, and as I tread among the gray, I watch as the forces of darkness slowly but surely devour what’s left of hope for the downtrodden among us.

It’s with great weariness that I document the outpouring of pessimism that is boiling over in my heart. While it pains me to be so antisocial, my disposition is a defense mechanism. I struggle to define the anger towards those who so heartlessly abandoned me in favor of their flawed ideas of gender roles, career paths, and family values. These concepts that those who claimed they loved me so highly value are all rotten cores of the once-positive ideals they once conveyed.

The rage that builds within me is not hatred for the souls of those who wronged me, but rather vitriol for the incorrectness of their actions, as well as great disdain and contempt for the hollow pursuits which they continue to chase out of either ignorance, complacency, or both. From my adolescent days, in my early notetaking on the rapidly decaying human condition, I observed so much potential being wasted. Now more than ever, tragedy is becoming a commonplace theme of daily life. The wastefulness is compounding, with all residual interests filling the coffers of the greed-mongersWealth acquisition isn’t the issue, but rather the perpetuation of ill-gotten gains becoming not only a norm, but one that’s become glorified among the upper echelons of villainy.

…

“We are judged not by what we did or wanted to do, but we are judged by people who don’t want to understand the work as a whole or even to look at it. Instead, they isolate individual fragments and details, clutching to them and trying to prove that there is some special, main point in them. This is delirium.” – director Andrei Tarkovsky of the film “Stalker”

In my writing, I aim to have my work intersect across four dimensions. The first is the width, the broad topics which catch my attention and tickle my fancy; these are the little notes I’ll make handwritten in my journals, many of them in the form of quotations made by clever minds, other times phrases that sound juicy, and often simply questions that are raised without clear answers. The reason I hand-write these while typing up most of my other writing work is that the very action biochemically stores these ideas within my brain, storing them for later bemusement and analysis.

The second is the length, by which I expand upon these broad brushstrokes in musings. Sometimes I will talk in circles about them, too often, but once I feel I have captured the essence of my thought process on a certain topic is when I finally categorize my musings among my archive of writing ideas.

The third is the depth, at which point I comb through my writing ideas for some musing that I wish to take to another level. The majority of these become actual essays which become published for a time on my personal web portal, although some experience major rewrites, and sometimes entire re-imaginings. Others are taken down and cannibalized for key ideas that return to my archive where they retreat back into the first two dimensions.

The fourth, and perhaps, the very most important dimension that I feel necessary to have intersect my writing is its place in space-time. This might sound dauntingly esoteric, but there’s an easy explanation for what I mean by this. It’s been said countless times that there’s nothing new to say; rather, it’s the way in which you say it, the methods by which you create your work of art that creates something new. I can’t recall exactly who I’m paraphrasing here, but long ago I read a quote in which someone quite intelligent remarked that every piece of writing (and art, in general, by extension) is a product of its time. You can say the same thing, but in a different time and place, under different circumstances, and make something new of it.

For many years, my primary hesitation in writing was having nothing new to offer on most subjects. But on many occasions, I’ve proven myself willing to go to lengths on certain niche subjects than most. My other major hesitation, secondary, but perhaps nearly as important as the primary one, is that my focus of art-form has drifted around so much over my lifetime. Fiction, despite how much I adore world-building and theory-crafting, is not my strong suit. I’ve long been much better at documentary and criticism. But naturally, I decided well into my teenage years that the world didn’t need another critic, as much as it needed a modern-day philosopher; the latter motivation colors much of my work in essay form.

This is why in my third decade on this planet that I have moved much closer to documentary; peppering my theory-crafting across depictions of events and circumstances, tinting and highlighting key bits that people may have not picked out the first, or even second, time around. Essentially, I’ve long spent too much time trying to tell the whole story as I see it, when my actual method should revolve around laying the groundwork and clues in plain sight and let the reader tie them together in their own minds. My words should stretch imaginations and spark intellect, not overload them with colorful metaphors, in-depth analysis, and pragmatic social and/or political commentary.

I really should return to writing my Building a Universe series, a documentary look into the creation of my own personal creative universe I built for myself to overcome intense loneliness, self-doubt, and emotional abuse. While I have no doubt one day some aspect or another of it could blossom into a major entertainment franchise, the look at how it came to be is much more interesting to me than whatever the end product may appear to be. Essentially, I’m far more interested in the “making of” rather than the finished product. The edit of the art, for me, is more important than the art itself.

Overload defused. Time to return to an upright position and leave you with these thoughts for now.

~ Artemis Desertsong