Recently, I rebuilt my desktop PC, and in the process of doing so, I had the chance to backup my hard drive. To my complete shock and surprise, I found a couple of folders containing my early-ish writing. Nearly all of it is from around 2010-2013, roughly; short stories and some incomplete works. More than a blast from the past for me, because it offered me a retrospect on my writing in the time that I had returned to college in earnest and developed a lot more of my skills in writing and opening my world to more concepts, themes, and overall possibilities. This is a piece from November 2013; it was the rough (and incomplete) sample for what I was planning on my second attempt at a novel, which also fell flat (0 for 2, wah, wah). For context, this was the height of my studies in philosophy and religion, so I felt like being smug, sarcastic, satirical and so on, blah, blah, blah. You know, that early college ego. There’s some good parts, but I wholly admit that I cringed more than once reading this over again.

There may be others that I post as I go through them in my spare time, maybe, but I felt this was a contextually relevant to my mode of thought for some of my current rough samples, and worth saving to my online blog/archive.

Without further wasting your time, I present “By the Ravings of Lunatics”:

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It seems, oh, what’s the word? Disingenuous? No. Inappropriate? No. Meaningless. Yes! Meaningless! It seems meaningless to write a story, to put to words a tale from beginning to end without indulgences of your own thoughts, don’t you think? True, that it is deceptive for all those fairy tales and ghost stories to go from point A to point B without blinking, simply trudging along that yellow brick road to the end of the line. There is no room anywhere for anyone to “feel” anymore. And why not? There is dialogue, narration, so why not wax poetic about the matters in-between? A stream of consciousness renders so many people unconscious, and yet that is where so many people reside in the day-to-day course of their lives. And so you have these stories and tales, the hushed whispers of a rumor that grows into a tumultuous broadcast on every screen, billboard, and blinking eyelid. Drowning in your sensory intake, you don’t want anything else to get into your head. But everything does. You all want that heroic journey, that daring rescue, that haunted house, that story, from point A to point B, with all the drama, but with no “drama” in between. You want a happy ending, but how else would you know it’s even a good ending without all the shit and garbage thrown at you from the beginning? If you want a life without drama, you don’t want a life. And if you-the-reader are such a person as this, then do me a favor. Stop complaining about your problems. And die.

With that having been said, let us begin. First, the who of it all. The dramatis personae. Let’s start with YOU. Now, to be fair, there are two instances of YOU within all of this chaotic mass of words and thoughts. The first, and much more frequent, is the second-person-plural-relative-pronoun that is to be representative of humanity in general. You-the-reader will find that I maintain a very stubborn and biased opinion concerning humanity. Don’t worry. It only goes not up, not down, but, simply, forward from here. All the love, the hate, the war, the peace, the tragedy, the comedy. It’s all there, and there is plenty to go around. The second YOU, if you haven’t figured it out already, is you-the-reader. And there is indeed a very specific difference between the two. A society, a collective can only do so much in terms of its ability. Numbers. The greatest ally to the few and the weak. But an individual can do so much, potentially even more than the herd, the hive. A collective has orders, an individual has ambition. A collective follows, an individual leads. I will bring to this metahypothetaphorical table many questions and statements that will provoke you-the-reader, and I hope that they do not fall on deaf ears.

The next character in this trainwreckinslowmotiononloop is somewhere between an antagonist and foil character. There is an unmistakable bias towards this figure, but that isn’t without history or reasoning. God-the-mother is a misunderstood character. In fact, the only reason I would call it god-the-mother is because of the identity with creation. For you-the-reader to mistake my… strong opinions towards god-the-mother as gender bias or misogyny is a poor assumption on your part. Hate towards a person is an entirely different matter than hate towards an entire kind. After all, that’s why I addressed the matter of humanity as a whole; hate is a part of that community, but only a part. There is so much more involved. God-the-mother on the other hand is a single figure, with a multitude of characteristics, the original cult of personality from the dawn of humankind. But we’ve only just begun, and there is plenty of room to grow and sprawl and elaborate on it.

Lastly, dear audience, there is I, your humble narrator. So much as already been written about me. Works that condemn me, others that praise me. Millennia have passed and I have yet somehow grown in popularity among the masses, as a figure of fear, of excitement, and, especially, of temptation. The devil incarnate, incorporated. Devil-inc. My story is much more complex and estranged than so many are willing to believe.

Why here? The salt of the earth are salting the earth, so what better place than among those who pride themselves on such an ambiguous identity.

Elvis. Has. Left. The. Building.

I can hear them. It’s not like the quiet, coercive whispers of a devil on your shoulder, the belligerent shouting of your drunken self, or even the maniacal laughter to a joke that wasn’t even funny. No, no, no. It’s silence. It’s the sound of an interrogation room, that sound you get when you stare at yourself in the mirror, but you can feel someone behind it, watching you, smiling.

Just because I’m the only person who sees that the world’s gone to fucking hell, that doesn’t mean that I care.

Humankind is doomed. You would rather foster the broken machinations of your own creations than the sprawling and thriving chaos upon which you build them. True peace rests at the threshold of chaos, because a man can ever only know peace when he is free.

I see greatness in you. Humans have this pesky tendency to rationalize things. To discern specifics from ambiguity. Substantive adjectives. Linguistic zeroes. That rationality is troubling, because it doesn’t account for every instance identified in the gray area of words. I see greatness in you. A character of great things. Great ambition. Great resilience. Great madness.

Knowledge is the greatest hubris of humanity. It is the narcotic of every one of them, the fought over and sought after drug of constantly dying addicts. Without care or forethought, they hunger for the words, ideas, thoughts, unspoken reassurances that they finally possess that which they have shed blood, sweat, tears over, only to die in obscurity of the fact that they never truly acquired enough of it. They sate themselves on a snake’s venom, when they desire its cunning. The reality is that they are an incapable breed; they lack the capacity for so many things, yet still they pride themselves on their accomplishments. They are afflicted with a poisonous bite, a wound that will never heal so long as they continue to tear it open for another fix of slow and painful death.

What exactly is the purpose of the soul? In this life or the life hereafter? There seems to be so much weight or value to something that is actually lacking in purpose. Humans haven’t figured it out yet, and I see no value in them either. A soul, to me, seems to be nothing more than the agency by which human kind exists. A soul is the spark of life, of existence, that jump-starts and perpetuates the autonomous systems of the body. If it is reason, then humans are the only animals that have souls, but if it is consciousness, then all animals must have souls. In any case there is no value of the soul in terms of warring against god-the-mother, because they would only exist in terrestrial planes.