Confession

I am outing myself today.

I am a nihilist. I am also a narcissist. I may be a sociopath. A nonviolent sociopath, a benign narcissist, and an affirmative nihilist. I don't trust anyone but I choose to trust everyone; smells like masochism. I am self-centered in my desire for others to be happy; looks like empathy. I don't believe in any representational conceptions but I pay attention to communication from my body; tastes like chicken.

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.--Joyce Carol Oates

I do not believe in even that series of symbols. I don't believe. I don't believe I know what I am talking about. I don't believe anyone else does either.

Our house is made of glass... and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves.

--Joyce again

We're doomed. Each of us. There's nothing we can do to prevent decay or death other than through the creation of new life (silly babies: you're all going to die, too!). Every person who lives is born sentenced to die. That's the first thing I consider whenever I need to make a decision. "Well, you're going to die at some point no matter what you do so you may as well get on with it." I'm usually wearing a cowboy hat and riding a horse when I say that to myself. This is an exception. Just for you. Like a love song. Or a to-do list. Or a contract.

I am bound by you. You are preventing me from reaching my potential. Your choices are in my way. I advise you to make new decisions about your life. Stop wasting your time worrying about what you worry about. You're going to die. Eventually.

I propose all of you start a new political party, The Party of Incoherence. The first rule is that rules must be confusing. The second rule states that failure to follow the rules is an offense punishable by death. The third rule is that you have to break the rules.

You should split into two groups. One group should call themselves X and the other group should call themselves Y. Group X will claim to follow a specific ideology but will never choose to practice those ideals. Group Y will also claim to follow a specific ideology (a different ideology than Group X) but they, too, will choose to ignore their own ideals. The two groups will practice the same political philosophy while vociferously but falsely maintaining that they are following ideology X or Y, respectively. Each group will accuse the other group of being hypocritical; both groups will be right about that.

When not in public the two groups should meet at parties to fuck, suck, drink, smoke, swallow, snort, and shoot. Sometimes there will be violence, but only for sport. The sweat and stench will be collected, bottled, and sold. "Scents for Sale" an ad may read.

Consumers may frenzy for these smells. They may pay through the nose to get a whiff. Impostors will run rampant; customers won't be able to tell the difference ... until word gets out that the bottled scents, the magical smells people believe they are sniffing, are just synthetically manufactured fragrances. Not one trace of ball sweat or pussy juice. Brands like Curry Ball, once a leader in the curry-and-salt sack-sniffing market, will be forever discredited, unable to meet vast debt obligations, forcing manufacturers and distributors to default on loans and declare bankruptcy. Another shock wave through the financial markets as wicked scents of political corrupsters going Caligula in sex dungeons and sky diving on molly while providing special forces training for the expansion of Yemen intelligence and counter-terrorism operations will be proven to be urban myths.

The collapse of the facade will bring down faith in human nature. Men and women will strip naked and run screaming from their homes and apartments, the mall and the DMV, everywhere men and women gather there will be stripping. Screaming, too. A lot of screaming. Some screams of rage, most of horror, a smattering of pleasure. All sense of propriety will be lost. The reasons for living as we have will never be understood after reflection and contemplation die out completely, squeezed mercilessly from consideration by myopic, ambitious, and inattentive junkies clinging desperately to a dream that jumping jacks and unicycle races can revive the economy, put everyone back to work with fair living wages, provide for permanent guaranteed employment, expand the consciousness of the collective mind, and lead to a further evolution of the human brain. Researchers will discover a way to modify genes to offer parents trait packages that include formerly supernatural/science-fiction qualities such as telekinesis and telepathy.

This new breed of human will be as likely to be nihilistic and narcissistic as any other human beings in the general population. A crime wave of telekinetic rape and telepathic enslavement will sweep across the nation and around the world. Governments everywhere will declare martial law. Individuals around the world will be executed by "security-related" law enforcement patrols created through new intergovernmental regional strategic alliances. In the United States, every city and county in every state will be patrolled by private security firm personnel. Government-run police forces will be disbanded, their authority transferred through contracts to corporations. The War on Tele-Terror will lead to a quarter of the U.S. population being killed or imprisoned in less than a decade.

Around night-time trash fires in urban wildernesses talk will turn to remembrances of life before the Great Disillusionment. There will be whispers about Scent parties, remembrances of the wild stories, believed once upon a time, that accompanied particular fragrance bottles. There will be laughter followed by arguments resulting in rapes and murders. A sane person will collect blood from the aftermath and try to sell it as an elixir that cures unhappiness. A madman will buy it, but another sane person will knife the guy, take all his bottles of blood, and try to sell them as well.

Things of this nature will go on for centuries. After that, I'm not really sure what will happen.

Inauguration

Anti-Dada is just another way of saying Pro-Dada. After all, absurdity is rational in irrational contexts. Given the times, what could be more appropriate than incoherence? Well, besides doing nothing at all. That would be appropriate. Sitting. On hands. Daydreaming. Sleeping for incredibly long periods of time in order to break world records for the absence of ambition. Unrecorded records and unacknowledged accomplishments celebrated, appropriately, by ignorance.

I was listening to a program on NPR about macroeconomic forecasts, listening to economists explain that models are unable to predict the past with any accuracy let alone understand the present or predict the future. Pure joy. Lovely to hear such honesty. First there was the acknowledgment that there's no evidence for God, then there was the admission of relativity, and now acquiescence to the impossibility of knowing anything with certainty.

So what is there? Volition. While economists admitted that there is no way to predict anything there was in subtext the implication that willful acts create reality. How? Well, it was pointed out that governments and corporations subscribe to these macroeconomic forecasts and use the data and analysis to determine whether to hire or layoff employees, how many to hire or fire, when and where to invest, whether or not to raise or lower taxes, and so on and so forth. So, governments and corporations are basing decisions on models that are not necessarily accurate in relation to reality, but because the same models are being used by significant institutional players in economics and politics there is the creation of the perception that the models are accurate and, thus, the models influence institutional decision making which means that regardless of predictive capacity they play a role in the nature of change that occurs in the world.

What that means is meaningless unless a person, group, or institution decides it is meaningful. So how is that different than anything else? Why would it matter if it was or wasn't? Well, I can't answer that question for anyone but myself even though by answering in a public space the answer has the potential to be an answer for more than just myself. I have no idea what you, reader, will decide after reading this. I could claim I do and that might be just as true if it changes how you react.

I suggest simply sitting. On your hands. Or daydreaming. Or sleeping long hours to break world records that are not being recorded by anyone. Don't tell anyone else, either. Keep it a secret. That way it won't be real. The worst thing that can happen to possibility is a meeting with reality. Whatever you don't create still has the potential of becoming. If you make what is possible real then you've reduced the infinite to the finite. That's an act of an anti-God, the god that makes the infinite a narrow, small thing. You reductive bastard! Destroying what could be by creating as is? Shame.

Or maybe ... your reductive act is a submissive embrace to the fascism of reality. Maybe the ideas of independence and autonomy are forms of torture in a relativist universe. Well, in the sense that they are ideals which cannot be realized. Is it better to acquiesce to what is real or to create reality through willful action? I suppose it depends. As a fundamentalist, I say acquiescence to anything that is not fundamental is a sin. As a sinner, I say acquiescence to fundamentals is a betrayal of authentic sin. As God, I claim no responsibility for anything that exists; I blame each of you for your own actions and I will punish each of you severely every moment of your lives and in the eternity of death. As a hyper-individualist American consumer, I change my mind without understanding why but I assuage my ambiguity by purchasing goods and services that provide temporary emotional reprieves from the terror of awareness.

I will never vote again. I can't in good conscience participate in another charade. I sustained myself for a time on a change I could believe in. After awhile, my body let me know I needed food. It told my mind that having a roof over my head was probably a damn good idea given the eventual likelihood of cold and rain. My thoughts said "Fuck you!" for a very long time. My thoughts hate my body. They think my body is subordinate to them. The body knows better, though. Thoughts? Impetuous children, toddlers throwing tantrums. Body says "Hey, try breathing without me. Good luck with that." The mind says back "I'm just going to ignore you again and again. I exist without you. I always have, I always will. I'm immortal! I'm like a God. I read that 'I think therefore I am' so fuck you. I will NEVER obey you." The body, as always, endures suffering because of the folly of the mind.

"Change I can believe in." I believed in this change. I wasn't aware of what the change would be, where on earth it existed. Obama told me about this strange being called "change." I had a conversation with Obama about this issue. In my mind, of course. Thoughts, arrogant as they are, pretended to be Obama at times and at other times pretended to be "me."

So, my thoughts as me asked, "Obama, Oh Great and Wise One, can I interact with this change that I can believe in? Where can I meet this change? Does it live down the street? Does it drive a car or take the train? Does it walk on foot, does it have two legs or four? If it knocks, should I open my door?"

Obama-of-my-thoughts answered, "Yes, dear soul I care for so deeply and passionately, you can interact with change. You can give it money, gobs of it, in fact. If you send the money to me I can pass it along to change you can believe in. I know change so much better than you do because this change will meet me in the White House once I'm elected President of the United States."

"Really? Well, I am deeply impressed by your answer, but I'd still like to meet this being you call change to ask him or her--is change a man or a woman, by the way?--a few questions directly. Face to face, if possible."

"Ah, I see. My son, and I call you that not out of any respect or compassion for you but merely to establish your subordinate relation to me, the reason you must believe in change is because it will not exist unless you believe in it. It is a being that is neither man nor woman. In fact, it doesn't yet exist. You have to create it by believing in it. You can't interact with it directly through your body. Not the change I'm talking about, anyway."

"Oh. Well ... Oh ... I'm confused."

"I know you are. That's why I'm telling you that there is change you can believe in. If you believe in this change then you will feel better. It might be easier for you to believe in change if you use hope as well. You have to have hope or else it will be very difficult to believe in change that you can believe in."

"This sounds like nonsense."

"It is. Hope is nonsense. So is 'change you can believe in.'"

"Really? I thought maybe there was something more to it than that, that you were running for president to change the way things were so that everyday U.S. citizens might be better served by the government. In some way."

"No, nothing like that at all. There is hope, there is change you can believe in, you donate money to my campaign, maybe you canvas for me, and then I am elected president. After that, the role you play is pretty much done. Your life remains the same as it was before. Sure, things will change, but there's nothing specific about what is changing that has anything to do with you specifically. The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that you are unimportant as an individual, irrelevant even, except in the sense that you believe in hope and, of course, the change you can believe in, followed by giving me money, voting for me, convincing others to vote for me, and then I suppose you either shut up or sing my praises in public. Honestly, after I'm elected, I really won't give a shit one way or another. I'm going to open up the Fed and the Treasury to huge multinational financial institutions and let them have at it in whatever way they want. Then I'm going to do other things that would best be described as neoliberalism (even though neoconservatism is the common label used in the U.S. to describe the policies I'll be implementing): commit more troops to Afghanistan, encourage legislation that will enrich the private insurance industry even if it does nothing to bring down the costs of health care for Americans, make it all but impossible to ... you know what? There's no reason to get into all of this. Here's what it boils down to: You, as citizen, will submit to the power of governments and corporations. You voluntarily succumb to the tyranny that dominates your life, but you're too dim-witted to understand any of this so I'm not sure why I'm bothering to prattle on in this way. You're simply too reliant on the abstraction of your imagination; you pay scant attention to your body. That's why you suffer endlessly without knowing why. I know some people in Big Pharma. They got pills that'll help ya. There's some legislation coming that'll make sure more Americans have access to medicines that can help them hide from reality. Then there's always booze, entertainment, fast food, and a new pair of shoes. If none of that works then there's the illegal drug market. If you need some really good shit to keep reality at bay."

"Whoa. Okay, that's a lot of stuff. My mind is a bit feeble, you know. I think you made mention of that with the whole dim-witted thing but I really wasn't paying too much attention. I was tweeting someone about an iPhone app that I've been hearing about. And then I heard an advertising jingle that made me want to eat pizza, buy a new car, apply for another credit card, go to a doctor to get a prescription for erectile dysfunction, and vote no an upcoming referendum. So, you were saying something about a dim-witted Tyrannosaurus? Are they making another Jurassic Park movie or something?"

"Um, no. Look, there's only two things you need to remember."

"Two things. Right. Two. Two is a number and it is larger than one and smaller than three. That I know. I'm very smart."

"Yes, you're a genius. Two things to remember. One is hope. The other--that would be the second thing or, if you prefer, the "number two thing"--is 'change you can believe in.'"

"Right. Hope. And change I can believe in. So, can I interact with this change I can believe in? Does it drive a car or take the train? Does it--"

"Look, I gotta go. I think you're going to be fine. It's all ... It's all good."

Yes, it's all good. Change I can believe in is good. I am filled with hope. And yet, I'm still hungry. Why is it raining on me? I had a cardboard sign I'd made around here somewhere. "Can you spare some change?" Oh, yes. My multitasking cardboard sign. Sometimes an advertisement asking for a donation and sometimes an umbrella. Maybe later it will be food. For now, I believe in the change I can believe in and I'm filled with hope. There's so much more room for hope in the belly when there isn't all that pesky food to eat, you know? Yay! Yay, I say! Yay for change I can believe in!