It’s good to know you

I have written a lot of shit on this blog. Occasionally, I go back to read what I wrote and can’t believe myself. And then I throw up. This nauseating ordeal has brought me to this: I am a hypocrite.

It’s up to you if you want to take what I say here seriously. I thought I should make it clear that I — don’t.

I have enough earthly endeavors to satiate my hopeless, existentially endless need to advance. Writing is not one of them. I don’t want stuff on this site to become a fruity need for social accountability. And I hold no delusions about any of this making a difference to you. Writing has no purpose for me except getting in touch with my conscience, however brief, however ultimately false.

To say I write to change is like saying I meditate so I don’t get angry anymore. To spend 10 minutes of your day where you, and what you are doing, have no meaning whatsoever is what makes the Kundalini in your brain go into a tailspin each time you try to meditate. Because You are becoming, for a short interval, what was before all existence: Nothing. The whole point of meditation is that it is pointless. Its inherent purposelessness is what makes it so hard. Tamed anger is a by-product of recognizing this purposeless and not a result of the act itself.

Writers often say they wrote a book because they needed it the most. We automatically assume they became better because of it. I doubt it made them any better. It just made them accepting of themselves. That can take a lifetime.

Writing is not a commodified, commercial (I will take gift cards though) exercise in (my) betterment. If there’s one lesson going over the blog has reinforced for me, it’s that I am a very fallible, very imperfect human being. I am no wholesome hero on a rescue mission of your dying consciousness. I have lost my way and still chose to pause for some rest, notebook in hand.

These are my meditations. A journey into my head with glimpses of my heart. Why invite you into this claustrophobic contradiction?

Because I want you to see how cool I am with all this vulnerability up my sleeve? Because I live in the 21st century where sharing your mental excreta with the world is imperative for your existence? Well, yes of course, but also because: You are in my meditations. You are the aloneness I share. A little creepy, but who is to say that of the Universe.

My Dad reads everything I put up here. And he takes notes and stuff. So after I have forgotten the dictum I have spouted here in like three hours, my dad refers his notes and calls me out on my bullshit. It used to annoy me, to not live everything I write. Until I realized that wasn’t why I (should) write.

It’s why I have wrestled with the question of having to put this all up in public. I was asking the wrong question.

What happens in all art happens in the privacy of these attempts. Whatever you put out is a figment of that solitude. And what better way to get to know each other. Not our names, what we do, where we are from, but to know each other in ways beyond labels and commonalities, beyond finales of failure and success.

This: To know each other through the lives we live — apart, unseen, unknown. To know each other in our aloneness. To know there’s someone else, always. This is the joy of all existence. Of poetry, painting, writing. Of nothing. The unbecoming is not a shared purpose. It’s a shared being.

It’s good to know you.