okay these are both so shitty right now, far shittier than other things I usually send you are. The second is my Montaigne-esque attempt. the first is my DFW-esque attempt.

dfw.markdown

"How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive"

-- Vonegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 105

Eventually, no matter the person, we come to realize, that, the fundamental, unflinching constant of the universe is impermanance. And not, I think, in the I-know-I-am-going-to-die-because-death-is-a-fact kind of way. That's an eight-year-old-grade grasp on the concept. No, I don't think anyone, at least I didn't, really gets death, in the upper-case-d sense of the word until they experience Death in its other forms. See, Death isn't just about your heart stopping and your muscles tensing up and your corpse rotting in the ground and your loved ones crying. No, that's the pop sense of Death, the Big Death, the one that we all think about, the one that we've been surrounded by for so long that that idea of it is so worn that it's lost its real impact. It's really just a wholly-tired idiom at this point.

See, what death is really about is, impermenance. Death as in your mother croaking affects us because it pulls the shades out from over our eyes, in the sort of "now you see a face / now you see an urn" sense, in a moment of discontuinity in in the graph of our life. It makes us stop for a moment and say, hey, this person is gone. And there's nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing that I can do. No person I can pay, no answers in the back of the book, no time-to-wait until things go back to normal. Nothing at all.

And so, if you are ordinary, wholly-ordinary, you won't, let's hope, run into the Big Death for a long time. In the mean time, then, you are only equipped with the over-folded-soft-and-faded-and-abstract-and-looming-over-there Death, way over there on the horizon in whatever sort of mental-aparatus you have for visualizing time.

For most of us, it's up to another run-in with a different form of impermanance, something unpexected, something unfamiliar enough to jog our senses. Something needs to drop a discontinuity in the graph of our life. One moment we are gliding along on a smooth linear slope, and in an instant, we are thrown fifty-paces upwards, disconected entirely from what we had before. It could be being kicked out of school because you pushed that teacher too far because you thought you had a sort of understanding, or losing your job because, turns out, your boss really did not mean what he wrote in those last few monthly evaluations and that you are actually awful at your job. Or maybe, it tuns out that you actually, turns out, are not on the terms you thought you were with that person and they don't, it sems, want, or feel the need, to see you anymore all of a sudden. Point is, you don't get you don't see this change coming, then, boom, a trip-branch-snap of an instant, Things Are Different. That, that's impermanance, that's the real sense of death.

And it's so pernicious, so permeating, because we still are so deeply-intertwined with those last few moments before the big change. Living moment-to-moment, we're all one big tangle of yarn and string and thread, we spin ourselves around the ones we love and the ones we care for, even the ones we hate that we come to depend on in a sort of movie-plot-grade-rivarly-type relationship in which our witty-banter, at first tense and grating, softens and grows into actually a sort of loving relationship, though neither of us would admit it. The normal flow of time, though sinister as it is, lets us slowly unwrap ourselves from people, from places, from arrangements. When you know you're going to move from that apartment, you slowly detatch yourself. When you decide that, just maybe this person isn't for me, you sort of steadily, discreetly grab a hold of the slack of your string and slowly wind it back, making sure the other person gets a sense of what's going on eventually.

These moments of discontunity don't let any of that happen. Nope, they yank the string back at full force, snapping them at the middle, leaving all the strands and fibers dangling from either end. It's up to you, then, to clean them up all at once.

But of course, this is easier said than done.

See, when you aren't ready for something to end, it doesn't really matter that it's stopped in the present. It's funny, the way our memory works. The present is just an instant, such a small, insignifcant amount of data. The past, on the otherhand, is brimming with any moment we could want. It's library-of-congress of our life. We can drift inwards into it's halls, and pick up a whole book on That One Time We Ordered Pizza or That One Time on The Park Bench and it's like Big Change never happened at all. It's great.

But, but the catch is, that, at least for me, when we time-travel back to these memories, it's as if someone had been steadily and unfeelingly rubbing away at their vibrancy -- the color is faded, the sounds are dull, the lovely touches and looks are so distant that you can barely recall them. And top it off, everyone who was there -- loved ones, strangers -- is gone. It's just you in a dim fascimille of What Was.

And there, in the halls of our own lonely-archives, you sit with every salvagable scrap of an image, touch, or look, sprawled out in front of us, shuffled back and forth, and forwards and back, trying in vain to reclaim the high-once-felt. Which sort of, at least to me, is a life-sucking, all-out-draining activity, so I try not leave the doors to my library locked.

"My memories are like coins in the devil's purse: when you open it- you find only dead leaves."

-- Sartre, Nausea, 33

But there's a funny thing about the mental archives. Those moments that you love seem to fade more and more every time you take them off the self, as if printed on a fabric utterly-alergic to your own self. So, you try to save them for special ocassions, for those low-points where you really use some Good Feelings. Easier said than done though. Because, cruelly, your mind seems to need you to spend time in that mental archive.

So it litters little propaganda-fliers all over your mental streets, such that, as you try to go about your day to day, moving back and forth in the moment, you are constantly stepping on, or being hit in the face by, a litle three by four glossy page advertising That One Utterly Beautiful Moment, and bam, it's back on your mind, and you're back in between those shelves, fading away the memory even more just to recall it. It seems, to work, too, that, the less you want to see an memory, the more painfully-sweet it is to re-experience once more, the more flyers there are swarming around your mental-eye, and the brighter and more garish they are.

"The people around me had gone on ahead long before, while my time and I hung back, through the mud"

-- Murakami

It's this endless craving for what-once-was that produces a fear for losing what-is, and what makes us cling tighter and tighter until.

Point is, you don't really get impermanance, the fact that this whole thing is melting as we speak, until its effects are brought upon you in a second. Because, otherwise, you're watching it in slow-motion, and you have time to setup the proper mental-lies and rationalizations to cope.

So, to wrap this up, when you have your moment of utter discontinuity, when you finally grok what it means that, the whole barn is burning, right now, I think there's a choice to be made. You can continue to plead that the world wasn't this way, to spill whatever you want at the altar, to cry, to lie doped-up-on-whatever, or, you can accept that, nothing is to stay. That, it's not a shame, a misfortune that what-once-was now only exists in your collection of memories. You can accept that, your current arrangement -- school, friends, more than friends -- is fleeting. And that, the moments that you live are valuable in the present. Unfortunately for us, this advice has been thoroughly stomped and worn to little leather-soft paper shreds by the self-help-industry and the true meaning of the words has been reduced, just like big-d-death, to just a bunch of trite idioms. But try for a moment to look beyond that, because there's a lot to be gained

montaigne.markdown

---

              On Contenteness, Longing, and Memories

---

"You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk."

-- Baudelaire, Be Drunk

Given enough time, I suspect, any man, no matter how dull or dim, whether he be of the academy, or of the plowshead, will realize, one day, that the arc of his life bends downwards, unrelentingly. That, no matter how high his mood soars, no matter how lovely and all-consuming a moment, or a touch, a sound or a look, that his disposition, as if tugged downwards by time itself, lurks back to the darkest, and deepest corners of his mind.

Our inclination, being the Great Rational Man, with our opposable thumbs and our scientific minds, is to seek an antitode. If time can so effectively gnaw to pieces our moments of joy, then there ought to be some Thing in the world that can ressurect these moments as we choose. We seek some way of effectively controlling the whisps and worries in our mind, to turn the same great intellect, the intellect that split the atom and minted sillicon, and aim it at the self. We seek opiates.

"How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive" -- Vonegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 105

And indeed, we can reach euphoric highs, courtesy of poems and prose and dope and drink. We can throw whiskey down our throats, lose ourselves in the push and pull of concerts, jump from planes, bridges, and buldings, but we can't stop the tide from washing away our feelings and memories away like sand, and leaving us, pushed up against the countours of our minds, alone.

And what's worse, it seems, is that this same invisible force turns at these medicines for the mind, attacking the potency our opiates until they fail to move us entirely. But, it leaves the thirst for relief untouched, and our need for another opiate burning stronger than ever. We scramble for another, until it fails us again, leaving us trapped in a cycle.

And in this moments where happiness eludes us, in the moments where our backs our pushed to ground, we time-travel to the past, our fists full of memories, trying to return.

"My memories are like coins in the devil's purse: when you open it- you find only dead leaves."

-- Sartre, Nausea, 33

 "The people around me had gone on ahead long before, while my time and I hung back, through the mud"

-- Murakami

We find ourselves in the corner of a moment-once-spent, a room, or a bench on the park, drained and desatured, once spent with another, now alone. We sit with every salvagable scrap of an image, touch, or look, sprawled out in front of us, shuffled back and forth, and forwards and back, trying in vain to reclaim the high-once-felt. But each mental pass is priced at the loss of potency -- the next time try to look back, the image will be fainted, the throb in our heart gone, the picture blurry. Soon enough, every memory rots from pictures, to words, and then, to nothing. It's as if memories are recorded a fabric, utterly allergic to our fingertips, that light up in flames after only a few touches.

The good ones burn, the bad ones will do everything but.

"The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love, The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations, Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events; These come to me days and nights and go from me again..."

-- Whitman, Song of Myself, Canto 4

Some try to turn from the past, scoop up every faded polaroid and memento, and stow them in a mental cave, sealed away by self-enforced bolder. But, the they ease into vapor, and seep past the bolder and condense into dark clouds across the mind's eye, teasing us with what-once-was, as we come to terms with what-is-now. They urge to to step back into their portrait, to let our senses flood with the fleeting activation just one more time.

Is there a solution? Or is this a fact? An an unflinching constant, instilled in man over a thousand Darwinian-iterations?

This suffering comes from our mental thrashing, as we infinitely weave back and forth with the past, and the future, in comparison to the present. We let what exists In Here bleed into what exists Out There, we mix what Has Existed with What Exists Now, and crave, beat for, them to exist In The Next Moment.

So we seek opiates, we seek to be drunk, to silence this voice. But the voice that rings out "I don't want to feel this way", that pulls up a vision of a Better Now, or a Better Then. We label every moment good or bad, no thought or inclination can escape this great judge [like the beast in the inferno], it sits at our mental gate, chopping up and labeling our experience into good and bood, and our mood switching directions at each and every judgement.

To be drunk is to suffer. To long beyond the moment is to suffer.

What we must come to realize, is that good and bad, happiness, and unhappiness, are the same thing. Temporary states, one and in the same that fade. Just as time picks apart the good, it equally pulls at the bad.