I am quite comfortable with the idea of idling while waiting to tackle a ‘to do’ list. In fact, I even derive a certain kind of pleasure in holding out the gratification of getting the actual work done. I will walk around the ‘list,’ sit next to it, glance at it from the corner of my eyes, run afar as if I was to save my life only to come strolling back ever so slowly, then stop at a safe distance so that the pull of responsibility doesn’t drag me close enough to have it picked up. No. I won’t do that. That’s the fun.

I relish those moments like one enjoys bubble gum. Chew and stretch them till the sugary sweetness is gone and the jaw throbs with a dull ache. Oh, yes, I play with that ‘waiting in’ time before picking up a ‘to do list.’ There is a sense of extended pleasure in knowing that I can do everything on that list and yet I have chosen not to. That I can decide to own that satisfaction of a job well done but instead look at it from far, taunting it, teasing it to suck me into its vortex and leave me with no choice but to complete the task. I wait. I walk. I lie down on my bed and bury my head in the soft pillows. I do a fox trot with an imaginary friend in my living room. I stand in a corner facing the table on which, like a sweet temptation, a naked woman, not inviting but willing and unresistant, lies the list. I walk straight to it with long purposeful strides, as if to pick it up in that very instant, but side step it the last minute, laughing inside at having given it the impression of having succumbed and then slipping away, shattering it’s momentary illusion of control. I glow in my victory.

Of course, all the while, I grin. It is unstoppable. ‘You are mine, sweetheart,’ I tell the sensation that awaits at the other end of that completed list. Prolong the gratification, I tell myself. Don’t give in right away. Wait. Wait. Wait some more. Learn to control your mind. I know that feeling of joy cannot escape me. Like a besotted yet shy lover, it waits for me to make the first step, to melt in my arms and infuse in me pulsating life. Yet it can do nothing till I touch it. Powerless over me, it waits. But only till it learns to play the game. Then it plays dirty. Seduction is sweet and poisonous. It conspires to destroy your mind by offering you sensations of the body.

My gratification wakes up from its helplessness, assumes the look of a high-school teacher and whispers its first words, ‘It’s a sin to waste your time like this,’ it tells me. ‘You should just get it over with and move on with your life. Be wise.’

I laugh inside my head. ‘Good try. But I am not falling for that one.’ It balks at me. I say, ‘I can get the ‘to do list’ done right now but then what? You will turn up as another one. Then another one. And then another. I am not going to slave my life away for these stupid, infernal lists, now am I?’ I smirk.

‘Life is systematic and organized execution of goals,’ it offers.

‘Life is a journey without roads,’ I refute. Turning to wink at my invisible audience whom presumably acknowledges and appreciates the ambiguous ‘Back to the Future’ reference/metaphor.

‘You won’t reach anywhere like that.’

‘Where will you take me if I accept the ‘lists’ as my master?’

‘You need to know what has to be done.’

‘But I follow my heart’s desires.’

‘That is no way to live your life.’

‘A list cannot be my guiding light.’

‘You are missing the point.’

‘Your point is that I must give up and give in and pick up that list and get going, is that not?’

‘All I am saying is it is only right that one takes care of one’s responsibilities.’

‘Does everybody have responsibilities?’

‘Yes.’

‘What is your’s?’

‘What?’

‘What is your responsibility?’

‘To give you a sense of achievement and pride when you have done something you committed yourself to.’

‘Is that all?’

‘No. Fundamentally, I make you happy when you fulfill your responsibilities.’

‘What is my responsibility? Is to pay bills? Or wash my hair?’

‘No. Your primary responsibility is to be alive. Everything else is a support function.’

‘Good. Am I alive?’

‘Yes. You are.’

‘Then why are you after me with this list and that list. If I am alive you know I am doing whatever it is that I need or want to be alive. Which means, I am responsible. So why not just be happy with that?’

The abrupt silence that follows takes me by surprise. ‘Hello?’ My voice echoes insides my head and then dies down. I don’t hear anything anymore. I don’t see the list on the table. It must have fallen and slipped under the couch. Through the open window a warm breeze waltzes into my room. I smile in welcome.

Checkmate.

In regard to the perfect girl that one devises for oneself in his dream. She can never be perfect even if she exists with all the characteristics that you would want her to have. This is because you as a person, are perpetually learning, and changing. Unless she is dynamic she cannot be perfect, because even the girl that supposedly was without flaw yesteryear might not be what you desire now. Furthermore, even if she is dynamic, she would need to be so in a perfectly congruent manner, aligned to your desires. There is, however, a catch. She must be so without your knowing. For it is clear that in some aspects of relations, the pursuit of a woman induces certain emotions – enjoyable emotions – that one does not find once he has her. This is due to the comfort of certainty, him knowing that she is his. If that perfect girl was so flawless that you lose any fear of losing her, you will become bored, because then, despite her dynamic nature, the relationship will become static, and plateau at a stagnation….

Held like water in you shaking hands are all the small defeats a day demands. 10-6 or 9-5 trying, dying to survive. Never knowing what survival means. Leave the apartment to buy alcohol. Hang our diplomas on the bathroom wall. Pick at the plaster chipped away, survey some stunning tooth decay, enlist the cat in the impending class-war. Let’s lay our bad day down here, dear and make-believe we’re strong, or hum some protest song. Like maybe “We Shall Overcome Someday.”

Overcome the stupid things we say. Say I needed more than this, say I needed one more kiss. We left that light on way too long now. Let’s plant a bomb at city-hall and kill an MLA. We’ll talk the night away. You call in sick, I’ll quit the word-games that I play. I swear I way more than half believe it when I say that somewhere love and justice shine. Cynicism falls asleep. Tyranny talks to itself. Sappy slogans all come true. We forget to feed our fear.

Now go and brag of thy present happiness, whosoever you are, brag of thy temperature, of thy good parts, insult, triumph, and boast; thou seest in what a brittle state thou art, how soon thou mayest be dejected, how many several ways, by bad diet, bad air, a small loss, a little sorrow or discontent, an ague, etc.; how many sudden accidents may procure thy ruin, what a small tenure of happiness thou hast in this life, how weak and silly a creature thou art!

I look out for those around me — woman, brother, friend, stranger. I pass along expertise, one man to the next. Know-how survives me.

I am good at my job. Not my work, not my avocation, not my hobby. Not my career. My job. It doesn’t matter what my job is, because if I don’t like my job, I get a new one. And I never take it too seriously.

I can speak to cats.

I listen, and that’s how I argue. I craft opinions. I pound the table, take the floor. It’s not that I must. It’s that I can.

I can look you up and down and figure some things out. Before you say a word, I make you. From your hairstyle, from your shoes, from your posture. I infer.

I own up. I grasp my mistakes. I lay claim to who I am, and what I was, whether I like them or not. Some mistakes, though, I let pass if no one notices. Like dropping food on the floor.

I can tell you I was wrong. That I did wrong. That I planned to. I can tell you when I am lost. I can apologize, even if sometimes it’s just to put an end to the bickering.

Style — I have that. No matter how eccentric that style is, it is uncontrived. It’s a set of rules.

I love the female body, the revelation of nakedness. I love the sight of the pale bosom, the physics of the human skeleton, the alternating current of the flesh. I am thrilled by the wrist and the sight of a bare shoulder. I like the crease of a bent knee.

I know how to ridicule.

I know how to lose an afternoon. Playing Xbox 360, reading graphic novels, browsing thrift stores. I know how to lose a month, also.

I welcome the coming of age. It frees me. It allows me to assume the upper hand and teaches me when to step aside.

I understand the basic mechanics of the planet. I can close one eye, look up at the sun, and tell you what time of day it is. Or where north is. I can tell you where you might find something to eat or where the fish run. I understand electricity or the internal-combustion engine, the mechanics of flight or how to figure a checkmate in three moves.

I do not know everything. I don’t try. I like what others know.

I do not rely on rationalizations or explanations. I don’t winnow until truths can be humbly categorized, or intellectualized, until behavior can be written off with an explanation. I don’t see myself lost in some great maw of humanity, some grand sweep.

I resist formulations, question belief, embrace ambiguity without making a fetish out of it. I revisit my beliefs. Continually.

I am comfortable being alone. Love being alone, actually. I sleep. Or I stand watch. I interrupt trouble. This is the state policeman. This is the poet. Me, both of them.

Sometimes I go and sit in a crowded place knowing I won’t spend a dime, witnessing the temptation and the maneuvering of others. Sometimes I stand on the street corner observing the chaos, ignorance, and apathy. This is not about quietude so much as collection. It is not about meditation so much as considering. I refract my vision and gain acuity. This serves me in every way. No one taught me this — to be quiet, to cipher, to watch.

In this way, in these moments, I am like a zoo animal: both captive and free. You cannot take your eyes off someone when he is like that. You shouldn’t. Who knows what I am thinking, who I am, or what I will do next.

Schadenfreude. Leave it to the Germans to come up with a word for deriving pleasure from others’ misfortune. Part of the reason that my karma levels are so low is that I make no apologies for enjoying when people I hate finally get what’s coming to them.

Cynicism and idealism are two cheeks on the same ass. But being less cynical doesn’t preclude your remaining intelligently skeptical – after all, many of the examples of ‘cynicism’ would, to many people, form part of a perfectly rational worldview. There’s nothing inherently cynical about not settling for easy answers. Of course, it’s hard work, and not a succession of soft-focus cockle-warming epiphanies, being a cynic.

So I’ve been thinking about Social Darwinism; and further thinking about how weird it is to be thinking about Social Darwinism. That might be because I sparknoted Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand recently and her philosophy of Objectivism certainly seems like a close cousin to Social Darwinism to me. Or maybe its because I take the city bus every morning and there are always beggars around looking for money.

I never really wanted to consider myself a Social Darwinist, mostly because I’m constantly surrounded by bleeding hearts and liberals and bleeding-hearted liberals, but I find it hard to refute the basic tenants of a philosophy whose pillars are industrious work ethic and self-advancement. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are people that I do feel for, and believe need assistance: the sick, the psycho, the retarded, et cetera, but I certainly don’t believe in welfare or governmental/societal intervention for the preservation of a few at the expense of the many.

That sounds really cold-hearted, I know, but I’m a firm believer in learning through failure and survival. Lord (and everyone else) knows that I have failed an ungodly number of times in my life, but the measure of a human being is not his failures, but his successes. Yet how can any man be considered successful if he never faced any trials or tests of his endurance and moral integrity?

It’s the same thing with parents that over-protect their children. Those children are never given a chance to learn from their failures and can’t deal with the harsh realities of the real world. They grow up to be the guy that shoots Lincoln or sends bombs to people’s houses. Simply put, every able-bodied, able-minded person in this world has the ability to rise above their conditions. It is a matter of application and denying yourself the comforts of self-pity.

I realize it easy for someone like me to make generalizations like this, considering I’ve been born to relative privilege, and I do see the need for charity and – as implied by my earlier statement about random acts of kindness – I don’t believe in the staunch, kill-or-be-killed, dog-eat-dog Objectivism of Ayn Rand.

I’ve heard it said that the unexamined life is not worth living, but I have to retort by asking if you continuously examine your life, are you really even living it?

I’ve come to the realization that I’m completely unable to give a fuck. Whatever mechanism causes people to give a fuck – whether it be a soul, a conscious, Irish guilt – mine is broken. It is slightly upsetting. I opened up this blog writing thingy with the thought that I want to write something, but I really don’t give enough of a fuck about anything right now to even post something coherent (you know, like I always do). Blogs are self-indulgent, sure, but acts of self-indulegence are not inherently narcissistic or vain.

Maybe I’m not supposed to care. Wasn’t it the Shins that said “Caring Is Creepy”? There’s a certain level of awe and prestige in our culture bestowed upon people who can remain aloof. Maybe caring is creepy. Think about the concept of a “crush”. You can’t let a crush know that you care about them. Or at least you’re supposed to ration the amount of emotion you show to them until you’ve gauged the likelihood of their reciprocation. You’re punished for caring essentially, or for getting carried away. Yet every storybook and movie you’ve ever read or watched leads you to believe that you’re supposed to wait around for that romance that makes you abandon all pretense and let’s you get swept up in it. Isn’t this contradictory? I don’t believe in love at first sight, mostly because I believe love to be a complex emotion that varies, not only from person to person, but internally from relationship to relationship, and the singular sense of sight (the easiest sense to deceive) should hardly be left to be judge, jury and executioner over love.

The Lucy Van Pelts of the world are happier than the Charlie Browns. Assholes are the heroes of their own stories. And they don’t even know that they’re assholes; because if they did, they wouldn’t truly be assholes. They’d be self-loathing wishy-washies in therapy. So raise a glass to the insufferable jerks; little critters of nature!

And this is my conclusion; my brilliant insightful coup de grace: The truth hurts… that’s why I use it.

Maybe, perchance, I have misjudged my readers and in fact, what you are looking for is a discussion of the philosopher niche? It’s a great topic to think about — what is the niche that the philosopher occupies? Why do we have philosophy? Why do human beings like to engage in it?

Not all people might like to do so. Though I have, in jest, suggested earlier that only those with active and sensual lifestyles should engage in philosophy, as opposed to people with introspective ones, the truth is that they don’t. There is a big divide between popular culture and philosophical, or high, culture, that’s hard to bridge. You can’t get the athlete to write philosophy. Why not, though? Because he’s too busy.

This is key in understanding who writes, or “does,” philosophy — that some people are always too busy. The rest are too bored, and ergo, they write philosophy. So the true niche of philosophy is boredom. You know when someone will start spouting philosophy, is when they are bored. Some people are just sitting there, she got nothing on her hands, he got nothing in his head, and the next thing you know, they are saying philosophical stuff.

What comes out of boredom is self-reflection. Boredom is a state of refined lethargy. It is a state of languor, the kind of attitude that looks best with when adopted on a chaise lounge, with a cigarette holder in one’s hand, dripping ash on the carpet like a ghostly benediction. And what comes out of self-reflection is the slowing down of reality. The world resolves into archetypes and objects, categories and metaphysical entities, all of which interact at a slower pace than the hurly burly of ordinary reality. Everything happens with the import of historical materialism, with the ponderousness of academic tomes. Everything has meaning.

For a philosopher, all these aspects of the philosophical world are infinitely alluring and infinitely malleable. Everything can be questioned — what we perceive, what the perceptions mean, how someone knows what they mean, whether any one knows anything at all, whether there is in fact worth knowing. A philosopher can wander lost forever through the tricky terrains of these questions for hours.

Philosophers do not only occupy the niche of boredom, but are a good cure for it. If you find yourself possessing a moment of time in which you wonder, “Boy, I don’t know what to do with my time right now,” think of a topic that has plagued philosophers for centuries — is there free will, what if nothing actually exists, do animals have moral rights — and you will soon find your head hurting so much that you will be compelled to find something else to do. This is why philosophers were invented — because people had to be convinced to not sit on their asses and be unproductive if economies had to be built, wars had to be won and heavy metals discovered.

If you were thinking of occupying this niche yourself, know ye that these are difficult grounds to tread. You might think that it’s a simple matter to spout nonsense but it isn’t. Nonsense takes a long time to spin out, after the first three hundred words of it or so. I started writing this post eight months ago and couldn’t finish it until now. It’s an exceptional amount of boredom that you need to be able to sit down at your desk and construct philosophy or even to put together thoughts about philosophy (an act called meta-philosophy in the jargon of philosophers.)

If you read this far, it means that you really are into the niche of philosophers rather than merely into the utterances of that German guy, who wasn’t a bad egg at all really. You know why he wrote most of what he wrote — because he never got laid. So maybe that’s another philosophers’ niche — sexual frustration. Oh, but don’t even get me started on that one.

A particularly bored girl once said to me that she thought molecules had meaning and a purpose of their own, even though it was a very tiny and darling purpose. I told her she was drunk and insulted the color of her nail polish (black). I am not making this up, because this is the kind of human interaction you can’t make up. It was four in the morning, and she and I had been drinking a lot. This was before I had had sex with any one. I was a nerdy, drunk, virgin, arguing the metaphysics of molecules with a drunk girl. Let’s face it, at that time, what I was doing was something slightly, but ever so slightly, different — I was arguing metaphysics with a drunk highschool kid! This is important, because it is what adds the post colonial emphasis that all narratives need — or definitely all narratives that involve the Oppressed.

Anyway, to return to my original point — one couldn’t possibly imagine any conversation, no matter how drunk, ever approaching such topics as molecular metaphysics if the interlocutors weren’t bored, to begin with. Terribly bored, perhaps. I won’t claim that the degree of boredom bears any relationship to how good the philosophy is, because such a claim would be too controversial and distracting. But it’s important to at least notice when a philosopher is less, or more, bored, than other philosophers, or than he has been on previous occasions.

Unfortunately, my proposition is hard to believe, and easily refuted. One could point to the generally energetic, mentally so if not physically, life of most philosophers. There is also much passion, that one associates with many of the philosophers — and even more so with all philosophers in the post Enlightenment era that are associated with various strains of empiricism and utilitarianism. None of these men were bored at all — in fact, they were a study in industriousness and engagement.

The thing to realize is that philosophers are not always bored (or stoned). Boredom is not the philosopher’s niche for always, but for a critical moment — the moment when they are ejected from the world that doesn’t know boredom, or at least true boredom, and into the world of philosophy. The philosopher’s attitude after this critical moment is of no importance for us. Only the critical moment, the ejaculatory moment one might say, is what matters.

Another criticism we encounter is the idea that philosophers suffer not from having too much time on their hands, but merely from an excess of the clarity of vision. A philosopher sees things — the reality that envelopes us but is carefully hidden from most of us, the structures that govern us without revealing the slightest impression on our shoulders of their heavy yokes — and so he has to react. He has to point to these spectres and try to describe them, either to alert the rest of us — as if we asked the philosopher to be told!

It’s instructive to consider if boredom is, or has a relationship to, disenchantment, discomfort and any form of rebellion.

Anyway, I am beginning to get the feeling that watching too much porn has damaged my ability to relate to women, or to sex in general. Well, duh!, I hear you say. What else did you expect? But I don’t think it’s the simple explanation at play here, that I have tended to objectify women because I watch them being treated as sexually subservient online. It’s more that the focus of my interest in sex is on personal pleasure and control. I want my sexual life to be like watching pornography. I get to choose most of the time how to get my rocks off.

Real life sex is about listening and compromises — it’s like a political conference! Where’s the “Here, suck it, and now I’m going to fill your pussy with my big, hard cock” dynamic?!

Gentle reader, at this moment I am keen to let twin trains of past and present obsessions collide. The engines meet face to face at exactly equal velocity so that they rise up on their hind wheels while peeling apart and driving through; prismatic spirals of shatter glass, chrome, iron, hydraulic tubing, tungsten (the engines of my mind are always built primarily of tungsten).

Now the lead cars are also rising, pelted by expanding bits and pieces of both engines like meteors, perforating, crushing, collapsing, introducing chaotic elements into what nanoseconds past was perfect symmetry and then the shock wave dispenses with the subtlety of shrapnel and tears each lead car to accelerating, unidentifiable hot chunks.

In both directions cars are leaping upward as if in joy toward the center of impact, chaos has almost but not quite surpassed order and a nearly intact dining car lifts off the track, it’s ass end rising; and the dining car on the other train buckles nose first into the track, passengers shoot through disintegrating walls, windows, tumble almost gracefully, trapeze artists made of tangled meat, up, over and into the somersaulting dinning car from the first train, punching through the roof like bullets through a paper target!

And in the spinning dining car sufficient centrifugal force creates for a fractional moment artificial gravity. To the passengers inside, both original and recently arrived, it seems as if nothing is moving at all or would seem so if not for the terrible bodily damage they have sustained.

Recalling that these trains are imaginary, recalling I am not a spectator, but rather Imaginengineer… I restore the structural architecture of the dining car, drape white linen back upon the tables, refill each cut glass vase, reassemble each flower petal by petal, ‘ton em sevol ehs, em sevol ehs’, restore the passengers to the physical state they enjoyed prior to being brutally shaken about like whatever makes the noise inside maracas.

I take a second’s worth of time within the dining car between my fingers, stretch it like Silly Putty until that single second becomes hours quite long enough to hold a dinner party in.

And then I have myself a peek.

Her eyes are a chocolate whirlpool, I want to dip myself in them and emerge chocolafied, I want to hide in her refrigerator waiting, waiting, waiting to become a midnight snack.

A lifetime or lunchtime, we all arrive on schedule at our terminal destination.

Who is ever spinning away from his true Center, and like a wandering star, remains outside the Core of our very Being?

Who is ever lying to himself about what is happening right now, and like a political ideology, proclaims as truth his own preconceptions formed in the past?

Who is ever pretending to be what he is not, and like a popular actor, turns his life into a comedy-drama of make-believe?

Who is ever denying the actual cause for this pretentious display, and like a fashionable critic, blames others for his own hypocrisy?

Who is ever escaping from taking living responsibility for his own actions, and like a dedicated con artist, tries desperately to fool himself, as well as others, that he is?

Who is ever packaging and selling himself as a commerical product in order to gain self-gratification, and like a super, but grasping, salesman, pays the price for his own craving, which is death to the spirit?

Who is ever thinking that he is something solid, and like an isolated body, suppresses the emptiness that plagues his quiet moments?

Who is ever believing that something is good or bad, right or wrong, positive or negative, this or that, and like a leading authority on the subject, traps his object self in a cycle of conflict and hostility?

Who is ever experiencing whatever as being outside himself, and like an unconscious observer, never sees its essential quality as being within himself and as ourself?

Who is ever projecting himself but never being or understanding ourself as a Whole, and like a partial witness, gives evidence against our very Being?

Who?

Why, my own ego, that’s who!

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.