20210125

I woke this morning, not 20 minutes ago, with fear. No, not with fear. With dread. With the sense of some great, aweful thing looming over me.

Curled up in bed all I wanted to do was stay curled up in bed. I don’t know why this should be, except that I am hungry in the morning, and, I suppose, I have very high expectations for myself. Which is to say that I have expectations for myself.

What I expect is really not all that haughty. I would like to do some work on the things I like working on. And then I expect myself to publish them on some platform somewhere, or submit them to someone who will publish them on my behalf.

These do not seem like such great expectations to me. They do not seem especially challenging. And yet I lay, awake, for half an hour, trying to force myself to go back to sleep so that the great, black, looming monster would go away.

It is a monster without form. A simple black miasma that will swallow everything up into itself. It is the fear of leaving the comfortable surrogate womb of the bed. It is the terror of stepping out into the day and facing up to its challenges, no matter how small and how easily surmounted.

Which is, I suppose, why so many people get as high as they can, as early as they can, setting their automatic coffee makers to have their daily hit of caffeine ready two minutes before the exact moment when they get up out of bed. And, really, who can blame them? For most people, the entire rest of the day is going to be an unending series of things they don’t want to have to do, but are obligated both contractually and financially to perform.

The system itself is designed to force people to do these things they don’t want to do. Their menial jobs, at a desk, or cleaning up after people who sit at desks, or selling food to people who sit at desks or clean up after people who sit at desks.

I hate to admit it, and I have fought the thought for a very long time, perhaps out of blind optimism, and perhaps out of the self-protective need to deny my own complicity, but the game is rigged. And more than simply rigged, it is a grand conspiracy designed and orchestrated by a small number of people who take pleasure in the thought of being other people’s master.

And in the service of this grand conspiracy they have leveraged the most powerful coercive tools of all, the individual’s own mind. Fill someone up from a young age with the idea that their life is worthless if is not lived exclusively for the purposes of usefulness and productivity, drum all sense of autonomy and freedom of thought out of them by wringing them through 20 years of mandatory education designed specifically to teach them to think how you want them to think. Of course they’re going to do anything and everything they can to keep themselves imprisoned. They believe that their prison is the safest and best place there could possibly be.

And they might not be wrong. That’s the kicker. If your basic goal is to stay alive for as long as possible and produce as many healthy offspring as you can manage to produce, then sure the prison is the way to go.

Non-sequitur:

Bodily sensations are a total drag when they interfere with my ability to do things and focus on things. Hunger especially. Fuck that guy. When I am hungry, I cannot concentrate on anything without the most intense effort. My mind wanders down into my belly and stares unendingly at the grinding gears churning at nothing.

I experience hunger as physical pain. I’m sure I’m not unique in this. But when I’ve gone, say 8 hours without eating, it hurts. It feels like what it is, that the acids in my stomach are beginning to eat through the walls of the digestive sack. It hurts and it feels like I am dying. I know that I am not dying, yet. But it very much feels like it.

And, like every good Freudian, I have just proved that there are no non-sequitur and that everything we express is interrelated. Because I wake up hungry. Every morning, I wake up with hunger gnawing at me; I come to life feeling like I am about to die.

That’s a hell of a way to start the day.