An Insane Rant about One Variety of Insanity

Things are not going well.  

Right now, my head hurts.  I don't feel motivated.  I feel paranoid.  I'm feeling my own mortality.  I feel like quitting.  

And so it goes...

I am editing myself all the time these days.  Things happen that impact me and I try to write about them, but then I falter and stop.  If it's something at work, I'll tell myself, "Wait a second...  What if my boss reads my blog.  What if my colleagues get mad at me."  I'll edit it.  I'll make it indistinct.  I'll change the names to protect the innocent.  I'll play the pronoun game to hide who I'm talking about.  

At which point I discover that the thing I was writing about no longer interests me.  It's boring.  It's bland.  I wonder what the fuss was about.  I set it aside.  I feel like I've wasted my time.  

And so it goes...

I want to rant.  I want to rant the same way so many people out there are ranting.  "This is what I think and I'm saying it at the top of my voice because it's RIGHT because I think it's right and if you think I'm wrong it's ONLY because you are one of those people that HATE AMERICA and FREEDOM and all the GOOD THINGS the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA has given you, you ungrateful WRETCH!"  

I don't rant, though.  It's that editor again.  I start thinking about the thinks I want rant about and words like "accuracy" and "truth" start getting in the way.  I don't want to be wrong.  I don't want to look like the idiot I think a lot of those ranters look when they blithely ignore "truth" and "accuracy," even while they seem to be convincing so many other people that their truth is TRUTH, which only makes me want to rant even more.  

Through most of Friday at work I was almost convinced I was about to get fired.  I'm not going to write about it here, though.  It was paranoia linking three unrelated instances together.  I found out the truth when I went into my boss's office and confronted him with, "Am I in trouble?"  I've tried three or four times this weekend to write about it, because what my paranoia came up with really fascinated me, but it all came out mucky on the page.  

And so it goes...

I got that from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.  It's from his novel, Slaughterhouse Five.  I read it in Jr. High School.  In recent years, though, I've started saying it all the time.  It is the single most appropriate thing to say about existence in my opinion.  "And so it goes..."  Things continue.  They were continuing before we got on board, and they'll continue long after we've gotten off.  It even forms the basis of one of my standard greetings to the people I meet: 

"How's it going, Erick?"  

"It goes."  

I can feel it doing it now.  I couldn't when I was a fourteen year old kid, but I can feel it now.  Things are going.  Going, going, GONE!  Like a home-run in the bottom of the 9th Inning.  Game over.  Done.  Finished.  終わった。That's all she wrote.  The fat lady is singing her guts out.  Our lives start with the impact of the ball  on the bat, and they end when they've been knocked out of the field.  Lights out.  A trail that curves into the sky from one point to the end, with the landing marking the difference between "Is" and "Was."  

And so it goes...

Maybe I'm just feeling stuck.  Mental wheels trapped in the muck of life.  Spinning and spinning and spinning around and around and around, not getting any traction to move forward.  When it gets like this, I think, "Maybe it's time to quit."  Just give up.  Spend the time going to the gym.  At least doing that may add years to my life, keep the ball up in the air a few hundred feet more.  Just exist and maintain it for as long as I can.  

But I don't want to quit.  Not because of all the things I've been taught over the years.  Like my Mom telling me all the time when I was little, "Winners never quit and quitters never win."  Or the Japanese saying, "Fall down seven times, get up eight."  Or the Blues Travelers, in their song, Just Wait: "There's no such thing as a failure that keeps on trying/Coasting to the bottom is the only disgrace."  None of this makes any difference.

I don't want to quit because I want to complain about the universe.  Simple as that.  If I quit and then complain about how unfair the universe is, and how unlucky I was, then I'd just be a whiner and I really hate whiners.  

It's like voting.  If you don't vote, then don't complain.  You got exactly the politician you deserve.  

And it doesn't matter that, objectively speaking, I can look at my life and say that it's much, much better than what a lot of people, maybe even most of the people in world, can call theirs.  I want what I want and not getting it pisses me off.  I'm sorry if there's a line of people that would stretch around the globe three times over who would kill to have exactly what I have, I'm not in that line.  I want more.  It's human.  So there.  

So...  What do I do?  For anyone reading this, it's a rhetorical question.  My blog entries have become something like bottles with messages in them thrown into the electric waves washing up on my shore.  There's no real hope of one of them leading to my rescue.  I don't even have a deflated basketball I call "Wilson" to keep me company.

But questions deserve answers, so I'll try to give myself one.  The only answer that seems to fit, though, is one that worries me a bit.  

I will do as I do.  The same as I've been doing.  Just as I'm doing now.  I'll write something out and fling it out there.  Boom.  Done.  I will try the order I want to find in the chaos that is true nature of things and note it down.  

It's been said that the surest sign of insanity is doing the same thing, over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, expecting a different result.  Maybe that's true.  

This is, however, an insane universe.  Everyone that is honest with themselves, will, I believe, admit to their own level of insanity.  And...  "Insane" is not synonymous with "Illogical" or even "Ineffective."  Just that it doesn't correspond to expected ways of doing things by "normal" standards.  

It's trying to break through a wall, hitting it over and over and over and over and over and over and over again with a hammer, with the expectation that THIS TIME it will fall.  It's that type of insanity.  

That's all I have to say.  Back to life.

And so it goes...