oceans of doubt.

“ As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.” — John Archibald Wheeler

BUT — that bastard gave no credence to the oceans. and the earth is 70 percent ocean. as of now. that number is on the up. fast, in a cosmic sense. zeus is betting dionysus and taking the over from the given betting time to reach 80 percent. but poor zeus doesn’t realize dionysus has insider knowledge. zeus knows only our power. dionysus knows our revelry. he knows we can’t fucking stop.

and time continues to roll with no regard for my safety — like a rat stuck inside a bowling ball.

and our friends keep getting married — ya know, because we’re in our LATE 20's.

–

the ability to keep records and store memories of events and knowledge was no doubt a pivotal moment for our species, but perhaps more than anything what it did for us was cement us in existential despair.

for at that first moment of the calendar we were then forced to ponder ourselves in relation to time. what we would do with what we had left of it. how much it would be. what we’d done with what we had already had of it. how much it had been.

it’s all really a bunch of hooey. but now that we’ve created that feedback loop, there ain’t no turning back baby. yikes.

i’ve even read that our perception of time shrinks as we age. so that it really does go by faster as it piles on. what a fucking kick in the dick. insult to injury knows no more appropriate home than in response here.

*loud throat clearing* other me just told me to lighten things up a bit. it’s getting TOOOOO GRIMMMM.

grim. like a shit episode of sleep paralysis. one where you toggle between almost awake but paralyzed and knee deep in a shit nightmare. for what seems hours. and every time you think you’re about to wake from it you can’t quite muster the desired result.

grim. like a bad acid trip. which for the first dozen or so times i took psychadelics i thought i was immune to. wrong. i text a friend at a brief moment of lucidity during it all that it felt like my brain was getting raped by the cosmos. over and over and over.

a pervasive sense of despair and unbounded negativity slowly oozing over every originally pure thought. and the inability to keep changing the mind quick enough to stay ahead.

outside of the now ineffable consequences that at the time seemed fairly tangible was a running and lingering theme that lasted 8 hours that the flood waters were near breaking and that if they broke i would literally never again regain my sanity. i would syd barrett away. but none of my friends write songs so nobody would tell me to shine on. they’d more likely pine, over a half-empty coors light, “what happened to that guy?”

it was fucking terrifying. for lack of a better term.

so yeah, i was wrong. i wasn’t immune. but my err should be no surprise to me or to anyone else in my species.

as a species we at different points in our history told ourselves we were ready, morally and intellectually, for colonialism, the internal combustion engine, and nuclear power. as a species we each times considered ourselves ready to grasp the consequences. in hindsight it’s safe to probably say we didn’t quite understand the consequences at the point of conception of those ideas (maybe we should have been more pro-choice about the ideas — dark humor). should we really be so certain that hindsight will tell us anything different about the internet or crispr? what makes us so continually certain we’re improving? shores and islands.

and as individuals, i don’t know if we’re really doing more than just walking around upright with two opposable thumbs and a big brain and fucking up and telling ourselves we’re learning.

we tell ourselves stories and we expect them to be true. we face a nice fat slap in the face when we’re wrong, and the degree to which it hurts us depends on the degree to which we held the conviction in the first place. like a pious bible thumping catholic priest all the sudden wrapped his head around the reality that the pope might just be a guy with a funny hat and immense studied knowledge about a particular book.

humans are frequently wrong and often immune to information. consider the fact that half of the humans who get married end up not married. which isn’t to say it’s a bad idea to try. perhaps it’s best if we decided it’s worth it even if or especially when it doesn’t last. but none of those poor souls walking the aisle think it’s gonna end. they’ve all believed they live outside of statistics.

but that won’t happen to YOU. YOU are too smart to be duped by silly human errs. okay.

we won’t get into it here, but it’s worth planting the seed and mentioning the idea now that your whole mental construct of YOU being WHOLELY and SOLELY yourself and nothing else might be a farce on its face. one of the biggest and most consequential lies you’ll accomplish telling yourself.

anyways.

–

it gets harder and harder to respect anyone who lacks self-doubt. in my case the more i’ve learned the more i’ve come to feel like i understand less. and i was told that would happen and i tried to learn anyways! i thought i could do some mental gymnastics to avoid the paradox. wrong again.

anyways.

those people who lack self doubt.

“what is that? is that even a person?” — louis

who/what is that millennial that thinks the world needs a frequent picture taken of his or her own face posted along with a caption of some type of *motivational* quote. what in the hell is that? our hypothetical self-imagined hero has an inflated idea of the size of his or her island, has no conceptual grasp of the size of his or her shores, and isn’t even tangentially comprehending how much of the space is taken by ocean.

i’d hate to be around when they are forced to stand at a cliff and meet reality. now that’ll be a slap in the face. loud one.

me? i’m all fucking oceans. and swimming in it. i’ve turned some type of corner that convinced me it’s okay i will likely be more awestruck every day until the lights go out.

and maybe..

“One day I’ll go so far I won’t come back.” — Burroughs