Sleeplessness

So here I am, sitting on the couch in my living room, watching SNL on Netflix and slugging Vanilla Coke (Yeah bitches, it's back!). Sleep seems nearly impossible tonight, and I have no idea why. I've been on Christmas break for about a week now and my sleep schedule is getting hella weird. For at least the last three days I haven't been able to sleep until after three in the morning, then I sleep until almost noon. That's with me actually trying to sleep, and tonight seems different from those nights. I'm not even like thinking right now, just on total brain autopilot. I get weird when I don't sleep. I get all edgy and morbid. My imagination runs away with me and I think I see shit that isn't actually there, it's kinda weird.

Sleep is generally the only thing that maintains my attitude of calm and relaxed humor. It's been a long time since I didn't sleep for a night, I'm not eager to go back to that. I've already cleaned and filed and oiled my stage combat sword today, there's still a few little tarnish marks on it. Think I'll bust out the oxalic acid for that here in a little bit.

Chuckie Buks

I've been reading a lot of Charles Bukowski lately. I feel like he is me. Or at least a version of how I like to think of myself. First of all, Chuck doesn't give a FUCK. But I'm too much of a nice fucking guy to follow through on being like Chuck. Yeah, I drink a lot of whiskey. Yeah, I smoke like it's going out of style (which it is NOT!). Yeah I think about women almost constantly, albeit sometimes in more abstract ways than others. I wish I could be that gruff old man, playing chess in the park with a lifelong friend on an autumn afternoon (because I was sleeping all morning) looking around quickly and passing a big old flask back and forth. Yelling obscenities at the kids skateboarding by. Those bastards. No respect for anyone but themselves. Throwing my smoldering cigarette butts on the cold and leaf covered cobbles at my feet. Then we finish the game, maybe get lunch at a bar, say our goodbyes and agree to meet up and do the same thing next week. Then I go home, turn on the news, maybe I have a dog who is just as jaded as I am. And we just sit there. Mumbling at the TV, everything is wrong with the world, and we know how to fix it.

I've been writing a lot recently, which is nice. It started when I did NaNoWriMo last month. I'm not particularly proud o the final product. Don't get me wrong, I'm proud as hell that I got it done, and soon I'm gonna have that sweet sweet winner tshirt to wear around and prove that I'm better than other people, but the content isn't great. I guess that's acceptable for writing about 2000 words a day and not editing anything. I think there is definitely a solid foothold for a story in there, but especially the second half of the story just kind of devolved into some weird socio-philosophical manifesto. I hit a wall, you see, and instead of just working through it, I skipped all the parts I didn't know how to write. As a result, the second half of the story has turned into a lot of weird and only thinly related events without a through line. Still though, it's done.

Because I got into a habit of writing a lot, I've been trying to keep it up. I doubt many people know about my secret urge to be a famous poet. But yeah. I started carrying my little black book around again and scribbling in it. I've been averaging at least one good idea for a poem a day, some of them I flesh out, some I don't. It's kind of nice in the dead time between classes. I'll go find some quiet part of the university and just sit down, enjoy the scenery, maybe just watch people walk by, and try to write something.

I hope to god I never lose that little black book. It has my name and phone number in the front of it, but if anyone ever really looked through it, I fear they would think me insane. There's a lot of weird shit in there. Things no one besides me was ever meant to read. A lot of weird symbols, a couple half pages just covered with the same words written over and over again in different patterns and styles. I have an image to maintain, goddamnit.

Boredom.

I'm bored, so I thought I would check on the old, disused blog. I think it has a relative somewhere on the internet. Some other platform I once created to spout thoughts about whatever I happened to be interested in at the time. It is, however, long since forgotten. I don't remember what website it was on or through, the URL, my username, password, anything. It's just a fragment of what I thought about at one time. I doubt anything there is even really relevant to how I live or think now.

However, even those little fragments of thoughts, floating about in cyberspace, are more real than most of the thoughts we ever have. However difficult it may be to find or make sense of, they still function as proof that the person who wrote them exists. Or did at one point.

I remember reading XKCD one day and it was one of those rare occasions where it wasn't really about humor. The comic talked about what happens to a person's internet life once they die. For example, I usually leave my computer on all of the time, simultaneously logged in to a bunch of different websites. Gmail, some forums, facebook. But when someone dies, it takes a long time for their trace to disappear. Maybe on some forum, they were a great contributor, and one day they just sort of disappeared. People wondered where they went for a while. Maybe they just moved on, maybe their computer broke, maybe they moved to the heart of the amazon, to get away from it all, and didn't tell anyone. People check their profile sometimes, just to see. One, two, three months since last login. Their sessions start to time out one by one, subscriptions expire. Server resets close out their autologins. They stop getting email from everyone except a few spambots. Eventually, once all their accounts have been inactive long enough, they start getting deleted, and then one day it's like they never existed at all.

Sometimes people read the things I write about and think I'm a morbid person, thinking about death a lot. I disagree. I think I'm much happier for my ability to consider the realistic effects of death. Simply because I'm not afraid of it.

Philosophically, I feel like I fall in a weird category. I have my own "religious" leanings. Politically I'm more a Libertarian than anything else, although that came from a conservative childhood and very liberal adolescence. I have some (a lot of) objectivist leanings (thanks Ayn Rand, you ruined me for all the other neighborhood cats). Yet I try to be mindful and respectful of life in general. Oh well, se la vie.

This too, shall pass.

That's what I keep telling myself over and over again. Usually this phrase springs to mind when I'm in some state of distress. Whether that distress be related to sickness, sadness, potential vomiting or otherwise. It has become sort of a mantra to me in times when I would rather be feeling a different emotion. I like that. I quite enjoy the impermanence if all things. Nothing will last forever, nothing has existed forever, and I love it.

Apparently this way of thinking can weird out some people, which I can only kind of understand. With my Catholic upbringing, I can remember as a child feeling scared because I knew that I would eventually die, but I didn't know when that would be. So I was worried that I might not do enough good things in life to outweigh the bad things I have inevitably done. But I've come to realize that I don't believe in a god anymore, nor an afterlife, and the knowledge that there is nothing after this life gives me a great sense of security. It's like a blanket can wrap my mind in, the comfortable knowledge that at one point we all will have our consciousnesses obliterated.

I feel like this life that we live is all there is, not a step in a journey, nor a precursor or afterthought to or from anything else. This is all there is. The "hereafter" for want of a better term, is completely devoid of all existence, therefore why the hell should we care, take the time to better yourself while you can. There is no reward for being a more advanced person, at least not beyond the obvious rewards in this life. But it kills the time until we die, and that seems to be what a lot of this life is about. Yeah, you could go live in the woods and go crazy by yourself, and that would be just fine, but most people don't seem to love that idea, and so they choose to live in a society. To be a member of society, you have to make money, or else you won't be able to eat or clothe yourself. But really, eating and clothing yourself are just things that are convenient to help the time pass.

People shouldn't be afraid of the "afterlife" because of the idea of eternity. If there is such a thing as eternity, then time becomes completely meaningless, and there may well be no end to an afterlife if it does turn out to exist. Yet if time is meaningless, then there is no beginning or end, and so nothing actually happens.

I'm rambling.

Time just broke my mind.

I've decided I might not believe in time. I was on Facebook chat with a buddy of mine (Hi Matt, if you ever read this). As is our custom we began an unannounced battle of words and wit, mostly just circular logic and trying to confuse each other. That's the context.

The actual event occurred when in the course of the conversation I think I said something along the lines of "Yeah but "now" is a word that applies to such a minute amount of time as to be nearly or completely insignificant". That's when my brain broke for a weird second. It's so true, there is really no such thing as now. Such a rapid passage of a moment should have no meaning whatsoever, it's not enough time for anything to happen. Right now I'm trying to visualize a concept for the word "now" but all I can really imagine is a graph of an asymptote, with the zero being absolutely nothing, and the definition of "now" is the function being represented. (I don't even like math.) The definition of "now" continues to approach closer and closer to zero and therefore nothingness but it never actually touches, the moment of now just becomes infinitely smaller and smaller and less meaningful. Think about that. Like not even enough time for an electron to move at all, much less orbit around something.

That was the first part. Then I thought about (as I was writing the first part, actually) about the future, which doesn't exist yet. And the past, which doesn't matter anymore because it is over. So I think time might just be a hoax, like I understand how people use time to give a frame of reference to their lives and actions and all that good stuff. But I don't know if it actually exists in the traditional sense at all. Some people say that time is supposedly the fourth dimension, but I dunno.

Like I said, I over analyze junk a lot. Like A LOT.

Intros and explanations

Okay, so I'll explain myself and what I'm doing here first. My name is Joey, I'm newly 22 years old, and I'm a college student (theatre major). I smoke too much, love beer, don't sleep enough, and have a naturally philosophical view of life. I analyze things a lot, probably mostly too much, which is fine, but it makes me kind of live in my head a lot.

I was raised Catholic by my wonderful parents, whom I love dearly, even if I don't say it enough.

Yet I am Catholic no longer, much more of a Zen Buddhist now, though I have yet to take my precepts. Along with that Catholic upbringing I feel tremendous guilt occasionally for things I shouldn't feel guilty at all about, this also leads to introspection and often I decide that I shouldn't drink or smoke or party as much anymore, but of course I do.

I also enjoy writing poetry and fiction. I've only been published in one magazine, but I've never actually submitted to any others, so who knows what'll happen down the line.

Anyways, all of this is here because I decided one night while in my room after reading someone else's blog how useful it could be for me to be able to keep track of things in one place, and maybe some other people will get some mild kind of amusement out of it, as I greatly enjoyed reading about what someone I'm barely acquainted with had to say about their life. So here it is.