Sunday, August 2, 2009

A Long Time Coming [via Personal Issues]

For a long time, I've been a relatively boring person. I filled this website's pages with superficial value judgments of pop culture happenings, and sometimes took a stab at actually writing something wherein a recognizable desire to be something better could be discerned, but never eked out anything that was really great. I have come to the realization that this is probably because almost nothing I've published here has come from a moment of really personal motivation. I mean, why does any great author write about anything? How do they make it good? It's good, and so are they, because they are invested. I care about pop culture, duh, but I'm also intensely aware that each moment in that arena is just that - a moment, with no lasting worth - and so it is hard for me to care that much.

Lately, however, I've become a lot more interesting. Still waters run deep, sure, but the deepest ones can be very busy places beneath the surface, too, and the last three months have set my emotional ocean churning like nothing else. This is endlessly frustrating for me, but so is writing for the internet in general - I tend to vacillate between the oversharing resultant of unquenchable insecurity (which demands proof that I can be likable after all, despite years upon formative years of social rejection), and my probably surprising natural tendency towards privacy and solitude.

I do my best, I think, but sometimes I also find that I fall egregiously short of the goal (to find out what's important, examine it thoroughly, and share it with others through the language I love so well...and preferably do it with a degree of gravitas?). What's the point of writing things down anyway, though, when even the supposedly momentous events of my life seem to have the same amount of consequence as those pop culture tidbits do? For all my swinging around from private to public and back again, I also vary wildly as far as my opinion of the importance of my own life goes. I think it's what makes me an Atheist: how can you really respect a deity when he/she/it/they is/are constantly having more of an interest in what happens to you than you do? I mean, I'm pretty much set on dying before I turn 50 - I'm practically planning for it. I drink heavily, I smoke more and more regularly, I can't concentrate on anything for more than ten seconds, and am constantly spiraling closer to rejecting actual nutrition altogether, sequestering myself in a darkened cave with internet access, and subsisting forever on Muddy Bears and Coke Zero. What the hell!? Maybe this is the kind of degeneration that goes hand in hand with quarter-life crises, but I doubt it. Maybe it has to do with my purposefully rejecting the Lord Our God Jesus Christ, but I also doubt that. So what now, Dear Reader? Is Fairly Alarmed doomed to infinite self-deprecating introspection whose only conclusion will be my relatively early death, or can I aspire to be - and actually become - something better than a brand, an interesting person: an artist?

1 comment:

Devon K. said...

Duh, you'll be an artist. I wouldn't describe your current situation as a downward spiral; it's more a 'rewind/repeat' pattern from which you can and will escape.