On the foolishness of men

Pride is a stupid thing, particularly when mixed in the right amounts with its diametrical opposite, uncertainty. When uncertainty tells you that you might not be doing the right thing, pride inevitably responds, "Of course I am!" Intelligent, reasonable behavior then goes out the window.

Ahhhh...screw it. I'm too irritated to be abstract and philosophical. I play an online game. I'm in a guild. One of my guild officers asked me last night to do something that, as far as I'm concerned, was ridiculous. I requested a confirmation of the instructions (mostly because I couldn't believe what I was hearing), and was told, effectively, to shut up and not question his orders, he knows what he's doing. And all I can really think is, "If you're asking me to do that, you obviously don't." We're still discussing the matter, privately and via e-mail, today. He's not budging and while I'm trying to remain diplomatic, my patience has thinned considerably.

I think living in New York is starting to make me rather abrasive. Speaking from history, I don't like giving my opinion if I think it will stir up waves. That is changing with alarming rapidity, and I'm acquiring a certain shocking bluntness.

Or maybe I'm just not the bottomless cup that I always thought I was.

On continuity

I write this as I contemplate a proper answer to a message. I posit something else in the meantime - is it easier to ask a question, or is it easier to answer one?

Now to the matter at hand - my problem with the God of Christianity stems in some part from the concept of omniscience and omnipotence. I was going to go into a huge discussion about the issue using newtonian and quantum mechanics, but then I realized that was mostly just me enjoying the sound of my own voice (so to speak). The crux of the matter is - if God is omniscient, truly omniscient, can there be any free will? If the universe is a closed system, with no outside interference, then the answer would have to be no. If God knows the future, then he knows exactly how each of us will behave indefinitely far into the future. Everything we do is nothing more than the motion of cogs in a great machine, wound and set to spinning at the dawn of time.

Now...I do have to entertain the notion that perhaps God does know the future, but he may act to change it. That, however, would actually argue against God's omniscience. After all - if he knew how things would turn out, why didn't he just set them in motion the right way to begin with, without necessitating later intervention? Anyone who says here, "He moves in mysterious ways..." is going to get smacked, because I like the idea of an arbitrary God even less than the idea of a limited one. Anyway, this knowledge includes accounting for intervention from certain other outside sources, such as the Devil. Omniscience is OMNISCIENCE, after all. Knowing all things.

I think it's been posited that if the future doesn't exist yet, then there isn't anything to know. God can't know it because...well...it doesn't exist. You can't know what's not there. I, however, think that's a cop-out answer. The future may not exist, but an omniscient God certainly knows every single variable in the present and past universe. He knows precisely where everything is, how fast they're moving, and what forces are acting upon them. He knows me, and how I think, far better than I know myself. After all, I don't know what motivates me half the time. He doesn't need to guess what my reaction would be to certain stimuli - he knows. This is God, after all.

So if he knows all this, even if the future is unknowable, he should be able to predict what will happen to an indefinite amount of time into the future. Now, at this point, it would be reasonable to toss in that little kicker, entropy. The tendency of things for things to fall into the lowest energy, most disorderly state. Maybe some things happen simply because they happen. No rhyme, no reason. The bowling ball has fallen onto the cow because...it was there and the cow was convenient. But this would suggest that something like chaos and entropy could balk the infinite mind of God. If his predictions, his knowledge, and his will can't pierce the veil of entropy...then he's hardly omniscient and omnipotent, now is he?

It's a conundrum either way. Logically and reasonably, I can't see any way around it. Either what I believe to be my choices have no meaning, and therefore I have no hand and no responsibility for the things that I do, or God is not omniscient and omnipotent.

But now...now we enter a rather more abstract realm. What if I were to say - "My choices have meaning. I have free will, and God is indeed omniscient and omnipotent." Well, I'd have said it, in the loneliness of my apartment, and I would likely feel a mite silly because all it really did was stir up the dust on my monitor. But if God were to say it, if an omnipotent God were to declare it so...then it kind of has to be so, doesn't it? In spite of all its apparent inherent contradictions, if an all-powerful being declared this statement to be true, then for him to really be all powerful the statement must then be true. And the rational order of the universe breaks down.

But of course God must realize that, and therefore he is free to declare, "The universe remains a rational, orderly place that follows certain rules." And so it does, forced into it by nothing more and nothing less than the infinite power of God's will. This brings up an interesting thought. What if all these contradictions and inconsistencies exist within the universe, following no law or regulation, but bound together into existence by the simple and inescapable power of God's intentions. I keep getting this mental image of a man with an inescapably strong rope, tying shut a massive suitcase that really just wants to fly open and spew underwear all over the place.

Which is the entire point, but brings me to my third problem with the Christian God.

When everything springs from you, it makes your decisions a bit arbitrary. But I'm sleepy, and don't feel like touching on that right now.

And yes, these are things I think about while riding the subway.

On insomnia revisited

There are too many thoughts living inside my head. I'm too tired to entertain them, but neither do I want them to leave, for it is dark and lonely in here all by myself.

On past recollections

Well, I don't know. I just got the urge to write something in here, because I was doing rather well and it seems such a shame to just...stop. I'm also procrastinating on sleep, which is a rather masochistic thing to do, but I find sleep isn't quite the comfort it used to be. Who really needs sleep anyway? Hallucinations are fun!

So anyway, I was talking with...who was I talking to? Yeah, I can already tell this is going to go very well. I'm already forgetting the persons with whom I was conversing, and here I'm trying to make a certain philosophical point. Oh, right - it was Missi. Yes - we were walking toward the promise of fried chicken or some other clot-inducing sustenance right after a show at the Academy. I don't remember the show, but I do recall a certain sense of dissatisfaction. Not with the shows, mind you. But...with something else.

I take an aside here because in conversing with Myia this weekend, I've finally identified the feeling completely. It was dissatisfaction with the things I should have been unhappy about while at the Academy, but wasn't admitting to myself. I've always held a rather more exalted opinion of the school than perhaps it entirely deserved. Or maybe I forced myself to think so, intent on finding another way of reaffirming myself in a field where I still feel a little off-balance. I don't know. I like the Academy. I enjoyed my experiences there most of the time, but it certainly wasn't as perfect as I kept making it out to be.

In any case, I didn't recognize any of this in-school or after graduating, but they finally caught up with me that night after the show. My emotions are painfully slow sometimes, and I rarely have the patience to wait for them. Unfortunately, they then gang up on me at the next available inopportune moment. By that point everyone's tickets have mixed up so I don't know what order they're supposed be in, and everything just sort of shoves in all at once and leaves me feeling nothing but slightly confused and rather hungry.

But I digress into strange metaphors. Let me just say - I felt the pain of separating from the school for quite some time. It was inevitable. After all, I practically lived there for two years and then, slice, nothing. To make matters worse, I've never handled sudden transitions well, and sudden changes in my life make me internalize even more as I try to sort through what I feel. Well, the transition finally completed that evening, and I no longer missed the Academy. Life goes on. Yay.

Well, that was a considerably longer digression than I intended. Anyway, as I was initially saying - it occured to me that everything I enjoy in life seems to be one form of escapism or another. I can actually sort of pinpoint where it started - jab in a red pushpin, as it were, roughly around the time that my parents divorced and life effectively went to shit for five or six lovely years. There had been a certain motion toward fantasy before then, and I'd always liked horror movies, but the central obsession of my devious little developing brain up to that point involved certain extinct lizardfolk that roamed the earth (raping, as it were, the planet, and pillaging without regard, as Nicky Silver so eloquently puts it) some 65 million years ago.

There must be some kind of psychological study about this sort of thing - changes in a child's interests as his environment undergoes certain radical shifts, positive or negative.

Anyway, for one reason or another, fantasy, science fiction, and horror became my primary mode of expression very suddenly, whether in writing or in art. At about this time, I started what I called (at that time) my Alien Sketchbook. I think it was probably my first inklings of world building, because I constructed this entire...hmmm...galaxy would be the best term, in my mind. I was in the sixth grade at the time, and I have no recollection of what I was reading. Stephen King was certainly in there, but in a pre-adolescent sort of way I actually chose what I read based upon page number rather than content. Lugging around a book somewhat larger than my head was a very good way to make people think I was intelligent, or so I thought.

Anyway, the Alien Sketchbook (which still sits in a box somewhere in Mom's garage) was a collection of all the aliens that inhabited my little galaxy at war, doing what they could to survive its peaks and its troughs. I had categorized all of them and listed basic specifications like how tall they were, as though I could build them in a factory. Most of them were omnivorous (except the evil ones - they were all carnivores), and even the flying insects could bear loads that ranged anywhere from a fair-sized building to a small moon. Most were also psionically capable in some way, and any one of them could probably have forced stars to go nova by giving them mean stares. I was very taken with psionic powers at the time.

Anyway, I worked stupendously long hours on my Alien Sketchbook - I don't think I've experienced such jumps in my artistic ability before or since. I honestly think my obsession with that battered five-subject notebook worried my parents a little...particularly when I never let them look through it. And you know what, they probably snuck into my room and looked at it anyway. What an outrageous invasion of my privacy! I am very displeased.

I think in some corner of my mind, I was quite convinced that my galaxy, with all of its cataclysmic wars and demi-deific entities, was very real. It was somewhere out there, lost in the ether of space and time, and even if it didn't exist right then it would certainly come to pass at a future date. And when the aliens landed on Earth some gazillion years in the future, they'd pick up my little Alien Sketchbook and marvel that such a young boy in a nondescript Virginia town could have catalogued them so accurately.

I maintained the Alien Sketchbook for several years. As I grew older and my artistic skill improved, I actually secreted the original five-subject notebook away and replaced it with a black three-ring binder. This was a real beast of a binder, three inches thick with D-rings and very carefully chosen narrow-ruled notebook paper. It also had the approximate mass of a Winnebago, could probably be considered a lethal bludgeoning device in thirty-six states, and made me look like a turtle when hidden in my backpack. A rail-thin, anemic turtle with incredibly geeky gold-rimmed glasses. Is it any wonder middle school sucked so much? Hell, I'd have picked on me, given half a chance.

Hmmm...4:30 am again, and here I am still in the middle of a very long blog with no end in sight. Ah well. My craving for writing is satisfied. Sleep would probably be a good idea.

On blogging for the sake of blogging

Online journals are kind of an oxymoron. Or maybe just the name is an oxymoron. I keep a journal, of sorts - more of a stream of consciousness written work that I do (or at least used to do, before I became a fat lazy Chinese bastard) - that I wouldn't show my evil twin from Dimension X, much less the public. Well, in all fairness, there are a goodly number of things I wouldn't show my evil twin from Dimension X, because in due nature of science fiction he would be plotting my downfall in the most humiliating way possible. It would probably involve gallons of pig blood during the high school prom and force me to unleash the full unbridled might of my psychokinetic powers upon my shallow, derisive classmates. Flee, pitiful doomed mortals! Flee and cower before your doom!

It occurs to me now that a) I'm more likely the evil twin and b) red wine makes me psychotic. As I was saying - I often can't quite decide my mode of communication when writing in an online journal. Part of me believes that nobody reads this crap, and that part is clearly in denial because I can glance to my left and see that my random scribblings have drawn the attention of at least 83 people (or one person 83 times, or some combination thereof). Another part of me believes that I'm writing to an audience that will never actually read what I'm writing, and thus I adopt a certain abstract narrative mode. My audience becomes my ideal listener and takes the form of a bearded old English gentlemen in a very well tailored grey suit and wire-rimmed glasses. He looks terribly interested in whatever I have to say, nods every once in a while, and occasionally says, "Hmmmm..." in a very thoughtful way. While I wouldn't, say, go into perverse sexual fantasies for this gentlemen (how shocking!), I might be willing to share my childhood traumas and complicated relationship with my family.

And part of me just wants to spill, and superego has to slap him upside the head before the deep, dark reaches of my soul gets slopped onto a computer screen.

I digress at this point to say that the journal thingy I used to do is actually called "Morning Pages," if you're familiar with the works of Julia Cameron and her fantastic book "The Right to Write." She is a wonderful writer, Morning Pages are great, and I like banana pudding. The world is a fabulous place, or roughly 5% of its surface area contains fabulous places, and the rest are alternately dens of hedonism, misery, and despair. Humans are some silly bitches.

It is also possible, I find, to switch modes in the middle of writing a particularly long piece. This is especially true when I've consumed a concoction made from fermented grape juice in possibly unwise quantities. For the record, 2004 Fairvalley Pinotage reminds me of mashed paper and vodka. Being a sugar nut, however, might color my perception a bit.

ANYWAY, yes, switching modes in the middle of writing. It creates distinct voices within a given piece of work. Kind of like stitching together a quilt using several different materials, some of which aren't appropriate to quilts at all. Asbestos, kitten's paws, and radium come to mind. While it creates an interesting texture, the resulting furry, radioactive, and carcinogenic hodge-podge inevitably causes a catastrophic breakdown in reader comprehension. The entertainment value may, however, appreciate nicely and make up for the loss of coherence and value.

On friends and friendly advice

Myia and Darien are the bomb. Getting drunk with them is among the most entertaining and endearing experiences to be imagined.

I am also an idiot. A romantic idiot. And I have no idea how to be anything else.

On bitchy, bitchy hope

What do you do when you rationally, realistically realize that something is pretty much hopeless? When your higher brain functions acknowledge something as terribly improbable, when you're mentally prepared to accept that it has a snowflake's chance in hell of succeeding...and yet you keep yearning for it? Or am I talking about the difference between hope and desire? Perhaps they're interchangeable - it's quite difficult to hope for something you don't want, and you can't want something without even the tiniest hope that you might get it. You can certainly acknowledge it as hopeless, you can tell yourself that it simply can't happen...but deep down inside, there's always that tiniest glimmer that says, "Just maybe..."

There is something interesting about the duality of hope. Hope can keep a man going long after he should have long since expired. If it's strong enough, it can be the only thing that keeps him going. Hope can be marvelous, because it means we can go to bed on a dark today wishing for a brighter tomorrow. Because not to hope is to accept something that might otherwise be unacceptable. Hope can support us and keep us going in the face of the worst opposition, as we drag ourselves toward that light so far at the end of the tunnel. Hope believes in change.

But perhaps hope can also be a dark thing, a consuming thing. Hope leads all too easily into obsession. Even if it's not quite that extreme, hope can become the yearning for something that...realistically can't happen. What use is hope if what is hoped for can't occur. What use is dragging yourself through the tunnel when there isn't a light at the end?

Heh. And there is my dualism, in a way, and yet not. There's always a light at the end of the tunnel, somewhere. Maybe not in this one, and maybe you can't see it, but there is always light somewhere. Even in my worst dregs of despair, there's always something, SOMETHING that I can hold onto. Something bigger and brighter than myself, perhaps. Hell, even the knowledge that in the end, the universe goes on.

God, I'm such a drama queen.

I wish Myia were here. I need to talk to her so badly it's painful. 'Cause damn it all to hell, I've done it again.

Okay, I'm abstracting, and I know I'm abstracting. In fact, not only am I abstracting, but I'm also being terribly emo at the same time..and Jesus bloody Christ, some of it is being emo ABOUT abstracting. Do you know that sensation when you step slightly outside yourself and go, "My good man...do you have any idea what you sound like?" And then you kind of just want to grab yourself and shake until a) all your teeth rattle out or b) you get a grip and realize you're a mature adult, not a whiny sixteen year-old. There are mature ways to deal with things, and I actually know what they are.

All things in good time, all things as they develop, and...

You know what? Fuck it. I give myself the right to hope.

On insomnia

I can't...bloody...sleep. Why can't these bloody profound creative thoughts come to me when I'm in a position to do something about them, and not when I have an eight-hour day to look forward to tomorrow. Even if a large enough number of monkeys working for a long enough time can produce Hamlet, my forehead whacking the keyboard every minute for eight hours straight is unlikely to produce a workable web page. Maybe it's because night is so much less...distracting, than the day. I wish being nocturnal was a reasonable mode of existence for a human being in New York City. Come to think of it...it is. Okay, fine - I wish being nocturnal was a reasonable mode of existence for me. I hate walking around half the day like a drone, and when I'm finally feeling up to speed, it's past dinner time. AND WHERE THE HELL HAS MY COPY OF "BACK TO METHUSELAH" GONE?!

I think it's also because more often than not, I'm alone at night. And though I'm not even aware that it's happening, my shields go down. And everything I'm afraid of thinking during the day just flood in. I don't know. It seems like I don't know half the things I'm saying nowadays. Particularly on this online blog. God I'm tired...I wish I could just go to sleep. Instead, I shall post a poem that I wrote a long time ago.

"Mother and Sons"

I am told that life is small,
and I have heard that life is cheap.
A worthless bauble among all
the treasures of the galaxies.
A speck of dust in the great black room.
Against the vast expanse,
not even a curiosity.

I am told we are a whisper, lost
against the tempest of time.
A forgotten word in the dusty library.
When we die, none will remember us,
no one will weep.
We will be as a forgotten memory.

Ah, but if you die, my dearests,
I will weep.
I will weep for the lost songs and
the lost poems, the endless unwritten stories
that will never come to be.
I will grieve for the lost sunsets and
the lost clouds, the great designs
that no one will see.
I will mourn the seas in their fallen seashells,
the unheard sighs of the abandoned trees.

I will weep for wonders left
underdiscovered.
I will lament the starry sky
and the spaces untouched by your curious hands.
I will cry for your vanished lives.

I will weep for the lost worlds,
for the sum of years from all who have lived,
surpasses the life of time.

For that loss, my dearests,
I shall weep.

The sentiment is a mite trite, but I still hold to it. It seems to me particularly true when I look at the great skyscrapers of New York City, gaze at the myriad sparkling lights of these huge structures, knowing each erected with not only the effort of man and machine, but the accumulated knowledge of ten thousand years. Each building contains dozens, hundreds of people, most with at least as many years behind them as I have, and each with a story to tell twenty or more years in the making. Each with a story as different from the other, and also as similar, as the moon is to a fuzzy white peach. Perhaps it's insomnia making me excessively romantic, but when I really get down and think about it, those stories and those lives seem to me of paramount importance...every bit as important as any sun or galaxy of stars. A whole universe, for that matter, seen through the eyes of one person.

On dragons inside a dungeon

Unless you're creative with your dungeons, odds are good that they simply won't fit. And even if they did fit, could a colossal wyrm really take enough advantage of an underground room to benefit from his natural flight? It is, of course, possible to make a truly enormous room.

You know what I'm thinking? I'm thinking about a dragon inside an opera house. Not just any opera house - a HUGE opera house. I'm talking four, five hundred feet to a side, thousands upon thousands of chairs, and enough room for the dragon to fly. I'm talking split-level mezzanine where archers could possibly shoot the dragon before it has the chance to rain fiery destruction upon all the oh-so-expensive velvet chairs. No crowds, mind you - that would just make things difficult, but...I think there should be a chandelier. A huge one, dangling right in the middle of things, so a particularly heroic...ahm...hero could jump from the mezzanine to the chandelier and take swipes at the dragon as it flies underneath. And if the heroes are really clever, they can fiddle with the levers and knobs and try to hit the dragon with pieces of the set. Yeah. That satisfies my sense of the unusual.

In a more serious note, I'm kind of pissed off at myself. I know what constitutes a good adventure. I know, essentially, what will entertain my players. I can even recognize signs that someone isn't enjoying a game. Why, then, can't I seem to do anything about it? My success rate in running a smooth, really enjoyable game seems to hover between 40-50%, and that's frankly just not good enough. I want all of my players to be enjoying themselves, dammit, not just two or three at a time. Why oh why can't I seem to let go of the story in exchange for fun when I need to?

Bah!

On nightmare fuel

The sheer amount of time in between posts here makes me wonder why I even bother keeping up a blog. I think I post when I want to talk, have no one to talk to, and can talk myself into believing that a) there are people out there listening and b) there is no one out there listening. I love being a walking ball of contradictions.

So...I suck again. And not in a good way. (When was the last time I sucked in a good way, and is there any way to say that without sounding like a slut-man?) It's been, wow, about four months since I graduated from the academy, and have I done anything productive in my intended field of passion? Nope. Not a damn thing. Not a single, blessed, bloody thing. Well, I got my headshots, and I worked - made some money, although not nearly enough to support any sort of healthy lifestyle in New York. Oop. Back up - getting my headshots is actually kind of misleading, because getting my headshots suggests that I...ya know...have headshots. I have digital images of myself that, once committed onto paper, would make lovely headshots. I have no gotten them reproduced, in part because by the time I actually GOT my headshots, I'd already planned to go home for two weeks. In part because reproductions would cost me about three hundred dollars right now, and that's money I don't have. And anything else put onto the credit card is going to be just another nail in the coffin lid.

But that's not the real reason at all, now is it? Let's be honest here - I'm scared. To hell with scared - I'm fucking terrified. It is, for obvious reasons, not a run-around-like-a-headless-chicken sort of terrified...although in a cosmological sense, that's pretty much what I've been doing in the past four months. No - I'm sunk so deeply into doubt it feels like I'm walking around staring at myself, judging, and constantly finding myself wanting. I feel like that quote in Stigmata, as my oftentimes flawed memory presents to me, "An actor must have faith; you do nothing but doubt."

So I'm getting off my ass tomorrow. To hell with it - I'm slapping the money on the card (one of the many cards), and high interest be damned. I'm sick of lying around thinking about what I need to do for my future, instead of actually doing it. It's funny. All I have to do is think about what Myia would say to me. She would kick my ass so hard I might as well give up homosexuality. Well, she's coming back to New York pretty soon, and I'm damn well going to have something positive about myself to say to her for once.