On dark and spiraling staircases

Feeling odd tonight, peculiar, strange, and a whole host of other synonyms I can't seem to bring forth from the tip of my tongue, and I'm wondering whether or not I could write a successful blog post in a stream of consciousness format without really worrying too much about it. Somehow, I find myself doubtful, since I find myself going back and correcting the odd thing periodically anyway. This anal tendency of mine is going to have to be addressed at some point. I was talking to Jonny tonight about myself, which is hardly unusual, and I made a realization which was less a realization as a decision to speak about something I've known for a while but which I convinced myself was an unknown factor, because there are so many things that lie buried and which should remain buried but for the excavation and digging that alcohol seems to bring. I should seriously just stop drinking. There are no weapons in this world, just shields of varying adequacy. I suppose I could feel clever, since I didn't see that anywhere - yup, I made that one up all on my own, and I'm going to claim it as a favorite quote of mine, since it's a little bit of insight and brilliance that I can call completely my own. Although we do have to ask whether or not anything is our own, in this world where the same archetypes and ideas repeat endlessly under the sun. Is that even accurate, under the sun? Some days I feel like I'm standing at the edge of a precipice, at the edge of that big spiral staircase that goes down past the rim of the earth, and I wonder whether it would necessarily be such a bad thing to fall. Maybe sleeping would be a better term for it. I'm tired, often tired, tired of expending the effort, tired of trying, tired of trying to balance an equation that ultimately has no balance, it seems, and I'm tired of trying to keep up a happy face in the face of that inequality. That's the definition of absurdity, when you look black eternity full in the face and realize that you don't have anything witty left to say. I'm wandering around in the dark, in a dark vast room with arches and hallways as tall as the world and what little light I have can't illuminate the walls. The light is swallowed, consumed by an endless shadow, darkness, teneboration so piercing that a halogen bulb, football lights, the electric power of cities, atomic bombs, the solar heat of fusion couldn't be more than a tiny blip in the vastness of an eternity that stretches on forever and ever and ever and then you discover you're the only thing in the darkness, which isn't strictly true. You stand at the edge of the precipice because you realize that you aren't alone. You can turn back at any time, walk away at any time, except that if you turn around you do realize that someone else something else is in the darkness with you, and that's the real horror - the fact that there is an other when before there was only the perfect solitude, and in fact that's not the true horror at all. The true horror is that if you turn around and walk away from the precipice that would mean facing the other, and realizing that the other is just you. Only you. No more masks, no more smiling faces for other people's benefit, just the core of you that you can't face or identify or discuss because it burns a hole in your gaze. That's why we really don't and can't be alone. That's actually why humans are such social creatures, because when we stand in the dark all by ourselves we have nobody but ourselves to keep us company, and only then do we realize what flawed creatures we actually are. I see a jagged crack splitting my figure from head to toe, and it's not light that spills forth but an oily blackness that seems to stain even the emptiness a hollow shade and I don't know what light can penetrate it. Can you light up the galaxy with such a sad little glow? Is it pain, jealousy, rage, envy, the whole assortment of seven that assembles as they pour out of the cracks, and is identifying them enough to banish them away into some place where the light can wash over them and heal them into something that might be constructive, something that might redeem everything. Redeem. Implacable, sequestered, untouchable, unbreakable, irredeemable, damned. Thinking about that a great deal, and wondering whether or not my pendulum has swung too far in the other direction, and whether I'm actually choosing between a pit and some red-hot walls. Is there a choice there? I think we can see the choice and it doesn't seem to be much at all, except that as Poe indicated even in the darkness of an unfathomable abyss there is hope, always hope, in others? Can yourself be someone else? Can you rescue yourself, stand outside yourself, look into yourself and forgive yourself the errors and thereby heal the tears that wash down from a place too far into the past for nearsighted eyes to see? Who can invest in you the authority to forgive yourself your own crimes and redeem you into the light? Do I even know what I'm talking about, because I think I'm ultimately rambling phrases that sound insightful but ultimately is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. That's the thing. Nothing. Sound and fury are ultimately shields as well. There are no weapons. There is no fight, really. There's only a withdraw with as much defense as you can muster before the blank walls of forever push you into a spot that might as well be emptiness, nothingness, vacancy. Against a backdrop of infinity what can you do but dwindle into a point of ultimate meaninglessness? Or is there synergy? Is it synergistic, the action of having one plus one? Simple mathematics combined with considerably more complex motions of the heart (and soul, if such a thing could ever be defined in a way that has any meaning whatsoever) to fill an infinite void with a light that can best be described as empyrean. God exists nowhere but within a human soul, if such a thing exists, and if it doesn't then perhaps God doesn't exist either, and we really have nothing to shield us against that vast and lonely nothingness. Nothing against nothing. It seems apt, in its own way.

I said that I would shine by my own light, but like Lucifer I've been unhappy because I desire things that cannot be. Desire is for what you can't have. The need for what's readily available is just greed. It seems you're destined to be either unhappy or greedy. Covetous. Those aren't quite the same word. Greed doesn't seem to be such a bad thing when compared to an eternity wanting something always out of your reach. I have no stomach for Sisyphean tasks, but the alternative seems, according to C. S. Lewis, to be damnation. What does that even MEAN?

I really need to stop drinking, and to stop reading fucked up love stories that take place in haunted spatial distortions inhabited by eldritch abominations.