“He who has a why can endure any how”
-Nietzsche

For several years I’ve been trying to formulate a sort of thesis of myself, attempting to sniff out the dominant theme or crucial element which reveals my fundamental essence. Sadly, each wall or barrier of my  personality which can be removed and held up to the light of reason cannot by definition be included as a necessary element of that same personality, for if this object by itself constitutes a part of my fundamental ground there would be no need to transcend it, get beyond it: and most importantly I could not have removed it for examination in the first place. For example, I liken my hand to a moon, even though its orbit is particularly intimate it is not a part of my fundamental essence. I can examine it, and I can remove it and yet I remain. Fallowing this train of thought: one’s truest essence cannot be captured, cannot be solidified, nor can it be taken up as an object and shelved in the dusty cupboards of thought. Think of a piece of paper lying flat atop a table, and you will realize that its very essence is the condition which prevents it from looking back upon itself. “Who am I?” it asks. How shall we help this piece of paper to see itself? We either bring him a mirror or we bend him in half so that one half sees the other. Being a reflection the mirror is a slight distortion of the paper’s nature, and the bent piece only gets to gaze upon itself through the destruction of its nature.

“Who am I?” I ask, and the flesh-clogged moons which surround me answer.

“You are a hand,” says my hand. Yet when it is shattered the arm remaining says, “you are an arm.”

And I say, “Either I am nothing at all, or I am something which cannot be removed.”
Yet when I look at myself each new discovery yields a fresh resentment, for the simple reason that there always seems to be another layer to remove. Perhaps the answer is that I am looking at the wrong things. I am not something to “know”, I am something to “be”.

Perhaps my true fundamental nature is still “primitive”, OF nature, wordless..and still has a home in the world.. Trees, clouds, they hold a beauty which strikes me as “belonging”. They never seem
to feel alienated from the the world, for they constitute it. Maybe this “belonging” is the state of my truest self, a self which is mirrored and perceived within
the orbits which cling to it.

“Envy consists in seeing things never in themselves, but only in their relations. If you desire glory, you may envy Napoleon, but Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexander, I daresay, envied Hercules, who never existed.” -Bertrand Russell

It occurred to me some months ago that not a single person I have ever known could with good faith be described as genuinely happy. For as long as I had been staring into my own mire, I failed to realize this. Like Narcissus who was crippled by the love of his reflected beauty, I was paralyzed in the ripples of a memory which continuously washed ashore the more desperate moments from my past. I searched for the beauty in these memories like someone who stumbles upon a beached whale drying in the life giving sun, and simply to fight the meaninglessness of the scene says to himself, “this is no ordinary death.” And after a while when he has time to put substance into his claim, “this bloody mass is like a ruby lining a halcyon crown.” The point is that I spent my time redeeming and explaining myself to myself by poeticizing a collection of memories. No wonder I couldn’t detect the (perhaps less elaborately digested) unhappiness of everyone around me. But what leads to unhappiness?

I think one of the main factors of unhappiness is resentment of one’s life and the sequential judgment of the world. If one believes that one’s myopic tantrum of a life can be used as a stick to measure the universe against, and then finds the universe lacking (”this world is horrible, why didn’t god….”), the result can be nothing other then misery: because it is the willed assimilation of a life sucking error.

Two weeks after arriving in San Diego I was given a ticket by the ruthlessly moronic trolley police, whose existence I hadn’t even considered as a possibility until then. I was reading, and suddenly a tap on my shoulder alerted me to the presence of a fucking idiot.
“Yes?”
“Trolley ticket please.”
“Hold on,” I said.
“Trolley Ticket?”
“I bought a bus ticket, can’t I use that as a transfer?”
“Get off at the next stop.”
Stalin would have been proud had he been witness the next ten minutes.
The level of alarm directed against this particular crime reminded me of someone using a tornado to weed their garden. They (yes, it takes multiple people to deliver a trolley ticket) explained how they could arrest me if they wanted to, and made sure I got to see their handcuffs, which were packed like two pieces of old toast into the belt of their polyester slacks.
These lifeless, hallow mimes, aping an air of importance in a bizarre attempt to instill grandeur in a situation devoid of reason, used everything at their disposal: sunglasses worn at night, long justice-filled sighs…
It was a pathetic scene. I felt as if I were watching brain damaged hogs scrambling at the tired udder of a spent sow:
You can only milk a situation for so long before it reverses course and…you begin to show unsavory colors to the world.