Lots of noise in my head lately, wanting out but refusing to let me let it out. At times, it feels a bit like some malevolent force scraping at the paper-thin membranes in my mind, maybe testing the prison walls, maybe just reminding me it’s still there.
Ah, the joys of mental illness.
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
― Alice in Wonderland
Some days, this is an accurate sonic representation of the inside of my head.
Also, it entertains me to pieces when technical metal drummers look so bored.
It comes in cycles. Each cycle has a beginning and an ending, interchangeable. When you begin a new relationship, you end a period of solitude. When you end a new relationship, you begin a new time alone, with all the good and bad that accompanies it.
Without those endings — and, importantly, honest and open self-exploration — the next beginning is doomed. And you can find yourself trapped in a loop, endlessly repeating the same patterns and endings and beginnings and endings. Well, endlessly, until you shed your human form and hitch a ride to the alien overlords on Comet Halley…
Imagine a slice of a video — like the screenshot above, for instance. It’s a picture, right? Video is simply a string of still two-dimensional images (with the addition, in our age, of audio) (try really hard to image a still-capture — a two dimensional version — of audio) (sorry for the migraine). Video is a three-dimensional thing — width, height, and time. Life is just that with depth added. (quick — imagine a three-dimensional slice of your life, removing time, leaving a frozen snapshot, like a landscape that you are trapped in)
The nature of time is debated over and over, whether its singular ‘direction’ is real or just a by-product of the way we perceive things. But if we somehow found a way to navigate, temporally — would you? Would you try to experience things backward, maybe? Relive sections of your experienced life? Fast forward past bad times?
What if your entire life and all its experiences were laid out in front of you, birth to death? What if it turns out that everything in between is terrible misery, with not a moment of hope or release?
If you knew that every relationship you were ever in would end, no matter how awesome parts of the filler would make you feel, would you instead choose to live a life alone?
Would you sacrifice the good to avoid the bad?
It’s pointless, but I keep at it nonetheless.
How do you know that something feels good without ever having experienced pain?
Look, on a long enough time scale, the survival rate of literally everything drops to zero (sorry, First Law of Thermodynamics). It ultimately doesn’t matter (unless we figure out how to experience time differently, in which case, nothing will matter either, because we’ll all just be living our own personally selected virtual realities).
And if there are infinite parallel universes, with an infinite number born every passing nanosecond, then all this starts to get really weird, really fast.
See why I drink?
(I often wonder how insane — or worse, intellectually deluded — leaving my thoughts in public like this makes me seem…)