Mi: Paranoia Mentation

  After I finish playing for the night I find myself rooted to my chair, staring at a glaringly bright computer screen. The Internet is a trap for the needy and foolish. Filled with people hungry for information and validation. The former can always be found. The latter is a fantasy.

I want to write. I want to put to record the endless ideas that have been floating around in my head, but nothing is good enough. Nothing has ever been good enough.

 

 

 The Internet is a beast. You are connected to everyone the way food is connected to an animal as it eats. Your output is eaten, digested, and turned to excrement. If you are lucky, something will get caught in the teeth long enough for the sour, half rotted remains to be tasted and enjoyed again when they are cleaned. There are few things that we digest that we remember the taste of long after.

 I reach out to the faceless void as a gambler reaches for lady luck with dollar lottery tickets. I only continue to try because sometimes, like a gambler, I am tempted by a small victory. A person treats my output as a positive. A dollar win. I get back in self esteem the amount I lost in humiliation for bearing witness to my own irrational nature. Sometimes it's two dollars, three, but you spend a dollar every time you play. It's never enough to keep you out of the negatives. The lottery isn't in the business of giving away money after all.

 I have an addiction to maintain. I'm addicted to being understood. I'm addicted to attention.

 I stare at the screen, in an insufferable mopey mood, trying to think about what I can write that someone might care about.

 I just want to help people understand. Help them solve problems. Help them parse out the meaning of existence, one stupid detail at a time. In multiplayer games I'm a team player…despite never being on a team. I've never been in a clan, a guild, a loose circle of friends who play regularly. Yet every time I play I want to find a way to save every member of my team.

 We're all ensnared by the same foolish hobbies and patterns yet I can't talk to them outside of trying to look intelligent. Trying to impart wisdom.

I don't want to seem desperate for understanding, for friends. If you are desperate then that is a weakness. The weak get nothing. If I seem to be too human then no one will trust that what I am trying to say has authority. I have to seem above it all and inhumanly competent otherwise I can't be trusted because of bias or insanity. It's politics.

 …Fuck them all. Even the nice ones. The world is a trap for those who take it seriously because of these people. If you genuinely care then you are foolish for caring about something that is 'just for fun'. They believe everything will save itself, or some governing body will come fix it. Real change only happens when people stop and take a look at the irrational fool in the back. She's been asking for change for years but we only noticed just long enough to take one weak kneed step forward.

 The Internet is a series of fools who think they are intelligent because they have hobbies that require pushing a power button. Irreverence and sarcasm masks the fact that we all think we have nothing to talk about. We are all afraid that everything that is important to us will pass out of human history without a whimper of complaint. In refusing to respect ourselves we guarantee that outcome.

 I won't go quietly like them, though. I have plenty to talk about and I want to say it all. I want them to understand this and join me in my heroic fight so I don't have to hate them.

 I will tell them “You're all fooling yourselves. This world has more purpose then you could ever imagine.”

 Our culture, the media we digest, is the fulcrum our society pivots on. It shapes the expectations of the next generation and hold the heart strings of the current one. All your bald space marines, your reality shows and pop music. It's poison to a person's sympathy. Empty calories that fill your belly but provide no real nourishment. The food and the shit are almost the same chemical composition.

 Our generation was poisoned by utopia. Heroes and hopes and dreams that proved impractical. We vomited out our frustration and turned into cynical and selfish people to forget about the crushing disappointment. Santa isn't real. Neither is batman. You're a tool of a society that hates you and you'll work a dead end job and save no one with your pure heart.

 The next generation though….is much worse off. Reality shows, trash TV, sitcoms with bitter humor that place hurtful exclamation points on people's differences rather then celebrating them. Even our comic books, the home of our enduring heroes, seem to celebrate death and loss. Soon our children will cheer at everything we fear. They will take our cynical ways and fashion a hell for themselves. We overdosed on hope, and are giving too little of it to our children. Someone has to tell everyone. Someone has to gain the credibility needed to say the absolute truth.

 The things you all are amusing yourselves with are shit. Too much hope or not enough. No balance to the world. We have to maintain realistic expectations in our culture, as we cannot satisfy everyone, but we must preserve honor and sympathy, as rewarding only self interest has divided us into selfish haves and bitter have nots.

 In refusing to tackle the hard issues with a realistic but understanding nature, our culture is rewarding mediocrity and profiteering. There is nothing more destructive to the human condition then popular mediocrity. It breeds more of it's ilk, choking out the exceptional. They are not needed when everything they used to do can be mass produced.

I…..need to sleep. I take these things so personally. Am I losing it or am I really claiming to be a crusader? Why do I feel like I have to tell all these faceless people everything about my experiences, about how I digest and excrete the filth that our culture feeds to me, when I doubt anyone really sees what I see?

 It just doesn't feel right to remain silent.

Doesn't feel right at all.

Mi's current mood: Gloomy
Currently listening to:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kICNZvM2his&feature=related