what did i do? not much, but what did he do? quite a lot, while younger, too - but he stood on the shoulders of giants, he said
and me, for my part... i did a little... i didn't shuffle half-heartedly through every second of my life - i wasn't stillborn and stagnant, but i hit a stalemate early, and proceeded to play drinking games with the ticking chess clock, like i had all the time in the world, for re-arranging letters in words - but i had an arc, and grew, to a point - maybe not for the better and i didn't grow forever - the last movement was a trite ritardando
but there were some funny places, wry times, when i made unique use of things that had been made available to me, after a long road paved with good intentions, maybe the road to hell, but a long one with good intentions, of female persuasion bearing the brunt of procreation and males dissuaded from suicide by the promise of yet another one of these exhaustively trashed generations, making francis cobain's pre-hab clinic graduation ceremony, taking the hit for me, so i never had to be a dad, but you had to get your diploma, and it worked out great for me, so you could service my power line when the storm knocked it down, that allowed me to type a line i thought was witty, which sadly became number three in my top ten points of life and legacy, most of them tied to technology and a rarefied cultural circumstance in a vertex of geography and history's graphical overlay (it won't interpolate cause the function's fucked)
but one of them was tied to a woman. . . which i never thought was my game - but i was still human, getting my pantlegs snagged on poorly plastered-over juttings of antique pipe-maze from evolution's sub-basement boiler rooms that power this program the master mainframe's running for azathoth's avatar, he played my life like a first-person slacker - shiva watched the show for a token respawn cycle, yawned, "slipped" on the power bar, stubbed her toe and cursed at azathoth, made Him feel like a dog, a pavlovian one - and i described it like that, half-grinning, half-chagrined, having taken pride in a little thing from a big ugly thing, clinging to the outcropping, wanting to live there, being bound to self more than anything else, let alone everything else
but sometimes
i can take pride in "everything else" too, and feel a part of that
and sometimes
i can feel shame in "everything else" too, but the shame never extends to exactly everything because when the shame comes, it only exists by contrast with something that must exist somewhere, someone so good as to enable all this shit we do in our sprawling, spiritually-destitute decadence where a little newton goes a long way, yes, a moon rocket is decadent, but not in the same way as Husky Energy's office suite on the 6th floor of the Scotiabank Building on Water Street, where three computer monitors per cubicle are the average (mind you, not the median) and i scavenge USB peripherals from their trash bins, cause i'm part of the cleaning staff, i have that access, it's what i do for a living, it's where this life has led me, not the path of least resistance, i put up token resistance at times, once going so far as learning how to drive and be another self-righteous road-raging member of this motor society, which can be convenient, i'll admit, but oh, the agony of learning even basic things, in this society, and i basked in pyrrhic wins by cryptic victory laps, but when you chalk it up, i didn't resist much, and consequently, no real victory over anything
and on this office chalkboard over here are mathematical equations that relate to drilling pressure, i'm guessing, i don't understand them but they look impressive, he's not just some contemptible business drone, he's an engineer, with practical skills and brainpower profitably entwined, and i'm cleaning for an oil company, apparently i have enough left to lose to be willing to collaborate with corporations that are saving for fallout shelters for their families, cause they love their families, but not their janitors, cause their janitors don't smile - well, the dominican does and the philippinos do sometimes, but the canadian one, he's an insolent white little weasel, and i can't blame them, i wouldn't like me either, being all non-smiley, but maybe they'll take the dominican, the nice bible-reading man (who suffered enough already for our sins, you can tell by his thick accent) with them into their oil crash calamity buffer drome, and sure there'll be hordes who won't get in, the kind that never win contests, the born-losers rockin' the free world at a one-man pabst party, 'twas ever thus, the BPers would say, but they're all azathoth's figurines left out in the woods at night, right?
so when i feel the kind of shame that can extend far beyond myself, it always stops short of the idea of this one person, the good son that keeps the family together, just barely, hanging by a thread while eleven other siblings drink and bet themselves and their children to ruin, but that good son somehow pulls a christmas out of his ass every year, he saves christmas, and christmas saves the family one slice of wholesome happiness a year, and it's all because of someone like him, the only one among us sinners (incidentally correlating to the jesus function via vertices) [or the adopted daughter of the lesbian god], set against the wastes of innocent material, wand cruel dynamics, and gratuitous grace of nerve reprieve in the irony of oceanic desire, bottomless, and the irony of damaged nerves, benevolence, in the global sandbar summer of love, so shallow everywhere so bring your boat over to my bay, we'll have another sandbar party over my way, and then when we're done having that, we'll party back at your barsand
once i admired the mandible mechanics of a social insect, though i doubted it was a point of pride for that bug, as a being - but maybe it was, and if it was, then i could relate to its pride when i've thought that for all the lowness of me in this era, with opportunities undreamed of by an unbroken chain of ancestral genetic iteration stretching back through prehistoric haze, and the chasm spanning what i could do - and what i did do (sweet fuck all) with this situation... there's still some personal trivia that makes my head swell stupidly at stupid times and i get those stupid waves of nausea in feeling it, and love/hate the feeling - but it's true that i can type with speed and precision on a computer keyboard - which is a neat trick, i don't see anything outside my species pulling that off - and there are even some in my species who covet that ability - and oh how cute it is when anyone, ever, looks up to me for anything, awhahahaww
and i can read, too, how 'bout that? and i can talk, and walk - this nerve clump in my skull cage (the most densely ramified matter in the universe, some say) is some sophisticated shit, man - and if you think i'm something, you're barely scratching the surface - just check out this guy newton for example, he's got a derived unit of measurement named after him - he got it through higher level functioning than i could ever be bothered with - not that i ever had the option to function at that level through sufficient bother - but i did have the option to at least dig how you derive a newton, and i couldn't be bothered with that either - it would have caused intolerable bother, for everyone - i would have graduated high school and gone on to a university shooting - it wouldn't be worth it - i would have killed the brainiac who would have gone on to figure out cold fusion - and all for the brains to figure out how to build a fertilizer bomb
but i'm kinda proud that newton's a human and i'm one too - i mean, we don't come from the same family or anything, but our DNA maps aren't that different - and hey, we even speak the same language, just different-era dialects - and we can both read, so we're practically blood brothers - even though we'd probably hate each other if we got together in person, and i'd probably make him ashamed to be human - and i'd still feel grudging pride that he's human, pride by osmosis, but i'd hate the way the universe works that makes these people who make me ashamed to be me...
...but it's not all about me
so it turns out that pride is inversely proportional to ego, a nice contrarian twist - so why do i get so gloomy so often, when there's bliss in ego-less immortality, so close to the taking, with just a slip of the identkey and a slip off the self?!
in those little moments of joggling, the door seems to open for a second and what i normally feel as wishful thinking, and a gyp of an afterlife, is actually the REAL DEAL, a kind of big picture peace and tranquility with bite: the bite of the first worm through the lead-lined coffin buffet - when i'm no longer the embalmed corpse in the coffin but the worm excelling at being the worm - ah, what i used to think of as enlightenment, now ringing like a brain aneurysm, an artifact of over-zealous cells i so enjoyed a decade ago - the zeal is gone, salvation is late, or way too early, so i'll continue adding projects to my daytimer, some to do today, some to do tomorrow, some to do in a month, some to do maybe soon maybe later maybe never
