Outbursts of a Professional Lowlife; Thoughts of a Sober Barfly

By Baethan Balor

I observed no human face other than my own and corresponded with no one this Christmas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Sep 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781663242310

Baethan Balor

An ongoing testament to the human condition, Baethan Balor’s experience and rendition of love through the practice and documentation of his unique metaethical philosophy offers a frontiersman’s perspective into the reasons for why people love each other, the resulting suffering, and the societal implications on a global scale.

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OUTBURSTS

OF A PROFESSIONAL

LOWLIFE;

THOUGHTS OF A

SOBER BARFLY

(YEAR FIVE)

BAETHAN BALOR

OUTBURSTS OF A PROFESSIONAL LOWLIFE;

THOUGHTS OF A SOBER BARFLY (YEAR FIVE)

Copyright © 2022 Baethan Balor.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means,

graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by

any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author

except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

iUniverse

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expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the

views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-6632-4232-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-4231-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022913132

iUniverse rev. date:  09/26/2022

CONTENTS

November

December

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

Dedicated to my Ego, Self, and I.

"Look not mournfully into the past, it comes not back again.

Wisely improve the present, it is thine. Go forth to meet the

shadowy future without fear and with a manly heart."

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Entities are documented to the best of my truth. Errors in spelling,

punctuation, grammar, and syntax are fundamental. The reader is a fool.

NOVEMBER

Friday, November 20th, 2020

3:09 PM

Journals are self-indulgent.

There will be no dissertations, self-effacements, or highfalutin opinions. There will be stories of men and women.

5:35 PM

Every activity I engage in is sexually-oriented despite a revulsion for copulation, for what the act symbolizes, even with due consideration and application of contraceptives: Proliferation of suffering, i.e., antinatalism. To covet another’s flesh without reproductive intent is a puerile ambition, just as one who dies unfettered without direct posterity remains a child their entire life.

I’m already dissertating a highfalutin opinion with a self-effacing consequence. A story, yes… A story:

A man and a woman of nondescript appearance deemed each other to be of worthy value to-

Ah—but fiction is merely an opinion.

I don’t judge people, said a highbrow socially enlightened globalist, But I can already tell this book isn’t worth my time.

Saturday, November 21st, 2020

12:03 AM

Many people don’t think. When I ask, What is your self-assigned meaning in life? and I receive answers such as I don’t have one; I’m just here to chill out; and I don’t understand your question, the immensity of the lack of thought is evident.

Runner-ups: To take care of my family; Don’t die; Drink this beer. I’ve discerned hundreds of life meanings over the past five years, and only one answer, spoken to me by a young Caucasian man in the U.S. Navy separations division, impressed me: To feel the full spectrum of human emotion and to help those I meet to cope with their physical and mental ailments.

At my local gym, I gazed at a poster of the human muscular system on the wall of a cycling room and recalled my time reading Modern Man In Search of a Soul by Carl Jung. I stood before the poster in the same pose represented and saw a simulacrum of myself in the flesh.

Psychology is a weapon disguised as medicine employed on ourselves and others, i.e., a substitution for shamanism. To refrain from preaching my ignorance is difficult; I feel compelled to reiterate my condemnation of applied psychology, though I perform my own microcosmic uncontrolled studies and observations daily, and consume the information published by others concerning the field. To love what you hate.

12:51 AM

The greatest weakness of psychology is that the more one understands their own animalistic behavior in conjunction with learned virtues and shame, the easier the process is of adaptation to the values of a new self-understanding: A creature supersedes the human.

2:34 AM

A creature. I will lay my thoughts bare to this template throughout a gentle, unique moment of anhedonia accompanied by ataraxy.

Sickness pervades me. I experience no emotion except for unyielding indifference. My life is of no value. My respect for others is a mere diddling just as I judge a reader (who judges me) to be a fool. Others are keen to lay bare their proclamations of respect, to shake and hold a hand—pull it close, squeeze…

I wonder what I’ve lost along the way, on the fringe of the American Dream. To dither between the earthly realm of man and the fabrications of my mind presents a presumably eternal dilemma if the cyclic rebirth of life and consciousness is truth.

Considering this is a new book and that this material may one day be heeded by an unfortunate, another introduction is in order:

I have no friends by choice. This moment, I would be content to die a relatively moderate death with equal parts pain and encapsulated life reflection—though this is a digression—yes, so-

I’m a man of no particular quality. 6'1, 168 lbs, predominantly Welsh, Scottish, and White British heritage (Englishman), lean and muscular physique, one-inch blonde hair often styled with a scruffy backward sweep by a modicum of product, faded blue-gray eyes, a face… a face, often deemed handsome by many: A baby-face, though this is my profound meretricious impingement that impairs me with reactions unbecoming of my reticent character compounded with an unorthodox appearance of undeviating black dress clothes, boots, and simple wool jacket, carried with a severe mien wholly removed from North American culture.

I don’t understand people, for our frailties, desires, morality, bestial modes, political schemes, philanthropy, and lust. I never learned to drive a vehicle out of lack of want or need. I’m unemployed and $2,000 in debt—soon to be $4,500 once I purchase a service from my vanity publisher for my previous book. I’m disciplined and prioritize my health by enacting a structured lifestyle to ensure the daily production of my thoughts. Besides this, I read… too much reading, and watch internet videos of human-to-human violence. My only social stimulus is the few members of the gym I attend for nightly two-hour-long strength-training sessions seven days a week, and mobs of drunkards outside the sleaziest dive bar in my city of residence by the parking lot that I pass through on my route back to my second-floor apartment at the nexus of Glens Falls, New York.

Sunday, November 22nd, 2020

12:44 AM

I encountered a thirty-one-year-old Caucasian man named Joshua at the gym. I was once acquainted with Joshua three years ago when I worked at a grocery store as a maintenance associate. Our hour-and-a-half-long conversation revealed a mind of similar disenchantment; this is a common recurrence the more men of my age that I speak to.

Joshua’s self-assigned meaning in life is, "Take it day by day," and he prides himself on his ability to dissimulate.

On my return home from the gym with a load of groceries in my U.S. Navy-issued recruit backpack, I listened to my recording of the conversation. Noteworthy statements:

1.I’ve always been fascinated by people to see me for what they want me to be instead of who I actually am.

2."We all have dark thoughts and if I can pretend to be something to make someone’s day a little better I’ll do it."

3.I’m negative because the world expects you to fail. We’re built into wanting to be selfish.

4."I got to the part of life where I wanted to kill myself and went to get help; it’s really interesting—they put you on pills for anxiety and depression, and the pills—the only thing they do is mess with your brain so you’re not able to access that part of your brain. I got off the pills, told myself like—dude, fuck it. Live your life; life the best way you can until you’re fifty. If you don’t like it, fuckin’ go. I’m thirty-one so it’s almost close to my deadline but I’ll see it through."

Joshua enjoys telling boring and mundane stories about his life with slight alterations to entertain the people he converses with. Slight details impact the meaning.

I said, If you have an opinion that you would like to express then you will change the story just to suit your viewpoint; if you’re telling a story of yourself and you alter details, you may either make yourself [generally] more grandiose or humble.

Joshua said, "It’s a little bit of both."

"In my writing I alter nothing; every banal detail is accounted for in excruciating truth. To lie to myself would render my life’s meaning void. The basis of our between-sets conversation had been ignorant posits and regurgitation of ingested media.

The modern church of psychiatry is a bane to freedom when people are told that their thoughts are not conducive to society. We’re informed that depression and anxiety are unnatural states to be cured rather than contended with. Schizophrenia, bi-polar, borderline, socio/psychopath, obsessive-compulsive, autism, etc., are spectrums of the human condition. Pedagogues at the frontier of psychology preach… No, I refuse to go this route with my thoughts again—to become a (meretricious) pedagogue too; I delude myself. I’m a perpetual kindergartner. To fight the system… why? To scorn psychiatry and mark it as my personal bane is a testament to the insecurity of my psyche. I suppose I want to help. Yes, help others, under the pretense that these words will be read. Who would I help? I don’t know.

Despite the psychological jargon of which I’ve written of to a tiresome degree—and consider writing an incomprehensible book with the sole intent of attempting to dismantle the stranglehold of monetized self-pity with my meritless process of thought, I genuflect before my lord and master who informs me: Google.

"At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."

- Plato’s Phaedrus

This third-hand reminiscence of Socrates causes me to blush from shame; yes, I blush from a dead man’s words: taught to be ashamed of my life’s meaning.

1:46 PM

I wake from my floor, remove my earplugs, listen to the clarity of an American football game watched by two retired marines through my ceiling, and reinsert my earplugs. My studio apartment devoid of furnishings is unheated and dark. The sun has already begun to fade from the day.

Forty-two job applications, three interviews, and no approvals over the last two months. I must utilize a credit card to pay my rent.

Earplugs removed: A crow caws from a nearby park while I type from a windowsill podium facing the brick wall of a library. Commercials and the charged banter of my upstairs neighbor resonate over the muffled hum of traffic from the cities’ hub. Earplugs reinserted. I often feel locked in these moments, where each day is a cyclic repetition of the one previous, with slight alterations of media intake and fluxes of diluted emotion. I resolved to write a short work of fiction from the perspective of a rat this morning, though I only ever produce comedy, and I’m not in a funny mood. This entry is comical enough—my entire life has been; a masquerade of a tragedy, too.

My gratitude is compounded with perplexion. A shower. Refrigerated food. Clean clothes. Three cups of black coffee. Sauerkraut. A steamed vegetable medley omelet with fresh crushed garlic, blueberries, almonds, cacao nibs, spiced with an array of wholesome additives, cooked in a pan of extra virgin olive oil on medium heat… Every morning, undeviating, plentiful in the manner of repetition. The evolutions experienced throughout transitional periods incur new behavior; however, I settle into a regimen immediately, whether I’m homeless, enslaved, well-off, employed, or impoverished. The menial drudge I seek, to liberate me from the constraints of mundane civility which I have chosen, is an absurd neurosis; I enjoy my little screen: My window to the world, bestowed to me by my lord and master.¹

Ode to Obscurantism

Everything is known to me

Except for which I cannot see.

(x8)

10:45 PM

A former lover from Arkansas, Candise, messages me once or twice monthly. I don’t respond. Twenty-two minutes ago, a simple I miss you, was displayed in my email. I suppose I miss her too, only because I’m barren otherwise. Even Pelagia and her vicious antics… Amethyst, the survey vixen. Eliza… Many names and faces of women who no longer exist: transient, amorphous memories. I wonder why women linger in my conscience, not as haunts, wraiths, or banshees, but as geists. Angelina too, with our recent meeting at the bar. A one-night stand with Laurie. Shelly, the other one-night stand who—from what I’ve deduced—unknowingly eloped with sex traffickers and ended up tied to a slab in a dingy basement.

I lapse into recollections and account for mere tender vices. The feminine is precious to me. I respect the feminine—that’s all, no particular woman, though I don’t desire. I’m no provider, stabilizer, or a reliable liar: An illusion of masculinity.

No, I don’t miss any of it.

Candise pines for other men too, and copulates with secondary/tertiary validators while her primary man who provides tangible resources waits for her to approve marriage—the last I knew; I was one of these men. The intent of Candise’s outreach is to test my integrity.

Other women may pine for memories of me, late at night, in their bedrooms, alone, when their current man, or men, wound their vanity. I’ve never met a woman to not have a man in her life, romantic or platonic. The platonic man may be a timid man playing at a ruse until the right time to play romantic intent—the dupe. Some are rapists in-wait. There are fathers, brothers, the cousin of an ex-boyfriend, a celebrity idol obsession, the (quasi) homosexual best friend. Psychiatrists, lawyers, doctors, clergymen, and social workers occupy the thought matrix of masturbation sessions.

However, all of this may be applied to men, though men may masturbate thrice a day to mental pictorials of a forty-four-year-old corpulent female convenience store cashier cocaine addict with two teenage kids and a husband, if she looks at him.

There’s nothing wrong with any of it; I attempt to be comical for my own entertainment, but there’s nothing funny about wanton sex and the proliferation of suffering; it’s a bit dry for me. I enjoy a proper paradox, superb satire, or logical fallacy. Schadenfreude is rinky-dink. My pain entertains me just fine.

Yet, I indulge in videos of human torture, murder, fights, and fatal accidents. I never laugh, cringe, or feel anything remotely standardized. My amygdala activates and I’m reminded of death daily, in a myriad of manifestations. The gore videos enhance my appreciation for my prim, docile, lower-class privileged la-di-da white male existence. Football is gross in comparison.

I’ll never know a solitary woman to love as a friend, for they prefer their mental hermitage akin to my own.

Monday, November 23rd, 2020

5:29 PM

Fiction is a supreme undertaking of a grandiose opinion and I’m a man with nothing profound to think of. E.g.:

A six-inch-long rat emerged from a wall-side drain pipe connected to a Ukrainian tavern alleyway and sniffed the late-evening air moistened by a recent rainstorm. Sprinkles of water continued to fall and spattered onto darkened cobblestones of a four-foot-wide walkway. A large, oblong drop of water landed between a meager patch of shaggy fur between the rat’s eyes.

Unbelievable, thought the rat; therefore, the rat didn’t believe the drop of rain had fallen between its eyes, for the sheer impertinence of nature to enact a will presumably estranged from the rat’s—in the rat’s conception of reality—proved to be a happenstance mistake of an ambivalent god. This really is just bullshit, mulled the rat while remaining motionless, fixed on all four paws with its head downturned at a slight angle towards a deep crack throughout the center of a hundred-and-thirty-nine-year-old mossy stone. What lofty expectations must I design to expect to be spared the misery of this current moment? What ample injustices await me if I were to advance another step into the unknown segues of avenues untraveled? I am mystified by my own inaction. There must be a reason for this feeling which compels me to seek nourishment, whereby I advance out of my sanctuary only to be assaulted with the wrath of-

Another drop of water landed on the rat’s left eye and the rat understood that if it remained poised and resolute with thoughts unconducive to productive life that it would continue to be wetted. The rat rushed forward onto a human-occupied avenue, beheld the irradiance of two satellites and the luminous glow of eight dead stars between a swath of smog separating the terrestrial plane from the occluded celestial expanse, and succumbed to immediate death on being crushed by the downward slam of a boot heel.

A twenty-four-year-old three-hundred and forty-seven lb Caucasian male bank teller lifted his boot from the flattened skull of the rat, muttered, Fucking hell, removed his hat, and scratched his head.

At once, a reader no longer humanizes the rat and instead sympathizes with the misfortune of the bank teller for having been so startled as to be impelled to crush the rat with a pair of boots presumed to be of more worth than the rat’s life of which had been terminated. This, too, is an opinion.

Actually—no, there was no reason for the guy to kill the rat.

If I were the bank teller I probably wouldn’t even notice, and if I did, I’d just walk on past.

I own rats as pets, so…

That’s a snack for later.

I get what you’re saying but to presume that the reader presumes the nondescript pair of boots to be worth more than the rat’s life is a far-fetched notion.

What’s there to sympathize with?

Rat’s skulls aren’t that fragile nor are rats distracted by strictly human accounts of perceptual curiosity.

I humanize with the rat more than with the bank-teller.

The opinions that never were continued to manifest as a product of the postulated universal consciousness, and although the writer thought his original story of the rat were well-enough—despite his dislike of the prose—he plotted to kill the rat for the sheer amusement of it, did so, and proceeded to presume the reaction of a myriad of people oriented with ambiguous upbringing and cultures. This confusion amounted to a mental transference of imagination channeled to a keyboard through the physical act of fingertip keystrokes that produced English characters on a template; however, the thoughts served no purpose other than to convolute and confuse by the time the writer had begun to need to urinate and prepare for a walk to the gym and grocery store; thus, he ended the process with a feeling of unwarranted relief for achieving the illusory state of delusional achievement for what his will had wrought.

10:18 PM

Robert Sapolsky is a research frontiersman of extreme interest to me, for his endgame postulation reasoned with neuroscience is that free will doesn’t exist. This is a paradox, for if God does exist, in whatever metaphysical manifestation, e.g., monism, pantheism, universal thought, etc. (which is impossible for humans to understand let alone comprehend), then existence is a matter of predeterminism, i.e., fate. However, free will may be an intrinsic function (chaos) of predeterminism. To deduce that free will doesn’t exist based solely on neurobiology and that our actions may be accounted for before we are even conceived in the womb… is bold, albeit, moot, for even if this predeterministic theory is true, the knowledge doesn’t benefit humanity in any way; in fact, humanity would be better off ignorant of the answer to this argument as old as the ancients.

An advocate of any theism may counter-posit that God is the determining force, i.e., determinism, and that God has granted—or imbued humans with a free will via a divine determinism—or that consciousness is the God of which we are holistically united, wholly estranged from neurobiology. The brain components and the inherent chemicals studied, from dendrites, to axons, neurons, sodium… What do we understand other than the preliminary substratum of elements we are capable of observing and naming, not to mention atoms, neutrons, and protons?

11:56 PM

When I watch a video of a surgery titled Midfacial Split performed by Dr. C. Rayappa and observe a human visage disjointed and reassembled, I feel the same as when I observe a man’s head pop beneath a 10,000 lb forklift, though I fail to identify what this feeling is in conjunction with latent thoughts of free will, consciousness, microcosmic universes, and the ultimate shallowness of human depth.

Tuesday, November 24th, 2020

1:19 AM

A young woman who works at the grocery store checkout line who often initiates flirtatious interactions with me. I said, What troubles you the most?

The woman said, The reason for my existence.

I paused mid-packing of my groceries and said, I like you.

I like you too!

An impromptu scheme overtook my rationality. I asked the woman to assist me with a question about a kiosk in the vestibule. The woman followed me; I turned to her, stated that I only intended to isolate her from her colleagues, and requested her phone number. The woman declined, thanked me—claiming to be flattered, and stated that she has a boyfriend. However, she continued to express her intellectual interest in me and her unhappiness with life, blushing as women do in their coy manner. I cut the interaction short, departing in positive spirits, and observed the woman observe me in the opaque reflection of the wall window near the automatic doors as I walked out. Come back soon! she called.

I will.

A good woman. I respect fidelity, even if the virtue were the last tattered vestige of morality enacted.

11:18 AM

I’ve lost my reason. Virtue is pretentious. Whether the aforementioned woman copulates with one or one-hundred amounts to nothing. I had been enamored by a notion of romantic love for women in general at the witching hour. This is a testament to loneliness and sexual appetite. Or rather, sexual appetite begets loneliness.

The pretentiousness of virtue fascinates me: A socially cohesive element, i.e., rapport. This manner of thought manifests when the mind resorts to explaining reality when neurobiological precepts occupy the forefront of one’s mental processing. There is no free will, after all; I’m merely a product of my environment, genetics, and upbringing. My crime against humanity for publishing profane anti-humanistic literature is my predetermined fate, God-given or otherwise. I need to be saved from myself.

The reformation of the criminal justice system that Robert Sapolsky—the atheist and baboon watcher—aspires for, in the classical antiquity sense, is the notion that a divine nature exists by the contemplation of justice and virtue.

God is a monkey.

1:34 PM

Hypocrisy permeates all activity. In stillness, there are moments when I listen to the muted wind outside my apartment window, the hum of a fridge, creaks in my ceiling, an offset drip of a kitchen faucet, the rattle of nearby cafe workers emptying garbage into a dumpster, and the distant voices of people… I understand that the people are the most tangible, prominent, and profound. There is an understanding of all that I don’t understand. A jet plane flies overhead. A coffee maker ventilates steam.

Is this insanity? I don’t identify with any of what I’m presumed to be. Everything is makeshift putty. Thoughts are playthings. The material of earth contours to desires. Imitation and hypocrisy. Rejection is crucial: A turning inward of desires, where, and when, one may discern the inadequacies of shame. I wish to be born again, to unlearn the experience of my relatively ephemeral existence—understood superficially—when the reality could be infinite, inexorable existence, governed by laws beyond the horizon of fundamentals assumed known.

What would I be, then? Life is a process of wakeful meditation. I dream of dishwashing and daydream while dishwashing. A feeling of restlessness prompts me to this template, where I may be conceited in prose. If I were a painter, I would create scenes of a painter painting a painter, painting a painter, ad infinitum. If I were a sculptor, I would sculpt a man sculpting a man sculpting a man, until an impossibly small homunculus stood at the dust-covered base, with a micro hammer and chisel in hand. If I were a musician, I’d be silent.

3:24 PM

I went out for a brief walk in the park and joined five homeless men idling on a gazebo. The men presumed me to be a preacher—of some sort. They idled, and spoke casually of nothing. One man attempted to address me with philosophical posits, speaking banalities of truth and image in an attempt to rouse me while I stood and observed their idle activity for twenty minutes. I recorded the conversation, though the final three minutes is the only ignorant excerpt of significance:

A bowed and bent man dressed in beige work boots, ill-fitted blue jeans, an American flag-colored jacket, and a discolored brown ball cap, said to me, Have you had enough?

I said, Enough of what?

"Everything. Life in itself; life is full of adventures. Day by day—everything is an adventure—it’s everything we learn. Either you take it for granted or you take it for life. The man stared at me expectantly. I said nothing. Right? It’s all true, he chortled. I have three PhDs. Do you know what a PhD is?"

Another man seated to my left, on his knees, with his back leaned against the railing of the gazebo, sipped a can of beer, looked up at me, and said, He got ’em all from breaking into houses. They have someone else’s names on ’em.

I have three PhDs, repeated the bowed man.

I said, In what?

Pretty heavy drinker, pretty heavy dick, the man chuckled and addressed the seated man: What’s the other one? The seated man shook his head and crunched a brown paper bag between his hands.

Three minutes elapsed. I observed the moderate bustle of people busy with their business, heads down, sunglasses on faces, facemasks on some. The bowed man surged forward, stopped three feet away from me, outstretched his gloved hand, and shouted, How ya doin’—my name’s Al! Nice to meetcha.

I glanced at Al’s hand, kept my hands at my side, and said, "It’s nice to meet you too, Al."

You Jehova?

… No.

You sure?

"Why do you think I am something?"

Oh—you have to be something. Do you believe in yourself?

I said why do you think I am something?

Everybody is.

The seated man said, You don’t have to be.

I said, We’re just human, and rubbed my hands together for warmth.

Al mimicked my behavior and said, "Everybody is always something. You were born to be something."

So you believe in fate—is that what you’re preaching to me? My voice involuntarily inflected a subtle satirical snidery.

"I don’t believe in faith at all—the only faith is what I have to bring it."

I enunciated, Fate?

"Faith is what I give it!"

"I said fate."

Faith! The man spelled: F-a-i-t-h!

F-a-t-e. I glowered.

The man shrugged, turned from me towards his peers, and said, I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.

I said, "You don’t know what fate is? All right—now I have had enough," and descended the steps of the gazebo back towards my nearby apartment building.

I heard the men mutter behind me, Al’s voice distinguishable among them: Go back to the universe you came from.

5:35 PM

The preliminary discussion between Socrates and Thrasymachus in Plato’s The Republic serves as the basis for the superiority of justice in all human affairs. Socrates’ reliance on analogies, i.e., the musician fine-tuning an instrument with a limit or measure as a direct comparison to a man limiting his realm of exertion in a position of power is faulty, and is also the moment that Thrasymachus (who deems injustice to be superior over justice) quits the argument, yet remains engaged with Socrates as a passive observer humoring a lecturer.

"It was suggested, I believe, that injustice is the stronger and more effective of the two; but now we have seen that justice implies superior character and intelligence, it will not be hard to show that it will also be superior in power to injustice, which implies ignorance and stupidity; that must be obvious to anyone."²

Character and virtue are subjective, irrespective of justice; however, justice is not the highest virtue, truth is. Both justice and reason are dependent on individual motives; therefore, both are faulty, for the two virtues are human affairs.

Justice implies superior character and intelligence, is comical. One who behaves in alignment with justice—the law of the state—a nation—a globalized world, arbitrarily, in every circumstance, is a fool. One would have to be afflicted with the faith in the impossible: a utopia—to be absurd enough to praise justice as the superior route. He who knew nothing supposedly knew justice.

What would Socrates think of an amoral one who doesn’t seek to gain at the expense of others—one who doesn’t believe in an absolute right of moral conduct? Such a person wouldn’t have a seat at the Agora—to be sure, and wouldn’t think to bother with politics or a person like Socrates. No, this person would instead continue aside from the policymakers, far away, with their reason intact and applied to relations with one’s—preferably sparse, company.

But all this implies antisocial behavior and consequently mental illness, yes? Of course. I’ll be mad sophistic, then.

Wednesday, November 25th, 2020

11:47 AM

A man needs work, and this is no work. My mundane resumption of menial labor affords me no greater opportunity in the general workforce than any other man. A work-from-home writing job would inflate my ridiculous screen viewing to gross proportions. I desire a tribe. My life is a sham. My failings sweep over my conscience in the manner a miasma corrupts a drained swamp.

Desolate despair and loneliness undertones my solitary activity. I withhold the power to change my affairs and instead trifle myself with activities such as this documentation and the revision of my previous year—gratuitous reading, of educational inclination and self-indulgence. Exertion of the body, consumption, defecation… nothing changes regarding the functions that serve as a foreground to entropy. I see unhappy workers exchange dialogue in the alleyway outside my window while I sip coffee and am envious of their particular unhappiness. I want to be unhappy like them, with them, and judge them silently while they speak to me, judge them on insignificant details of their character and conduct. I’d speak, and the listener would do the same: Drag on a cigarette, eye me up and down, pause for 0.8 seconds on my boots, check their watch, angle their body away from me while leaning on a rail… Yes. I wouldn’t even attempt conversation; I’ve heard enough of the answers to my absurd philosophical queries and don’t care to establish a rapport via discussions of the weather, a sport of null interest, celebrities, or cultural phenom. Discussions of literature are ostentatious pedantry. "Oh—what do you know about what I know? Ah—you know that too? Ah—yes, yes, yes—lovely. I want to know more! What have you watched?"

And what do I know?—the self-assigned meanings in life of four people I intended to transcribe; however, all four of these people proclaimed a variation of I don’t know, though I know they did know, only, they hadn’t the slightest desire to share this knowledge with a stranger, nor attempted to exert a modicum of effort into the necessary thinking to formulate words for an answer.

Art is a complaint: How things should be, the meaning of things, what we could be. A vision here, a dissertation there; beauty is causal with the severity of censure against humanity.

What is a landscape painting, then, or a few lines scribbled on paper, or a snapshot of a starry sky? I think of these expressions as disingenuous complaints, for the psychological impetus which inspired them. The few strokes of a pencil on paper wrought by a four-year-old is a declaration of boredom. The starry sky: I’d rather be there than where I am. The landscape, too… Sometimes a spade is just a spade, says a philistine; yes, the worst kind of art is merely a spade depicted as a spade. What is being asserted? Why gaze at an inferior depiction of the thing in itself? If art is not a complaint, it is not essential. Sometimes worthless art is just worthless art. Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is the most famous painting globally because it says nothing. Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory, now that’s saying something!—and nothing nice, too.

9:36 PM

Yes—more art complaints:

At the gym for another round of exertion for the sake of greater exertion, I encountered two men and one woman. The self-assigned meaning of life of each was a befuddled iteration of Take care of my family.

On their departure, a young woman in her early twenties with middle-of-the-back-length hair dyed a mix of white, grey, and light blue at the roots, entered the facility. I had encountered this woman yesterday, though I had spoken nothing to her. An hour ago I recorded a conversation I initiated with this woman that exemplifies the current state of affairs between the average man and woman in America:

I said, Hi. What is your self-assigned meaning in life?

The woman said, Um, and chuckled. I have no idea.

"What characteristic do you pride yourself on?

Umm… I’m going to college so, I guess that—a student.

"What troubles you the most?

Umm… I don’t really know, um; I don’t know—I’ve had depression for like most of my life so probably that, but-

Depression?

Yeah.

You mean just being alive?

The woman said, Sure, and laughed.

"This whole… depression and anxiety stigma that’s overtaken this culture—psychiatry… It’s nonsense."

What do you mean?

"It’s like the four humors in times of antiquity, with bloodletting- The woman eyed me with confusion and I could discern nothing else on behalf of the face mask she wore, -and all that. Shamans. Now it’s just the psychological institution that’s only been around since the 1930s. The woman turned from me and began to walk away with a forward slump. I sauntered back to a rowing machine and finalized: … That’s what I mean… it’s a scourge, to everybody."

Now, I understand that my inquiries are invasive of one’s personal inner life, though this nature of my inquiries is only considered such because of the acculturated expectations of normalized American behavior. My actions are devoid of sexual intent, albeit, she is an attractive woman; I’ve nonetheless chosen to siphon my sexual energies into this document and have consequently abided by the current political administration of total human equality. I continued to think of the woman for four minutes while I finished my last two sets of rows and yelled across the gym, Why are you depressed?

What?

Why are you depressed?

I don’t know—I just have been, she giggled.

I held my palms out at my side, grinned behind my face mask, and said, … You don’t know?

"Yeah it’s a chemical imbalance," she said as though I should’ve known, and expelled a vexed single-syllable laugh.

I think that, philosophy-

I don’t care what you think—I, I really don’t. Another expulsion of fake, nervous, annoyed, two-syllable laughter.

Amusedly indignant, I said, "… Oh! … I was just going to suggest, regardless, if you care, that philosophy produces brain chemistry, opposed to the other way around. Perhaps to give you a little bit of—empowerment, for the benefit of your state of mind."

The woman murmured a barely audible, That’s cool, that I didn’t initially hear until I listened to the recording, and showed me a sidelong thumbs up.

We continued our artificial physiological stimulation as the hamsteresque creatures we’ve made ourselves to be, and disengaged from each other.

I contribute to the so-called collective consciousness by inspiring existential self-reflection one question at a time throughout this quiescent lot of banality. Mornings and nights are lived rereading the dialogues of Plato, reading discourses of Robert Sapolsky, and segments of Max Stirner’s The Ego and His Own… Then I engage with those of my immediate gymnasium reality, incapable, as they are, of oration without a sequence of self-doubt riddled with filler-language, e.g., um, uh, but, like—tentativeness, and circumspection now regarded as the not-so-unusual cultural norm.

My intellectual pomposity is intolerable—to me, even; I can hardly bear to record thoughts of my eminent sciolism (Sciolism definition: a person who pretends to be knowledgeable and well informed). Who will endure me but myself? Verily! I roam throughout my sphere of ignorance with useless knowledge imparted by writings of those more intelligent and educated than myself, extricated, as I am, from the higher echelons of scholastics of which I perceive to be a bane of humanity—a veritable scourge to punish the leagues of drones of which I am a part with perpetual notions of progress. One unity. One goal. One understanding.

A mentally ill loser—this is the history obscure critics will ascribe to me. Ah—there’s something heartwarming about self-deprecation—to lower myself to a supine state, whereby I sweep my hands through mounds of feculence akin to a giggling red-faced grade school boy taught the art of the snow angel; this, too, is a complaint: Why couldn’t I have been an angel?; "But angels do exist!; I wish Jesus were alive to tell Santa how good I’ve been this year!"

What? It’s just a snow angel? I concur; angels are the quintessential expression of art, for they are best-endowed to complain.

11:33 PM

I crack my windows to listen to a thirty-nine-degree downpour while playing a binaural beat through my two countertop speakers. The patter of rain against pavement is my natural world. A car shuttles by on a nearby primary city road every thirty seconds to a minute. Tears welled in my eyes and didn’t fall; I don’t know why; I posit brain chemistry and predetermined will.

Thursday, November 26th, 2020

1:30 AM

I read during the half-hour before sleep while reposed on my floor and clenched my teeth in delight on envisioning the italicized text:

"To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written word and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming—like worms when a rock is lifted—under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky."

- Fernando Pessoa’s, The Book of Disquiet

Happy Thanksgiving!

12:55 PM

The American football theme song plays overhead while the two retired marine friends incessantly banter. These two represent the average lower-middle-class mid-forties Caucasian American with military experience. I assume both skipped breakfast, perhaps lunch too, in preparation for gratuitous engorgement.

I’m no sullen skulker; however, to hear the tinkle-twinkle of Christmas-themed commercials through my ceiling followed by intermittent bursts of the return to the game football jingle compels me to insert my earplugs, though I still hear the muffled shouts of vicarious victories and indignant chastisements. The behavior is reminiscent of my father twenty years ago.

1:58 PM

Father rebellion manifests as a thought. In Freudian logic, my behaviors up till now may be deduced from my childhood through adolescence. Mother abandonment is a logical match.

Interpreted by antiquity, I abandon the earth (Gaia) and rebel against God (the divine).

In modern neurophysiology, I had been predetermined to act as I have.

There is never anything worth writing, nor speaking, yet I persist. I’d rebel against and abandon myself if I hadn’t consigned my will to this documentation.

3:26 PM

But, as he forgets earthly interests and is rapt in the divine, the vulgar deem him mad, and rebuke him; they do not see that he is inspired.

- Plato’s Phaedrus

On reading the above excerpt, I consider faking my death, to free myself of the constraints I have imposed on my will. I knew initially what I had chosen upon embarking on this path, only now, five years later, the effects of my labor have marred me with ambivalence. I’d be a fraudulent coward to forsake my self-assigned meaning—my sanctified delusion, and a hypocrite to life itself, and to every being I’ve ever questioned of their own life’s meaning.

In my exaltation of freedom, I’ve lost forever the means to be free.

Friday, November 27th, 2020

6:44 PM

Opportunities avail. I raked leaves for $18/hr. today and have been referred to an attorney that lives down the street from me for potential full-time employment in his office. An assistant manager application for a small chain-retailer has advanced to the second phase.

I inquire of people’s meanings, their pride, and their troubles, never to hear from them again. I’m addressed with silent derision and disdain. Aloofness is my only recourse against the scorn I elicit on myself. No one ever attempts to speak with me, despite their eyes which connect with mine and of their partially averted heads that suggest, I’m here if you desire to speak, for I will acquiesce, but not out of my own volition.

Last night, on my way home from the gym, I stopped at the park at 10:10 PM to scout the homeless that converge on the gazebo for an overnight sleep. There had been only one man huddled on his side, garbed in a thick winter coat on the wooden gazebo floor wetted with puddles of water from a previous nights’ rain. I approached, light-footed, up the three gazebo steps. The man stirred and gaped at me, terror expressed in his widened eyes, expectant. I said, Do you need a place to sleep?

I’m good, said the man, still flat on his side with an upraised head turned in my direction. I frowned and looked out to the quaint city streets. The forty-nine-degree air was tolerable, and the man’s thick coat provided insulation from the rainwater. I wouldn’t trust me either—the manner of which the man had previously witnessed me behave.

I said, All right, nodded, and walked away.

7:07 PM

At the house where I raked, there were other middle-class developments by a lakeside. A matriarch passed with six or seven adolescents in-tow while I stuffed pine needles and leaves into bags. The woman greeted me with a stupendous smile and inquired, How are you?

I addressed her with the countenance of a villain and said, I’m well—how are you?

"Good—thank you."

The children said nothing. I wondered what she preached to the children. The sight of them, grouped close together along the forestry avenue, each of them supporting the other by proximity and immediate misconceived understandings, amused me. I wondered if she spawned all the children herself, or if they were neighborhood affiliates, friends of friends, a cousin or two, a foreign relative. Healthy youth had been the impression, led by an imparter of virtue and education. Two single-digit-aged children hollered and played at the wooden-walled house opposite where I worked. Out back, a man utilized a chainsaw. The children peered around vehicles and shouted, Hi! to me, repeatedly, over ten times, and scampered away. I ignored them, and attempted to recall my childhood mind while I labored: A consciousness contained to a tiny body yet to glean an iota of wisdom from experiences lived. Hi! the voices of a little boy and girl called out to me. I had no interest, and scared them on account of my disinterest.

A lake sparkled between two lakeside adobes. How serene, to be able to spend the evenings and afternoons by the calmness of a lake on a whim from the comfort of one’s home, to be extricated from the immediate space of others, separated by only a wall. A moment of envy muddled my concentration with an ephemeral veil of vileness; therefore, I thought, But what ends must they grovel for to attain such a pleasure, surely diluted to a humdrum fancy of no particular interest as the years pass, thereby I restored my inner serenity; what attitude is this?

I wouldn’t want a lakeside adobe, or anything extravagant that would bind me with desire to a particular settlement, so why did I linger for a minute with my gaze fixed on the subtle undulations of the scintillating evening water? I crossed the road at sundown after I finished my work and considered trespassing on private property, to dip my hands in the lake, to feel the reservoir… A sentimental moment which I dismissed in favor of reason, and turned back to my employment site to wait for my employer.

Saturday, November 28th, 2020

12:20 AM

The white-haired girl at the gym hates herself in a similar manner as I do myself, only she isn’t aware, or didn’t want to admit the fact to me; instead, she dismissed my thoughts, which is an act of honesty I appreciate. Not often do I encounter blunt malice to mirror my own conduct.

We spent two hours together and apart, again, just us, engaged with strength training, isolated from each other in our personal delusions. The white-haired girl had been cycling prior to my arrival, dressed in a loose-fitted hoodie with the hood pulled over a forward-facing ballcap. I imagine that she spends her nights crying, responding to the coercions of numerous men via text message. I presume this matter due to her excessive phone usage between sets. One may learn a lot from people with my routine questions: Hopes, vanities, ambitions, fears, and shame.

I admit my loneliness; this too, is self-pity, for the benefit of disciplines I’ve chosen. Depression is best summarized as the feeling of loneliness existing simultaneously with an aversion for companionship, i.e., self-hatred/loathing that manifests as misanthropy—regardless of the chemical makeup that serves to explain what is already known by the feeling, the experience, the condition of being human. To know the physiological chemicals to supplant, supplement, or diminish, and to administer techniques to correct abnormal behavior, is a scapegoat from reality—a distraction from truth. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and the notion of soma portends as an inclusive allusion for what is now being prescribed to those intolerant of feeling the full spectrum of human emotion, from the lowest, most base, debilitating depression, by which there is no recourse but to fight or die, to the most exalted pride, disparaged as narcissism, or egoism. Our culture’s resilience—the people, is as fickle as the democracy we uphold.

The authentic crisis of our civilized world is why we hate ourselves and how to resolve it. Progress and productivity is not the answer; it is the problem.

I squat low and shed tears between my knees on behalf of the savage I will never allow myself to be.

1:16 PM

I ascended the stairwell to my apartment twenty minutes ago after being driven to and from the site of yesterday’s rake employment, to finish the job, by an attorney affiliate of the real estate agent. The attorney, Dennis, provided me a business card, a new pair of winter gloves as a kind gesture, and logged me in his contacts as his go-to manual labor man for seniors he composes death wills for.

On my way through my second-floor apartment hall, I encountered a Caucasian male tenant with frazzled grey hair styled in patchy spikes at the hall intersection.

The man said, Hey—are you the guy who lives in the apartment next door?

I said, … What one?

In 208.

Yes.

All right—well do me a favor then and don’t walk around here in the hallway in your underwear—thanks. The man veered past me with an animus sneer expressed on his sunken visage.

How is that a favor?

"What do you—no, well I’m telling you to not walk around in your underwear."

I turned to him and said, Why?

"Because women live here—and it’s a safety hazard to walk around in your bare feet—thanks—have a good day."

Why are you angry?

"Because my wife lives here and you don’t need to be walking around in the hallway in nothing but your underwear!"

Do you work here?

The man folded his arms and said, Why?

My voice boomed: What authority do you have?

"What authority do I—I’m a sixty-six-year-old man that doesn’t take any shit."

I leered at the man, said, Yeah? Fuck you asshole, and continued down the hall.

The man retorted, Yeah, reflexively, and entered the elevator. He took my shit, all right. I haven’t cussed at anyone in the traditional vulgar manner since the age of twenty-two. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to defend my right to be clothed in only underwear in the hall and simultaneously challenge his declaration of authority. I entered my apartment, stripped down to my briefs, and returned to the hallway in search of the man, defiant, instigative, wholly puerile and base in my conduct. A Hispanic woman passed me in the hallway and blushed while I stood and glared at the security camera. The man had gone. I returned to my apartment, brewed a pot of coffee, redressed, reread my lease agreement to ensure the validity of my defense, and stood at my windowsill podium to write of the occurrence.

10:28 PM

I am whatever my ego decrees me to be in retrospect; tonight: "I truly am an idiot."

Two young boys who are now familiar with me at the grocery store checkout line inquired, How is the world today?

I said, I don’t know. The world in my head is all I care about! I addressed both in turn and said, Are you an egotist? The cashier said, Yes; the bagger said, I don’t know.

Therefore, I commented how in this capitalist society, everyone should be an egotist. The cashier said that everyone is an egotist, in a jovial non-combative tone—to which I had no choice to concede—immediately, and postulated that even in socialist countries, the individual ego is the driving force of human affairs, regardless of the social construct. Why I even open my mouth is an abject mystery, and I suffer the internal turmoil of a censorious discourse relayed by my deviant conscience: caustic lambastes, for exposing myself to be the fool I know myself to be.

I said to the cashier, Do you know why Jesus wept? and his posture straightened as though I had struck him with a proverbial fist to the chin; thereby he blinked thrice and said, Umm-

-He wept, I interjected because the cashier could not answer, "… because he had a huge ego… unparalleled, rather."

Yeah—I suppose that’s true, acceded the cashier while the bagger remained silent and ogled me with two bright youthful eyes peering out between a forward-facing brown employee ballcap and standard facemask. A woman at the self-checkout glanced over her shoulder at me while I donned my pack full of groceries—lo!—I imagined the woman’s contentious thoughts: "Everyone shits on Christianity yet this country was founded on its principles."

I said, Ah, don’t mind me, I’m just being ostentatious, and perhaps haughty, to which the cashier assured me that I was fine, even with a slight upbeat chuckle, and thanked me for the stimulating conversation.

I never knew Jesus, I concluded, and walked my route home, where I crossed a parking lot connected to the entrances of four of downtown’s busiest bars the moment 10 PM struck; thus, I witnessed the vermin pour out of their respective cubbies and shout obscenities… screaming… threatening… Yes, the meager masculine creatures, vitalized with alcohol, made for an abhorrent scene. Oh—people, smiling, groping—all these ings of action to describe after-hour drunken parking lot histrionics—as old as the first brew: What is there to write about? I thought to halt and observe the contentious scenes from a nearby shadowed alcove and instead prioritized the prompt refrigeration of my frozen salmon.

Sunday, November 29th, 2020

12:16 AM

Nothing is sacred. There is no modesty to my thoughts. I’m hesitant to acknowledge and admit the profundity of my ignorance.

To love is to lose, said the young girl, Amethyst, who once pursued me. I compound the issue: To speak is to lose.

Yet I write, often of longings for love.

I’m a terrible proofreader yet claim to be proficient in my resume for freelance writing. My neglected skill in mathematics equals that of a schoolboy. Enemy acquisition is a natural talent honed with pleasure. I’m uneducated in practical matters conducive to material success and a dilettante in metaphysical understanding, with a superficial comprehension of many doctrines and paradigms. Life is a paradox—a parody of self-understanding. The words we employ are categorically impounded upon themselves by the constraints of our primitive linguistics. The variations of isms, athies, ists, paired with innumerable prefixes proliferated with slight deviations are a tragedy yet to be accounted for.

I always think of spaceships, and wine, of course, paired with gratuitous copulation. Naked flesh teems with technological inspirations. Intelligence is the word. Everyone is yearning. I’m such a damned fool to persist with this charade. Pitiable tears well in my eyes which I refuse to shed—blinked back, subsumed with the watery majority of my biodegradable vessel. I feel the inexhaustible well of thought.

All of this is boring and melodramatic. My time…

12:02 PM

On my way into the grocery store yesterday, a beautiful middle-aged woman idled outside the entrance with a cart over-filled with products and spoke into a phone, I’ll leave your groceries on your doorstep. You’re not the man I thought you were, and terminated the call. The woman wept and snapped her head up to acknowledge me on my passing. I stared straight forward.

1:53 PM

Australian nature documentaries remind me of life beyond the cavity I live in. A documentary of William Segal and Max Gimblett reminds me of the lifelong scry into the ineffable, and of the cultures I yearn to see firsthand. A video of a mental patient decapitated by a railing from the fall of a 10-story suicide leap prompts an immediate thought: That’s how I want to go. A video of a young woman model being tattooed while masturbating is unfinishable and intolerable due to her vacuous repetition of the word, Yeah, in response to praises by two men of her agreeable personality.

In retrospect, the dialogues of Socrates were no doubt riddled with filler words of the era. For a man to prattle on about the mysticism of life and the inner developments of the so-called soul, error-free, uninhibited, with perfect grammatical oration, is absurd.

3:38 PM

J.S. Bach’s opening chorus of Mit Fried und Freud ich fahr dahin, BWV 125, conducted by Herreweghe, realigns me with my standard of virtue while I edit my last year’s self-assigned meaning and sip black coffee. Pretentiousness be damned. This life is folly.

11:44 PM

What’s even more absurd is that I presume that orations from antiquity couldn’t have been as refined and structured as portrayed. This is due to my daily associations with ignorance, thereby rendering myself ignorant.

The Books of Babel would’ve been a fine title for my expanding documentation, for I’ve constructed my own personal hell in this hyper-intellectual self-engrossed revel in my totalitarian precept: Virtue is pretentious; I live by this simple, extreme, three-word phrase, as dogma.

"Kiss me where it hurts," said a vindictive slut to a chauvinistic baron.

The baron: A profoundly obese, 5'4, thick-rimmed glasses-wearing arbiter of petty squabbles; he said, "Where does it hurt?"

Everywhere, said the woman. You’re dumb as dirt; you pretend to be educated, but you’re crude and uncouth. A fat bastard. Everything you do is against your fellow man. You’re maligned as a cretin by everyone that knows you but you’re too stuck up to notice. You’re a sad little cad with no sensibility in the books of men—real men. You’ve acquired a reputation through sensationalism, yet nobody cares for you, as you’ve betrayed the goodwill of everyone who once loved you. Your viciousness won’t go unpunished. Many men conspire against you who would love to see you dead. You’ll end up in a gutter someday, with no explanation, and nobody will know. You won’t even have a funeral. To burn you would be a trifle. Your body will be tossed into a river. You freely express your disdain and think that people don’t take heed—well they do, and this whole town is genuinely sick of seeing you.

Tell me more, rasped the baron. He pulled on his semi-erect penis and lurched onto the woman’s legs.

Miserable man. What you do is absolute folly. You’re a fool if you think any good will come from your ways. You were once benevolent—I remember; you had a heart of gold. Now… I’ve lost the words… I’ve stated all I needed to.

The baron snorted and said, You speak of specters, and slapped the woman with a black-furred hand.

Monday, November 30th, 2020

3:51 PM

All my life, my conscience has been mediated by a vindictive slut and a chauvinistic baron, i.e., my mother and father. No more. The illusory fantasies of my lucid dreaming, written of, with a flair of fictional drama, as I’ve been producing for the past five years among daily exposition, has served as a revelatory and redemptive well-spring of self-analysis.

There is no reason to condemn my actions up to this point in my life, for my morality