Online Confessional.

My Mother would just die if she knew one one-hundredth of what I write on here.

Of course she would. She's old-school like that, but it's also because she has a lot she'd rather stayed hidden. We differ in this way. I love my Mother, and for the most part, I do what she says. I know I'm her favourite, out of all my siblings, but even so I haven't seen her in years, and for all I know, may never see her again. She's fine with this. We are very private people. But I like to confess, and this would hurt her, because she doesn't want the ghosts of our collective past to haunt our respective futures.

So I come to this place.

Not so often any more, but I do when I can. It's different now. Now that I've verbally puked all over my old 'fans', and my regular readers are all wet over whoever is new on 'the internot', I can kinda just do whatever the hell I like, and not try to be entertaining. Like a fresh diaper, just waiting for the inevitable.
I don't want to cry about my childhood. It was so long ago, I can barely even remember last week any more. Besides, I'm over it. All of it. I'm sure my love/hate relationship with myself was spawned from this time, but I see it as it's own entity, rooted in behaviourism as it may be.

I don't want to cry about anything really. So I don't. That's one of the ultra-awesome and mega most massive things about being all growed up. You don't have to cry if you don't want to. I doubt I could , even if I wanted to though, which is one of the bad things.

I'm not sure if it's me, or if it's societal, but I just feel so disconnected from everything. Politics...blah. The environment...blah. This war or that war...blah blah blah. I used to feel a lot when I was a kid. We all did, didn't we? But I'm not so sure the kids today feel much of anything, not the ones I see anyway. And the things they do feel are normally hormone-driven big mountains of nothing. Kids stuff. You know, like politics, war, and the environment. I guess it makes sense. You do anything for long enough, and you'll develop callouses. I just didn't know it worked emotionally also.

When I think about who I used to be, I'm practically unrecognisable (apart from the fact I appear to never age). I used to talk all the time, I used to have endless crises, I used to need to be around people. I kinda feel like I'm just waiting to die, because I've pretty much given up. I still do things, of course, and do them to the best of my abilities. I just don't hold out any hope of it meaning anything, or being big and/or shiny.

I think the main component of change was when i realised I don't give a crap what anyone else thinks about me or what I do/think/am. Good or bad, I really don't care, because I don't respect you. I'm not trying to be nasty here, just honest. Why honesty when I don't respect you? I really don't know why, but that's me. I don't want to get in anyones face about anything, I don't want to offend or upset anyone. But I don't respect anyone, and I want to be truthful about that. It's more to do with humanity itself, not individual humans.
I like some people right now. I think they're pretty amazing in a lot of ways. Some people in the world are so amazing I can't think of a single thing I don't like about them. And I'd like to keep it this way. But experience has shown that if I get close enough, or spend enough time around them, I will find something sooner or later, be it an opinion, or an act, and that one thing will make me lose all respect for them, and we will part the ways.

So as you can see. my respect is nothing much to strive for. It's fickle, like the rest of me.

When you don't like people (and I include myself loosely in this category), and you don't care what they think, suddenly your whole life's purpose to play music and write words for them loses its juice. So you stop.

You still play and write of course, but this time it's for 'you', and not 'them', and there will never be any payoff at all, let alone a big break or some other youthful ideal that used to act as an intense and neverending fuel. You'll just record a bunch of stuff, and save it to your computer, and you'll write a lot of stuff, and save it to your computer, and you'll die, and whoever finds your antiquated G4 in ten years from now, when going through your belongings on behalf of the landlord, will smash it for fun, and there's your life's work gone right there, forever, just like all of us and all our lives collective works, and every trace of both humanity and the planet we're riding on, when the sun one day swallows it all whole.

"Paging Dr Nietzsche, we have one of yours in the laundry room."

It sounds very negative I know. But the difference between what I'm writing, and being a Smiths fan, is that it's only negative because we generally try to look on the brighter side of life, not because it's wrong, because clearly it isn't. I do like the Smiths though. Let's just be clear about that.

I think I finally know myself now. I know I don't like myself much, and that I'm incredibly flawed, bordering even on the moronic. But I'm ok with that also. I have finally accepted the reason I am perpetually stumped by the people around me, is because as much as I have tried to kid myself into believing I'm not so different, I am. I am so different, that when they see me walking down the street, they have not only no understanding of why I would be so different to them, but they also couldn't care less if you paid them. I am about as far removed from the cheeky swaggering Aussie bloke stereotype as you can get. Somewhat predictably, I'm cool with this also.

I speak quite softly, i don't make a lot of noise or commotion. I am quite a composed sort of person. I am not the life of the party. I like to stand or sit in a corner and watch proceedings, until I've seen about all the drunken out-of-it-ness that I can handle, and then I leave. People think I love myself because of the way I look and walk around, so I guess I must have some kind of arrogant air about me. I think it says more about the observers personally, that's their deal, so to speak. Some people who know me from online are shocked and disarmed when they meet me, because I am generally very pleasant and smile a lot. Most people also, and somewhat erroneously assume this means I care. Not so. I'm just being nice, for the sake of it. I like manners. At the other end of the scale, I like fighting too, and even half an excuse is sufficient, depending on my mood. As I said, I'm far from perfect, and I know it. I know the kinds of people who bully are in desperate need of understanding and some kind of compassionate counselling and help, and so it makes me a rotten and selfish human being to go after them as I do. It makes me worse than them, because I can't hide behind ignorance. And I'm not even remotely likely to apologise for it. So there you go.

This is sounding quite noir. I didn't know what I was going to write when I turned on the computer. I didn't know this was coming.

I guess, in the same way I mentioned developing emotional callouses a few paragraphs earlier, that it works for anything. Stare at the sun, and you'll go blind (apparently). I used to do it for days when I was a kid, and my eyesight is still perfect. But like I said, I'm different. People need ever-changing stimulus in order to feel like life is working. Being comfortable all the time feels horrible. Getting mugged could be the best thing to ever happen to you. It might make you feel human. I love adversity. I never used to, but now I love it. When things don't go my way, it adds some spice to the dullness. Gives me something to strive for. I like striving. I don't like existing.

Which brings me back the the top of this vent.

We're all changing, right? Collectively, we're all numbing up. We don't want to know the people on our street. The only people we want to know are the ones that are like us, or are better than us, or can do something for us. We've all subconsciously swallowed this Coke-commercial reality, irrespective of how intelligent we are on paper. We don't consider others, we couldn't give less of a fuck, as long as they don't hurt us. We're a planet of ultra smart dogs. Pack mentality/moderately gregarious. Loyal to more powerful animals. Dangerous when hungry.

We want to hide in our headphones or mobile phone when we're in public, we want to go back to our safe homes and tune into whatever entertains us/defines us the most, and just consume that mass culture for as long as it remains entertaining. We want to hide from each other more than ever before in history, while at the same time we want to show ourselves like never before. We want our photoshopped photos on the internet, we want to construct false realities on our blogs, we want to get ourselves heavily into debt to buy cars we can't afford, to impress all the materialistic people we want to sleep with. Dermatologists, hairdressers, boutique stores, tanning salons, all seeing piles of our money, in an endless quest to look like movie stars.

And by 'we', clearly I mean 'you'. i don't go for any of that. I may be a fuckup, but at least I created my own original malaise.

If I could sit down with God, in front of his computer, and have him pull up just one file for me, it would be this: I would like to see what life would be like if everyone simultaneously just dropped the bullshit and decided to be real, all at the same time. For most people, i think it would be their first time. I know it's a terrible stereotype, but the suburbs are infested with people who have never had an original thought or idea in their whole lives. They have never said/done/been anything but a clone of whatever is cool at the time, through all the time they have in this life. Stereotypes exist for a reason. And it's not only confined to the suburbs, but you know what I mean.

We're programmed from early infancy to respond to physical beauty. It's in our genes. We worship beautiful people. This is awesome if you're beautiful, until you age, and then you have to spend the same money everyone else does trying to recapture the looks you had, and everyone else wants. We also worship rich people, which may also be in our genes. makes sense from a pack mentality. Doesn't make sense from a more evolved perspective though. We go apeshit over these far-flung concepts like 'the economy' and 'cool', that, as much as they are a part of everyones lives, and are all over the world, there is not one physical thing on this entire earth that someone could point at and say definitively, and for all time "That, right there, is the economy/cool." We get ourselves so worked up over the pursuit of sex, over body shapes and physical accoutrements to aid in their discovery/posession, in having wads of paper, or even more strangely, wads of paper that only exist on computer screens. We break our fucking backs trying to get an edge over everyone else in the looks/popularity/cool/sexy stakes, like we never learned a goddamn thing since High School (and we haven't). You could be a molecular biologist every day, but you're still hoping to buy that Lexus. And for what?

So we can end up with some girl that looks like Victoria Silvstedt? So we can fuck her every night, and maybe even talk to her? So we can be seen with her? So a few years later, when your ego and self-esteem have adjusted, you can get bored with her, and want someone else just like her, but with black hair, or who is Japanese? And so we can repeat this process til we die, and call it a life?
I was at a party with Victoria Silvstedt a couple of years ago. She was right next to me, and for the life of me I couldn't think of one thing I wanted to say to her, other than "Do you like your life?". I'd like to ask everybody that question, except there's no way to make them be honest.

At the end of the day, everything seems to boil down to the pursuit of sex. Money = sex. Power = sex. Being hot = sex. I've had so much sex I'm thoroughly bored with it now. It took me way too long to realise it though, to the extent that I am seriously considering sending out apologies to every girl I have slept with for the last 6 years, for just using them, instead of actually having sex with them. I was a lousy lay, because I was basically getting myself off, and not giving anything at all. How could I have not seen that at the time? Incredible, but I didn't. And I bet there are an incredible number of you out there who do exactly the same thing, and don't know it too. Like I said, I'm disconnected. So now I don't go for sex at all. I don't look for it, don't respond to it, don't have it. It's a nice feeling knowing I may have bags under my eyes, and having no reason to worry about it any more. Freedom, at last.

If you've read this far, it's safe to say you're not one of these people. You're someone who thinks, and has opinions, and is searching, not just for mass-media-stimulus, but for a spark of reality. You may totally disagree with everything I have said, and are reading every sentence, just cursing me, and wishing you could smack me in the mouth. I can dig that. I'm jealous you can feel so much. I hope you find an answer, I hope you can break out of this Pavlovian stimulus/response cycle I always go on about, that we call life. I hope you can discover a meaning or a reason behind it all, and that it is positive and brings you happiness, contentment, and above all peace.

If you can do that, please shoot me a line, because I'm heartily sick of not giving a shit.

This is knifey, from 'the internet'.