Recently my brain has come up with a philosophical dilemma that I can’t solve. I know the best solution would be to stop thinking about it. Nevertheless, here it is:

Does the past matter?

By “matter’, I mean does it still have a bearing on the present. Is it still relevant? Are you responsible for your past actions, and do past events have consequences that can’t be dismissed, morally speaking? Can you renounce the past and live in the present without reference or reflection? Does “Now” matter more than yesterday or tomorrow?

If only Now matters, than nothing matters. Because once it’s over, it’s a new Now. And if nothing matters, why go on?

Or, if the past matters, and you have experienced unbearable tragedy or loss, why pretend it’s over and that you can move on? According to Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” 

Going about my daily life, I lack motivation for almost everything, and it’s easy to just decide to go back to bed. Going back to bed isn’t a crime and it’s not fattening. It’s peaceful and comforting. Sometimes, getting up again seems futile but I’m able to take a perverse satisfaction in doing it anyway, just as Camus describes Sisyphus.

Maybe the key for me is to live in the same spirit as Sisyphus. I once told Max that the purpose of life is to withstand irritation. Don’t worry: He was probably nearly thirty and already had his own ideas. Years earlier, he told me he felt like a contraption with its wires exposed. We were talking about the advent of Prozac, and whether it was a good thing or a bad thing to eliminate one’s deep sense of melancholy. What a ridiculous question! If only a drug could do that, without ultimately killing you.

Back to the original dilemma, what are your thoughts? I want to hear them.

*Also, how much would you like to hear Shakespeare done in AAVE? My kingdom for that shit. Seriously. I certainly can’t understand it as written.

1. Admit that everything is horrible and out of control.

2. Accept that no god of anyone’s understanding will step in to fix it. (see historical genocide, natural disasters, Donald Trump.)

3. Turning yourself over to any person or entity will only reduce what’s left of your free will. (see religion, social media, and advertising.)

4. Admit that you are fucked up and that in large part it was your childhood experience that is to blame, along with your genes.

5. Accept your failures and forgive yourself. Ask forgiveness where you deserve it but don’t be surprised if you don’t get it.

6. Look to thinkers you respect for the wisdom you need to keep going. Try Camus, Sartre, Schopenhauer, George Orwell, Doris Lessing, Fran Lebowitz, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, or Hermann Hesse.

7. See a professional if things get too rough.

8. Accept that you have caused harm but that you are human. Try to do your best going forward.

9. Every day, try to think about someone else and try to do one small thing to ease someone’s burden, even a phone call to someone who lives alone.

10. Realize how repetitive the 12 steps of AA are! Fucking hell! Enough guilt already!

11. Continue to think about other people, since reflecting on your flaws is an endless loop created by brain chemistry gone awry.

12. Reach out to others in your despair! They too know that everything is horrible and out of control! Ask for and offer comfort! Look to art when your brain hurts or your heart aches. And have a drink if you feel like it. I’ve just discovered Flaming Margarita’s and they are amazing!

Let me start by telling you how mad I am that I can’t have a pair of limited edition Converse sneakers with little lions on them.

I wish I’d never seen these fucking shoes but unfortunately for me, I subscribe to a couple of fashion sites for cutting edge men’s street-wear. If you recall, I am a gay man in a woman’s body.

A few months ago, one of these sites showed me an overpriced Japanese jacket meant to look like a souvenir jacket from Korea or Vietnam, the kind with embroidered tigers and maps on them. When the jacket sold out, I was mad that I’d passed it up.

So the Converse shoes reminded me of the jacket and even better, they were affordable. But they were sold out everywhere by the time I clicked on the email. The more unattainable they are, the more they promise the key to perfect happiness.

But just a few days earlier, I was horrified to learn that the Rihanna Puma Creepers I already have in black were released in pink. How could this happen without me being notified?? I found out from a girl in the mall who was showing me some cheap make-up, and she must have been amazed that a 62 year old woman wanted those fucking shoes as much as she did, if not more. We bonded in our sense of thwarted desire.

After a tense search of the entire internet, I found a pair on eBay. Problem solved.

But not really. Not at all.

This obsession and longing for material goods is the foundation of our economy but it serves a deeper purpose, for me, anyway.

It’s the ultimate First World Problem, in that it masks other First World Problems that I simply can’t handle.

Those problems are grief and loss. They are persistent like a toothache. I can’t bear the reality of them, and when I can’t distract myself with more superficial problems, I have to take myself to bed. When I take myself to bed, I know I would give anything to not wake up, but just blotting out a few hours usually gets me through the worst of it.

Last year, I became Facebook friends with a guru from Tibet. I liked his wisdom and his sense of humor. So I asked him how to cope with grief. When I told him that I’d lost a son, he replied that mortality was high in Tibet; families are used to losing children.

I felt he was chastising me but perhaps he was merely being factual.

Why was I making a big deal over my loss? Families in Tibet lose a child but still have to worry about typhoons and lack of plumbing and hunger and disease. They expect life to be hard and it is.

The guru directed me to a philosophy than might help to redirect me but like everything else I have tried, it was a hurdle beyond my capacity. Mindfulness, Dialectic Behavior Therapy, Tonglen, support groups, grief studies, Radical Acceptance, nothing matches the force of this unspeakable grief and loss.

I have spent most of my life saving baby teeth, book reports, handmade crafts, mother’s day cards, school photos, birthday party photos, baseball cards, rock collections, and I have lovingly organized them or displayed them.

I have boxes of Christmas ornaments, many hand made by my sons, but no sons to hang them on a tree or to open presents with.

Christmas will pass, so the sense of deprivation will be less acute but it will take a lot of limited edition sneakers to pull me away from the fucking abyss.

In Chennai, India, there is historic flooding, the worst in 100 years. Three million people are without basic services and 269 people have died in this epic disaster. I can’t imagine how desperate these people must feel because I only know First World Problems.

Feeling ambivalent about living is a First World Problem, and I guess I’ll have to wrestle with it in my White Privileged manner, wearing my pink Pumas if they ever show up.

Th other day, my nephew R was visiting and I asked him if he’d seen or heard about Beyonce‘s wacky Met Gala dress. Since R is one of the most culturally literate people I’ve ever met, it was a reasonable question.

His response was to shake his head in dismay and express contempt for the idea that anyone gave a shit about Beyonce’s dress. Why should anyone care about this, he exclaimed.

I considered his question and asked, Why should anyone care about anything?

This is the type of conversation I live for. And R is always up for it.

I asked him if anyone should care about the recent auction of “The Scream,” which set a world record by selling for $119.9 million. He said, Yes, because it reflects the state of the current art market and blah blah blah.

Why is “The Scream” more important to know about than Beyonce’s dress? This is a real question. I think that everything we “care” about is just a distraction from the horror of existence. Any time you find yourself in a life or death situation, you realize the fatuousness of all your preoccupations, of everything going on around you. Your choice of car, your shoes, your blue-ray TV, your favorite band, it’s all a distraction.

Moving away from existentialism, I wonder why The Scream is worth $119.9 million. It’s obviously one of the few paintings that is instantly recognizable by any imbecile. The Scream, the Mona Lisa, and Sunflowers are probably the big three, in terms of iconic paintings, right? And I love The Scream, but only because I know it’s an expression of unversal anguish. If it was called “The Toothache”, would it still be worth all that money?

We like The Scream because our taste is a consequence of our social class. Beyonce’s dress probably strikes my nephew as too crass and lowbrow to merit his interest. He may not know that you can take a course in Beyonce Studies at Rutgers.

I am comfortable with the idea that it’s all bullshit, but it’s my nature to wonder about human behavior, even my own. As I continue to waste my time with Tumblr, I’ve been wondering how I make the distinction between real art and kitsch. I tend to disdain the latter, but I wonder if Kitsch is in the eye of the beholder. I also wonder when I’ll be able to stop distracting myself with Tumblr and TV and start experiencing my actual self again.

Meanwhile, where do you stand on Beyonce’s dress, The Scream, and whether you should give a shit? Thoughts, arguments, insults?

This photo is all I could come up with for a New Year’s gift.

May 2012 be the year you see the dopeness in everything, and not the wackness. xo

“Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics.

You are all stardust.

You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded. Because the elements, the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars. And the only way they could get into your body is if the stars were kind enough to explode.

So forget Jesus. The stars died so you could be here today.”

– Lawrence Krauss

I always enjoy the discovery of a scholarly approach to a silly or lowbrow subject. Remember when Camille Paglia used to write about Madonna?

I had no idea that Black Metal Theory is now a philosophy and field of study complete with international symposia and experts   who say things like this:

We have been told by the living that the idea of a vital world is that of comfort and warmth. [Writer] Dominic Fox assures us that this is not the case. With an unparalleled militant efficiency, Cold World [a book about Black Metal] blackens the lines between poetics and politics, music and negative resistance. It is a haunting sermon from the world of the dead exhorting the living to revolt in the name of a life whose vitality has been disenchanted by coldness and whose sacredness has been profaned by nigredo. Reza Negarestan –  Author of  Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction

God. What the hell is “nigredo,” right? I looked it up and you can, too. But there’s no way that Black Metal Theory can be taken seriously, especially when it’s discussed in dense academic mumbo jumbo of the first oder.   Here is Scott Wilson, a professor of Media and Cultural Studies at Kingston University in London:

Black Metal is clearly a form of environmental writing, but one that could not easily be accommodated into current ecological discourse. Participants seriously considered the idea of melancology both as black ecology, exploring black metal as a geophilosophy of real and psychic spaces (the frozen desert is not so much ‘out there’ but inside you), and as an ethos, looking at black metal as the re-occultation of black blood and bile in rituals of mourning and celebration for the death of God and the extinction of his creation, particularly humanity, under the black sun of melancholy. As such, the symposium connected with a new strain in contemporary philosophy that regards extinction as a speculative opportunity for thought. Black metal resounds from the abyss and it is precisely only in relation to its sonic forces that the question of intervention in the environment arises in the articulation of melancology with ethics. That is, in deciding ‘which way out’ we should take, in deciding with what surpluses to dwell, with what waste, what detritus or decay in a process of unbinding with sonic forces that traverse an earth choking in wealth and death.

Ha! Blah blah blah. What a bunch of fucking wankers. All I know is that Varg Vikernes,   leader of the band Burzum, was released from jail after serving 16 years for killing a guy from Mayhem, a rival band, and burning down some churches.

Now he has a website, http://www.burzum.org, and two new albums. For some reason he hates Black people,    despite all the dark black negredo of his chosen musical genre. He probably needs to study the Theory.

by Charles Baudelaire

This life is a hospital in which each patient is possessed by the desire to change beds.   One wants to suffer in front of the stove and another believes that he will get well near the window.

It always seems to me that I will be better off there where I am not, and this question of moving about is one that I discuss endlessly with my soul

“Tell me, my soul, my poor chilled soul, what would you think about going to live in Lisbon?   It must be warm there, and you’ll be able to soak up the sun like a lizard there.   That city is on the shore; they say that it is built all out of marble, and that the people there have such a hatred of the vegetable, that they tear down all the trees.   There’s a country after your own heart — a landscape made out of light and mineral, and liquid to reflect them!”

My soul does not reply.

“Because you love rest so much, combined with the spectacle of movement, do you want to come and live in Holland, that beatifying land?   Perhaps you will be entertained in that country whose image you have so often admired in museums.   What do you think of Rotterdam, you who love forests of masts and ships anchored at the foot of houses?”

My soul remains mute.

“Does Batavia please you more, perhaps?   There we would find, after all, the European spirit married to tropical beauty.”

Not a word. — Is my soul dead?

Have you then reached such a degree of torpor that you are only happy with your illness?   If that’s the case, let us flee toward lands that are the analogies of Death. — I’ve got it, poor soul!   We’ll pack our bags for Torneo.   Let’s go even further, to the far end of the Baltic.   Even further from life if that is possible: let’s go live at the pole.   There the sun only grazes the earth obliquely, and the slow alternation of light and darkness suppresses variety and augments monotony, that half of nothingness.   There we could take long baths in the shadows, while, to entertain us, the aurora borealis send us from time to time its pink sheaf of sparkling light, like the reflection of fireworks in Hell!”

Finally, my soul explodes, and wisely she shrieks at me: “It doesn’t matter where!   It doesn’t matter where!   As long as it’s out of this world!”

Nearly two years ago, I brought up the subject of antinatalism here, and the arguments that ensued in the comments thread were impassioned, long-winded, and hysterically funny.

I’ve just discovered that the argument about antinatalism is still going strong, so if you missed it, check up on it here and here. I think the proponents of this belief system are not only wrong but tragically unglued. They appear to be desperately trapped in an endless loop of faulty logic, with no evident escape.

Enjoy!