An occasion where adulthood hit me was the X-mas morning spent mopping and cleaning the bar where I worked, all festivities on hold for much of the day. All because some ego couldn’t cope with the consequences of other egos unable to cope with their own.
Indulging friendships is impossible while preaching outside the closed circuits of any choir. But if they only need you to feel good about their choices in what they like or dislike, they are something other than friends. I’ve never in my life wanted anyone to like or subscribe to my shit, I’m more interested in prompting strangers to see the futility in mandating their voids be filled by any person, place or thing not connecting them expressly to the universe at large. Destroy all choirs.
The universe functions and thrives without misconstrued pampering for survival. Contrary to every artist. And the refusal to embrace that is how humanity fails to survive, favoring fantasies to reality no matter the costs. All the world’s a stage, but not one of us is the star or the audience. People entitling masters or servants either one, strive against nature and choreograph combat with their angels and demons not realizing that the producer is too busy fucking half the orchestra to care.
Following people you have muted is American politics in a nutshell. Nobody actually loves anybody, as much weight as they otherwise give the concept, they just love their own fan-fic interpretations of people, and call it anxieties when life proves too stern an editor. I could kick Mark Twain’s ass in a broken beer bottle fight. Because he’s been dead for years. But it’s bizarre to imagine there was ever an era with him as an editor at the New York Times. Every pundit today is so bloated with shielding from chagrin they wouldn’t even fit on his coat-tails. I never thought it accurate to count lust or wrath among the deadly sins. Unlike the other vices, most people only ever know them as temporary matters. And when either a lust or a wrath is in a blue moon prolonged, it becomes something else altogether.
And also unlike the other vices, lust and wrath can be justified. Not always but it’s at least possible, as opposed to gluttony or greed. But as with downing pharmaceuticals to fight the natural emotional spectrum, Powers That Be prefer we consider our confinement as liberation. I’d even argue the other vices can harm others as much as ourselves, particularly if they depend on us for anything under the sun, while lust and wrath are less about self-destruction. But frankly how we learn anything about ourselves is by not giving in to lust or wrath and sparing the destruction of others, while refusing the other vices merely spares harm all around. Which is great, but provides no learning experience beyond. Avoiding sloth, envy or pride makes you more productive, original and trustworthy, bringing value from you to others. But down-voting your own lust or wrath by whichever degrees, allows value in things beyond ourselves to exist without our credit or blame. While exploring by whichever degrees our lust or wrath is how we define relationships to and fro rather than become products of environments. Instead of simple reaction/repetition from exploring other vices, it becomes the matter of why we love a thing or why we hate a thing. They’ve an honesty no matter how blunt, the others will always lack.
Accepting a meaning in life is even easier than finding one, but finding instead any sort of thing that can genuinely and thoroughly humble us and confound us like a left hook to the third eye, is at once so much harder and so much more worthwhile. Whether by tribulation or by chance, the most amazing people we can ever know never learned how great they are, they learned how small they are.