My dad was an excellent handyman and maintenance man. He never went to school for any of it, but more often than not that was his vocation, and in what little free time he had he would often repair appliances for neighbors and co-workers, family and friends. Rarely would he accept any form of compensation, understanding that if they could afford such a thing, they would probably have no need to require assistance from some tinkerer lacking the proper degrees or pedigrees. I remember a particular occasion when I was a small boy, my parents were frustrated by the inability to find an honest automobile mechanic. So, my dad dismantled the family jalopy of that given year, stripping the engine down to as many individual components as humanly possible, so that he could learn for himself how and why they all fit together as they do. It took him less than a week, but across my own life I have readily courted sacrifice doing the exact same thing with what constitutes my own psyche. No voyage of self-discovery can involve conforming to or absorbing altogether the fantasies of others, but rather exploring the sensory perceptions of firsthand experience which comes generously through trial and error, and error, and error and error and error. The most personal of perceptions inform one’s identity, but the thing about personal perception is that everyone possesses one of their own. In a free society, none could or should be empowered or enabled to declare authorship or ownership over that of another.
My personal philosophy, my moral code of conduct dating back before I had language for expressing such matters, before I had found words at all, is to take whatever measures I alone deem necessary to bar all others from accepting any blame or credit for words and actions which are my own, no matter the circumstances. And of equal importance, that I maintain no interest whatsoever in myself accepting blame or credit for words and actions which are not my own, regardless of circumstances. None of which is even vaguely compatible with any persuasion of organized religion or body politick or other for-profit endeavor. For were I to commit a good, it is never by the grace of god or in abidance with laws or with enrichment the aim, all of which deny self-awareness and self-determination alike, but by personifying the merit and mettle of my own blood, sweat and tears. And were I to commit a wrong, it is not due to a devil’s temptation or because I was otherwise misled by flattering appeals, carried aloft and away by peer pressures of brand loyalty or political partisanship or religious fervor, but because I myself erroneously rewarded attentions to persons or places which do not warrant the kindness.
I have no time for allies or friends or relationships, as truth forever remains beyond biases, desires and fetishes, quirks and whims. The universe exists not to service what we may fancy. It is no cruel tyranny refusing to oblige the dreams of cruel tyrants. Knowing firsthand what surviving truly means, I recognize no authority over my choices or opinions save my very own. My life is my only origin, my only possession and my only end. Authority pervades with or without my gratitude or yours, as power’s capacity for the most appealing flattery does not unto itself prove its nature less corruptible or its influence less corruptive, rather it is that same flattery which compels lesser minds to abandon all sense of personal responsibility for the self-interest and self-enrichment of that same power. If what you believe in is beyond reproach, you believe a lie. The pain of it never lessening the validity of reality. Feeling good with bad decisions is absolutely trivial contrasted with the endless life or death struggles abounding the vast majority of civilization, life or death struggles rendered heartlessly and thoughtlessly by the self-serving status quo perpetuated. Esteem resolves no hunger or thirst, while inspiration is merely self-hypnosis.
I clean my own messes, I reset my own bones and I claim no prize for myself. I willfully elect to help those who need it, never those who want service, for continuance steadfastly brings about more potentials than does any destructive act. Each droplet of rain more productive than all the bullets of the world, with each individual as reflective of what could be or of what should be. Principles and convictions reliant on the influence of others are codependency, and self-defeating. By my long years few, if any, give such consideration to their own motivations. Where the cultural norms entertain themselves by keeping appearances to justify using and abusing others, I engage no forms of entrapment, exploitation or extortion to prompt others into thinking or feeling as do I, no one-sided pretenses of sympathy or guises of survival or anything else to suit me, as efforts requiring self-perception to be regarded universally are megalomaniacal. There’s no paywall here, no obligated subscription. I do not promote or endorse anything, and I am neither buying or selling any products or services, for I recognize existence is something other than to enrich or to be enriched, to entertain or to be entertained. I can make my own decisions and possess no inclination to lose myself in any crowd. I neither provide or request subservience. It does not affect me to go unloved, for no love must be returned, in the realization that love is not fundamental for anybody to refrain from doing harm unto others. Only the ego asserts that lying, cheating and stealing ever know a time or a place. Not only does the society I stand in opposition to forgive such travesties, with no sense of irony does it hero-worship their greatest purveyors. The function of the celebrity is to lie. The function of the politician is to cheat. The function of the executive is to steal. The most readily identifiable or desirable of singularities are no exceptions, they are simply the more effective enablers of your very own depletion.
Your leaders, your icons and your saviors have no hold over anything of value, only what would be willingly bought or willingly sold through the swindling of soothsayers and power-mongers, persons who quite frankly could not care less about who you are or what your thoughts and feelings may honestly be, what with auto-erotic beatification by happenstance being the priority underlining their words and their actions. Self-awareness does not arrive from accepting at face value what we are made to hate or from accepting at face value what we are made to love, because the unquestioning acceptance of allowing hands which are not our own to scratch itches which as well may not be our own is embracing the incompleteness within, this burning need to follow or to be followed, without trying to address why such a void exists in us, or why it exists to be filled. Dare not to understand the root of a problem, and it simply cannot be reprimanded. Of the dizzying throngs of egotistical personae living for some magic bullet to kindly alleviate all their ailments and predicaments, what measures are granted by them in turn, toward alleviating the ailments and predicaments of those they meet in this life?
Who sent the fucking memo that the universe serves to maintain the personal perception of anybody explicitly, at grave expense to all the rest?