draft #58

post #18

i write like i’ve got the answers to something but you know what? i don’t. i never have and try as i might, i’m uncertain i ever will. too many people have ever lived for me to get it. that’s okay, i think. it’s not okay but i’ll say it is. defiant to the vertigo i get whenever i stand.

i’ll never understand a single soul. i’ll never understand my own. leopards, parrots, bears. they never ask these things of themselves. they live regardless. it’s no criterion of life to have ever thought of anything. all of these creatures we call animals we celebrate, revere, place upon pedestals as holier than thee can ever be. all because they can’t think like we humans can. a dog never asks if it loves you, it just does. some day as a child we look at someone and ask ourselves “what is your relationship to me?”. suddenly, that’s when we encroach onto the space that is supposed to be of the “natural world”. one that doesn’t know where it’s going. aimless and entropic. serene.

can’t say i’ve ever found myself agreeing with that philosophy. perhaps that’s the contrarian nature that makes us so wrong in the first place. i’m not averse to being incorrect, i’m uncertain that i’ve ever been right. i feel it regardless, like all thoughts and arguments. put me on a stake, i guess? at some point when expressing anything it has to turn from mine to yours. my beliefs are all just one of your things. they ain’t even mine once i spit them out.

perhaps anything that move autonomously is damned to brutal tendencies. plenty of animals eat their offspring and rip organs from live prey, it’s how the job gets done. even within the sphere of some kind of conscience, humanity is incentivized through their very same wrinkled pink. given power and we treat this same nature as though it is our personal commodity. many of us exist as exploited, tired capital, creating for more than we receive in this life.

but at the same time we’re the first to ever have looked at eugenics in the eyes and directly spat in them. we visited my stepmother’s family across the country very recently as i type this. her mother’s been taking care of a handicapped vietnamese woman with the mental age of two or maybe less longer than i’ve been alive. she was taking me for a tour around her house that my stepmother had grown up in since i’d never been there before. most of it i’ve already forgotten, it’s hard to have any sentimentality towards the home of a grandmother’s that wasn’t yours. one of the last rooms I saw though was the bedroom of her foster “child”. it looked like the bedroom of someone who was family. bedding folded neatly, faintly purple walls. by the door, there was a large collage. art projects that she had made in workshops for the mentally challenged and so, so many pictures of all the places she’d been able to go and the people she’d seen. in the center, her in a jester’s cap with a grin showing all of her teeth. it was hard for me to look at, not because it was unsightly but the opposite. i saw somebody’s whole life right in front of me.

people will cringe at me calling her life functionally useless, and it’s really not wrong. for her there is no growth, nothing she’ll have ever really done for herself, who knows if she even remembers much of what’s happened on that wall in the first place. she’s been able to live 40+ years and the majority opinion is that it’s what was supposed to happen. no one takes care of their weak and wounded like we do. any other species, any other thing and she’d have died far, far earlier into her lifespan. but us? someone completely incapable of independence could live to be older than my mother got to be. all because it’d be wrong not to have, all because we are able to ask “what if that were me?”. perhaps compassion is what makes us unnatural. maybe compassion is what comes most naturally to us.

i don’t know the answers, i’m just some guy. retelling what i’ve seen. writing with no caps for reasons i can’t say why. like actually, no idea, i just started doing it and now i’m still doing it to the point where when i accidentally capitalize my i’s like i always do i’m backspacing to replace it. i’ve written about twenty drafts in the past month with hardly anything to show for it. sometimes i have a lot to say but can’t find my way or more often can’t find a reason anyone would care. other times i have nothing to say other than the feeling that i want to say something. i’ve got like, three vocabulary apps on my phone at this point trying to be better at this whole writing thing and i haven’t even used a single word i’ve learned from those in this post. hard to find the words for anything when you don’t know why anyone should take you seriously. the more i know, the less i know, and even that sentence has been a common phenomenon and realization amongst millions since the dawn of our cognition. step five or six of maturity out of infinity.

i’m just a kid. well, i’m 20, that’s like far beyond being a kid, i pay taxes and vote and have a job. but that’s nothing compared to the thousands of years of humanity and the forever of time. all i’m doing is putting words together like blocks until something i says sounds good. if they do for you, that’s cool. i hope something i say one day is cool enough that it gets put on wooden signs in suburban women’s houses. although that would actually embarrass me incredibly if i were to actually witness it. funny how we spend so much time wanting something and if we finally get it suddenly we’re too humble to receive it. that “we” is totally projection, i don’t know your life, i just know mine.

that’s all i’ve got right now. thanks for reading.