I Don't Mean to Cry Wolf

Just cognitively adept enough to know how ignorant I've always been

I try my best to be honest.

What comes out of my mouth is founded on some basis of what I perceive to be truth. I don’t mean to be a liar. I don’t mean to peddle propaganda. I’m a little selfish, mostly selfless. If there’s something better for people all in all I want to believe in it. To be reasonable, to be kind.

I have to admit I’m prone to fear, you know? I’m not above it, if anything it’s precisely at the level I am no matter how hard I try to climb it. I get scared about things, because I care about them. In ways, I wish to be small, but to be small is ironically to never know peace. The idea of a societal status quo is relatively modern and seeming to soon be flipped upon its head. Perhaps to want peace is a personal admission of weakness rather than meekness. I was never a monk, I was always a boy. One who’s never truly known what it was to go without.

The outside’s a raging ocean, darkened stormy blue as erratic as epiphanic. Hearing its every motion, feeling every tilt upon my ship as I stick thumbs in my ears shuttering my eyes to maintain an illusion of stability. It doesn’t matter how hard I ignore it, the deep swallows souls. I gain the courage to open my senses to listen to its song. Sure, I learn. I learn I’m doomed to die like all the others. I could keep my sights open, perpetually acknowledging inevitability itself, but I already know it. I could swing along the whirlpool in pretend peace as it swallows me or I could uselessly stand screaming towards it until capsize.

I get swept up because I’m human. What I am is only useful in a world with advanced technology inconceivable by generations to produce value paid in a currency that only works because we all say it does. An unprecedented, eroding trust. I am the outcome of generations of assembled institutions, productive in the modern world and useless in all others. Someone of my ilk would perhaps find use as a village shaman in prior times, a benefactor to Cicero’s classic complaint. Ideas. The hundreds of chickens that have died for my personal sustenance did so in the vanity of “ideas”.

Personal agency only stretches so far. I’m controlled by the puppet strings of fate with prayer hands that the universe may on occasion flow through me. There are more people out there who decide whether I die than the I who decides I live. Speeding bullet to Andromeda. God, forgive.

I try my best to be honest, but I’m no different.

Small cog of a too big world, I can’t wrap around it. Believing what I want to hear because I can’t accept reality’s brutality. All nonsense, no bite. Watch the world get better, watch the world get worse, watch everything stay the same as imagination makes its collapse seem so vivid. I don’t buy eggs anymore. I bought a computer though. A perpetual chase to enjoy anything and everything not knowing what may go away. Perhaps life was meant to be lived this actively, or maybe it’s consuming a la Erysichthon: an everlasting hunger so insatiable it eats itself in its unfulfilled mire.

Virtue signaler. Sheeple of the “MSM”. Pasty mediocrity of the mind. Shoot a bullet between my eyes and it’ll come out the other end clean as a whistle, there’s nothing to hit. The stupid can’t be truthful because they know of nothing at all. Meander from vague postulation to vague postulation to exalt myself whilst avoiding anything someone could call a “point”.

Because I know no truth. There’s nothing I can pull from with confidence. My best is the same old bullshit. Tugging on a loose string to the ends of the observable universe in hopes to find the heavens above. The intellectually useless know no salvation, stuck in a faux pas cycle of inaction waiting for the answer to reveal itself for them. For me.

I try my best to be honest, but I can’t be.

The search for black and white becomes a discovery of all the shades of gray. Sit in a chair in a soundproof room every Monday to be reminded that’s human. My biggest villain is the only thing I am at all. I’ve furrowed my brow to the point the creases above them resemble the electromagnetic waves the brain this head contains emits. Too small, too prone to error, yet I’m told I have one of its more effective iterations that have ever existed.

I keep my mouth shut. I read words, I read lips, faces, motions, silhouettes. The last thing the world needs is a misconstrued, incorrect motif guised as an “opinion”. My perch upon the vow of silence represents the epitome of neoliberalism, nodding my head along to all the right things yet saying nothing when it matters. Dr. King Jr. warned humanity about people like me as much as he warned them about the dangers of his active oppressors. Few are as the vile as the man who should know better, yet does none at all.

Despite it, my heart finds no motive for change. This overwhelming world, what fault is it mine? One eight billionth, perhaps. A number of zeroes before those digits 125 so grand that no reasonable publication would bother reporting such a percentage as anything but a zero. My privileged path of ignorance lays bare before me with the fuzzy haze of the amplified warmth from sunbeams through a windowpane. I can take it anytime. I’ll be as wrong as everyone ever was…

I try my best to be honest. It’s really, really hard.

I’m sorry.