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[channonyarrow]

There's something deeply satisfying about realising that I am always and eternally attracted to people who are not attracted to me, nor never will be. Normally, I would not consider this satisfying, but in the light of my last post, I think I'll call it that this time.

I am, I hope, a pragmatist, most of the time. However, we might all be that, because I don't know any altruists and wouldn't trust them if I did. What else is left? Either you serve yourself or you serve others, and Mother Theresa is dead anyway, so there's that option out the window. In other words, the gamut of human experience is not that great - we all tend to be pretty much alike, and that's the realisation of your twenties that is so horrible. I am not a beautiful and unique snowflake, and neither are you. We're all pretty much the same, accounting for some high swings at either end. I want to go to a high school somewhere and tell every single student that, preferably quietly (remember the cockroaches in Bloom County? Like that.) and watch them all crumble. Because we wear our belief that we are unique little snowflakes on our sleeves. America is the country of I, of the individual, and it shows. We believe ourselves unique; meanwhile, I bet that statistically speaking most people in the McDonald's in Paris near Place de la Bastille are lost Americans. We believe ourselves unique and we conform on a level that, if we realised it, would make our national brain explode.

You are not special; I am not special. You have not felt something that I have not. My ennui is the same as yours. It's like we expect that being wrapped in different flesh, shaped in different ways, means that we're different, but we still speak the same language, we still have the same words, we still know the same concepts. It's merely pretentious bullshit to assume for one second that what you feel I don't, what you have experienced I can't understand, and most of all (most commonly of all, anyway) it's pretentious bullshit to believe that You Are Unique, because you're not. Our flesh shapes us, and we share the same flesh. People act as though explaining something that they feel is like trying to translate the mating call of the Wild Yak into Swedish via Korean, and it's not. There are words out there that we all know, and if you can't explain it with words, try finding the medium you can use, for fuck's sake. In other words, shut the goddamn hell up and learn how to communicate, whether it's through words or tempera paint or feces on a wall. Don't just sit there in your isolationist bubble and pretend that You Are Different, because You Are Not. You are still human, you have still done the things humans have done, you have still got the same tools to describe your life as any other American, and on a broader level any other human. Shut the fuck up. I'd rather hear the story of someone's life that I don't know, that I haven't lived before, than listen to everyone yap like fucking dogs about how they're Individuals. I always mentally add the really stoned "man" to that sentence, because it seems to lack it.

This is what I think.

I think that everyone needs to shut the goddamn hell up about the things that create barriers, not because I love my fellow human beings because by and large I don't - this doesn't mean that I don't want your body, though - but because I am really fucking sick of hearing about how I can't understand. I can't understand what it was like to be in Vietnam. I can't understand what it's like to be a man. I can't undersand what it's like to have a specific sexual definition. I can't understand what it's like to be a victim. I can't understand what it's like to not be a victim. I can't understand what it's like to be you.

Fuck that shit. My understanding is not fucking broken. You want me to understand, you tell me. You don't want me to understand, tell me that. It has nothing at all to do with understanding, and everything to do with the amount of work you want to put into it to make me understand.

You are not special, I am not special, no one is special because we are all human, and we exist within a narrow range of personalities (because there are so many possibilities we don't use) and experiences. I can understand anything you can do, even if I all understand about it is that I had to have been there. But for fuck's sake, give me some credit and let me tell you that, don't tell me that. And quit pretending that you're standing on a ledge looking out over a sea of misery/love/success/virtue/non-virtue/soup and NO ONE ELSE is standing there with you. We might not be lemmings, but we're certainly not alone in the world or in our progress through it.

If you feel alone, maybe it's because YOU have stopped communicating.

Chew on that.

And all of this has gotten me angry again. Actually, I've been doing a slow burn for about four days. I will never have beauty, I don't know truth, I wouldn't believe in Justice any more if I tripped over the bitch with a broken beer bottle in my hand - but I know anger. And I'm mad again.

I will show all of you. I will be Someone. Not someone special, because that person doesn't exist, but I will be someone. I will be me, to the greatest and fullest extent possible, and you're invited along for the ride if you wish to come. I don't think that it will look any different than it did before (now I'll start posting all entries in rhyming quads and iambic pentameter sonnets!) but I'm angry again. I am going to be someone the world will not soon forget, goddamnit.

Just to show you that I was better than you ever thought.

Just to win. I always want to win. If I can't win, I won't play the game, and I'm still here so I must be able to win.

Comments

[channonyarrow.livejournal.com]

On a deeply personal level, obviously everyone's experience (whether pretty or ugly, traveled or not, etc) means that they are unique. But I'm mainly absolutely sick of hearing, in essence, "YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND MY PAIN" from people who, really, should just shut the fuck up because we've all been there, we've all done that. We are members of the same species - we can communicate. A lot of people seem to think that actually, we can't because no one can understand them, but we're all human. Beings that couldn't communicate (aside from, obviously, the extremely mentally-abnormal) would be, like, trying to get a fish and an elephant to have a discourse. It's just a shorthand for saying, to my way of thinking, that a person doesn't care to put the effort into explaining why they feel as they do, because then they might (horrors!) be understood. There are a lot more similarities between the pretty girls' experience of men and the ugly girls' experience of men than there are differences - but if both sides shout that the other can't understand what's happening, no one will ever find that out.