It's another white night for you, fueled by coffee and cigarettes and obscure Netflix documentaries recommended by the award-winning Netflix preference algorithm, which makes you ponder for a few moments technology's ability to accurately pinpoint your bizarre tastes and possible tastes and everything in between. At first glance such a thing feels creepy, perhaps a thought experiment that should be confined to the realm of science fiction, an Outer Limits episode for a rainy day. At midnight this everything in between seems like a yawning chasm you'd like to explore for a few hours, but that article is waiting for you and the phone is ringing (of course you don't answer it) and what is the point of all this?
You know you shouldn't ask yourself this question because you might not like the conclusion you come to. It's difficult to stop the urge, though, because it's so much fun to castrate the universe and what else are you going to do at one in the morning? But then you remember that David Foster Wallace said something about water and the urge subsides. You become the vanilla version of you, the least interesting carbon copy of you, and it's one in the morning and what are you going to do to entertain yourself?
You start to think about the day and how little you've accomplished even though you told yourself you were going to do everything, everything in between. But everything in between what, exactly? Where are you situated in the universe? Between what two objects does your person lie? It's not clear to you, but you know what you mean by it.
Your thoughts drift to the girl you saw leaving the coffee shop as you arrived there in the morning. You always intend to say something profound, but you never do. You think you're brilliant and maybe you are, but you don't feel like it tonight. And besides, you never feel like you have the proper venue to spout your brilliance. You're charming and funny and mordant and people should listen to you, obviously. Sometimes you wake up thinking this will be the day when you magically find the proper venue to spout something brilliant, and from this day forward every day will be the same and the brilliance will never shut off. You espouse a self-serving theory, which posits that once the nuclear reaction commences it will continue forever. If only you could be brilliant once, you could be brilliant every time. You're waiting for the first time, and it feels so close.
At this moment in the night, you are overcome by the sudden urge to get violent. You rail against the universe in your usual way, safely confined within the four walls of your living room and with no one to explain how silly you look when the light creeps in through the blinds and hits your face like that. You understand how banal it seems to direct your insults toward that cosmically large and obdurate mass we call the world. It would be better to direct them toward something more specific, like a traffic light or alarm clock.
You are watching the world as it blows up in front of you. Everything around you is fading. People you know are dying and there's nothing you can do about it. And even though you feel suffocated and tired of it all, you are alive and extremely lucky to be able to contemplate the beauty of this disaster.
So live, and live hard. Make the choice to be a part of it all. Breathe in the impermanence of things, and accept this.
You know you shouldn't ask yourself this question because you might not like the conclusion you come to. It's difficult to stop the urge, though, because it's so much fun to castrate the universe and what else are you going to do at one in the morning? But then you remember that David Foster Wallace said something about water and the urge subsides. You become the vanilla version of you, the least interesting carbon copy of you, and it's one in the morning and what are you going to do to entertain yourself?
You start to think about the day and how little you've accomplished even though you told yourself you were going to do everything, everything in between. But everything in between what, exactly? Where are you situated in the universe? Between what two objects does your person lie? It's not clear to you, but you know what you mean by it.
Your thoughts drift to the girl you saw leaving the coffee shop as you arrived there in the morning. You always intend to say something profound, but you never do. You think you're brilliant and maybe you are, but you don't feel like it tonight. And besides, you never feel like you have the proper venue to spout your brilliance. You're charming and funny and mordant and people should listen to you, obviously. Sometimes you wake up thinking this will be the day when you magically find the proper venue to spout something brilliant, and from this day forward every day will be the same and the brilliance will never shut off. You espouse a self-serving theory, which posits that once the nuclear reaction commences it will continue forever. If only you could be brilliant once, you could be brilliant every time. You're waiting for the first time, and it feels so close.
At this moment in the night, you are overcome by the sudden urge to get violent. You rail against the universe in your usual way, safely confined within the four walls of your living room and with no one to explain how silly you look when the light creeps in through the blinds and hits your face like that. You understand how banal it seems to direct your insults toward that cosmically large and obdurate mass we call the world. It would be better to direct them toward something more specific, like a traffic light or alarm clock.
You are watching the world as it blows up in front of you. Everything around you is fading. People you know are dying and there's nothing you can do about it. And even though you feel suffocated and tired of it all, you are alive and extremely lucky to be able to contemplate the beauty of this disaster.
So live, and live hard. Make the choice to be a part of it all. Breathe in the impermanence of things, and accept this.
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