Finding the light in the darkness

I said that line in a previous post and it surprised me.  I don't really know why I said it, it really wasn't related to what I was saying, but it happened and it has been tumbling through my thoughts ever since.  Get ready to go on a journey, dear reader.  This thought spreads its arms across the vastness of human experience.  I will start this tale in a place you'd never expect and lead you into the unknown and then back to the humblest yet most quintessential aspect of our soul.  I have a lot to live up to in my own introduction...  So it is time to start.

In economics, there is a term called marginal cost.  For you calculus minded individuals, this term defines the integral of the producer's cost to produce an additional unit, q, with respect to q.  For those of you non calculus people, I will have to use more words to describe the same thing:  When producing an item, there are some initial costs like building a factory to make it, wages for labor to produce it, and the price of raw material for it to exist in.  All those costs divided by the number of units that can be produced with those costs is one way of thinking of the marginal cost.  According to a lot of market theory, the marginal cost of increasing my productivity by one unit is the price we should sell our good at; ie if I still have loans on the factory floor and my CEO has a huge salary, then my marginal cost will be pretty high, but once I have paid off the price of land and fired my CEO, the cost of increasing my output by one reduces drastically, and so should my marginal cost, the price my customers pay.  

Technology has driven real marginal cost down on an exponential curve the last hundred years.  The industrial revolution was but one step on this path.  We broke the task of making a shirt across the world, cloth coming from here, dye coming from there, labor coming from here, distribution going there.  Institutionalized slavery still exists today, but the mechanization of labor could reduce the cost and time of production further.  With all these drops, why hasn't the price of creating dropped?  Because the marginal cost remains the same in the balance books of these companies.  As marginal cost has exponentiated downwards, upper management pay has exponentiated upward which holds our marginal cost at 20 dollars even when it costs 13c to make a shirt.  

People say often that this greed is the ultimate evil of our time.  It is the darkness, the yin, the masculine energy flourishing to dominating power that has subjugated our world to the state we see today.  Yet the light is rising, my dear reader.  You know it.  You feel it as I do.  But how?  It is in the nature of masculinity and femininity that our story travels next.

Masculinity is a blanket of earth or a swathe of fire.  It extends and covers, it smothers with its exuberance and desire.  Femininity is the wind or the water.  It flows and it yields eternally.  Masculinity reaches indefinitely and femininity is never truly grasped.  If masculine energy has reached so far as it has in our economic model, how is that feminine energy to return the masculine back into balance if it only yields?  Let's talk the housing market to answer that, shall we?

College debt has exploded over the past fifty years to the point that fewer and fewer homes are being purchased and that market is slowly dying.  As this cycle begins to wane, the young are not reaching for new homes, they are being inherited, traded, and communally built.  Why?  Because economic oppression from our economic model forces people to be more efficient and use less and something just clicks.  Some personal transformation occurs and them to become as humble as the dirt.  After being shoved into the dirt, they become the dirt and economic shackles no longer hold them.  Homes get passed down and no longer have any value aside from becoming places of life shared as a community of man.  This is how femininity triumphs.  Please remember, I am not talking about man and woman, I am talking about a state of being.  It is not to say that all women are like this and all men are like that.  The correlation exists, but we all have both in us at a certain balance that changes every passing moment.

An arguably better example is Napster.  Someone took it upon themselves to use the free building tools provided on the internet to build a sharing house for media.  Once media springs out of the mind and into the physical realm, it is replicated and shared on these platforms with very small marginal cost compared to running a company that crafts and ships disks.  The cost of housing and replicating 90kb is negligible, why pay a distribution company with thirty offices of stooges who isn't really paying the artist for their profits anyway?  Fast forward ten years and media is being produced and shared on YouTube professionally on nothing but advertisement revenue.  Marginal cost is so small, it can be absorbed by someone who wants to steal a bit of your airwave to sell someone detergent.  So many free platforms now exist and the amount of wallet saved from this free exchange encourages donations to what someone knows is worth their investment.  A freer market emerges.

This feminine motion is intoxicating, it draws you into it like all sacredly feminine motions do.  Once the Napster market was tasted, it was too sweet.  Once soaked in this masculine darkness as we have, these feminine motions draw us back out into the light BECAUSE OF the darkness before.  Without being forced to pay an absurdly imbalanced marginal cost, freer models of being would not be so seductive.  Ironically, the darker the shadow, the brighter the light needed to create it.  We have been in the dark so long that it can be hard to see how far this light will take us.  Fifty years from now, I imagine a brightness that looks like this:

I imagine a young person building a set for a movie.  She has a device attached to her arm.  It is a deeply interconnected device that links her to like minded individuals.  With it, she finds or creates the schematics for a piece of her set for free.  The rendering technology exists because someone desired to make it.  The energy exists because our star still shines and our wind still blows.  She grabs some recycled material and feeds it into this device and it prints her imagination into reality.  She crafts her whole scene this way, creating the illusion of being in a wake-walking lucid dream of her imagination and she spills forth this story into reality without a single dime.  She is housed wherever she may go because no one owns land anymore and the world is beautified with communal architecture that incorporates natural cycles into its designs that eat waste and regurgitate food-- like an edible architecture birthed in the minds of the local artists.  She is making her movie because it has meaning for her.  With no marginal cost, she gives her movie to the sharers.  The money donated to her by the fans of her imagination goes towards treating herself beyond the basic needs provided for her by the sacred environment she lives in.  Man lives in rhapsodic abundance and life is lived to the point of tears in every waking moment.  

This image-- this light will grow not just from, but because of the darkness that envelops us today.  Without the ideas of mechanization, efficiency, the ever grasping for more that strangles the mighty into husks of Sin, we would not have these tools.  Now armed with the fruits of that mindset, we are free to take it and create with it.  Therefore I say that I am in love with masculinity-- in love with this evil darkness, because it's depths grow me.  When he envelops me, I become the light in his darkness and suddenly I am cradling him and we are one in the same.  

One day, like the breath of a divine being, the feminine light will be smothered again by darkness on a grander scale as it has from the birth of reality.  One day, that darkness will become light yet again, but I can only hope I will be long dead to see what darkness the next cycle will know.  I do not hate the dark that has swept over us as it now fades.  I anticipate it, so that I may flow around its advances and use its flame to burn brighter and longer than I ever knew possible.

A new take on an old story? Or an old story that had a new take?

Everyone remember that tale about the Tortoise and the Hare?

I won't waste much time reviewing the tale, but basically the Hare is incredibly fast and somehow the Tortoise, who is very slow, gets challenged to a race and accepts and the hare is so confident that he hops like 5 meters and gets tired from going so fast then takes a nap or some shit and the Tortoise who is slow and steady wins the race.

I hated that fucking story.  Sorry for swearing.  It never made any sense.  One, why would the Tortoise accept the race?  Two, the hare is faster; why wouldn't it win?

Part of me says that these are the tropes we teach our kids because they are just good kid stories.  They aren't.  Kids are brilliant in ways we just aren't brilliant in anymore.  If we understood that, we'd tell many different stories.  I'd tell the Tortoise and the Hare story like this:



Once upon a time, there was a very confident Hare.  She was so fast that she could outrun the sun and always have the sun on her back if she wanted.  Her speed was legendary and everyone knew how fast she was.  Everyone including the great green Tortoise.  Now the Tortoise is an incredibly slow creature.  Even under water where he is fastest, the Tortoise swims very slowly, but always has a nice big smile on his face.

One day the Tortoise waits for the Hare to hop by and stops her and says, "Hare, I would like to challenge you to a race."
The Hare laughs out loud, "Tortoise, my speed is legendary, I can outrun the sun, I can go all the way to Paris and back in a single afternoon.  What possible challenge can you pose?"
"I may be slow, but I can go all the way to America.  Can you run there?"
"No, but we are talking a race of speed, not a race I cannot finish.  I won't let you cheat me, oh slow one."
"I challenge you to a race to our respective homes.  I assume you can find yours from here?"
The Hare is stunned, "Of course I can.  It is in a tree in London not far from here, but why would I race you when I KNOW I will win.  You are a sea creature and I must assume your home is in the Ocean which is even further away from here than my house is.  Since I am so much faster than you, I am assured to win!  Why waste my time?"
"I will wager my 150 year life span.  If you win this race, it will be yours."
The Hare cannot believe her long ears!  She may be fast, but she only has a few years to take in the glory of the world around her, so she goes fast to see everything she can.  "And what if YOU win."
"Oh, it is no big deal, if I win I guess you'll forever be in stories as the fastest Hare that lost to the slowest Tortoise."
"No, Tortoise, I will go down in history as the oldest AND the fastest Hare in the world.  I accept."
Crowds of creatures from far and wide gather.  Birds fly screeching overhead.  Mortal enemies like Apes and Tigers sit next to each other to watch the race.  They yell in unison, "3. 2. 1. GOOOO!"
The Hare darts as fast as her legs can take her.  She could outrun the sun twice over at this rate.  She's running, running, running, and suddenly a Hawk swoops down in front of her.  "Hare, you have lost the race. I shall lead you back to the Tortoise, follow me."
"Impossible."  She cries.  "There is no way he won unless he cheated!"
"Come see for yourself."  The Hawk flies majestically back in the direction of the start of the race.  The Hare follows.
She arrives to see the Tortoise sleeping in his shell exactly where she left him.  "Is this some kind of JOKE?"
The animals all yell together, "See he sleeps!  See how content he is!  He is home!"
The Hare cries out, ashamed in her obvious loss, "No!  I can nap anywhere I like!"
The Hawk lands and squawks, "You lie!  You are only able to sleep when in your home beneath the tree."
The Ape pounds his chest and adds, "You are too paranoid and in a hurry to get anywhere and cannot even sit to enjoy the wonders of Paris.  You are too focused on making your time to there and back as fast as possible to enjoy it."
The Tiger growls, "I can run very fast too, but at least I pause to give myself a bath once in a while."
The Tortoise finally wakes with a yawn, "My friends, please that is enough," he says as he walks over to the Hare and gives her a hug, "can't you see that you hurt her feelings?  She can only sleep beneath her tree because she has no shell like me.  She is paranoid because she is very small and very fragile.  She is focused on making her time because that is how she survives."
A tear streams down the Hare's face, "Then why DID you race me?"
The Tortoise replies with the same smile he always has, "Because it is something I had never done and wanted to try.  Maybe one day you can sit on my back and I can take you and your family to America."
The Hare smiles through her tears.  "OK.  I'd like that."



In other news, my dreams made no sense last night.  They were DRENCHED with emotion, yet their plots made no sense.

In one, I was a dog and I was trying to help a girl who reminded me of Terra from Final Fantasy running away from Sephiroth (I assume because he was casting Meteors on her as she ran).  I would warn her by running near her and nudging her away from where the meteors would land.  I could have easily ran away as I was much faster, but I stayed and helped her slow human body escape.  Near the bottom of the mountain, he lands and I just lose all sense of self-preservation and tackle him and start biting as hard as I can.  In a last attempt to keep her alive, I explode brighter than a star.  My body no longer exists, but I still feel my shape.  I close my eyes and fall backwards. My only thoughts are on her safety and how I wish I could have done more.  I don't hit the ground, I fall and fall and fall and begin to spiral in towards the center of the Earth.  I feel source and know everything will be alright.  I see her for just a moment as she arrives safely at a safe house.

In another, ... yeah, no I'm not even going to try going into detail.  It involved a little girl who could bend reality and at the end of the dream everyone tried to convince me it was all a lie.  But it couldn't have been.  I dunno.

Anyway, peace all.

You are an angel

I give leftover food from my work to the homeless-- only things that would otherwise get thrown away. While illegal to do in most cities, I do it anyway and I don't plan on stopping.

Today I met a very grateful young woman who I have given food before and today she thanked me profusely for my leftovers and said, "omg these things are so delicious. You are an angel."

Without thinking and with a timing that could only be described as magical I replied, "not an angel, just a cashier."

The moment that followed was filled with so much shams. The silence and appreciation in the air was tangible as she smiled and took in what I said.

"No, I am pretty sure you are an angel."

I just smiled, said have a nice Friday, and continued towards my train home, a sack of one or two leftover meals swaying at my side.

Crippling depression

Sometimes I just need to escape into complete solitude. Normal, living human beings spur inside me a jealousy and a sadness I simply cannot bear. I uncontrollably break out into tears. I am not exaggerating.

Mid conversation, I get up and leave for apparently no reason.
"Where are you going?" My roommate asks.
"Somewhere else," is all I can reply with the faintest hint of sobbing in my voice. My acting skills have become rusty.

What causes it? Is it the ease with which other people are able to simply be that I cannot grasp? Is it the utter regret that my entire life spurs into existence? Or is it nothing at all that causes the teardrops falling like rain onto my iPad screen as I sit alone in the bathroom? One may never know.

The same roommate spoke to me as we were buying tampons, milk, and other necessities at the store. She said, "I wish there were more people like you in the world. Just helpful for no reason." To which I could only reply, "I don't... To have a person like me, you have to have the events that forged me and I would not wish those or any similar events on any soul, no matter what good came of it-- to do so would be sadistic to the point of damnation."

The most tangible silence of my life followed those words.

I'd like to hope that I am being over dramatic, but when I realize that I am sitting in my bathroom because I am quite literally unable to stop the tears streaming down my face, when my roommate comes in to try to cheer me up and I have to send her away because her presence is making me claustrophobic to the point of hyperventilating tears, ... I realize that I am not. The pain that makes me who I am ... is fucking awful.

As a suicide prevention moderator, I have been able to help others back from that most precarious edge, but not without its own share of risks. The other night, I dealt with a young girl with much pain and a knife to relieve it. I have moderated hundreds of crises with no problem, but her situation awoke in me something that I had thought was long behind me. I became paralyzed with something I could not explain. I couldn't help her. I knew what to say, but I also knew she would not listen. The only advice I could give would go unheard and I knew it. Everything felt futile and lost. I was returned to the place with no hope. I called for help and was assisted by a superhero named Remus. He helped me resolve her struggles for the evening, but my wounds were open again. I cried myself to sleep that night, unable to control the volume of my sobs. Again I was saved by a loving friend's comforting arms.

Given a poll of random persons who have interacted with me, I think the consensus would be that the world would be a worse place without me and what pain I must have experienced is worth it for what I have become and the good I bring on a daily basis. However, in the deepest, blackest portion of my existence, I honestly think that they are all wrong.

But I am not alone.

And for that I continue, for I know I never will be alone. To help another is to help thyself. There is no 'you' and there is no 'me.' We are all one and in each one of us there is all.

Diamonds in the Rough

Insanity leads to chaos,
Then to solitude...
The fruitless effort of adding
Meaning to what is meaningless

A lone, Crimson tear
Falls into the sea...
The echo of the remaining star
Cries out in the infinite vacuum

The least I can do
Is send my distant prayers
Over the winds of time,
Setting sail on dreams...

----------

I didn't write that.  I found it in a video game.  It was just an everyday RPG for the PS1 where you play as the protagonist and traverse this world AND a world where you died as a child.  Some RANDOM npc from his hometown was like, "hey, friend, I want to be a poet but I'm kinda stuck here in this little restaurant, would you listen to my poem?"  I was like, lol sure! ... And then I was like, ... oh.

My point with this post is two fold.

One, you can never know what you will find where you go.  Don't judge a book by its cover basically.  Just because it's a character in a video game doesn't mean it won't have something crazy to share.  Just because it is a waiter at a run down cafe doesn't mean it isn't a worthwhile person.  This npc was a diamond in the rough.  Frankly, that whole game is, but her even more so.  Don't let anyone be unnoticed-- don't turn away any pile of dirt.  Take in the whole world as it is and let that brilliant brain sift and sift.  You'll find yourself more diamonds that way.

Two, she is a poet in the world where the protagonist lives.  The story goes that there was a moment in time when the life of the main character was SO up to chance that the timeline split in two and years later, he learns to travel back and forth between the two worlds.  When he lives, she is a poet.  When he is dead, she's depressed.  No she doesn't love him or anything!  He just ... affected her.  His mother being in the town affected her.  Him and her friend Leena dating affected her.  Her friend's husband becoming a fisherman instead of a banker due to the protagonist ALSO affected her.  Every single drop in that ocean sweeping over her and creating something different.  Every single drop in that ocean caused by one small event that was left to chance.

The event of the protagonist living or dying.

----

Every moment of life is a drop in the ocean.  Make it good moment by moment by moment and you'll find a swelling tide of good, one drop at a time.  If you can't do it for you, do it for the NPCs around you ;)  They might just write a poem someday that gives purpose to all of your suffering.