Factory Joe

tara and i had a conversation on the way in to work this morning… got a bit heated, contesting things about the meaning of all this… throwing back, to, uhm, like — why do i even bother getting up in the morning? what’s the point.. why bother? etc.

etc.

that was the gist of things, topic area yknow. brought on, well, her technorati stats haven’t been incrementing as much as she’d expect lately and strangely that was disappointing to her on two levels: first, that technorati wasn’t able to feed her ego… and second that she even cared about it — that how she felt about her standing in ‘the big out there’ wasn’t being reflected by the all-knowing social oracle… and somehow that was distressing to her.

so we had this big debate thing. ya discussing it all, big picture stuff. philosophical things.

what’d i say? i said ‘get over it’. i said ‘get over it’ about whether there’s meaning or not. i said ‘get over it’ meaning give up the search for meaning because it’s just circular. you get nowhere.

i said ‘get over it’ and do what you want to do in spite of whether there’s meaning or not… b b b better yet, go on the assumption that there is no meaning and keep fighting on well, in my words: “because you should make your own meaning”. maybe if there is meaning, you can act all surprised like when your mom used to bring in the cake with burning burning bright candles on your 4-11 birthdays.

2 + 2 = 5. but really what she was saying was 1 + 3 = 4 and i was saying 2 + 2 = 4.

not one of us thought 2 + 2 = 5. no, making your own meaning, well, that’s silly. you start doing that, well, we know that someone would come correct us, guide us straight, show us some conventional meaning… helping us back on the path. back to rationality, normalcy, dependability.

stop rattling the cage, man, you’ll draw attention to us!

. . .

so ok well. this was the discussion, but it was in the form of an argument of sorts. something of a fight-didn’t-say-quite-the-right-thing-damn-did-i-just-say-that?-i’m-such-a-dick kind of thing. maybe a misunderstanding, maybe it was beyond us. fuck, rambling again.

whatever, it was large talk-thing, meaning-of-life size, we disagreed, felt discomfort, walking-rapdily-away-from-the-other-without-addressing-the-issue, awkward; god, i am still a child? so, end of act I. curtain rises; we make up, end of act II. curtain closes.

. . .

so i come to the thing that’s distracting me from writing, ehm, those other posts.

i remember in high school i couldn’t get along with most any of it. it was all lies, everyone played each other, and the kids who couldn’t or wouldn’t conform, yeah, well if your constitution didn’t afford you enough latitude to dream yourself another reality, well, you’d get swept under the tank treads of adolescence and the whole fucking machine would just keep steaming on, leaving you crushed and broken in its wake. there was no room for stumbling, no patience, no room.

on the one hand you had oblivion. on the other, prison. take your chances, but make a decision. and fucking like it.

and so.

there were some who didn’t make it out of high school, both for reasons out of, and under, their control.

but these situations occurred in a relative vaccuum (“behind closed doors” as they say). the closest we came to the reality of suicide was when the principle would come on the PA with his canned speech that he used every time and tell us all of the tragic passing of so-and-so, how it was a sad day for manchester high school west, that counselors were available if anyone needed to talk. it was appropriate perhaps, but deathly clean. efficient. sterile. the machine chugged on. another one fell beneath the treads and went silent.

i’ve only witnessed one other suicide on the web. but cedric didn’t play it out online. i found out after the fact, by a member of his family. the effect was similar to what i felt when i found out that kurt cobain killed himself. just kind of left me numb and awestruck:

“the bastard did it, he really did it. that one final act of freewill. and he fucking did it.”

i listened to heart shaped box over and over looking for hints. but he was always talking about suicide.

. . .

meh.

look… erhmmm m m… there was something i was getting at here; trying to say something to relate this conversation tara and i had this morning with the discovery of — fuck — the slow public death of chris mckinskey… but i’m all out of juice, i can’t finish this, there’s not a whole lot that i can positively add here.

uh.

i just realized that i listen to a shitload of music by people who have killed themselves.

shit, tara, what the fuck happens if we find out, after all, what i pretend to have accepted? y’know, that in spite of all of this, maybe there really isn’t something bigger than all of us out there making this make sense? maybe chris, cedric, kurt, elliot, ernest dot dot dot just dot dot dot

dot do t

dot

faith. you said faith.

d ot.