The nights grow stranger as the years pass.
Purpose is a struggle. Since our later teens my sister and I have conferred regularly with each other about an overarching sense of nihilism. She always managed to find energy to push for a lifestyle that she deemed suitable. I wondered where she found the energy. For a decade and a half I had the frantic push of amphetamines to inspire mania where enthusiasm was lacking, and now I’m without it. There is a sense that I’m a wilted retard, burned through and tired. I’m not, but it’s a feeling that persists.
My sister finds her present raison d’etre in gaming and friends. It’s not enough, but it’s something. We talk, and she’s evidently frustrated, but that frustration rises and falls with the months. It depends on what’s happening in her life. Promotions feel good. Gaming feels good. Another month sober feels good. But it’s similar for her as it is for me: there is a pervasive sense that the quotidian is a façade behind which lies nothing, nothing, nothing.
It’s funny, this sister is the one who is also an addict. Go figure.
It’s classic, isn’t it? These actions are distractions in the mire of life allowing us to forget, if momentarily, the all-consuming mouth at the end of life, the tearing entropy grinning like a skull. Ah, a joint blew out. It’ll heal, but it’ll never be the same. The oldest problems, the oldest feelings, dressed in terms that aren’t even that new. They need translation for each generation. We experience unique pains in every era, but they all relate to primal feelings, and we need to give new terms to these feelings, old feelings extant in novel contexts, in every era.
Empathy, for me, has increased with age. As I experience more of the trials age permits, I get more of a sense of time, a breadth of human awareness. I see more of others, I live through more situations. Youth was marked by a lack of emotional understanding, an inability to see how people could wind up in unlivable, alien situations. But I’ve lived longer. I’ve had more time to notice odd patterns of thought, what to consciously avoid, what to indulge. I can see how that man ended up talking to himself, why he tics just so. I can see my own luck leading me out of any of the innumerable pits I began to dig myself. I can see how easy it is to fall into any single pattern when there is no overarching theme greater than “don’t die, maybe reproduce.”
What do I do with the hours of my life?
Lately I work and talk. I talk to people I know online, seldom people in real life. I work every day of every week, at least a little, more often a lot. I read sometimes. I’ve been reading the same novel for a month. Sometimes I give myself to idle fantasy. I exercise. I distract myself with food. The hours I spend outside of work are filled with attempts to assign my time with some kind of busyness that carries meaning.
At funerals we often go over how a person spent their life. Often the phrase “he found immense meaning in” makes its way into the service. I wonder at that, if they actually found meaning. I wonder behind the eyes of every man who claims he’s found meaning if there isn’t some perfect little seed of doubt eating at them. A core nihilism close to hunger, some ripping energy that forces the fire of their faith higher as the challenges of the universe around them rise, and rise, and rise. And maybe the nihilism is a misinterpretation of hunger. This is the simple nature of all things, to consume and to be consumed. It is enough to satisfy the bacteria and black holes. Why not me?
The search for meaning is a problem solving tool that persists beyond its utility. Pattern recognition provides pleasure, because if we’re capable of understanding a pattern we are capable of predicting a future, and thus better capable of acting in a way that allows our persistence into that future. When the problems on our horizons are not existential, existentialism pervades all things. Perhaps there is a breed of man that finds easy answers and is satisfied, reaffirms his faith daily, nightly, does not worry too much about meaning altogether. This worry is a neurosis. As is often said, a man with only a hammer sees all problems as nails. Abstracting to myself, all of life is a problem to be solved. The brain spins. What is next? What is the point? Is this it?
This is it.
The nights grow stranger as the years pass.
I look in the mirror before I sleep and recognize the face only for my long familiarity with it. The child who thought his way into my present would see me as an alien, though he’s a near friend to me now. I lay in bed and stare at a new ceiling, play with a phone, drift into thoughts.
The very quality of thought changes as you age. What your brain is capable of producing in concept, remembering, manipulating. Your sense of self drifts. Everything firm about life dissolves. For the faithless, there is no rock. For the faithful, dementia excises that rock.
Dreams come and go. I struggle to remember them, do away with them entirely at times through habit, then will them to the fore of my consciousness for weeks, trying to understand myself through the passing images. I long ago relegated dreams treatment more as curiosity than element of self, but I grow to question the wisdom of that. I’ve drawn whole stories from my dreams, songs and ideas from them, stark images I will someday reproduce. Strange feelings of sex and violence and stress and absurdity, and joy even. And joy even.
I lay in bed and wait for sleep, place my mind in such a state that it may permit unconsciousness to sneak past the forebrain and take it from behind. Sleep is increasingly an obligation. There is pleasure in it, but there is not enough time in a day. I have to balance sleep time with waking time, manage the quality of my waking hours by permitting enough time unconscious to occur, but ensure I do not oversleep to eat away at the waking life I seek to improve. Life becomes some striving for a balance in attempt to improve the time I spend conscious. And as my conscious life improves I find things becoming easier, life coming together in concrete, material ways, but I always find that last problem, that first problem.
Why continue forward.
I listen to the life outside my window and envy the crickets for their song. Monotone, simple. The frogs croak and the wind carries their horny little sounds.
This bed is not my own. This house is not my own. I pass from room to room, through lives and friendships, seeing people seldom and using those meetings as a gauge for self. Who have I become in time? Who have they become? Will they recognize me? Who was I to them then? How do I relate to them now?
It’s an odd fact of experience that we slide back into relationships like old selves repossess our bodies, hijack our minds and tongues. We slip into dynamics that contrast with our present and make us wonder: which one is me, and do I want to change what was? Updating the past with the present, with our desires.
The nights grow stranger as the years pass.
But also more familiar.
I know myself and what I need better than before. I sleep more easily when I permit myself to. I know why I need to sleep. I know when I’ll wake and who I’ll be.
The nights lose their mystery, and I cultivate a familiarity with self. While seeing the drift in my person, I learn what that person will need to get through the next day, and can put him in situations advantageous to his physical needs. Even the spirit settles with time, the tempests blow over, and I permit myself calm ports within which I might weather those moments where the question returns. When the question returns.
What do I do with myself.
The oldest question.
There are more answers with time, but the question always returns.
What do I do with myself.
The nights grow stranger as the years pass.
Perhaps I’ll permit myself a dream tonight.
