Ebb and Flow and the Impending Tidal Destruction of the Human Race (Or Something Like That)*

Don't ask me to explain your indecision. David Byrne

There's laundry all over the goddamn place, some of it clean, most of it dirty. Unwashed for some number of months I fail to recall. I sit in this room, my room, for hours each day playing video games for no good reason except that they allow me to shut my mind off for a period of time. At the very lest, I am able to divert a few brain cells away from their primary task, assessing whatever nightmare I have created in the past five minutes. Picking a good pass play on third down is much easier than contemplating a long sexual drought from which there will be little chance of escape. The rains come when they feel like coming, not when you do.

If I'm lucky, I sit down and type a bit, but this is the first time I've done so sincerely in a few weeks, opting instead to hide myself at a local diner to read Bukowski, scribble repetitive self-evaluations, and drink bad coffee. There was an article recently accepted by the medical journal I work for called "The Self Pith." I laughed when I saw it. I can understand all too well the desire to jab pins through one's own Flesh. Purgation. Catharsis. Et al.

Still, I realize that there is no need for all this self-flagellation, no need to live in perpetual misery. It is as foolish as living a blindly happy life, just less enjoyable, and, in its own way, more addictive. Your standard, smiling bastard refuses to ask the necessary questions, and, therefore, refuses to bother himself or rack his brains. People like me ask too many fucking questions and have decided that every answer is horrible and inexorable in its horror. They fail to understand the true nature of people, which is not that they [people] are generally rotten, only fickle and unable to be trusted. This inherent lack of trustworthiness does not, I don't think, come from malice or spite. Not necessarily. We just don't know what we want; yet we want incessantly. We fall victim too often to the notion that there are things--many things--worth wanting. More importantly, and perhaps especially in modern society, we don't know what we need.

If Mr. Jagger can't no satisfaction, how can we?

You can either cope with things as they are, or you can take the coward's way out and gravitate toward either one of the poles. Be blindly, idiotically happy for the rest of your life by ignoring brutal realities that will haunt you forever, or drown yourself slowly with hyperbolic terrors that may or may not exist. Loneliness does not breed the latter. The latter breeds loneliness. For someone who has learned this lesson many times over, it seems I have done a remarkably shitty job of putting my knowledge to any practical use.

No one should be left sexless for an extended period of time. It is a death sentence for the mind and for the body and for whatever manifestation of the human spirit you'd like to rationalize into existence. Leave someone with nothing more than masturbation for a few years, and watch them crumble. Watch their brain lose its ability to process simple arithmetic. Watch their skin shrivel up and begin peeling. Individuals who claim to have no need for sex are usually lying to you, but those who mean it--those few for which this claim is actually valid--have ceased to be human. They are often scientists or literature professors who, during their endless, fervent search for humanity, lost it. Humanity exists only as a philosophical or scholastic concept to them. It is an interesting talking point for people who have "transcended" their nature. Mind over matter, indeed, but many people fail to realize that, in the end, we are only matter. The mind might have power over the body, but when the body breaks...

Mind you, these sorts of people are very rare. Ninety-nine percent of humans are unable to forge this kind of disconnect between their intellectual, religious, or other ambitions. Rather, suppression is the rule, denial the operative defense mechanism. We must all be wary of those who advise us to deny primal urges of any sort, but we must do this without falling into Hedonism or Gluttony. The line is not a clear one. The more probable answer is that there is no line, only an expanse of gray with hopelessly undefined boundaries.

That is the existential conundrum with which we must learn to live in harmony, which we must embrace or else accept the inevitability of our destruction, wrought for no reason at all by our unwillingness to tolerate.

Morality. Decency. Propriety. These are just buzz words meant either to sedate or to create a high ground where the Pious Few may seek refuge in their self-righteousness. When you look closely enough, you realize that everyone, regardless of faith or disposition, believes he/she is a member of the elite, and this makes us all hypocrites. All of us Christians. All of us Muslims. All of us intellectual lowlife scum.

All of us. All of us. All of us.

This is why there is no such thing as moral high ground, and it is also why we are unable to realize that while extremes like Good and Evil or Creative and Destructive do exist, they are not incarnate in any one person. Hitler was not completely evil, and neither was Stalin. That is to say, deep down somewhere, both of these men probably had the capacity to help an old woman cross the street or put a smile on some lonely child's face. (What have we learned from Darth Vader?) Jesus Christ was part sinner, and even Mother Theresa had her moments of selfishness, maybe even Greed. The only two functioning polar absolutes in this world seem to be Ebb and Flow. We as humans, however, control neither of them.

But what the fuck do I know? I'm twenty-two, but it would be the same if I were fifty or seventy-five or nine hundred years old. The Big Questions--the ones that really matter--are and shall remain unknown to you and me. The Answers will prove even more elusive.

You know what they say about Death and Taxes, don't you? Well. Not everybody pays their taxes.

* Written December 15, 2006. Exhumed March 20, 2007. The author has since gone on an ego-trip in an attempt to counteract the characteristic depression outlined above.