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Sometimes I feel my voice start to crack, to freefall back down into swells of cyan noise. I tumble into obscurity and it is strangely comforting. But it is also dangerous.

My deadly sin is pride. My greatest fear is the mundane. I see the world, in its teeming masses, and I am afraid of sinking into the mire of comfortable consumerism. I am terrified that one day I will wake up, almost dead, and realize that I have done nothing at all. Money is a means to an end, but wealth is not a suitable ambition. Neither is happiness, at least not in the conventional sense. I need to leave an indelible stamp on this life before I go, to scrawl my marks across the eroding landscapes and arrested organisms. I need to say something profound to humanity. Didn't I just tell you that I was proud?

And so I lay awake some nights, frustrated, realizing that time is crawling forwards and I am bloody twenty-four and still nothing has happened. I am still mired. I am still lazy and still full of impotent loftiness. And I have no excuses.

The internet has put an end to excuses, opening the doors to a new public sphere and inviting anyone and everyone to just fucking Do It Yourself. And the public has responded in force, flooding this blank canvas with oceans of words, seas of images, briny wells of ideas. The corporate-guarded gateways to cultural consent gave way to an immense marketplace of text and media, building itself higher and wider and more convoluted with every passing second. Distinction has become virtually impossible in a brand new way, but there are still those who try and succeed. And I am not one of them.

I confided these fears to Sally, a twelve-year old girl on the brink of genius, yesterday during our class. I told her how it was frustrating to want something so badly and yet not badly enough to find the time to do it. Sally knows about chagrin: she studies twelve hours, dawn-till-dark. But she studies not only at the behest of her mother, but because she sees accredited intelligence as a means to achieve her goal: "I want to make as much money as possible." She is unapologetic about her greed, and often worries that when she goes to university (6 years from now) that people will want her to go drinking and disturb her work. Sally's greatest fear is friends.

But when I asked her if there was anything, anything, that she would rather do, screw the future, she smiled a little. "Well... I really want to dress up as a character from a graphic novel and go to a convention." Graphic novels - which, I've explained to her, are different from comic books because of their adult themes and horrific depictions of violence - are one of the few pleasures Sally allows herself. Still, I hadn't really anticipated nerdy cosplay as the grand ambition of a pre-teen who can read Orwell's 1984 in two days and understand it, in a foreign language to boot.

Curious, I asked Sally what character she would be. "Oh... just this girl... she is like a fighting girl, you know? And she pulls enemies into a demon world and her hands turn into - oh, what's the word - bones and then she rips out their hearts. Yeah, she looks kind of like a vampire and has red eyes. She kills lots of people." Oh. I told Sally that when she takes over the world, she'd better remember good 'ol Chris Teacher and save him from her menacing robot hordes. And she just laughed.

But somewhere in the depths of Sally's bloodlust, my fears were assuaged. If we can learn from textbooks, we can also learn from her graphic tales of gore and fleeting mortality. Time and time again, I've tried to impress upon Sally that the ever-receding horizon of the future isn't everything, that life is mostly now. And I should take my own advice. If I should, perchance, have my vital organs forceably removed by a demon-girl one day, I think I would like my last-second flashbacks of life to constitute some kind of meaningful experience for me. I would be heartbroken to see that I had wasted my existence pursuing a grandiose lectern that never quite came. I would want my organs back so I could try again. Chasing immortality is a futile pilgrimage, especially when you realize that building your own personal totem is such engaging work that hoping to build a monument for everybody is just foolish.

History swallows most everybody, and those who withstand the currents of time do so accidentally. Imprinting the world is an incidental benefit of imprinting oneself.

Posted by Chris at 12:06 AM >> Commentations (5)