Have you ever been fed up with having to act rational all the time? I guess it is expected, but the frustrations and failures that can wreck your day can also wreck your beautifully constructed rational empiricist front that you use like armor all day. I am supposed to be the answer man that can solve any mystery, figure out any conundrum. Yet I am faced regularly with all sorts of strange and unsolvable dilemmas that have few solutions or perhaps none at all. Happiness and sadness are a common dialectic that people want to understand, but I’m not sure that emotions are frequently understandable, logical, or empirical. The meaning of life may be no meaning at all, or it may have to do with the existential dark side inherent in the human soul. There are days, however, when I wonder about my own soul and this odd journey through time and space that often seems to be an arbitrary and fictional dream with no point of temporal or spatial reference that makes any sense. So space is expanding? Into what? I ask. Some other space? Everybody seems to be living the same dream, but there is nothing continuous about this fragmented, broken, chaotic, non-linear, and discontinuous narrative we call life. Words fail me (well, almost, but not really). Can we even ask the right questions about reality given the finite bounds of language, syntax, and semantics that limit both our thinking and our expression in ways that we cannot even begin to imagine because we are always bounded by the limits and inadequacies of language? We don’t even know that we aren’t asking the right questions about reality because our reality is constructed out of language. Perhaps the artists and poets have intuited that there is more to life than what the banal quotidian language of daily life has lead us to believe. Only by breaking language, destroying syntax, vilifying semantics and ignoring usage can we begin to see beyond the Black Friday of mindless consumerism and take back the orphaned human imagination and give it back its job of providing new ideas and promoting new ways of seeing that transcend the blind pack of popular wolves that would dumb us down and make us all speak the same idiot language of mass communication and digital mummification that has kidnapped originality, creativity, and individuality. I don’t want to be like anyone else. Life is to short to let others tell you how to life it or to give in to peer pressure about what is acceptable or what is right. Pop culture kills brain cells, stifles personal initiative, stomps out creativity, erases imaginations, suppresses spontaneity, silences voices. We often fear what the neighbors might think unless our lawn is perfect, we won’t buy beverages in the grocery store foe fear of being spotted, we won’t kiss in public because others might be uncomfortable, the car must be washed, your suit pressed, your tie silk. So we fight about religion, politics and sex, but we don’t make original or heartfelt arguments, we parrot the crap that comes out of the television, forgetting all the while that we might be creating something of our own, making something new.
