Philosophy: The Breakfast Cereal

I fucking love philosophy.  Does that make me weird?  Probably.  Is it additionally weird that I love the darkest of the philosophers like Nietzsche and Kafka and Sartre and Camus and Vonnegut and Thompson and Orwell and Pessoa and Morrissey?

I don't care!!  Fornication with odd ideas is a good strategy - no strings attached.  I can read about all these different ideologies without prejudice and learn about misanthropy and idealism and happiness and morbidity and failure and introspection and the cold and broken hallelujah.  And in doing so, I can feel a solidarity with all those feelings without feeling too alone or too crazy, because other intellectual people share both my bliss and my neuroses.  It's comforting, even when it's disturbing.  If Nietzsche, a guy who was dealing with tertiary syphilis and the utter betrayal of those closest to him, could declare at the end of his life that:  “The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest: asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. Knowledge-a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest ” -
well, then I can handle my personal shit.

So when Morrissey occasionally reminds me that "time's tide with smother you" - it makes me more ready for the suffocation of life, because I remember not only his sweet voice, but also the idea that all the shit that happens in life IS smothering me.  I just have to find a way to breathe.  And when I can't find a way to breathe anymore ... well, I'll be done with it all.  Camus will finally be speaking a truth about suicide which I can celebrate.  Even though he couldn't follow through with the ultimate exit, that doesn't mean it's impossible or even implausible for other people who are at the end of their road.  I suppose it you're still alive, you're not yet at the end of your road.

Maybe all of us bleak thinkers are simply idealists, drowning in the shit of humanity.  We see the potential, and then we see people not living up to that potential.  That's a crushing weight to bear.  As Salinger so aptly said, we're all a bunch of goddamn phonies.  The worst part is that we KNOW we are, but we just can't help it.  And us idealists are just like, "really?  Ya fuckers?  Is this what's happening?"  And yep.  People are still doing their shitty, mean, acts every day.  To themselves and to other people.

But I want to believe.  I see your guns and bombs and insults, and I raise you with truth and respect and tolerance.  Get it together, people.

Let me leave you with another idealist, mr e e cummings:

“Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it's there and sitting down

on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity

i hate you”