The Morning Post

So you feel the alcohol and the smoke have settled down -- transformed into noxious colorless vapours -- your dreams that brought you close enough have been ripped open once more for the coming of the waking world. Water. More water.


The somber tones outside leave little doubt about where you are right now. The guitar cables are tangled and your phone's battery pack is screaming death.


Why fix what isn't broken? Why make carvings upon the clean smooth finish? Why complicate things that ought not to be when you're so close to the end? (an end).


Perhaps because I've lived a little too long without it. Time zips past you when you're not really paying attention. And this time it did and I wasn't. It dawns on you that as long as it stays out of your reach, it depreciates into mere memory, then history, then myth and finally a mere concept. How easy it is to dismiss other people's problems with parenthood statements and condescending "been-there-done-that" advice when you deal with mere concepts.


But it's not just some abstract concept that anyone can just master. There is no master. We are slaves because we submit our freedoms for its disposal. Is it a bad thing? Not really. The initial freedom to enter it and the sustaining freedom to dwell in it are always there. But along the road, we twist and tumble, we dive and lift off, we shape and mold, we change our course into a bleak grey area called compromise. Individuals die. And we see something ultimately more powerful emerge.


I am tired as I wake up. It's no concept. After the songs and lyric fragments that flood my mind and hard drive, I seemed to have lost sight of the very meaning of it all. Yes. Meaning. It's not truth that we search for because truth is amoral and inhumanly neutral. What we want is meaning. The type that gets you up when you don't want to. The type that makes you walk under the rain and look up and clench your fists as a smile curves up your face. The type that causes you be both impatient and terrified about the very next day when you know you'd just wake up sober again only re-enter the cycle of self-destruction.


It's not just a concept because it has to be necessarily trapped and incarnated by context. Particular who-what-where-and-when's surround you and you have to act within these parameters. And yes, it's inconvenient. Square one always is. It's full of anxiety and empty of confidence. How much truth are you willing to give and how much is enough so that meaning can be drawn from it without flooding another's life? How much unchange can you tolerate and how much of change can you offer? It freaks you out because you know in your mind that you will suffer -- and suffer again. But sometimes, the thanatos does come -- the human desire for pain and death -- and we embrace it... perhaps because death gives us a chance to mirror our lives and see that we don't have to do all this alone.


You need a walk. Think, though you grow sick of it. 


It's square one and you're in the context.