Category: Journal

Act always as a king, not a peasant. Act as a man who puts the needs of the community first. This man does not drink because he must always be vigilant, ready for when the wolves come to stalk the sheep. Even when subordinated to the imprudent, maintain your integrity and dignity. Act as an emperor in peasant clothing; act as Socrates, as Diogenes, as Epictetus, Washington, as Ashoka, as Shakyamuni, Winters, Leonidas, as Marcus. We hold to higher truths than fashion and convenience, than the cut of the clothe and wiggle of the tongue, than deceit, treachery, untruthfulness, selfishness, banality, mediocrity, superficiality. We reject the illusory world of emotion situation ethics and side strongly with virtue. We are a fortress within ourselves.

I am responsible for my own errors. I do not blame those in my trust for my own faults. I do not make excuses. I am what I am by my own will or lack of will, lack of restraint or restraint, heart or no heart. When it is time to die, I will fulfill that duty. With no whining. I will attend to the quest for honesty with serious devotion. I will recite Thomas Paine before every battle:

‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.

Your definition of a friend disgusts me. “Hook up” with a steel in your gut, by your own acidic hand. Do not “fool around,” do it right, completely, bleed out that black ichor which serves as your blood. Become “fuck buddies” with the piercing end for the utmost virtue.

Speak the truth of those you find the need to fuck and keep the fealty of friendship for those who cherish it.

This world is a burden
And it disgusts me.
I want to deny it,
Its inhabitants and their possessions.
I’m embarrassed to know
This soil produced me.
I’m dying to be elsewhere,
Trying not to belong in a nature
Of impulse and self indulgence.
A brother to none,
my kinship lies elsewhere.
I am separate and loyal to no one,
If born from this soil.
I’m embarrassed to know you;
you do not represent me.
a likeness only in structure,
Not in mind.
I vow to never belong to anyone
Born from this soil
A people that follows blindly
Will not reprimand me.

What is the ideal design for a society? If we thought clearly, we might say:

(a) Leadership by the capable: genius intelligence, conscientious application, empathic understanding but given toward seeing the whole picture and not the conflicting demands of individuals.

(b) Does not trash its environment through reckless industry and overpopulation (the primary threat to our environment is land overuse, as with sufficient natural land to absorb, process and counter our pollution through oxygen production, it can deal with us just fine — yet when we occupy almost all of the land that can be civilized, whether with farms or factories, we destroy that nurturing support structure).

(c) Has healthy values that place creativity, sobriety, sexual selectivity and marital fidelity, heroism and transcendence above temporary pleasures such as physical satiation and seizure of power or acting out of emotional desires (revenge, hatred, desire to be loved through popularity).

(d) Gives to each of us a place where we can contribute meaningfully, and returns the rest of our time to us. The average person works 8-10 hours and commutes nearly two per day; this leaves 4-6 hours for paying bills, haggling with service providers, fixing up the house, spending time with family, spending time with friends, etc., per day. Weekends for most people consist of a day for errands and a day for rest, with one or two nights of recreation in between. This amounts to too little time for a quietude of contemplation and devotion to family and friends and society in a meaningful way; instead, we get token applications of each and, because people are constantly exhausted, lots of television watching.

(e) Produces higher culture, learning, arts and heroes.

(f) Rewards those of a higher nature, and ushers the criminal, mentally defective, stupid, ugly and petty-minded toward evolutionary extinction.

“The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly as necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.”
– President Theodore Roosevelt, 1912

Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet today ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men. All of these things have come upon them through ignorance of real good and ill… I can neither be harmed by any of them, for no man will involve me in wrong, nor can I be angry with my kinsman or hate him; for we have come into the world to work together…

I am re-reading Meditations, but this time I am going to read it from front to back cover instead of skipping from aphorism to aphorism. I made a trip to the tiolet yesterday and found myself absorbed in the reassuring wisdom of Marcus after that long winded and misanthorpic rant. What turned into momentary reading material transformed into an hour bathroom session. It is amazing the sheer breadth of topics covered and how so effectively every topic is addressed with the grace of a sage. This is for the besieged.

Much credit must be given to Gregory Hays who managed to produce the most approachable translation I have yet to encounter, breathing life into a text which is often translated in a formal, Shakespearean tone. Gregory understood that Marcus was writing to himself in a personal journal and would have never used such an academic tone.

In my opinion Marcus would have never used such an elitist tone, it is simply not characteristic of his generous and kind spirit. Hays translation reads warmly as if Marcus is speaking directly to the reader with his hand on your shoulder in a fatherly, wimsical and very intimate manner.

Translating Greek (and Latin) is not a clearcut deal (since the languages don’t make any sense if directly translated word for word) and the translator makes all the difference in the end. It lies on the translator’s shoulders to transmute ancient words into something a english speaker could understand and do so in a stylistic fashion which does not betray the spirit of the original text. So again I would like to thank Gregory Hays for his most skillful, insightful and powerful translation of the journals of Marcus Aurelius.

I yearn for other philosophical meditations penned in the fashion of a therapeutic journal (and hopefully translated by Hays too). The reading experience is much more intimate than that of treatise or discourse. I would die to get my hands on a Socrates meditation but we all know that will never happen. Socrates never wrote anything down, just as Epictetus, Socrates remixed, never did. A man can dream. I feel so close to the wisdom and insights of the Socratic line of philosophers and recall fondly the many teachers that trained me in the Socratic lifestyle before I had even discovered the ramblings of Plato. Truly it is the righteous life.

I return to school tommorow into what will probably wind up being the worst semester yet. Sumerian agathodaimon be gone.

“He only earns his freedom and his life who takes them everyday by storm”

– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Although I usually try my best to keep my posts here fairly impersonal and philosophical, if I don’t get out this list of disdain i’m going to implode. Again, sorry for the Devin Townsend style rant.

I’m sick of being lied to by everyone, being mislead by people who supposedly love me, of gasping for air in this suffocating facade of normalcy.

I’m sick of living in a world where everyone has vile secrets, double lives and throwaway declarations.

I’m sick of that look the paper gangsters shoot me as they pass me on the road, going 90 miles per hour in a 20 miles per hour zone; that false gesture of constant threat and murder eyes backed by nothing but mass produced drum synth and predictable shouts about getting bitches into your car.

I’m sick of the emotionless music cranked out at the lowest common denominator like every thing else in this decaying culture, the music engineered to get girls (like every thing else in this decaying culure), the pointless, memetic, hollow phrases sung so trite on top of two chords. I’m sick of never being able to discuss what I listen to or becoming a straw man when I do. The fashionable devotion to new ways of life and new ways of thinking to completely replace previous ways. The fashionable adoption of any mundane creed flashed so seductively on MTV; the idiocy and gullibility of people. I’m sick of the close mindedness and ignorance, the steadfast devotion to corporate arbitration, the way buying shit that you don’t need gives you purpose. I’m sick of the dishonesty in music, how the frontman of Creed can have drunken groupsex with Fred Durst and some groupies and still talk about christian values as if they were anything more than a vessel to sell more records and stuff his pockets so fiercely with green paper that will be scattered at the time of his hopefully sooner than later death. How ‘hardcore’ rappers can brag about selling records to 13 year old suburban pampered cunts.

I’m sick of giving her my everything, my heart, my life and being stabbed in the face in return. I am sick of being unable to feel love anymore, of only being sure my heart beats when I reflect on past times, the gaping void in my stomach that wells with disgust and pain every single moment i’m awake, the heart palpatations I feel when I realize this isn’t a dream. I am destroyed by the memories of hopes and dreams, of plans and promises smashed to dust. I would have died for this. I am sick of constantly being dissapointed because NO ONE CAN KEEP THE SIMPLEST OF CONVICTIONS. I am sick of the notion that integrity is for nerds and christian prudes.

I am sick of all the supposed philosophers who so easily get into girls pants with irrelevant speak of meaningless metaphysical nonsense or speak of change in the world, only to get drunk on the weekends instead; the way their seductively talk about their fantasy world when it doesn’t matter but won’t even bring dissenting opinion when pressed during a debate out of fear of someone dismantling their bullshit theories. It seems that if you speak of chaos magic, spirit healing, chakras, shadow bodies or thelema backed with some flowery words its easy to woo the idiotic masses. I am sick of the prentention of these people who all support the gratuitous branding of anarchy symbols, any offensive or radically left wing philosophy without knowing what their talking about. Ask Pol Pot’s children just how fucking great communism is. Ask Thich Quang Duc if immolating himself in a town square was just David Copperfield Vietnamese edition.

I’m sick of having to force a smile when I should be screaming. I am sick of being expected to ingest all the deceptions and still be ‘friends.’ I am sick of this world that produced her, when I know we could love eachother in another place, another time. Some other world where father figures don’t rape their children and its not OK to guilt trip a misguided and battered girl into spreading her legs. I am sick of married men exploiting high school girls who lack the self-respect to say no. I am sick of seeing so many girls be battered only to turn that venom into words that cripple like a gun. I am sick of not being able to bring justice to these social parasites, of not being able to prune the wilting plant. I die when she is hurt. I’m sick of braking my back for everyone, being the rock that people cling to, and then being second guessed and doubted when lesser men spread fabrications; the imprudence of those who would so easily buy into slander and heresay. I’m sick of being the one down in the fens when liars and manipulators win over with lies what I so honestly loved without misleadings.
I’m sick of my supposed friends who could care less about fellowship. Ruthless careerists stepping on my face to reach the top of the pyramid. I am sick of being used by these so-called friends and being selfless, being unselfish at every turn, only to be spat upon in passing. I am sick of hearing the firebrand rants on sobriety only to have those words mean nothing when you return from college a alcholic. I am sick of when you sit around and talk shit about everything that you once based your whole life on and i’m supposed to smile and nod. I am sick of being unable to have honest discourse, of always being distracted by something technological when we rarely meet, of the secret plots and the selfishness. There is something supressing honesty in meeting, something illusory which hovers in air. I am sick of being able to remember simpler times when all we needed was a porch and a couple blocks for manhunt. I am sick of being ignored and forgotten when new vaginas come around, from spending all my time with someone to spending none. I am sick of the way my supposed friends constantly complain about their girlfriends but never openly communicate to them, the way they endure the greatest annoyances for nothing, the way they sell themselves to the idea of work to the bone and nothing to live for outside a 9-5 work shift.

I am sick of there being no refuge, no one to stem the constant loneliness, no righteous government to serve, no school of philosophy that isn’t teeming with esoteric nonsense or overly critical cycles of analysis. I am sick of being forced to look over my shoulder and being on guard when speaking to new people.

I am sick of all this filth, the stench of liquor, vommit and semen on 12 year olds, invitations for dark alley hand jobs, listenting to her stories of secret whoredom and depravity. I am so tired of being alone in my honesty, of never finding a single human being that doesn’t lie directly to my face. I am sick of the search, of aspiring to search, of living at all. This place is an allegory of everything unnatural, neurotic and unsound, it is the antithesis of reason, of love and of compassion. I am sick of being sober, of thinking clearly, of being alone at all times.

I am sick of listenting to inspirational speeches by politicians, the deceptive rhetoric and sensationalism of network news, the constant fear brigade that seeks to drive everyone into the arms of hate, mistrust and selfishness. I am sick of the mandatory corruption at every strata of executive power.

I am sick of enduring this dying cell.

I am sick of walking home in the dark by myself.

Reassurance: Nothing will last and this is just noise. Time destroys everything. This pain won’t last because I won’t. Every order, empire, paradigm will be smashed into dust, every atom recycled eternally through the duty of oblivion. Your fleshy bits will be eaten by worms, which will in turn be eaten by beings far greater than themselves. Your bones will one day burn as fossil fuel. Those of the future will burn their ancestors just as we burn ours. That is our fate: a toxic vapor of burnt excess. This moment is nothing considering the gaping void of time before and after, the irrelevancy of individual lives. This will mean nothing. This is just noise.

Remember:

Matter. How tiny your share of it.

Time. How brief and fleeting your allotment of it.

Fate. How small a role you play in it.

Through one choice made all choice is gone
And I see them throught ice glazed eyes
I envisioned their will to never crack
Now these hands are ties behind a broken back
Whatever I once knew fell apart in my hands
Breaking, falling to the floor like sand
Through these fingers of panic this decent I see
I look down, all I see is what used to be

I mourn for all the loss
I have nowhere to place the blame
There is no more time for deciding
Father, I know what their hiding

Time has come for the truth to be known
Shed the falsehood for your own good
There’s nothing wrong in taking another step
There is no crime in saving what’s left

Cast iron convictions catalyst to my reactive hate
I see the times to come. I cannot wait

A kinship lay in shambles
Shadows of promises once made
Indifference, emptiness
To those who have been betrayed

So I cover it with pride
And this torture I keep on the inside
These years of decay
Are chipping me away

Vengeance will serve as attrition to their sin
This is my jurisdiction again
A line is crossed as I have been
Punishment, bloodlust revenge

It’s hard to look back on what it could have been because I remember what you said but still don’t know what you meant. If I only knew then what I know right now it just could have been so different. Those dreams, your dreams, were fueled by the promises you made to me but you never meant to keep. Lessons were learned the hard way. I try to focus on the future but couldn’t get past your mistakes. What do you have to say? I won’t look back but will you ever change? Those dreams, your dreams, were fueled by the promises you made to me but you never meant to keep. I won’t look back. Lessons were learned the hard way. I try to focus on the future but you will never change.

I won’t look back.