I happen to be a man whose feelings fluctuate between having a distinct lack of stuff in me and having too much stuff in me. Whether that stuff be composed of ether, like emotions and spunk and what have you, or composed of tangible things, such as water, bread, and $300 chocolate bars, it is fair to say that the highlights of my life are either the points where I put that needed stuff in me, and the points where I get rid of it. Spunk goes both ways; a bit like me, a very useful substance. Would recommend.
I have too many ideas in me, you see; they go around and around in my head. Sometimes they go in my gut — those are the good ones. Too often they show up out of nowhere, making it very hard for me to know if I’m actually smart or my brain isn’t using its full potential, like a teenager passive–aggressively cleaning the whole bathroom because his dad complained the bath was dirty. To be fair, it’s an important appliance; the whole room was named after it.
When I get these good ideas, I’m forced to let them out. In some respects, it’s this letting out of ideas that keeps me occupied with my live. In others, it’s the doing of stuff that makes me alive. But I know these are vague ideas, as doing stuff is one of the principle meanings of life. Perhaps it’s best to say I’m doing stuff that helps other people also do stuff, but slightly better.
I’ve been debating with myself the past few days whether it’s worth it to do anything at all if there’s no telling when humanity will nuke itself off the Earth, and even then just be a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot in this great big universe. But practically, the world is still pretty big, and I live longer than most things in that world, so I might as well try to make some lives more pleasant while I’m here.
Death is a mystery to me, and to be honest I’m skeptical of the concept. First–hand witnesses are hard to find. Sometimes you get people who claim to have died, but then pansied out and decided to come back for a few more years. I always found it curious how people who suffer near–death experiences go back to their lives as normal, like it was something as casual as washing your panties. You would think they’d try something a little manlier, like bare–knuckle boxing, or juggling.
It’s important to understand death, because though it is foreign to you (and if it isn’t, let me know what it’s like), it will happen to you — if you believe the hype. There were a few words that changed my way of thinking, made by the excellent Subnormality guy, whose article about happiness and hard work I found well and truly revolutionary but which the brilliant cracked.com commentators took issue with. Apparently the notion of doing something with your life instead of lounging about like a potato is so controversial that multiple people felt the need to express their disapproval on a website that somebody else created. Hmm…
Though the article has no grand overarching theme and has some bizarre references to things I’m not familiar with and therefore must be destroyed, overall the article is full of such excellent inspiration and information that the returns that you get from the five minutes spent reading this are so grand that I am unable to count them.
It teaches the lessons that more people need to hear, and does it in a way that doesn’t alienate the audience, unlike the article immediately following it, “6 Harsh Truths that will make you a Better Person”, which is written in the literay equivalent of somebody kicking you in the nuts and telling you move out of the way next time, asshole. It seems Mr. Wong hasn’t yet learned another harsh truth: you can say the most brilliant things in the world (he doesn’t, but let’s ignore that), though none of that matters one bit because you said it wrong. The only people who listen to assholes are other assholes, and that’s not a good position to be in.
You see, I like Winston, the Subnormality guy. You can tell he’s Canadian because he says things in a way that doesn’t make you roll your eyes and wonder to yourself “Christ, how much inbreeding did it take to produce this twat?”, which is just another way to say he appears a standup person. His drawings are as brilliantly composed as his writing is, and having the wombo–combo is what makes him exceptional. It’s very important to be a Renaissance man; specialisation is for insects.
And if you have one takeaway from that article he wrote, let it be this: “Nobody who knows they’re going to die is capable of not trying their best". As a culture we have deluded ourselves into ignoring the harsh reality of death, as much as my joking made it seem like a non–issue, so that when we are old and it seems much nearer than before, we realise that we have wasted our lives on trivial things, and it is by and large too late to change it.
I know I will die, and thus I train to live longer. I know I will die, and thus I write to ensure some small legacy. I know that I will die, and thus I place an extremely high value on the limited amount of time I have. I know I will die, and in doing so, I am forced to do my best work, and failing this, constantly self–reflect so that I may one day do my best work. For one day an old man will visit me, and that old man will be me. I will not disappoint him by failing to make my legacy.
Anyway, if you’re wondering what in the hoot all this has to do with this wallpaper from Katawa Shoujo, it’s simple. The novel had made me realise some of the feelings I’ve described in my very first paragraph, being full of knowledge at the same time as it has drained my emotions, making me feel things foreign to me when I first read it at (thinks of an arbitrary age) thirteen, and glad I am for having experienced it then, for it has taught me some things that will be useful until my timely demise.
But as I have already talked about the novel in some short respects in Snow, and redundancy is not very fun at all. So I had talked about some other piece of literature which made me feel similar things, though with vastly different lessons. The feelings are the same, as they tend to be, though the methods to entice them out are always new. It takes something truly great to make me feel something completely foreign to me. I suppose that’s why I was such a nerd when I was younger. I just hadn’t felt enough.
Date: 2017–03–15. Size: 6,790 bytes. Colours: 8.
Upscaled Dimensions: 400×500. Original Dimensions: 200×250.