Yesterday I wrote all about Rickie, the central character in E. M. Forster’s 1907 novel The Longest Journey. A sensitive young man with literary aspirations, he is destroyed by accepting the way of the worlds instead of continuing to pursue what really matters to him, his writing. This surely is a well-known narrative to any writer.

After writing that post I found some scribblings in a little notebook that I carry with me to work. Years ago I always had a notebook with me, and nearly every day filled it with an idea or two. Nowadays, I’m lucky if I put an idea in there once a month. Kevin anyway, in the back of this one I found the following two little pieces dated January 14, 2024. I forgot about them I can remember sitting in my car before going into work, listening to the Senses Fail record, Hell is in Your Head. (It’s a beautiful little record, by the way.)

#1.

Maybe if I just keep writing whenever I can and however I can then something will come of it but the realization that I’m counting on the exact masses that I can’t stand to do something about it isn’t reassuring. Sleeplessness and denial over the simplest among us who shouldn’t have survived but then again so shouldn’t have I. A revolt, a rebellion, a nonsensical declaration of something more than I or anyone used to be. To read, to write, to talk – no, to phone, to tap, to scroll, to be lost in ones and zeros until you can’t breathe, then continuing to do it anywhere and everywhere possible – NO, REBEL. To think clearly is a rebellion in our modern age.

#2.

No one wants to hear about what happened to you when you were 11, but without those stories I wouldn’t be me nor you you. What happened then will tell you much more about me than what happened yesterday, and so I go on, knowing if you give a shit about me you’ll listen to these stories and if you don’t then nothing would shake you from your self-absorbed discontent. So what happened to me at 11? Not much. Or at 12, or 13, or 14, and that’s the point. I was sheltered, unexposed to the horrors of the world and to the worst impulses of that most and invasive of species – humans. Thus, instead of gradually desensitizing to the suffering of others until feeling nothing (like most people), it all came on like a tidal wave and I continue to drown in the unrelenting suffering of others from sunrise to sunset with barely a break in between. For years I believed in the myth of a romantic relationship as salvation, but all that did was set me up for disappointment when I found every possible match a disappointment due to their unrelenting human-ness. And so we all remain trapped, unless we wake up, and I think I just did.

Alas, I didn’t wake up, or perhaps I did, then stuffed it down out of necessity in order to make it through a shift at work. When you only see the things that are truly important, it can become impossible to do the things that you need to do, the things that society puts on us in order to satisfy their unquenchable desire for more stuff. We can’t wake up once and expect it to stick when everything we’re surrounded by wants the opposite from us, we must wake up again, and again, and again.