The Individual and Happiness

I am wary of happiness and peace. For me, those concepts are just that, concepts. If they were ever more than that for me, I don't recall the time or place. Any semblance of either one, when it enters my life, is not enjoyable because I know it will not last into the next day or even the next hour. In those moments I am saddened by this fact. If ever I am happy it is because I have forgotten what happiness is. People tell me my "depression" is just a chemical imbalance. In other words, happiness is a drug, a purely biological occurrence of finely weighed chemicals. Happiness is not an abstraction like we all want to believe. Our affair with the concept of "love" is similar, a conceptual contrivance to shield us from the fact that all we really want is security, sex and self-esteem. It is more ego-boosting to think "love" is the union of two beings sewn into existence for the sole purpose of buying chocolates and fucking.

I am clearly maladjusted to a life whose participants, if they hope to be happy, must also be amalgamated into the stream of life as dumb fishes, swimming through unaware of how trite their scales are, and how being happy or living a satisfying life is just about putting off the fact that they will be clubbed to death on a boat deck somewhere down the line and ground into a communal chum for some other form of life to crop from. Dumb dead eyes tell all. Most would claim these thoughts as the rantings of a chemically imbalanced person. We are just the utterance of a trillion myopic microcosms. The sum is not greater than the whole, only more complex. People are just rotting life, void of anything lasting or eternally true if stopped in time for a moment. Nothing is uttered from a person that hasn't been uttered before and with more eloquence, including this diatribe. No one creates their emotions; they are created for you in a closed circuit of biological and social inevitability. The only frame of mind which would salvage any dignity or purpose is the epicurean one. Resign to your animalism and wag your tail. Debauchery must rule the day in that circumstance.

Even supposing I take medication to make me less distraught, it doesn't change the facts as I have just explained, it will only blind me to those facts and thus will they be cast aside as artifacts of a deficient mind and I can then swim to the boat with my dumb dead eyes thinking my scales are prettier than the ones on the fish next to me. If ignorance to these facts is happiness, no thanks, I would rather just not be. That is where truth lies, lasting and unaided by the biological fallacies, the ego-maniacal means of the human condition.

"My cells are smarter than your cells", he sells.

I once wanted to be an "intellectual", but what the hell is that anyway? Must be someone who bathes them-self in intellectual avarice, for who wants to be an intellectual outsmarted by intellect? No one, and the self-deception must begin with: "To each their own". The only field of human concentration where I have any degree of actual truth or lack of competition or avarice, is in the arts. This of course is hard to find as well. You must not visit museums or art galleries, or any public forum, else you will find the same negative qualities I mentioned above. "Art for art's sake"-to borrow a phrase, is the only place for unabated truth outside of death. Since I believe truth to be relative, a poem for instance, written from you and for you only, without care for its reception elsewhere can never be bested or found untrue. Art has power if left to itself, not to be subjected to the critical guise of minds bent to their own particular rays of sunshine. Do not share your art if you do so with designs for applause or rejection. Sharing though, of anything, is doing just that: looking for a response, so do not share at all.

Despite all I've said, I am no different from anyone else; I am a dumb fish with dumb eyes and if I am to cast my lot in the furthest direction from the pack of other dumb-eyed fishes, it must be with a practiced sense of apathy. Funny I should share this then.

The southwest

Seems to me that the misuse of water is a gross offense. Nowhere is it more evident than in the American Southwest. Yeah, let's divert 1/8 of the Colorado river to an enormous swath of land that is by definition, a desert. Water utilities are actually cheaper in places like Phoenix because of state and federal subsidies. Let's all throw a penny in the bucket so (insert name) can never have to experience a chill for the rest of their lives, so they can have Christmas dinner on the fucking patio. We should adapt to the land and not adapt the land to us. Sure, that is idealistic, especially in the modern era where it is almost impossible not to rape the land and settle it at the same time, but an effort would be nice. Of course, that doesn't just pertain to the Southwest, but that is a bigger rant for another blogger to espouse. People ought to live wherever the hell they want, but population dispersal and growth should be natural, or in the very least logical.

The area of Phoenix is larger than that of Staten Island, Paris and San Fransisco combined, and is adding 100,000 new people a year with a development plan akin to "Risk". Population growth is not an evil, but the (hate to say it) sprawl mentality is so whorish in this instance that I can hardly believe it. If the civic powers and developers that be would have never decided to pad their pockets with this 1950's-style "progress", people would be living where water exists and where beautiful useful land could be utilized (I'm talking to you Arkansas, Illinois, Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, the Dakotas etc). Everyone wants to live on the outskirts of the city and the growing patterns of Phoenix reflect that enormously. The only thing is, in five to ten years, those people are no longer on the fringe, their mountain view has been usurped by yet another gated community, and the disgusting trend continues. The cheap labor available from the ample immigrant population is the perfect low-cost environment; it's like giving Methamphetamines to a workaholic (and that is in reference to the developers, not the immigrants).

The problem of population growth is ultimately a losing battle, only so much space and so many little lives elbowing for a view. Phoenix has already dealt with water shortages, and logic suggests that it will only become worse, exponentially worse. The American Southwest is beautiful and awe inspiring, a treasure trove of open road, but it's too bad there is a growing cancer in Arizona (and I'm not talking about Melanoma).