I Blog, Therefore I Am

I was serious when I said I'd stop blogging. Solipsism might have been a blog, but this? This is more akin to a column.

What's the difference?

Well, maybe I'm way off base, but last I checked, blogging was all about community. You participate in a give and take when you blog: people read about your life, your wanderings and your ponderings, and they make comments about it. Ideas float around in a two-way street of information.

What I'm doing here is one-sided. I say what I say and it's not up for public discussion. I guess.

I do what I do and - as happens in person - I ignore most peoples' reactions. For the most part.

I punch as big a hole as I like, and I'm mute to any ramifications. No?

In space, no one can hear you scream. In cyber space, the more you type the louder you scream, and yet the claim is that it's an egalitarian venue, in which anyone and everyone can read your screams or sighs or smiles.

What does it all mean? What does this all mean? Where has the poetry, the artistry, the definitive nature of my blog posts gone?

The way of the dodo bird, my friend.

I got off the phone with an old friend, Track Star. Track Star sat in front of me in Honors Sophomore English way back in high school, at Brooklyn Tech. Our teacher was a bald gay man by the name of Dr. Cocchiarelli, who was definitely the first language teacher to truly demand great work from me. (And for that, I'm eternally grateful - even if he did end up failing me.)

Track Star was always an aloof kid, sweet, kind, smart. There was always something a little different about his personality. It's the kind of different that most people, I suppose, would describe as something off - but me? I have a feeling that I would've found a way to make Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot my friends if given the chance.

Not to say of course that Track Star has much in common- I mean, he has the basic human tendencies in common with- He- Well... He's... Hmm...

After speaking with him for almost 40 minutes (after not having spoken to him in almost a decade), I can safely assert the following: he has the inquisitive nature of someone looking for definitive answers; he also has the penchant to use whatever definitive answers he's attained to sway situations to his favor.

Now, let me say for the record what I told him: I'm guilty of a God complex. At least, I was.

I've always been good at reading people, "figuring them out", simplifying strangers to equations and cliches so that I could do with them what I wanted. It's a strangely unique talent, I suppose. I've met only a handful of people who can do this, and more than a few of them use their ability for evil. Or some variation thereof.

It's because of this God complex that I was able to manipulate people and situations. I spent a great deal of my life being disingenuous and mean, and during that time, this skill came in plenty handy. I would enter a situation, assess the players involved, and instantly come up with a plan to have my way.

Sometimes, as I got better at reading scenarios and personalities, I'd make up a goal just to have an excuse to play with peoples' lives.

I didn't care what the outcome was; people ended up beat up, heartbroken, destitute, alone, unhappy, close to dead: I didn't care.

Sometimes, I'd bring people to the brink of financial ruin, to an inch of their lives, to a rock and a hard place, just to pull them out of that dire situation. And all this just to prove to them and myself that I could do it. I was smarter. Prettier. Better.

I don't know exactly when I started to change, or how exactly the epiphany came to me, but little by little I stopped being that person. I had amassed enough street cred to do as I pleased, and no one fucked with me. I had enough friends in high (enough) places to do as I pleased.

I just decided not to do anything evil. Not if I could help it.

So I found myself in strange situations and I always bailed my ass out of tight jams. I told myself that nothing I was doing was wrong, per se, but different. I told myself that I was just being an individual, going where the wind blew me.

I didn't take into account the fact that I'd long ago cemented a way of life, a persona, an ego which permeated whatever corporeal shell I showed. I was convinced that I could be reincarnated as a stork,a snail, a salamander, and this potent potion of power would still seep through my pores like pheremones.

Maybe there is a place where souls go before we are born. A place where the bare bones of our psyches are made and cemented. Maybe once the foundation for our personalities is set, there is no turning back, and everything we do is only a manifestation of that subliminal secret of our subconsciouses.

Whatever the truth behind the lives we lead, that was who I was. And, sometimes, when I find myself face to face with the remnants of a variation of myself, I doubt what I do. Am I merely doing as I've been programmed from the beginning? And if so, is this program universal? Or am I the only individual with this unique set of 1s and 0s?

Or am I changing? Is it possible that I was once the foundation set by some other power, and that I'm presently molding myself into something wholly my own? Or is it possil that I'm in charge of what I do, and that I'm really making the decisions of my life, and that that's the way its always been?

Like I tried unsuccessfully to say to Track Star, none of the answers really matter. At last, they don't to me.

I'm a philosopher. I will always seach for truth.

But the search for truth is like the wise person's way of searching for their soulmate: it's a passive search.

We know what we want and we are able to identify it when/if we find it. But in the meantime, why spend so much time thinking about these unanswerable questions that better men and women have thought about? Why waste precious moments attempting to come to a conclusion that might very well prove our undoing?

The truth,to me, is that we live every day according to a pathos that is unique to each individual. We find reasons to wake up, people to live for, goals to aspire to. And whether all that is by our own hands or the hands of some greater power, this is what we do. And it's great.