blog

So the one thing I learned in High School that I found most interesting was Hegelian dialectics. Maybe I misunderstood and continue to misunderstand. Regardless: push - pull - transcendence -- it's is a pattern I have looked for everywhere forever thereafter.

Here's one, from personal history, teased out of the last handful of years: the push pull between sobriety and intoxication--literal and metaphorical. I'm yet unaware of whatever may be supra to these two things so I'll stick to this potent, sometimes devastating little duality.

Sobriety: The domain of the middle class most of all. money, marriage, respectability. And especially, always strong. A good mouthpiece is Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of something or other, which is on upwardly mobile, obliviously servile (mentally at least...) immigrant bookshelves everywhere: "I doubt that anyone would seriously consider unfairness, deceit, baseness, uselessness, mediocrity, or degeneration to be a solid foundation for lasting happiness and success". Anything has to be tried before it can be so discarded, eh?

Intoxication then, is for kicks, and for clarity. What can be turned so topsy turvy?: nearly anything: economics, gender, orientation, rationality, law. Like the man, beer bottle in hand, at the anarchist rally on top of the picnic table screaming "fuck the police". [Get a motherfucking job, I said under my breath--not that I'm employed myself...]. And then there is consciousness itself. like all the times I spent drunk hunched over late at night pounding that very consciousness away with very loud music over the headphones. You couldn't give me a good reason to stop back then though. I was looking for something, a yet more altered state. Thus the fine line between exploration and escapism, if there is such a line at all. Cept maybe exploration, in order to warrant such a dignified label, always reports back to reality..But then there are stories about poems carved into the mountainsides of isolated parts of east asia--monks that left the human world and never (physically) looked back. wondrous. too many choices. meh.