Once upon a time, Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tears for Fears was my favorite song. Mostly because of a few specific phrases it contains:
Welcome to your life
Theres no turning back
Even while we sleep
We will find you
Acting on your best behaviour
It’s no great secret I spent a large fraction of my childhood in the 1980s, but much of that I only remember in a kind of broken haze.
It’s interesting what happens when perspective is adjusted. I see conflict now as pointless, anger as a loss of self, a weakness of infinite depth. But Why? A push was all I really needed, maybe even for years. Scientifically, I know the brain is nearly endlessly malleable, and barring significant cases of genuine chemical or physiological distress, it can be guided to fit a specific end. In this case, I’ve long considered myself helpless to disrupt the cycles of anger that have plagued me since some of my earliest memories.
It’s a beautiful Sunday night in Illinois, and Jen and I have just enjoyed a wonderful pot roast, complete with some gravy I whipped up from the resulting stock. A nice night to relax with some hot chocolate under a warm fleece blanket with a fluffy kitty curled up my lap.. It’s a good time to reflect, recuperating after two and a half hours of exercising yesterday. A time to finally write up part of the outline I wrote while riding home from work one evening.
Bob: Wow, I was beginning to think you’d fallen off teh intarwebs.
Shaun: Droll.
Bob: Well, I certainly thought so. What, nothing to say for the last over a month?
Shaun: …
Bob: I’ll take that as a no.
Shaun: Do you think this is healthy?
Bob: What? Talking to yourself, or being so apathetic you can’t even bring yourself to write about anything?
Shaun: There’s nothing to write! I played some video games, watched all of House… nothing exciting.
There are things of dark,
and things within the sky.
There are folds of woe,
and wroth of shallow eye.
There are prophets that sit upon words haughty or stripped of fear. And sit they must, digesting solemn mixes of faithless harrow. They tire of life, promised full of meaning and limitless wonder. They are broken, the wanderers, lit like frozen candles flickering in the infinite chaos, striving weakly to scale and scrabble brittle scaffolds of reason.
