Why don’t I start off with a raunchy dose of pretentiousness: When I first returned to college, I was more engaged with the world intellectually. College is what you make of it, right? Well, I just don’t know about that. I feel like I was more enthusiastic when I came here than university life supported and things weren’t so much moving at the natural pace of thought, as they did match to compensate for the retardation that comes with having people who didn’t do the reading and never engaged with the material, but are being forced to talk anyway. There’s plenty of room to sit back and laugh at that for a while but then I realized I am paying real money to be here, so I tried talking about the marketplace for writing and I really enjoyed some of my discussions with a professor named Dr. Les Harrison. I really liked Nathaniel Hawthorne but people acted like it wasn’t relevant to their lives. I guess that’s true when your life consists of Facebooking to pull pussy and Internet Likes. Young Goodman Brown, in lieu of Facebook, had dark rituals in a forest pulling crazy, firebreathing, reality-warping pussy – but if he were around today, I guess he would just go to 4chan if he wanted to see “devil worship,” virgin sacrifices and questioning Faith.

I complained recently about an undercurrent of anti-intellectualism running through university culture but one of my classmates said it is probably an effort to “over-intellectualize” the material by certain professors that kills the inquisitive spirits in the others and myself. But now that I write this, I think it is neither, and that I’m just burning out in an unhealthy way.

Recently I accidentally deleted the content from this site while attempting to install software. I was in a hurry and wasn’t paying close attention to the install directory. So that killed the momentum of my personal website and I tried to convince myself I don’t care, but I think I really did. I had a good deal of material posted up that even if nobody saw, made me happy just having something up that looked nice. I am still not sure what to include here but I have some photo sets I’d like to put up and I may get around to that eventually. Honestly, though, I just don’t have the creative urges I used to. I’m becoming a lot more hesitant. For some reason, I am stuck in a mode of “let’s wait and see” about everything, like the news and my writing elsewhere. It feels like I have nothing left to say. Why is that? I would like to get back to at least some feeling of wonder at the world. Weary cynicism is turning me into an old man.

This coincides with several grim realities like the death of my mother, my increasing anxiety and progressing into my late twenties. And I do have things to say. What they are, though, I think is always changing, and becoming less and less of a joke, unfortunately.

For example

I think Socialism is not such a bad thing, and that a smart retooling of American political structures is necessary to reach that end. I mean if you look at American politics, even the supposed left – the Democrats – are remarkably right-thinking, especially when you look at their policies. Military cuts are off limits on either side and no one is interested in social welfare unless they’re talking about compromising it out of existence. I think the apparent degradation of our political system is solid evidence Capitalism is eating itself. The condensation of capital on the glass of financial institutions is dampening new hopes for the old American dream. I think Socialism would be a simultaneous admission of self-defeat on our parts and yet, a step forward all the same. If a 2.5% GDP is hardly good, then a .5% loss is barely much worse. Unemployment is shit anyway and if opening more McDonald’s jobs and road work jobs, and new war jobs, is all this country’s got to offer, then I think we shouldn’t fear a total re-roll of the American Way. But I don’t watch TV, which seems to be the main source of where our opinions of change come from. Not only that, my visions would demand a bottom up rewrite of the U.S. Constitution, and is prohibitively complex, so it’s really just a musing but not at all an unhealthy one (I only want to contribute positively to a discussion) but very much in the vein of the kinds of grim reality I described earlier.

Shit’s just too real to be funny now, yet I still see so many clever Onion headlines. I wish I could be so jovial. I think it really has a lot to do with my environment and college making me feel dumb. I’ve complained about feeling down ever since I started back at college and I would venture to say that’s a two-prong effect of 1) actually being very ignorant and 2) being made to feel more subordinate than I should feel, by established scholars. One half of my dejection is justified and the other half, is perceptibly unjustified because I know I’m too hard on myself. But I have to be.

That is not to say that I’m not happy, but I can’t just let myself get too comfortable. College and politics and websites have nothing to do with that. I just don’t want to stop growing, and I don’t want to be one of these people who, at 40, has settled in eating cheeseburgers, making absolute statements. I know we are always dying by the minute but when I’m finally satisfied where I am, that will be the spot where I finally die.