on Change - Bojack Horseman and Friends from College

as I walked back from my lab after another late night Netflix binge, the humid breeze lapped against my skin doing no justice to the storm brewing within. When I walked past the lights and chatter of the people around me, my innermost thoughts once again took refuge in the solitude one finds with another entitled judgemental prick at a party; the sort of love a repressed father gives to his children, unable to tell them how much their proximity and play means to him except for mock outrage at the foolishness of their actions. 

And though whatever flows here was also borne out of that cozy corner in a dimly lit club, what I really wondered then was how good it would be to have a soul to share this with again. The disgusting squishiness that vulnerability provides - the relief and tension of the feeling of a body sliding on top of yours, emotionally and physically. My mind turned to all the beautiful people who had inhabited my life, and it took a special depth of perspective of this moment to get my mind away from being lost in its limerent fantasies. It is in moments like these that I could see myself sinking deeper, perhaps entirely into someone's eyes or the glow of their presence as they looked at me without caring at all for societal judgement.

But as I found myself innocently in the entrails of my memories of intimacy, the big brother, the big other came back roaring. It reduced all I had witnessed till now to nothing - the moments I had shared with my highschool sweetheart dreaming of camping under a starry sky, the many calls and texts - to a spectre of regret. To see the beauty of those moments contrasted with how that whole thing turned out was not something that I was yet ready for. And then again it looked at all the women I had been enamoured by in the times since then - conventionally attractive damsels in distresses, or projects in maturity that I thought would fix my own brokenness, or a great friend who it would be so much easier if I could see illuminated in the glow of a moonlit night. Or perhaps I had seen her too like that at times, but the societal conditioning would ensure that I could never continue to see her that way making it better for both of us if I remained mature with my choices and miserly with my heart.

So it continued to romanticize the many women I had in my life, determined to chase its own tail. And thats when my attention changed to another thing. A pattern so deep I trembled in articulating it for what it might reveal about myself.  

I am bored of this narrative style, and it has served its purpose to set a tone. So fuck that. 

Some pieces of media that I have recently enjoyed are Bojack Horseman and Friends from College. I haven't seen bojack past the first few seasons, but I spoiled it for myself and got a good gist of the author's palate. What I like about these shows is their complex portrayal of human emotions. 

Fundamentally, its a much deeper answer to "Do humans change" than what appears at the surface in life. Friends from college is a similar dumpster fire. There are vibrant characters, each playing their roles. The viewer anticipates everything going to shit like the calm before the storm in a toxic family gathering - yet all that doesn't alleviate the sense of unease when the tragedy finally does occur. Its a hopeless feeling perhaps best characterized in the doujinshi comic Metamorphosis (which you should not look up if you do not know about it already, I must refer to it to be true to myself here). 

Its a hard blow against the sense of entitlement cultivated by advertisment and propaganda. If everyone doesn't have access to instant change towards perfection, then how can anything be sold to anyone at all? And if it is not guaranteed that this next fitness program will for sure get you thinner or you will have all your money back guaranteed then why the fuck should people even buy it? And that's really the point. Most stuff isn't meant to be bought. Most of the shit we produce isn't meant to be consumed. My brain urges me to make a coherent argument about how Say's law operates under late stage capitalism, or how there is a deep aesthetic judgement required for choosing what is viable to consume or not, but really I don't have any easy answers.

Art that deeply moves you and inspires you is really not that common. Is the art in the relationship of the person observing to the process and product created by the artist? These are again not questions I have answers to. It bugs me that there's no way to get it right every time - a definitive standard that would allow me to create perfect art with the perfect cadence for every word as its read. But that is really the truth. Most of life is shit, Like most art.

In this sense, Marxist's romanticization of work as a liberating process is also something that my mind contests in this instant. Even a highly specialised, highly dedicated person isn't always liberated by their work. Sometimes when I try to write, I write shit. and I scrap everything and remain angry at myself for the whole day for not being able to express what I wanted. Sometimes there's artists like 21 pilots who (in my opinion) are unable to put out work that connects with what the old fans came to them for. As I write these words, it becomes clear to me how the information quantity of the previous paragraph has declined. 

And as much as I like dense paragraphs that get straight to the point, that is not all writing is. 

It sometimes dances and flourishes with words like "Phenomenology" and "Aphrodisiac". Sometimes its like a cute girl I know who over accentuates her facial expressions. Sometimes it is like another cute girl I know who hesitates about the banality of the metaphors I use ... "He did not just". Sometimes its ugly. Sometimes its pretentious. Writers, like people are always moving, not necessarily forward. Like this paper I recently read from John Baez about the fundamental theorem of natural selection.

Sometimes writers make a soup and they lose the readers. Caught in a pool of goop that is intelligible only to their "refined" aesthetic sense. Like feeling understood by a toxic ex. And that is life too perhaps - one step forward and three steps backward. Vicious goop that we move through everyday. Its the quicksand that makes us feel the doors are closing in. Its the stickiness of the perspiration of a warm hug on a midsummer night. Its in trying to clean out a bathroom sink with a toothbrush. Perhaps this is what the Hindus said when they used the term Ojas or the hermetics in their mentions of the magnetic that contrasts with the electricity of fire and intensity.

Its funny that I decided to edit parts of this post while writing which is something I don't usually do. Perhaps emblematic of how my process itself has been described by a different kind of symbolism here. Though I am not trying to make this piece good, I am trying with this piece. I don't know what.

Perhaps a different intimacy with the writing, a sexy dance that doesn't care to be intensely beautiful but still doesn't laugh at itself in unseriousness. I was often consumed by the fear of what would happen if I give in to this side of me. I saw an image of a beggar fallen by the wayside in others destructive paths of ambition. Given how life seems to be going around me, that may be the truth of how things turn out. It shrinks down my ego and makes me feel small to accept - but this goo is the foundation for something much more beautiful. 

A fun that keeps the fire sustained on and on. It's the groove I can play when I get tired of practicing my paradiddles. It acts through and on parts of me I would never even observe - the micro-timing of my ears in 4-4 to build up from the ground and nourish what could never have been discriminated in the violence of discrimation and categorization. There is fire in me too, which I am not afraid to own when I can sincerely believe that there is nothing dirty about me. 

The metaphor of the mother gaia makes sense here. At its base sex is an act that can be seen to be somewhat disgusting - a squishy sploshy transfer of fluids. But in man's acceptance of that - his most base instincts - there is freedom to reach any height. No matter how exalted the denomination of the thoughts that come into my head,  at my core I am still an animal - sweating, swearing, fucking - trying to obtain mastery over my body. A will to power focused only inside the brain misses out so much alpha. Are you really navigating life's loss landscape if the contours are not even dizzying your ride?

What I really wanted to do with this article was to see how we really change as humans. Because change is not what I see around me. The revolutionary in me is dissappointed to only see behaviours mutating through various coping mechanisms without there ever being real lasting change in people and in institutions. I see no point of discipline on a journey like that, because it seems like one is only playing out the consequences of their determination. It is not discipline for me to write, rather it is abuse in a Bukowskian way using it as an outlet for everything I am.

Whenever I try to change, any imposed routine with an objective already misses the point. But my brain fails to accept that there is no change in life - no point to the violence I rush to impose on myself in each action.  It refuses to see the truth in the simple fact that I have wanted to make video essays out of what I wrote since I was 16, but somehow it never felt right no matter how I rationalized it to myself. But with this article that might just change. Or maybe it won't. Perhaps as Taleb says, what should really be learnt from black swans is that there are black swans. In all their magnificent glory and rarity. Perhaps all we can do as mere humans is to examine the change in the unchanging and the unchanging in change. 

And with that my brain begins to wander. So I wear a classy fur coat and my sunglasses and thank you for having read whatever I was trying to point towards uptil now. 

I do not know if my writing or life is gonna change any time soon, but I am grateful for the oppurtunity.