the image of life i keep coming back to is a bleak one; here we are, walking together down a one-way path; when one of us stumbles, another of us assists them to their feet and we continue on, negotiating hurdles, dawdling in comfortable hollows, but all the while, all the time walking towards certain oblivion. why try? why bother with the in-between?

i think the reason postmodernism/new agery/existentialism and most of their pop variants shit me is that they try and paper over the void beneath, cover up their their nihilistic origins with sophistry and word tricks, a new angle on an age-old despair, fresh paint on a ruin. these are the philosophies of our time, these are the fruits of ten thousand years of thought, these are the toys we use to give us narrative strength, life positionings.

i'm no longer catholic or christian by any measure, so i've been trying to find a new framework, one that doesn't require such a weight of belief, because i feel comfortable in frameworks, because life is understandable within frameworks, even invisible ones. but the bleakness, the nothingness, this is all that offers itself as alternative. i am familiar with death, i have seen its simplicity and complexity and horror and it is the void, it is the end of all things, it is the end of self, ego, id, i, i, i.

the newly bereaved often embrace life affirming behaviours - a quote from somewhere that found me a year afterwards, an explanation of much of me since then. i want to be intensely nownownow, to stave off thinking of the commonest horror, the greatest unseen, the mundanest of all things.

so far, lovemaking is the best solace; drugs sometimes for selfishness, a dose of chemical mayhem, but people are my real sustenance, the people i love are why i live.