Some thoughts:

On our way to the family farm deep in the Texas plains. My grandfather purchased the land back in the early eighties: a way to test himself by pitting his will against the dusty earth, making it yield grapes and cotton. The drive down there was as much a journey into memory as into the countryside.

Narrated by my uncle and grandfather.

It’s funny how you can fall in love with somebody over their posts on social media sites. I guess it’s because those posts are usually portraying that person’s best version of themselves. Short bits of text are easier to perfect, it’s easier to prevent Freudian slips. Despite this, I like to think that I can gaze into their real personalities and know them. I can look at their pictures and imagine how their lips move in real life. The way they contort to form words. 

When I’m alone I often feel that existence is pointless. Humans seem to be masters of invented meaning: in the end we’re all dead but we have to contend with daily short-term living, so we make shit up and call it purpose. And everything that happens in between the beginning and end of our miserable and short tenure on this earth is completely devoid of a telos; these things are just a happenstance, or byproduct, of a much grander cosmological occurrence. People hate it when you say you’re a nihilist, so these thoughts typically inhabit my private moments. Lately, it’s been harder for me to keep them down, to shove them in dark corner of my psyche. In times of joyless laughter, I feel a blackness oozing out of the corners of my eyes, spilling down my face and staining my teeth. It’s a malevolence brought on by the anger and depression of being a purposeless being surrounded by beings that believe themselves to be purposeful. It’s all false and doesn’t matter. I get sad thinking about it, because there’s really nothing to be achieved by being angry or sad, or exhibiting emotion of any kind.

            To me there seems to be fundamental divergence in philosophy: on one hand, the belief in the supernatural and on the other, the realization of our pointlessness. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. Being a joyful, relieved Christian, for instance, is just dandy. You can take your mind off of the horrors of present-day existence and put all your faith and trust in some authoritarian and parent-like being. The disadvantage? You’re a fucking child. You follow like a lamb to slaughter the machinations of some charlatan with a book about the supernatural. There’s no evidence for any of it, just delusion. Being religious is foregoing reality in favor of metaphysical drugs.

            The other way, my way, is considerably darker. It involves realizing that you’re just a figment of an eternal system of being. Your accomplishments, your joys, your sadnesses, will just zero out over time. The advantage: realizing that your course through existence is your own decision. This way, you do not bow down to a capricious deity, and deny yourself pleasure, which, in the end, is all we have. Nothing else exists for sure.

            I’m never quite sure how to move on from this. The only thing I can do is revel in my own creation, my own enterprises. I guess this is why I’ve been on the Rand kick, lately.