Zen

I like negativity. Black voids excite me.

I've always been fascinated by the idea of nothingness. I spent a lot of my late adolescence plunging into it. I wasn't necessarily what you'd call "emo". I never put on mascara or eye shadow, never cut myself, never wrote depressing poetry for the sake of pouring out the contents of my heart, never pretended androgyny.

I did wear a lot of black and shapeless clothing, though. I did own a pair of custom-fitted fangs that seamlessly clipped onto my canines, but I never indulged in any live-action role-playing. Unless you consider acting like a mindless, drugged-out zombie to be role-playing.

When I first began to understand how computers and data storage worked, I quickly learned that the best way to make things operate smoothly was formatting and deleting the hard disks. There was even a command in MS-DOS called "kill", which obliterated the drive.

There are people out there who believe that to truly find themselves, they must first lose themselves. Allow me to explain.

You've spent your life collecting experience. That experience has fundamentally altered your behavior in ways that now shape and dictate how you act. It's an ongoing process that happens as long as there's activity in that brain of yours. Therefore, if you could somehow reset those experiences, somehow delete or reformat the data in your brain, would you then have a clean slate from which to work?

There are more than a few experiences I could do without. It's quite possible that these select memories of actions I took, and things that happened as a result thereof, are responsible for me being who I am today.

If I could excise those blocks of information from my mind, would that somehow make me a better person? I say no.

Consider the time paradox. You know, the shit that always happens in those sci-fi stories involving time travel? You go back in time and alter a single moment, and the whole rest of reality has to adjust itself to compensate. The butterfly effect, the idea that the air currents made by a butterfly flapping its wings in the Himalayas somehow become a hurricane on the other side of the world. Ripples in the pond grow into tsunamis. Any other number of bullshit philosophical metaphors.

I believe we must consider all the data in our brains to be cross-linked in a massive wafer, where each subsequent layer of this wafer depends on the data upon and below. Remove any part of this cat's cradle of synapses and mental rays, and the yo-yo drops.

If you catch my meaning.

So what the hell does this have to do with the darkness I perceive in myself, and my emptiness fetish?

The absolute Zen. Being both everything and nothing at once. Achieving nirvana through the union of the one and the zero.

I used to believe that nothingness depended on the erasure of time. Not anymore.

Nothingness is a balance. It's the sum of the positive and the negative. It's understanding that something cannot exist without a sense of nothing to compare it to.

I like negativity. I like it exactly as much as I do positivity, and it's with this attitude that I achieve my spiritual balance.

2014.04.26 – 2023.01.09

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