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Dystopia

Started by Q. G. Pennyworth, May 19, 2013, 01:57:26 AM

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Q. G. Pennyworth

Because we grew up in someone else's walls, and our own walls, and the walls of our parents and grandparents and back across the centuries and the windows just keep getting smaller and there's no such thing as a sledgehammer strong enough to tear the fucker down, and there's nothing outside the walls anyway.

We can't breathe.

And we wonder if every generation feels this fucked or if it's only special generations, special times, that get cornered so fucking hard that even staying in the lines becomes an impossible task because they drew the lines smaller than your body and how the hell are you supposed to fit in there?

We crave dystopian stories because they're familiar. We live and breathe for the moment of defeat, the moment he loves big brother, the moment he swings in the breeze, the moment she goes D-con. There are no good paths open to us, only bad paths and corrupt ones. The walls are ten miles high and made of granite. It's just this, forever and ever, and so many people seem blind to it that it's comforting to know at least one other person in the history of the human race has seen what we see and it won't make things get any better but at least you're not crazy.

Not uniquely crazy, anyhow.

But in the end if even our insanity isn't unique what on earth can we bring to the table? What possible use is there for 7 billion brains, most of them tied up in the same stories, barely capable of keeping up with the demands of daily function? What good is progress if we're killing ourselves in the process.

I wonder sometimes if I hadn't squandered so much of my mental energy on trying to be sane what I could have accomplished. Or maybe if I had fixed the problem sooner. I talk about myself in the past tense and remember practicing talking about her in the past tense, trying it on like an unwanted wedding gown - big and uncomfortable. When was the last time one person could do anything? She died because we think it's okay for the poor to get sick and the rich to get better, because she was a stubborn ass, because they didn't make her get help sooner.

For no damn reason.

It all happens for no damn reason, no matter how many stories we write about it and how hard we try to spin it, in the end it's just a couple people sitting around and trying to weave a fairytale of relevance around a life that probably didn't have much impact, but saying that's sacrilege. If only she'd been fighting an evil empire, taken down while rescuing others from a natural disaster, protecting the innocent from a mad man, if only there was a story that was worth it, but there never is. We just get ground down under the same machine and don't do enough to make it better and then we're gone and our kids are in the same boat. Over, and over, and over. And the guys who say "give me liberty" bleed, and their children live on, and they shoot Shays men and centuries later still no one is free.

So kill me.

The Good Reverend Roger

This is fucking awesome. 

May riff on this tomorrow.
" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

Q. G. Pennyworth

Quote from: The Good Reverend Roger on May 19, 2013, 03:23:20 AM
This is fucking awesome. 

May riff on this tomorrow.

Feel free. I meant for it to be a little more polished before posting, but that way lies no posting for three weeks.

The Good Reverend Roger

Quote from: Queen Gogira Pennyworth, BSW on May 19, 2013, 03:46:25 AM
Quote from: The Good Reverend Roger on May 19, 2013, 03:23:20 AM
This is fucking awesome. 

May riff on this tomorrow.

Feel free. I meant for it to be a little more polished before posting, but that way lies no posting for three weeks.

Also, in ranting, your first draft is your best draft.  It's about the ruptured spleen, not the polishing.
" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

Q. G. Pennyworth

Quote from: The Good Reverend Roger on May 19, 2013, 03:48:11 AM
Quote from: Queen Gogira Pennyworth, BSW on May 19, 2013, 03:46:25 AM
Quote from: The Good Reverend Roger on May 19, 2013, 03:23:20 AM
This is fucking awesome. 

May riff on this tomorrow.

Feel free. I meant for it to be a little more polished before posting, but that way lies no posting for three weeks.

Also, in ranting, your first draft is your best draft.  It's about the ruptured spleen, not the polishing.

Well, by "polished" I meant more "starting at a reasonable starting point." I just kinda jumped in halfway through a though. Which, I suppose, is probably how ranting is supposed to work anyway, it just makes me feel like I'm not doing things right. I have the ability to make words around feelings in a somewhat coherent way, even for very large and unwieldy ones, I really ought to do that whenever possible. (+1 layer of guilt and obligation).

Left

Quote from: Queen Gogira Pennyworth, BSW on May 19, 2013, 01:57:26 AM
It all happens for no damn reason, no matter how many stories we write about it and how hard we try to spin it, in the end it's just a couple people sitting around and trying to weave a fairytale of relevance around a life that probably didn't have much impact, but saying that's sacrilege. If only she'd been fighting an evil empire, taken down while rescuing others from a natural disaster, protecting the innocent from a mad man, if only there was a story that was worth it, but there never is. We just get ground down under the same machine and don't do enough to make it better and then we're gone and our kids are in the same boat. Over, and over, and over. And the guys who say "give me liberty" bleed, and their children live on, and they shoot Shays men and centuries later still no one is free.


Agreed.  It's all meaningless. 
Sometimes I find myself focused in on the idiotic magnificent ghastliness of humanity as a whole, and then see how little this construct that I think of as "me" can actually do to lessen the horror.  That's real, as far as anything is real, and I find that looking at the big picture is just a bad thing most of the time.  It nails me to the floor, as if the carcasses of a thousand murdered children were piled onto me.

Sometimes it's best to just not look. As I said to a friend: "If the news is making you vomit, you should quit watching it for a while."
Too, I wonder if what we experience through the media is deliberately pitched to make the world seem big and frightening...that which bleeds leads, and what does it lead to? people huddling around the new homefire of the tv set, eating sanitized corporate nutrition and yellow #5.

They're marketing eyeballs to their advertisers, after all.
Everything's empty. All you have is now. It's entirely possible the past and the future are simply stories we tell ourselves.  Our selves are stories we tell ourselves.
So why do we tell ourselves these stories of craving something that never quite fills the holes in our souls?
Someone else is writing our narrative.




Hope was the thing with feathers.
I smacked it with a hammer until it was red and squashy

The Good Reverend Roger

While I enjoyed the read, I reject the premise in its entirety.

The world is a dystopia?  Perhaps.  Society is fucked?  Name a time when this wasn't true.  The world is meaningless?  Rudyard Kipling and Papa Hemmingway beg to differ.

And so do I.

The world is your playground, even if the sawdust on the ground is full of broken glass and rusty hypodermic needles.  It is your toy, to play with or light on fire and kick down the stairs, as you see fit.  For the MEANING is this:  For each and every human, sitting in their seat in the audience, THEY are the main character on the screen, whether that movie be a comedy, a tragedy, or an action thriller with Michael Bay directing.

For me, it's a movie about a short bus full of monkeys racing around the sun, with one or two monkeys trying to steer while the rest poop on everything, light fires in the back, and generally lick the windows.

And, you know, that's all the meaning I need.

What?

Fuck you, I'm sick.
" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

Q. G. Pennyworth

I appreciate that's where you are. I can even recognize that where you are is objectively better than the OP. That's not where I am at the moment. I lost another family member to cancer last week (an aunt, this time). I think I'm allowed a while to be a debbie downer.

The Good Reverend Roger

Quote from: Queen Gogira Pennyworth, BSW on May 20, 2013, 09:41:29 PM
I appreciate that's where you are. I can even recognize that where you are is objectively better than the OP. That's not where I am at the moment. I lost another family member to cancer last week (an aunt, this time). I think I'm allowed a while to be a debbie downer.

Of course you are.  Your movie is, at the moment, a tragedy.  To pretend otherwise would be a trivialization of some very real grief.

But that's not to say it's meaningless.  Quite the opposite.  If it were meaningless, you wouldn't be grieving, would you?
" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

Cardinal Pizza Deliverance.

Sometimes the dystopia creeps into the moss-filled cracks of what TV TELLS US IS TRUE and THIS IS THE REALLY REALITY. We're supposed to want happy endings because those are the only ones that matter. We wait to get rescued. We rally the troops and lead our side to victory. THAT'S what happens. That's what the good Lord intended and what we deserve.

But it doesn't work that way for hardly anyone anymore. People are born, they thrash and struggle against the glass or they allow themselves to be meekly pinned in place for display. The pretty pinned people offer the cleanest and clearest glimpse but we're drawn to the smeared up messes, the tangles of broken limbs splatters of gore and crumpled wings.

We want the happy endings for ourselves and the hellish mess for . . . 'I don't care so long as it isn't me'.

And when the disarray comes our way, we wonder which one of Billy Mays' miracle products we could have purchased to avert this disaster, which of the late-night informercial careers should we have pursued to be somewhere other than here? Business management or accounting? Because it isn't fair.

And it isn't. It never was. It never is. It won't ever be.

So we grieve, we clean up the mess as best we can, pull ourselves together, and dodge the pins or give in.
Weevil-Infested Badfun Wrongsex Referee From The 9th Earth
Slick and Deranged Wombat of Manhood Questioning
Hulking Dormouse of Lust and DESPAIRâ„¢
Gatling Geyser of Rainbow AIDS

"The only way we can ever change anything is to look in the mirror and find no enemy." - Akala  'Find No Enemy'.

The Good Reverend Roger

Quote from: Cardinal Pizza Deliverance. on May 20, 2013, 10:06:52 PM
Sometimes the dystopia creeps into the moss-filled cracks of what TV TELLS US IS TRUE and THIS IS THE REALLY REALITY. We're supposed to want happy endings because those are the only ones that matter. We wait to get rescued. We rally the troops and lead our side to victory. THAT'S what happens. That's what the good Lord intended and what we deserve.

But it doesn't work that way for hardly anyone anymore. People are born, they thrash and struggle against the glass or they allow themselves to be meekly pinned in place for display. The pretty pinned people offer the cleanest and clearest glimpse but we're drawn to the smeared up messes, the tangles of broken limbs splatters of gore and crumpled wings.

We want the happy endings for ourselves and the hellish mess for . . . 'I don't care so long as it isn't me'.

And when the disarray comes our way, we wonder which one of Billy Mays' miracle products we could have purchased to avert this disaster, which of the late-night informercial careers should we have pursued to be somewhere other than here? Business management or accounting? Because it isn't fair.

And it isn't. It never was. It never is. It won't ever be.

So we grieve, we clean up the mess as best we can, pull ourselves together, and dodge the pins or give in.

Or we snarl, and tell the meaningless void that we'll see it out it the fucking parking lot to discuss matters.

When The Terrible Old Man died, I didn't grieve in the usual sense of the word.  I went straight to "anger" and stayed there.  Fucking universe.  99 years isn't enough.
" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

Sita

Something tells me I don't deal with death like other people.
I've lost 3 grandparents, only one of them did I get upset about. And that was only for a week or two.
The other two I was more "Bummer, guess that ends the family holiday get togethers." And otherwise not phased at all.
:ninja:
Laugh, even if you are screaming inside. Smile, because the world doesn't care if you feel like crying.

Cardinal Pizza Deliverance.

Quote from: Sita on May 20, 2013, 10:57:49 PM
Something tells me I don't deal with death like other people.
I've lost 3 grandparents, only one of them did I get upset about. And that was only for a week or two.
The other two I was more "Bummer, guess that ends the family holiday get togethers." And otherwise not phased at all.


When my grandparents kicked off they were sick. Their bodies wouldn't work at all and they were tired. Wore out. I didn't grieve 'em much, since they were more or less happy to go.

But sometimes people live life all the way up and are full to bursting with things they've seen and done and what they still want to do, to achieve, to witness. When their time comes, they go fighting every step.

Those folk, when they die, I grieve for.
Weevil-Infested Badfun Wrongsex Referee From The 9th Earth
Slick and Deranged Wombat of Manhood Questioning
Hulking Dormouse of Lust and DESPAIRâ„¢
Gatling Geyser of Rainbow AIDS

"The only way we can ever change anything is to look in the mirror and find no enemy." - Akala  'Find No Enemy'.

Left

Quote from: Queen Gogira Pennyworth, BSW on May 20, 2013, 09:41:29 PM
I appreciate that's where you are. I can even recognize that where you are is objectively better than the OP. That's not where I am at the moment. I lost another family member to cancer last week (an aunt, this time). I think I'm allowed a while to be a debbie downer.

I'm sorry for your loss.

...I don't really know my family anymore. 
...I spent my last ten years trying to explain myself to someone, and I failed.
None of us really know or are known by anyone. We're alone.
Hope was the thing with feathers.
I smacked it with a hammer until it was red and squashy

P3nT4gR4m

Quote from: The Good Reverend Roger on May 20, 2013, 09:13:18 PM
While I enjoyed the read, I reject the premise in its entirety.

The world is a dystopia?  Perhaps.  Society is fucked?  Name a time when this wasn't true.  The world is meaningless?  Rudyard Kipling and Papa Hemmingway beg to differ.

And so do I.

The world is your playground, even if the sawdust on the ground is full of broken glass and rusty hypodermic needles.  It is your toy, to play with or light on fire and kick down the stairs, as you see fit.  For the MEANING is this:  For each and every human, sitting in their seat in the audience, THEY are the main character on the screen, whether that movie be a comedy, a tragedy, or an action thriller with Michael Bay directing.

For me, it's a movie about a short bus full of monkeys racing around the sun, with one or two monkeys trying to steer while the rest poop on everything, light fires in the back, and generally lick the windows.

And, you know, that's all the meaning I need.

What?

Fuck you, I'm sick.

OP was good but not my experience. I'm with Roger - World means whatever the fuck you decide it means. The meaning of life is an opinion.

I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
Not actually a meat product.
Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK
Awful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.
High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.
Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart Contagion
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walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark