The Fargo Kantrowitz'z Literary Campsite

So how’s the philosophy thing going?
Not good.
Why?
Well, you just run out of it too much. You’ve always got the internet to go to in order to remember what it was, but then you get a little confused about what mattered and then you realize that there is too much anyway and to fuse it all into some sort of meaning would take a supercomputer. You could give a little bit of your own synthesis to the populace, but where would that really get you? It’s just a small thing really, to be a writer today, everybody reads, but meaning doesn’t seem to have a place to rest and sit still.
Are you bored with thought?
Yes.
Why?
Because.
Hmm?
You want me to answer whether I am bored with thought by giving you a thought that I would be bored giving you. Do you see? It is never ending. It’s perpetual swirls in the air that dissipate soon after.
So you strive after creating swirls that will last forever?
And how do you do that? How can your thought last forever? Will you have changed anything? Everybody gravitates to what they can touch, anything they can stomach or sexualize or raise them over another for longevity and survival sake.
But don’t you still have spirit?
Yes, I do. I have spirit, yes I do, I have spirit, howbout you!
Hmm?
High school cheer at football games. What’s so big about spirit? At a certain age you’ve failed enough that you are not locked down into anything in the world that really matters, the baser animal needs, you just have spirit and thought. The rest is dirty looks and people’s intuition steering them away from you because you have a tinge of death about you, once again, because you never locked anything down. After awhile you don’t even want to play anymore. You just want to quit.
How do you quit life? You don’t mean killing yourself?
No. I don’t believe in that. I would walk the earth first.
Then what?
I don’t know. Sometimes just quitting the whole thought game seems like the best thing to do. You’ve got the Buddhists who believe that this is the only way to go and they’re pretty sure about it, but if you yourself do it you feel like you are losing all of the mental work you have put in up to that point. A part of you believes that you should just go on thinking these thoughts that are getting less and less exciting for a prize that seems less and less real. I don’t know. I don’t want to quit and being a Buddhist would probably be a good thing for me, at least in a little way, not all the way. I’m not going to get a robe or anything. Thought betrays you after awhile because while you’re thinking something there is another part of you that says that you blew it in the past and now you’re just playing the game. You’re not successful at 46 in the standard way and you take that as failure as everyone else takes it for failure and you feel like you’re just trying because if you didn’t at least try you would look like a human corpse. Nobody wants to be a human corpse. Can you sense the energy running out of my very words? What’s underneath this lack of energy? Doesn’t seem like much. Who knows. Maybe there’s a whole new world there and I’m just holding on to the old one. The intellectual world when I’m supposed to give myself over to the spiritual world and see where that takes me. So, I’m always half going forward and half stopping. I’m on the fence as to what is important in life. All I can think of doing is calling it quits. Go day to day as I age and the philosophy fits me more and more.
Sounds bleak, like you’re giving up.
Giving up, what? Thought? Why not? Look where it’s gotten me. And caring too. I don’t have much energy anymore for either of these. I’ve had enemies and they’ve trained me that everything I attempt will be countered for the sheer joy of sadistic manipulation of another. They like this when a person has high ideals like I had. On the other end of the spectrum you have that endless ladder that you must climb to make it among these animals whose favor you seek. Who knows what sort of word or phrase you will use which will turn those with power to give you credibility against you forever? Who cares what other people think? I do and I want to stop forever.
Walk the earth?
Yeah, walk the earth. Stop caring, but still exist. Maybe I will be able to write one or two words that matter, maybe not, doesn’t really matter because they’ll just be taken up into the other Billion billion words being put out there on the internet that don’t matter either. I thought I would make a living off using my mind, but now, after failure at that, I don’t have the energy. I simply don’t have the energy or care to do it.
So what are you going to do?
I don’t know.