Insomnia (2002) (Patreon)

I have this insignificant obsession with significance. When I go to touch a metal door, or a metal surface, I don't trust that I haven't built-up a little static electricity -- these things happen -- so instead of touching the metal with my fingertips, which always give the most immediate jolting pain from a static shock, I first make sure to make first contact with the side of my arm, or the sleeve of my jacket, or the flat of my fist, anything to disperse the gathered energy into a diffused sensation, a tiny zip instead of a jolt, and this has worked out very well for me as someone who sees themselves as surprisingly prone to being shocked, not knowing where any of this electricity comes from other than -- existing.

This principle applies to almost everything. I have never been diagnosed with OCD, and I do not pass judgement on people who do have it, but I am not exactly eager to get myself checked out by doctors, or psychiatrists, whom I hate and distrust from past experience. What I would be diagnosed with is a combination of paranoia and disassociation, which in theory seem like chalk and cheese, but in practice work together rather well. It goes like this: I fixate on details, little things, and connect them to a larger sequence of entropy, which I believe I have an active role in creating or destroying.

An example: if I know I did something the wrong way, I have to go back and right it. If I accidentally didn't pay for something at a store, I will drop whatever I am doing once made aware of this, go back to that store, tell the staff, and pay for it properly. This is not because I respect their institution, nor that I'm really that worried about being caught stealing, but because I know that if I do move forward with the awareness that I have done this, I will not be able to sleep, I will have nightmares, I will become edgy and anxious, looking over my shoulder constantly, waiting for the worst, waiting for the hammer to fall in response to my trespass against the cosmic order which insists that, if you let one tiny mistake slide, it will come back to hurt you in some karmic way.

I do not know if I believe in karma in a broad sense, or that I even really know what karma is. But all this applies to more than mere accidental thievery -- if I place a book in a spot where it isn't supposed to go, it must be corrected. If I drop a wrapper or paper and it begins to fly off, I have to go catch it and place it in the nearest garbage bin. If I hurt someone's feelings without knowing it, I consider myself to owe them a debt and will try and rectify that.

I fail at this. All the time.

It is not a matter of honor, or of reason, or morality. There is an underlying system of order to the universe that is slowly sliding into the clutches of oblivion, is what my gut tells me, and my mind follows. Every day I feel the decay, the sensation that all the buildings around me are not being fully tended to, that they are rotting and slipping into the mud and will be blown away by a strong gust one day because there was not the will to keep them safe against the ravages of time. Everything is incorporated: people, places, politics, objects, it is all dissolving and slipping away like sand grains, and it is becoming harder and harder to recognize what the stable normal is supposed to be.

In the small suburb I grew up in, it is a wasteland now. All the stores are boarded-up, the homes are vacant, the schools are closing, the water is contaminated with radioactive particles and metallic gunk. Not because it couldn't have been a good place to live, but because entropy set itself upon it, this post-industrial hell, and no one cared to stop it, it was allowed to disintegrate.

I was lucky enough to have left, but for how much longer? Every single mistake that humans make gives the enemy the advantage, we give it inches of victory every single day, every time we indulge our irresponsibility, our sense of entitlement or disconnection, and it creeps in through these moments, these tiny atoms of flaws in what was supposed to be a paradise, atoms which now constitute a cosmos that is growing colder, desolate, dark matter consuming that which it created, absorbing its errant child of conscious mortality.

The sense of paranoia and disassociation:

1) Paranoia, in perceiving everything to have a connected intention.

2) Disassociation, in not perceiving what is immediately at hand, in standing outside of experience, becoming numb to it, passively engaging with obligation while not feeling the pleasure of immanent agency.

The combination allows for a life-world in which freedom of action becomes impossible because there is only ever trying to attend to the ideal action modeled on a universal perception that you yourself have no access to. Intention exists, yet it seems divorced from resulting actions because there is no way to correlate one with the other: the correctness to hold ourselves to is not a matter of judgement or consensus, but of the recognition of signs and the desire to fulfill the circuity of signs, to participate fully in the economy of the symbolic order, but never to be fulfilled by this desire, to fear its absence, because without that desire, the world not only becomes disassociated from the mind, it also seems that one is faced with a crucial task, the task of psychosis: to submit yourself fully to an outside system and let it guide you, or to cut yourself off from any meaningful relation to symbols, immersing your life in the free-associative chaos of an unrecognizable reality that never stops changing.

The tiny exercise of control masques the lack of worthwhile control, and the sense of release from this control belongs properly to the order of death, the only state of being where the human is free from the burden of choices, the continuity of the self, the mistakes that inevitably come with living inside imperfection -- the act is the attempt to bridge the impossible ideal with the crawling inequity, but without a relation of action, when we forget the context, the motivation, the rationale for doing something, it decays into robotic habit, and then vanishes, drowning in the abyss of a history we either can't see or refuse to countenance -- so afraid of the past that it all becomes moment after moment.