The Boxer

All's quiet on the front, smoky room
Boxer standing tall, peering through
Finding no one left to fight
What to do?
To the ring to the right point of view

Read these lyrics. Think about them. Listen to the song if you need to, but concentrate on this final verse. Do you see what I see? What's the theme here? Why would you ever read something voluntarily that makes you question something so ridiculous?

Why would I ever maintain and *long for* connection with an entity whose unknown and perhaps innocent intent makes me question something so ridiculous?

If I break things up into smaller paragraphs, maybe you'll read every word. I have to earn your attention.

Now that you realize you have a desire to question yourself about the poetry above, I'll tell you the answer. It's repetition. Endless, despairing repetition. This whole fucking album has one theme, and now that I've seen it in four songs, I can find it in all of the others. Every time I listen to this music, it gets better. Every time I read it, hear the words, evaluate the meaning in any sort of contextual depth, I find life flowing through it all, life and truth, and it's not even mathematics I'm talking about for a change. I've written so much about mathematics that I refuse to continue in this post for fear of losing customers. If I ever reach that negative number, I'll have to stop writing.

After my recent episode of failure, I've risen to a relatively stable state yet again, and yet again I'm slightly wiser, and what I already suspected has become knowledge instead of vague guesses at the answer to life, the universe, and anything, which I previously knew to be forty-two. (If that made no sense to you, it's only a lack of culture, nothing important.) I look back on myself, and in disgust say out loud, "How foolish of me! Every time something bad happens I get all caught up in it, but now that I'm happy I know how things work." In my head, though, deeper in my head, I know that my thoughts were still with me, and I understand now as I understood then the ebb and flow of the river of life. I've thought about this since my mood has risen. It's not that I got over it. That's really not why things are better now. Though they'll tell me that, I've watched things, and everything I said then was true, although I should've kept my surface ramblings private to avoid being pitiful. I don't know if you can see through all the bullshit in the last three posts to see what I was thinking. I don't know if I can ever describe fully what I'm thinking. My mood is something transient; my mood is something I get over. The pain, though, the pain stays, and I can feel it even when the source of the pain is gone. Hell, I can feel the pain all the time.

Let's try and be clear now, since I think I'm screwing everything up. This is all Alan's fault really. The more time I spend with him, the less ability I have to speak. Maybe I subconsciously copy him because I think it's hilarious, and hilarious is something I subconsciously strive to be.

I was miserable (although I did a very good job of hiding it—I checked with the people with whom I have contact) for those three days. The words in those posts are true in the sense that on one level I was thinking them. I left out details, intentionally vague to protect the innocent, but if you can work your head around that, it's all real. It's a deception, though. Lies are directly false, but deception is tricky because it might be absolutely true, albeit merely a fraction of the truth. Lies are explicit; deception can be implicit. I'll put this in a Venn diagram if you don't understand. Just ask.

The situation has been remedied by renewal of contact (limited, but present). The situation has *not* been remedied by a new outlook on life, music-controlled moods, or "getting over it". I'd still be quite desperate today had the circumstances not changed. The truth is all still there, though. The new situation does not invalidate the circumstances. This is so important I have to say it in more than one way. Life isn't happiness with sad thrown in there to fool you. The despair, the beauty of despair, is all there. The pattern is so real I can feel it all the time.

All that emotion is just a property of "mood". When my mood is ranked lower, I write things like I did three times in a row. Without that mood providing a different perspective, I fail to realize more of truth, and I'm worse off for it. Mood is easy to control, though, and since it's more fun to be happy, I play video games and listen to music and study and do homework. It's mostly fun stuff, and I'm living the good life with my friends, and every now and then something so beyond me, like I just bitched about for three posts, blows me away. The trick is when something catches me off guard and I become wholly caught up in my mood. This time, it didn't trick me. The bastard grabbed my mood and ran away with it, but I still felt life, and I still saw beauty in the despair. I'll repeat myself from the first of the posts.

Hemingway says, "You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can't believe in it. Things aren't that way." Hemingway failed to realize the beauty in the bad and the ugly.

I'm not pitiful, although I express that sort of behavior. Even in great sorrow I can feel joy, and this last predicament proved that to me. On one level it sucked really bad; that's the level of "get over it", and I would have. On another level down it hurt because communication runs deep in the brain. On another level down it hurt because it was something I needed (really, truly needed) and I didn't have the material to compensate. On the second lowest level of consciousness, I felt the pain because of the big gaping hole it revealed in my logical structure comprised of the world and everything in it and the magic of control over all the higher levels had disappeared. On the deepest level, though, I still haven't been touched, and as long as I don't experience anything truly traumatic, I have reason to believe that I'll still be safe, and I'll still be able to work my way up from there, even without this greatest of influences. The important stuff is still safe, if any of me has importance. I'm still hoping to find that Emerson to prove to me that my value exceeds my upkeep.

"To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived... this is to have succeeded." You know who you are.