Photography Skill +1

So, I suppose a little update is in order. I've put myself part-way back into the poorhouse, but for a good reason. I've invested in some new camera equipment, and today was the first day I spent trying it out. Needless to say, there's still some bugs to work out of my setup, but so far, everything is looking very promising.

I've also gotten back onto the boat of writing things beyond short stories. I've been reading a fairly awesome military fantasy series lately, and it's kind of put the fire back in me for writing. I was beginning to think that all was stale in the creative world, but of course, I was wrong.

Anyways, I don't have a lot else to say here. G, signing off.

ps. - Trevor, if you're still looking for your recording suite discs, I've found them, and they're safe. Next time I'm up that way, I'll bring them with me. Along with the $60 I owe Dan for Bioshock, etc.

Hit the Key; the most sour note

My head is spinning. The way has become muddied.
I don't know where I'm going or what to do.

It was said, and so I've mechanically repeated, that life is just a series of ever-more subtle and difficult challenges, arrayed to bring us to our breaking point. To date, I've strode over most of them as if they were nothing. They were nothing. Because I could always pay the simplest, direct toll. Myself.

I'm now in a situation where it's not feasible for me to take charge and fix what was broken. It's a helpless feeling. I hate it. This was the one challenge that I forever failed. And yet here it is again. What does the world do when the superhero is left holding his breath, looking at what he's done, and left wondering, was this wrong?

Midnight reveries stack up like bodies in a morgue, and yet all are destined for nothing. All the words and thoughts and missives are all sent to the midden, for though they are eloquent and well-crafted, they say nothing, or so little as to be one and the same.

I can write ad nauseum about the ills in the world. About how people are fucked, and how we're all so apathetic. But now, I just wonder if I've crossed that line. I'm listening for the keening of my conscience, and I'm strangely hearing nothing. So was I wrong, or do I just not care anymore?

Or perhaps it's just this weight is not mine to carry, and I should just close my eyes and hope for the best.

Or perhaps, at daybreak, this entry itself will find the delete key beckoning. We won't know.

Here's where I get off

There's an election coming up, and the world's holding its breath for the outcome. For it's the fate of the world that hangs in the balance.

And I don't really care. Why? You might ask. Well, I know you won't, because like me, you don't care. In the last eight years, I've watched all of our right, all of our freedoms, all of the good things we enjoy in life, stripped away and sent to the fire pits, the first in a long list of sacrifices to some arcane god of power.

I live in a city steeped in pragmatism which has spread like a plague throughout this region. The act of doing anything is meticulously pressed into a matter of returns. Even sex, the great Objective for now three generations running, has been broken down into a simple act, a return on an investment of time. Love is a clause on a contract signed for marriage, a sharing of estates and nothing more. Everything's a business, and nothing is emotional anymore. In fact, the very state of being emotional is exclusively shunned. You know it. You look at somebody grasping at their ribs, trying desperately to rip their heart out of their chest, and you don't feel compassion. You don't feel sadness.

You feel nothing. Nothing save disgust.

It's that same disgust I now feel, looking out at the most deluded mass since the ancient Roman Empire met its demise at the hands of its own ineptness and shortsightedness. I really don't care about the future of this culture, as it's dug its own grave. And even though it yawns before us, half the population lays blame, while the other half tries futility to backpedal. I have no stake in witch hunts, nor in maintaining the status quo. If into the pit is where we must go, then that is where I look, and where I dwell.

It's the product of a culture that's seeking to ascend past their own humanity. We've already convinced ourselves that we're better than the rest of the world's several billion people. In doing so, we're now trying so very hard to leave our humanity behind in the search of a pragmatist's Nirvana, where we rule everything with absolute control, and money flows freely into ruthless pockets.

Pride, it's said, erodes the soul. But are we a proud people? Are we proud of the fact that we celebrate the fact that we're surrounded by things we don't understand, nor want to? Are we proud of the fact that we wield awesome technology that we have no idea how to use?
Are we a nation of egotists and sycophants, or are we all just poor victims that are misunderstood?