Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Election Day Self Fulfillment Projections

I am pretty sure BO is going to win, and that makes me ecstatic. If you had told me that last January. Well, I would have been surprised, because usually political things do not work themselves out to my likings. I took a stand on BO early, and now there is a vacancy opening up inside me.

I think about it. The 'election' has taken up a lot of my consciousness in the past year and a bit. I would say that 23% of my thoughts are aimed towards meeting opposing arguments with counterarguments, towards having reasonable words to say.

I would also say that 73% of my internet time has been dedicated to reading political stories. I read DailyBeast, New Republic, fivethirty eight, and sometimes realclear or huffpo. I look at it all day at work and at home.

23% thoughts, and 73% reading. This is a lot of my consciousness, my mental life.

I worry what will happen to that consciousness after 'election.' Surely it will be a big relief. But also...

What will I do on the computer with the 73% of the time I spend there now? Where will that time go?

I hope it does not go to porn. I hope it goes towards things like 'networking' and 'research.' But I think it will go to 'porn' and probably 'criticism,' which, I think, is almost worse than porn. Porn is bad for somebody's sex drive, and criticism is bad for somebody's art drive. Criticism makes everything beautiful look suspect.

Too much analysis of beautiful things and you're fucked. You'll become anhedonic. Art will stop giving you as much pleasure as it is capable of.

Maybe I will get off of my computer more, or write more. I think I will have more mental energy to write short stories. And maybe I will submit them to publications.

I will also have 23% room for new thoughts/feelings. Mental life, I mean. What will fill that? I would like to tell you that I will find something productive to fill that, but I am not fully in control of my thoughts/feelings, or else I would be happy all of the time and probably working for a good company with benefits.

I will try to take an extra day at work. Make it four days of retail a week. And then I will go to a meeting about transcendental meditation. I'll kill time meditating every morning and every night. That's a good way to pass time. It's not destructive.

I got David Lynch's book on Itunes, and I listen to it when I walk to work. 'There are all kinds of fish out there, ones for business, ones for art...' 'I call that anger the suffocating rubber clown suit of the mind...' 'And when you get it, it's not a goofy happiness, it's a thick beauty...'

I like listening to him. I might try this. But is it weird to do that because one of your favorite artists does that? This might bother me. Also: I am afraid that if I go there, to one of the meetings, I will find a bunch of people who are also in pain and dealing with feelings of personal failure, and I will see myself in them. I will identify with them and it will be painful. It will make me feel worse about my life and not better.