Morsels for the Depressed, Depraved, Pessimistic, and Otherwise Declining Read online

  Morsels

  For the

  Depressed, Depraved, Pessimistic,

  and otherwise Declining

  Saul van der Walt

  Morsels for the

  Depressed, Depraved, Pessimistic,

  and otherwise declining

  Copyright © 2019, Saul van der Walt.

  All rights reserved, fair use and other limitations and exceptions to copyright respected.

  Names, Places, People, Happenings, they are all fictional here, any resemblance to things or persons in real life, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ISBN-13 (paperback): 9781702504744

  Dedicated to the semblance of a bearable life in this world

  and no other.

  CONTENTS

  Morsels

  Fragments and Flash Fiction

  Morsels

  Dulcey Lima (unsplash)

  ~

  An evil thing to sell a child, the belief: “anything is possible and you sweet love can make it happen”. In impossible world-spaces caught between promise, prowess, and an infinite nothing that threatens to consume all texture between here and eternity, the only thing left to become is monstrous, and empty.

  ~

  Authenticity, a guilty and seldom private virtue of the insincere, insecure, and identifically-challenged.

  ~

  The future is forgone one choice at a time, though oft it seems one’s choice in choosing is wholly lacking.

  ~

  There is causality and there is violence, only one is necessary.

  ~

  Every scar foolishly begotten is both the world’s autograph and your congratulatory Darwin award.

  ~

  “If I could be who you wanted, you wouldn’t need me.”

  ~

  One is not obliged to do anything, and whoever says otherwise is a slave (though, we’re all slaves to something or other).

  ~

  God is both vanity disembodied and the testimonial recognition of our failure to properly reciprocate humanity to humanity.

  ~

  Death, but a subtle change of pace to those already destroyed in life.

  ~

  The trouble with every thisness, that it just ain’t all that.

  ~

  After suicide, the second most pressing question in life is: How to solve the problem of other people?

  ~

  Sure, you can stoke up the feeling of meaning, that’s quite alright, but the real question is just whether you can hold on to it.

  ~

  Things don’t contradict themselves, people do.

  ~

  You’ll become a charlatan too if questioned far enough.

  ~

  When you discover that you are no longer proficient in your own language.

  ~

  Pain is a temple built in the name of reality, but for its service there is a sacrifice, and that is a tax paid on the tenability of the present moment.

  ~

  The nice thing about darkness is that you don’t have to take it seriously, when the time comes, your bare-assed prostration before it will be involuntary.

  ~

  I would write you a beautiful poem on the insurmountability of that immense distance which cuts between the lands of sofa and refrigerator, but I fear that would be too much to ask.

  ~

  Existence is basically trauma to anything living, but fortunately there are ways of being alive without living.

  ~

  You learn it from other people that you are ugly.

  ~

  Fear not, boredom will outlive sadness too.

  ~

  Sorrow and anxiety is the price we pay to think time.

  ~

  With the rejection of the other, the first veil to recognition is inevitably the fact of their feeling and being felt.

  ~

  Faking so hard that it actually comes off as more authentic.

  ~

  As a personality, you are a small program in a big computer.

  ~

  For the most part, no one cares, and with enough tears, not even you.

  ~

  If karma exists, whoever or whatever is keeping score is either evil or profoundly disabled.

  ~

  Don’t think; it’s not good.

  ~

  Nothing decays as fast as a future.

  ~

  Why do the happiest people always have the worst reasons for being so?

  ~

  If you’ve maintained expectations, blatantly questioning them, then you’ve not questioned yourself far enough. Reason is impotent against fear.

  ~

  Every symbol a person portrays serves a function, witting or not. Though, of symbols it often seems, they are just stand-ins for all the things we wish we were and could believe unironically — little affirmations, like prayer wheels for the psyche.

  ~

  Postirony: yeah ok.. but still though.

  Postirony, a kind of fatalism about one’s aboutness.

  ~

  You can’t really pre-grieve someone, but it helps.

  ~

  The crowning, squeeze, and drop of a turd, at once, a most apt metaphor for life.

  ~

  Vulgarity is closure over great constraint.

  ~

  To witness a disassembled jumble of vocalizations, and consistent cause for care and clean up, bear the face of a person you once loved.

  ~

  Today I showered, maybe tomorrow again.

  ~

  Pity is pain, for you and for them.

  ~

  There is nothing so subjective that it is completely unshared and unsharable, no one is that unique.

  ~

  And strength to those who suffer in silence and are working on it.

  ~

  What you cannot say, you must induce.

  ~

  Twisted head, mental strife. Tainted memories, trapped in life. Words too floppy, silence too empty. It’s getting old, the reasons don’t hold. People full of words, strictures, and expectations. Tiresome reciprocations, the usual altercations. Their music is relentless, this philosophy is goo. All been said before, it’s the end now, there’s a noise at the door.

  ~

  “It’s the postplatonic-postironic speaking, who dis?”

  ~

  As a once aspiring disappointment, I am quite successful.

  ~

  It’s not so much about reinventing the wheel, it’s more about learning how to actually build one for yourself.

  ~

  In times darkest, everyone’s a philosopher, just not necessarily a good one.

  ~

  When the cringes of existence become too much to bear, then it is time, you have to strip, bleat, and beat something with a plank, your name is a good subject for this especially, be sure to attain peak-ridiculous. If you are successful at this, then that drive, that mental organ, the anti-cringer, or rather, your malicious-dignity, it will be too ashamed for you, it will be defeated and lay dormant in an existential tizzy, for a good while at least.

  ~

  When existence turns into cringe soup, then think of your ancestors and what nonsense they thought and did; at least you’re taking it all up soberly.

  ~

  If exaptation is a tradeoff between degeneracy and practical utility, then it seems humanity is what happens when it all goes too far.

  ~

  The little things are the hinges of being, not the philosophy we conjure up to
relate ourselves to it.

  ~

  Our psyches are like the Namibian Quiver-tree, it kills off parts of itself when it doesn’t have the means to sustain them.

  ~

  There is no reason to fear the abyss staring back at you; it is more impotent than you.

  ~

  It doesn’t always get better, sometimes it just gets quiet enough to properly distance yourself from it all.

  ~

  Some have to walk on a road through hell to get where they’re going, others just luck out. Every success story comes with its own hell though.

  ~

  The sudden loss of a life lived in the momentary gaze of a stranger.

  ~

  Death is a kind of ironic pre-traumatic stress.

  ~

  When you zig, it feels like you should be zagging, and when you zag, it feels like you should be zigging. The whole thing, it’s no good.

  ~

  The world needs its ugliness so that words like “beauty” and “future” have meaning.

  ~

  Be wary of new comforts, it is harder and slower to part with a good thing than it is to get used to one.

  ~

  Freedom is to be determined or occupied in the manner of your choosing, well, as far as the situation will permit at any rate. However, while you may choose what you will, you can’t exactly will what you choose.

  ~

  The road to death is paved with inanities.

  ~

  No need to fear those horrors in the dark if you are decidedly the most depraved thing in the room.

  ~

  What is the use of an aphorism if you need a dictionary and two encyclopedia tabs to read it?

  ~

  Hmmm, the pungency of that wonderful aroma: “technically correct”.

  ~

  No, it’s true, life is like the Truman show, except we’re all Truman and no one is watching.

  ~

  “The world would be better off without me” is hopeful; it assumes you were making an impact.

  ~

  Genealogy is how we countenance ourselves in history.

  ~

  The most evil thing you can give to someone in an impossible situation, is hope.

  ~

  Existentialism is just nihilism with twiddling thumbs.

  ~

  “If a belief no longer serves you, toss it out,” an epistemology optimized for comforting nonsense.

  ~

  History is the pallet with which we paint the present.

  ~

  Morality, sing it with me, it’s a more.

  ~

  You know it’s serious when futility speaks for itself.

  ~

  You can find gods in the tomato if you look hard enough. But, if you look even harder you'll discover yourself. And, if you really really squint then you'll soon witness the abyss which dissolves all meaning and metaphor. Then you’ll snap back into it and tomatoes will be tomatoes again.

  ~

  What divinity can there be in a will if it is subverted some 7.7 billion times a day?

  ~

  Familiarity is a trust in stagnation.

  ~

  A wise fool is one who knows it when silence becomes dignity’s last refuge.

  ~

  You might smother the source of the angry or sad making words, but you will never unhear them.

  ~

  How tiny our voices are from a trillion kilometers away.

  ~

  Beauty can spring from meaning, but meaning is an ice cube slowly melting away as you do.

  ~

  “Self-actualization” is such a painful and fraudulent notion, because after all, seriously, what will you do with yourself once you’ve climbed the hill or finished the painting, game, case, shop, machine, book, project, job, collection, level, house, etc.? Start again? Clap hands and try to outdo yourself? Make children climb the same hill or at least one pretty much just like it? Or worse, realize that you’ve spent years of your life chasing things without actually getting anywhere or feeling any better? It’s useless, everything is useless and painfully so. If you aren’t yet crushed and tired enough to simply put an end to this maudlin mess that is life and living, you’ll simply keep hobbling along, reaching for the next best thing. You might as well give up the chase, find ways to enjoy what there is left for you to enjoy, and that so on your own terms, and not in some pathetic effort to impress anyone or to get to a point where you feel that you have now proved to yourself that you are a real human being and not just a bundle of deficiencies. If you have dreams, then they start with what you are in this moment, and what is in front of you, because things will not change unless you suffer to change them, and do so with no expectations. Self-actualization is a pipe dream, because even when you “get there”, before long, you will again feel as you’ve always felt, this time only a little emptier, and if not hungrier and wanting something more, then with a disenchantment and bitter loss of appetite that might never heal or ever again be as good as it was.

  ~

  Every day the chance to decay in a new way.

  ~

  At first, I felt there’s no future for me in my country, then I looked around at what it’s like in other countries and realized, there’s no future for me on this planet. I don’t know about other planets yet, I’m still looking, so far the options seem limited.

  ~

  To be resentful of an idea means that, no matter how ill-conceived it may appear, at some level you feel it a threat and thereby take it seriously. So, in attempting a disposal of such ideas, you can try to demonstrate its incoherence or build a rational case against it, however criticizing it poorly or yelling at it and its sources only strengthens it, which is why if nothing else, you can always resort to trying your best to ignore it, but make sure no one recognizes you actively ignoring it, because that will also bring you into question and give attention to the idea. On the other hand, if it is truly beyond your means to thoroughly refute it, or to at least, cite others’ cogent refutations you actually understand, then you can always succumb to it, but if you do not, then, well.. plea ignorance or invoke a deity.

  ~

  God card denied, insufficient theodicy.

  ~

  Parenting has failed the moment a child comes to believe that love or approval must be earned.

  ~

  It doesn’t mean much, but if you’re going to listen, please at least pretend to hear something.

  ~

  If the memory of you essentially comes down to occasionally activated configurations of brain cells, which are actively deteriorating in the heads of other people, then why should you want to be remembered? What is it about the brain states of other people that substantiates your having lived?

  ~

  At the heart of it, the problem with human connection is that, the other will inevitably prove, to much chagrin and disbelief that they are in fact not you, nor quite like you, they belong to the world, they are like nature, an alterity for itself

  ~

  With enough distance, many things become palatable, even life.

  ~

  No-reasoning is the only value-free reasoning, for the very content or terrain of reasoning is already value laden in that it is going somewhere non-trivially, and the fact of that is already a bias in itself.

  ~

  And when the answers have had their show and out stayed their welcome, make coffee.

  ~

  “You can overcome anything.” This is a serious claim, which if true stands testament to the strength and resilience of the human spirit; however, if it is true, then it is also a heavy blow against the fixity of any situation or ultimate meaning which could be derived from overcoming. But, alas, there are things you will never overcome, exemplars are: the endless angst, horror, and boredom at the facticity of your continued existence in this particular manner, with this particular ugly mug and set of deficiencies. No one chose their life, thei
r parents, their nation, to put it plainly, no one asked for any of this. And yet, this is it, we are expected to dance and humor all the inanities of the world with the utmost seriousness, as if any of it had any significance, let alone coherence. All that, just to establish a mound of memories which, if you are fortunate, you will call your life’s eudaimonia, it will be your prize for having clapped hands and entertained yourself with others, or merely in their midst, on a rock floating in a potentially endless uninhabitable abyss. However, even that prize of fond memory, of a balanced and “happy” life well lived, still does not outweigh the normal state of affairs, for if you have lived as the great majority still do, then you will have struggled to sustain yourself, you will have cried for all the wrong reasons, you will have learned that all things are transient and fragile, especially love, you will have hurt and been hurt, and you will have felt resentment at life’s grand indifference and all that is unjust in this world, regardless of whether it is, for the world is not about us, we are about it.