EPTI am a boy, and that means that I'm also a human being and a man and a person and an organism and a thing but all of these nouns are utterly irrelevant in light of the fact that I am an existing thing. And yet I hope the profundity of that realization is not lost on you, my dear reader: I am not some pedantic, inexperienced philosopher who has just encountered the likes of Socrates and has so set about questioning the very corpuscles which Newton thought comprised light. "Why," you splutter, "look at this guy! Look at him injecting factoids amid cluttered, stilted vocabulary to give the impression of great depth!" And yet you would be wrong, because while I do love praise, I love even more that ineffable something (not quite randomness) in my prose, because it is something over which I am maker, and, more importantly, because there will never be so perfect a mimicry of the way I perceive as my prose.
A clever reader will glean from my mentioning of Dostoevsky in the first paragraph (where only the most beloved could possibly exist) that I fancy psychoanalysis in writing. That would be true, but it does little good to say anything about it. But look, I'm rambling now about literary pretensions. I am not pretentious, mind you. I have terrible low confidence in my abilities. Oh, sure, I know I'm a brilliant "prose stylist" (as it is vogue to call them, so I hear) but I am not confident in my ability to write well. I can only hope that some soul reading this despises it. I hope someone writes that I am arrogant, that my writing abounds with fifty shades of purple, and two sequels more (let the third paragraph be for refuse, for refuse is more reprehensible than mere garbage); let someone say this! Let someone say that I am overconfident in my abilities, that I am sophomoric, that I lack experience, or, better yet, that I am a romanticist. It is only this sort of person that might belong to the category of people like me. I mean the sort who is terribly injured by the fact that there might be someone who writes well; who writes as well as they do (if you have a problem with singular they, this is not the time nor the place nor the author nor the blog). Because when I see someone who writes beautifully, when I read Byron's She Walks in Beauty, there is such an effervescent stirring within me that my only recourse is to gut it with the black knife of my reason. For while it is utterly impossible for me to avoid saying, internally, the limpid "Of cloudless climes and starry skies", it is also impossible for me to avoid feeling threatened by it. I wish to create, so dearly, what Byron did:
Styled in splendor of Sun disguised,
She floats across my misty eyes
And though her way my heart denies
She soars beyond these starry skies.
Simple. Juvenile. Sentimental. And yet human beings are sentimental, through and through. Why should we not write sentimentally? Perhaps in the first line there is something of Byron, something grand about the orgasmic joy of the phrase "Styled in splendor of Sun disguised." It's just lovely to say, that's all. If you don't think so, you are not only wrong, but wrong in such a way that I will never be able to comprehend your wrongness in the way that I might comprehend the wrongness of the man who believes the world is flat. That is much more reasonable than for you to hate beautiful things. It could be, for example, that the world is simply flat. It could not be that Byron is ugly.
But this is supposed to be about me, not Byron or Dostoevksy. And yet that are me, aren't they! Nietzsche, too, with whom I disagree on almost everything, but who is nonetheless still me because of the way that he writes. Let me then say a few words about the trite facts of my existence: I am 21, male (as I mentioned earlier) and a student. What do I study? Oh, this and that. My major right now is Mathematics with a second major in Philosophy, but I consider switching to Literature, or Linguistics, or Physics, or everything and anything (except drama; to break form: fuck that shit) on a bi-weekly basis. I am not indecisive (at least not in this): I simply love so many things, and I love them all dearly, because they are in me and I am in them. I love art because it is art, but I love math because it is math. And yet loving one deprives me of the other, and by now you must have grown tired of my terse use of the four-letter platitude, probably the most detestable of all nouns.
I am awful. I have all the usual symptoms of awfulness: three or four mental illnesses (and no, autism is not among them, though part of me is curious as to whether it should be) and the typical array of medications which accompanies them. They actually work quite well. In the day I am a paragon, efficient, utterly indomitable, strong-willed, clever, inspiring, and like some da Vinci. But I am not arrogant. No, I am not arrogant. If there is one thing I can convince you of, let it be that: I am not arrogant, or conceited, or anything of the sort. For I so dearly wish not to be intelligent. It really is the case that the average people have it best, and I mean that without a shred of derision. I envy them in the purest, most respectful way that one can envy. They do not concern themselves with invisible specters, with sententious monologues, with all that utter fucking nonsense which is indispensable for me.
No, I am condemned to a life of brilliance. I will probably never reach my potential because I am rather lazy, afflicted with too many bouts of depression/anxiety, and because I respond poorly to criticism, even though I take all of it to heart. When someone criticizes this piece, I will hate them, and yet I will remember every single word they have said in perfect, preserved clarity.
Love me, dear reader. Love me. Shower me with that platitude, not at all some lone voice crying in the night, but the penultimate (not the last, mind you!) gasp of some dying peasant. That is love. The rest is detail.
I'm Michael. Nice to meet you.
(It occurs to me that I might have offended people. That was not my intent, nor was it my intent to appear condescending. I need help T_T. I need...something).
