I graduated from high school recently. Homework was the true bane of my existence. It gnawed at my every waking thought and put a tinge of anxiety to my every moment. Am I doing it? Did I forget some? What do I need to be doing that Im not? The entire school experience is a depressing prison of course but homework is how it goes from an seven hour affair to a twenty four hour project. More than anything else it makes sure youre always at school, always worried about the evaluation of unrespectable teachers and disgusting sadists.
You start to wonder if theres a way out, like any prisoner examining the prison with obsessive dedication. You follow the vine to its end and back pacing your room going through the mental anguish of knowing youre trapped and theres nothing you can do about it. (http://steve-yegge.blogspot.fr/2008/10/programmers-view-of-u...) I used to have this fantasy where Id go down to the school building in the middle of the night when nobody is there with a barrel of kerosene. Id douse the schoolhouse walls with the fetid substance and light it ablaze, laughing as the walls go up in smoke before throwing myself on the tickling flames crying and screaming and laughing in agony as I burn.
You might be interested to know that I write in such a style to obscure myself from style analyzing techniques. Not to hide the face of my persona from the likes of nsa bogeymen. My mother would die if she found out the extent of what I am going through. Good samaritans trying to help by telling her would only make it worse. I find the writing pretentious and sickening.
At the end of everything I write I am tempted to justify my phrasing and word choice. I am smart enough to know though that making yourself conspicuous only makes you suspicious in the eyes of of most people.
The people you need to worry about most are the ones you who do not appear on your radar. They are rats, you do not know they are in your midst until you find their shit in the morning.
My experience welding left me with a phobia of all things electric. A mild phobia, but irrational as any risk blown out of proportion by the panicked human mind.
Power lines trail the countryside and cityscape, competing in ubiquity only with roads and fast food restaurants. In this I am also mildly agoraphobic, as one cannot leave the homestead without being stared down by the thick black cables, taunting and intimidating from their creosote imbued perches.
My mom said it was just a matter of time, the fear had been building for months, slowly.
Those men who retain their privacy by abdicating social media pay an impossible price. The gradual fade of their relationships and social livelihood. Only one who has spent so long starved by it's lack that their ache has forgotten to bother them can hope to pay it. Thankfully current business is email. But our peers are eager to change that.
Tales of young women giving themselves to multiple men is a common trope in hysterical portrayals of social ills. If one would like an example of what these tropes look like, 'Reefer Madness' is on netflix. This article almost reads like a paid endorsement of david camerons internet filter. It is a outrageous story about internet porn, men who dare anonymity, and youth corrupting youth designed to generate panic in the minds of ordinary men.
I have no idea what the situation is in the UK, but I know I've never been invited to any sex parties. Nor have I ever heard of such a thing happening in my area. This might be because such sex parties don't exist, or because men who obviously wouldn't participate aren't invited.
But then, who can argue with such wonderful anecdotes?
There are degrees of isolation. Paul Graham talked about suburbs being a place designed to raise children. He said that as you grow older a suburb starts to seem fake. Another reason suburbs seem fake is their demographics. A place designed to raise children will primarily have children in it. After a certain age it is no longer acceptable to talk to kids as equals. You bite your tongue and talk in a sing song voice or risk the ire of parental suspicion. In their eyes anyone who would want to talk to a child is a pedophile or other bogeyman.
You have friends who grow up with you. A few generations of teens live in your town at best. Should they not enjoy your company you are SOL. Adults are suspicious of your youth, energetic youngsters scare them. They are held to the same sort of rule about talking to children except to them you are a child. That in mind it should not be hard to imagine how you end up a social pariah in the Americas.
You know there is somebody else out there just like you. You will never meet them because they are inside just like you. The large pool of bored kids that hang out on IRC and talk about whatever it is other kids talk about has dried up. Twitter is not a replacement. Facebook is not a replacement. Those services are localist. They focus on the people you know in your town.
When you have nobody to talk to books become your conversation partners. Stacks of them in a sort of personal library. What F. T. Marinetti called "Public dormitories where you sleep side by side for ever with beings you hate or do not know.". You start to hate yourself for not reading them. You start to hate yourself for reading them. You desperately want to talk about what you are reading yet you know it is boring and nobody wants to listen.
The loneliness starts to break you. It eats away at your sanity. You start daydreaming of smashing the monitor that glows against your face in the night. Throwing the books from piles into the walls their pages slamming into drawers and dressers. Pages litter the floor as you step forward to the CRT television and knock it from the stand. Blood trails behind your step as the glass cuts your feet coagulating into a pool around you. Sitting in the fetal position against the wall of that destroyed room looking up at the face of your shocked mother.
"Son, I think you need to see a doctor." she says in an almost whisper.
You start to wonder if theres a way out, like any prisoner examining the prison with obsessive dedication. You follow the vine to its end and back pacing your room going through the mental anguish of knowing youre trapped and theres nothing you can do about it. (http://steve-yegge.blogspot.fr/2008/10/programmers-view-of-u...) I used to have this fantasy where Id go down to the school building in the middle of the night when nobody is there with a barrel of kerosene. Id douse the schoolhouse walls with the fetid substance and light it ablaze, laughing as the walls go up in smoke before throwing myself on the tickling flames crying and screaming and laughing in agony as I burn.
Im so glad to be free.