I have said often, and to many, that the pursuit of philosophy is like a mess of pick-up-sticks:  one can't touch any single part without moving the whole mass.  Of course, philosophy is distinguished from other activities largely by its approach, rather than by its objects.  In fact, the material of philosophy is, and has always been, all and everything.  So what one touches is - anything, and what moves is - everything.  Or, as Charles Fort put it:  "One measures a circle beginning anywhere." 

So - games.  An old Go proverb (is there any other kind?) says, succinctly:  As Go is, so is life.

I'm as guilty as anyone of having vices.  I collect them, moving from one to another of them in turn as they wear out or lose their vividness, and yet I never completely throw any of them out.  Games are notoriously a vice.  Monastic rules and the writings of moralists are full of exhortations to pass by such trifles in favor of more edifying pursuits, like self-flagellation.  But I've always reckoned that I would die someday, (and that for good) and ought to pass my time as I please - time being all I have or am.

So, having squandered my youth on these follies, what can be made of them?

Games have taught me forcefully a lesson I should like to have picked up sooner and by more impressve means - warfare or meditation or something.  That lesson is simple, and like all simple truths, utterly deceptive in its simplicity, and rich in its ramifications.  It is this:  PAY ATTENTION!  One loses by losing mindfulness of what is present directly before one, or by disregarding either the details or the overall situation, both of which dynamically interact at all times. 

I have also learned another lesson, and a harder one to convey to those who do not play games.  It is, again, simple:  games are totally meaningless in themselves, and they are an utter bore to play unless one animates them by pretending in earnest that they matter.  Put another way, the game isn't worth the price of the candle unless one cares, and the more one cares, the more intensely one will feel the game, and the more readily will one ascend to those states of concentration and sublime reasoning that are the chief pleasures of the true player.  One must care deeply - and caring is what creates depth.    Sartre says we make ourselves by our actions, which are creative gestures through which we are the authors of value and meaning.   For that matter, Heidegger points out that time gains its sense by the quality of concern - orientation toward a preferred future. 

Or:  games are not our actual lives, but they are best when treated as if they were; and life may not be a game, strictly speaking, but it should be lived as if it were.

It occurs to me that wallowing in self-loathing, self-pity, and, well, SELF  is rather exactly playing into the hands of the enemy (b/k/a the kilesas).   Having done it to the hilt, I think I could afford to let it go. 

So, a constructive start to the remaining portion of my allotted days.  Having lost a lot of what I thought my life was about, I am now free to do, be, and create anything I please. 

Let's go!

(This entry's title is a loose translation of Lux Nova Umbra Est, a band partially derived from the late, lamented Man is the Bastard.)

So...

I took the opportunity afforded by a brief vacation from antidepressants to take a dispassionate look at my situation.  It occured to me that what I have been saying to myself is quite different from what I would say as an observer of someone exactly like me in circumstances, but not myself.

Which is this:  I am a failure. 

I effectively dropped out of graduate school for no better reason than that I couldn't do the work.  I have never had a significant job, nor any accomplishments of which to be proud.  I have done nothing, I do nothing, I am nothing, and were I to die today, I would leave nothing but a stain and a stench.  Currently, I am so at the end of my rope that I am more or less forced to move in with my in-laws in order to save up enough money to be able to get the odd tooth filled here and there.  I have no prospects, no job, and no fanbase. 

What happened?

By way of a symptom of the current collapse:

Plagiarism.

I have many students each semester who find nothing odd in the notion of printing up a random paper from this here internet and turning it it under their own undistinguished name.  When confronted, many of them claim that this strikes them as nothing bad or unusual. Some faculty will even occasionally make the "culture defense", which runs like this: in some cultures, collaborative work is stressed, and individual work is disvalued, so this is a source of confusion for students originating from such cultures.

This is ludicrous on two grounds:

Ground the First:

No culture values stupidity, with the possible exception of this one.  If you can't understand a simple imperative like: write a paper - which prima facie suggests work and effort - you deserve the life of servility toward which your current trajectory is pointed.

Ground the Second:

If that's really how your culture works, then your culture is shit, and will eventually be killed and eaten by better, smarter cultures.  I know that's not how you see it in your culture, but in my culture, it's okay to say things like "Your culture sucks."  Or, as a wise man once said:  "Fuck your culture, and get back to work."

I hasten to add that everything's fine now.   More to the point my lover rejoined me, and my financial life is no worse than yours probably is.  Also, we have adopted two cats, and two rats, and, in general, the six of us are as well balanced as a mismatched set of mammals living in the Kali Yuga can be expected to be.

This is addressed to all the friends and lovers and others with whom I have lost contact.  This is an anonymous blog, so if you are here, and you know who I am, that is a privilege, and a sign of respect and love.  Please return this by not identifying me to anyone.

I am sorry.

I have left most of the people I have ever cared about behind, in the sense of not returning calls, letters, and email.  In some sense, I don't know why.  Some of it is distance - you moved, or I did, and friendship at a distance is ... different.

More often, it has been because to catch you up, I would have to go over the worst years of my life.  

(Also, I may have been crazy for a while, and I'm on pills now, but more on that below.)

My mother was never very well-equipped to handle the stresses of life as it had been for her.  She grew poorer and poorer.  For a while, she lived with me, but I could not handle the strain this caused me.  It was exhausting.  Perhaps I chickened out, but, rightly or wrongly, I moved out to a separate apartment, much cheaper than hers, in hopes of having the peace of mind needed to work toward my PhD., and simply to be whomever and whatever I am supposed to be.  Somewhere in there, my car was totalled, during a period when my financial aid was delayed and my insurance allowed to briefly lapse.  I was automatically responsible, and liable for a large settlement, without a car, and eventually unable to drive legally.

I was eventually paying all her expenses, and those of her many (dozen?) cats.  She grew no better, and I was always broke - partially because of my own inability to manage my practical affairs properly.  For a while, I had no utilities at all.  I cooked on a propane camp stove, and read by candlelight.  Sometimes, I had nothing to eat but cornmeal.  I "borrowed" some money from work to cover her groceries (or perhaps my own?), got caught before I returned the money (which, I assure you, I was going to do within days), and was fired.  I began supporting myself and her as an adjunct instructor at several local community colleges, and at any other odd jobs I could swing.  Some of these were very odd, indeed.  I was commuting all over several counties in Southen California, entirely on busses and trains, while trying to be a graduate student.    For a while it all worked.  The money was adequate.  I earned my M.A., got more comfortable with teaching, made some friends, and finally found the love of my life, without whom I would be an empty shell today.  She moved in with me and my roommates.  It was lovely.

Then, it ceased to work.  Bad things happened.  My lover left me under rather complicated circumstances - the relationship wasn't over, but she wasn't able to live with me comfortably.  My mother got worse, I got broker, I got more disorganized myself, and rather depressive, and eventually, it all hit the fan.  She was going to be evicted.  She had no place to go.  By this time, I had several roommates (having been evicted, myself, for frequently paying my rent late) and couldn't see them agreeing to have her move in to the living room, even without the cats.  She had no family except my Aunt, from whom she was quite estranged.  She put the cats to sleep - all of them - because she felt they would be worse off without her.  She told me she had lined up an oportunity to stay with another cat-rescue type.  On this basis, she started giving away her possessions, or having me store them.  I was suspicious, of course - I once candidly told her to please not throw away anything she had written, because I might like to read it someday.  What I meant was:  "If you're going to kill yourself, at least leave me that much of you." 

She had talked occasionally about suicide - even 10 years before this.  She had never struck me as anything but unhappy.  She had no friends, no family except me, no job, bad relationships with her neighbors and, when she did have work, with her co-workers.  Her job skills belonged to another era - that of clerical work.  She had no coping skills.  She was angry about a lot of things - often with good reason, but not always.  She had paranoid tendencies.  It was bad for her.  And now she was going to be homeless, because the person who she was going to be staying with was a lie.

So, she did it.  I got a letter in the mail - with no return address, of course, because that is the proper way to do it.  "By the time you read this, I will be dead..."   She blamed grief over her dead cats.  Or, perhaps, she blamed me.  She didn't say so, of course, but...  At any rate, I did.  Some days, I still do.

She quite specifically got into a full bathtub, and pulled her electric vacuum cleaner on top of herself - at that point, her only possession aside from her purse - and died, I would imagine, of electrocution, drowning, or both.  In a way, I admire the tenacity such a method evinces.  Mostly the memory of it makes it hard to think or feel anything properly.

Shortly after this, both my own cats died.  I have no explanation for this.  I did nothing unusual.  Perhaps she had been right in saying our family has a curse upon it - a demon or angry ghost.  I think I saw this figure in a dream once, and never forgot it.  I don't believe any of that crap, but my God - what are the odds??

Mourning is, as many professionals realize, a form of transitory mental illness.  I apparently had "complicated mourning".  Fuck those people.  I'm not certain if I lost my mind entirely, but I know that I got depressed, stayed depressed, and only broke out of it by taking Prozac.  I still feel a little unmoored some days.  It has been years.

And that's why I never write you.

There is little room left to doubt that civilization is on the decline.