I worked my own ruin. I knew what I was doing but I could not stop. I was compelled to abandon productive work and invest or waste whatever I had in the realization of a childhood dream, to become The Greatest Author Ever or Never Known, to wit, God. I quit my good job in Manhattan, flew to Hawaii and practically lived in the Hamilton Library at the University of Hawaii, where I devoted myself to studying what the greatest minds educated by the trivium had thought. I wrote essays and stories accordingly, about whatever came to mind, for Mind was all one to me. Only a few people would read my work because I was and still am a nobody without an editor and an advertising budget, but I had my fans on the pioneering open publishing sites. I was happy. I thought I was going somewhere. Seriously. Just read the romantic success stories.
I recently made what may have been a fatal mistake: I started posting collections of my work for sale on Amazon's KDP platform. I was there disappointed by my kind and literally nauseated by the millions of romances and horrors coming from the generic meat grinder. A highly regarded anonymous critic in the Illustrious KDP community immediately judged me a Failed Writer. Someone rushed to my first book published to post a mean review although he or she had not even read the preview. A bevy of Amazon writers who hang out in the KDP Community chimed in with discouraging or mean-minded comments on almost everything I had to say. Success was defined by the number of dollars one can brag about there and not the number of words, let alone knowledge and wisdom. Dump me: before all, writing is a commercial endeavor at KDP is it not? Otherwise, why would KDP exist? Wherefore I was by definition a Failed Writer when I arrived in the forum. At least I was responsible for creating three of the most controversial hence popular Questions ever posted on the Community forum before I left its denizens with their main notion of success and struggles to achieve it.
I live in a dump furnished with junk retrieved from the alley several years ago. I am a successful failure. Indeed, I have finally succeeded at losing in many respects. Millions of people in the world would be more than glad to live like me, in a place advertised as a paradise despite having one of the highest crime rates for a small city in the United States. Paradise can be hell at times. That being noted after a hurricane, my return to an impoverished lifestyle almost succeeded several times, at which point I ruined that successful decline by climbing heroically back out of it, grabbing one ledge after another, and then falling back to this cave of mine. I am almost dead already this time. It may be too late to fully succeed at losing except to die, so may my losses be lessons for someone else's gain.
“Do not worry, only fools make themselves miserable,” I tell myself. “It kept me busy, and there will be either birght light or pitch blackness at the end of the tunnel.”
I learned to avoid anxieties, not by faking a positive mental attitude, but by thinking abstractly, and just saying "no" after asking myself if I wanted to feel miserable. I am usually incredibly happy! I may moan and groan in writing, yet I am affable in person and smile a lot. It is the same silly smile my father said I had at my mother's funeral in Phoenix when I was not yet a year old. People who believe they are successful call me a loser. True, yet I am a successful loser! Maybe I have always been one. I certainly am successful in comparison to the poor souls in the alley or in bad news. Only a fool in those circumstances would be unhappy with my losses, so why make myself miserable over my successful failure?
Perhaps a psychoanalyst will find my diary and write me up as the excellent textbook case that I should be in order to make a fortune for psychiatry and help society get over itself. That would be nice, although I would rather define my psyche myself. Indeed, have never abdicated to psychoanalysts in person. I would be a prosperous psychoanalyst and psychotherapist myself if had a license and a fashionable technique for neurotics willing to submit to my authority. Truth is, I myself do not want to be defined by a trade or otherwise pinned down. That is my main problem, rooted in my basic conflict. I simply love my aberrant self too much to commit myself to therapeutic socialization.
So now I am completely alone without anyone who loves me, without a job, a church, a club, a real home. I have become a recluse with a range of two miles, enough for a round trip to the grocery store and the gym. Where else is there to go, anyway? To a restaurant and pay $30 for lunch? Or to a bar and pay $8 for a beer? Hanging out in bars for decades did not work, anyway.
No, groups of more than two are not my thing, so no group therapy for me. Nothing works, anyways, and in more ways than one. Nothing, in the end, meaning death, that is, the absence of everything, is permanent. Which leads me to justify my life as it is rather than make myself miserable.
How can anyone not be happy being all alone or All One to love Oneself all the more? Oh, but the Other is missing, so how can one be one without two or more? Why does one have to love another to love oneself? Go figure. Ask god if you have one.
I tell myself that I am not lonely, that I am alone or All One. Of course I cannot be the only One in the world. No matter how narcissistic I might be, I cannot be all alone without longing for another.
I tried to explain the difference between alone and lonely to a young man from New Orleans, today. We were talking about how South Beach had become a virtual zombie land filled with people dead on their feet who just keep coming and coming like Russians in Ukraine. I told him that Russians are mother f****** because Ukraine is their mother country, so I hope Ukraine takes over Russia so they can call the whole country Ukrussia and move the capital to Kiev.
“The whole world has gone crazy,” he said. "The spy balloon from China is probably filled with a lethal virus. China wants us to shoot it down so we will get infected.”
“Good idea if there are too many people unwilling to practice birth control. You know, my dad served two tours in the Army during World War II. He got in trouble for saying Russia was really our enemy, not our ally, and one day China would use Russia to ruin the Western world. He said he did not want to see what he called The Horror. He said he was glad he would die before that inevitable event. He did seem awfully glad as his own world drew rapidly to an end, laughing and carrying on though he could no longer get up and shuffle down the hall. I think he was happy to get the hell out of here at last. He said he was a messianic Jew, and opted for an afterlife. I guess we can be whatever we please.”
“My mom is in town from New Orleans,” rejoined my interlocutor, a fellow so handsome I imagined he had his choice of lovers straight or gay. He told me he came out some time ago, and I advised him to get back in the closet because disease was running rampant on the beach what with men behaving like minks.
“I dreamed that my mom died,” he declared. “That damn near killed me. I woke up crying like a baby. I realized she would die one day, and nobody would love me. I would be so alone, all by myself.”
“Wait until you are almost dead already like me. You may prefer to be alone, and you can get used to not feeling lonely, and you may even love being alone, but the truth catches up with you in the end. My best friends have moved away from South Beach. I have no one. I just saw an old lady wrapped in sheets being wheeled to a county ambulance on a gurney and shoved into the back like a mommy–I mean mummy. She was calling out someone’s name. The attendants shook their heads and looked sad. I wondered is suicide rate is for ambulance attendants is higher than the rate for police. Never mind, my friend, we must not make ourselves miserable although that is what it might be in the end, misery, calling out for someone who is not there, someone who is probably dead already or does not care, so make the most of it while you can, enjoy the day....”
“My head hurts something awful. I went out last night,” he interrupted. I thought of one of Omar Kayyham’s poems, brought him a can of wine seltzer from the Dollar Store and went home and had a quart of beer and a glass of wine and watched ‘The Last Bus’ on Prime.
Oh, life is a distraction ruled by conflict. Whom do we really love when we love another but our own selves? “Make the most of what’s left,” I tell myself when I look forward to nothing and backward to mistakes. After all, nothing and only nothing is perfect: History is a mistake if there be progress to something better. Make peace the best you can. Remember, if you do not like it, there is freedom from life in death, in eternal peace. I did not ask for life but I have the freedom to end it. Onward Christian Soldiers! Let the crowd marching off to war call self-homicide cowardice, but who is really the coward and who the peacemaker? That is the question to be considered in a brilliant essay if I live long enough to get to it.
I wonder, is it death or nothing that I love when I love my independence as if nothing were a thing in itself? Nothing can exist, after all, without empty space. I have indeed learned to love my independence so much that my greatest fear is to fall ill and become dependent on others. That is what “the good death,” what euthanasia, is for, is it not? Someone sold me on individualism during my formative years. Thanks, but no thanks for virtual euthanasia provided by religions. I would rather resort to opium. I only wish that I could fake faith long enough to have faith that I would live forever if I surrendered myself and complied with the wishes of others who want to live forever.
It is not that I hate others. Not at all. I love everybody, but I can only love them in the abstract. My father told me that he who loves everybody loves nobody. The crowd is too vulgar and hateful for my taste. Social media proves how nasty it is.
There is nowhere to go. Nobody wants a poor man who is almost dead already, anyway. My past has been a mistake. History itself has been one big mistake. That's why I withdrew from an active life, to figure it out and save myself, and, as the great author of my dreams and schemes, to save humankind. Good grief! Thus far I have lost. I have succeeded at saving no one including myself.
If only I had known what I know now, that there is no final solution to conflict, no end to history but the end of humankind; if only I had believed what Ludwig Gumplowicz said, that by the time we know and understand what's really going on, it is too late, I would be a more successful successful loser!
I had become obsessed with my chances lost in the past, in marked contrast to my great last chance, of being a messiah if not God Almighty and saving the world. I just had to have my solitude to be an author or originator instead of a commercial writer. I eventually realized I was in a trap, that I had entombed myself. I began really enjoying being alone with my reflections and I began to think, "With happiness like this, who needs other people?" Sadly, I do, but there is nowhere to go. It is too late. I shall just be happy with what I have, which is not much, but good enough for now.
No, thanks, I do not want a stuffed animal.
February 2023 South Beach
MY GOOD BOOK
I seek to borrow the only good book
With a perfect beginning, perfect end,
And I shall rest it in its perfect nook,
Where nothing further is left to defend:
Therein I shall find my perfect meaning,
All too long have I been loath to pretend
To be somebody I knew I was not,
Sneaking around the corners like a crook,
Striving to steal somebody else's plot,
While my unwanted garden was wanting.
After the good book's end, what have I got?
Heaven, without another book to read.
The end of history will comfort me;
Yet another book would just make me bleed:
There must be a good end to this trifling.
Thus one book and only one book I need,
Something very simple to begin with:
Nothing in the beginning is my creed.
And after Nothing you will find my myth:
Take or leave it, that is my being.
If it ends in Paradise with a fifth,
After some grand fortune has been well spent,
Or otherwise concludes, true to its pith,
Then safely to me has my book been lent:
I shall return it to its perfect nook.
My father, a truck driver wanted me to go to college, but then bragged about the value of being a simple truck driver with many stories of trucking that he never wrote and a love of sports teams that was his avocation until he found golf and casino gambling for jackpots on one armed bandits. Why did I just write this? I don't know, but like you, I write because I find it fun and it makes me happy, even though my books have not sold, so I give them away.
You wax quite philosophical and I like that even if you are no philosopher reject. I caught that disease a long time ago and found it much better than religion's repetitive dogma dragging one into scripture after scripture with promise of another life after a miserable life of confessing, praying, giving and cheating on the rules.
Ron
Good to see you are still on top form---I agree with your thoughts
here 100% But I could never express my thoughts like you do.
I look back with great pleasure at the fun we used to have on 'UKauthors' and 'Thought Cafe' that seems a long time ago. Hope the sun shines on you again and your undoubted talents.
My very best wishes to you...
Gerald Finlay--Gerry.