Well we’ve all seen the red carpet show now and all the beautiful rich and talented people gathering together to congratulate themselves on their beauty, riches and talents. In the end, when the earth has burnt away, when memories have ceased, what difference does it make whether I was the neighborhood “retard” or whether I was Jennifer Lawrence. Pointless, all of it. Yes, Jennifer will have lived a life 100 thousand times better than anything I will ever experience. But one hundred years from now when we are dust, we will be the same. Dust, useless quiet dust. A huge downgrade for the winners in life, a longed-for relief for the losers.  Perhaps with a different stroke of fate, had I somehow been born without my genes scrambled up like a scrambled egg, I would have been a star like Jennifer. And with a different stroke of fate, Jennifer could have gained an extra chromosome in the womb, leaving her mentally retarded and home-bound. Lives determined not by effort, nor by desire, but by genetics and resources. What could ever be the point of living, when we cannot control our destiny?
That is how I see the world. Everyone walking their journey towards inevitable dust. One could argue that in spite of the inevitable, a life like Jennifer’s was worth living. She experienced many happy things while she was here on Earth. But for one like me, there is no argument that being brought to life had any benefit whatsoever. There were no happy times.  A long and agonizing journey to return to a state I once contentedly inhabited: dust.
So that is what I think of when I see a program like the Oscars. Hours and hours spent in preparation, thousands and thousands of dollars invested, all in futility. A few hours of happiness, for a lucky few, that will no longer exist, when we all no longer exist. All we are doing, whether nobodies myself or whether stars like Jennifer Lawrence, is biding our time plodding on to our destruction in this slaughterhouse factory called life.
20 comments
Great post, I agree with this sentiment. I’m so tired of people saying ‘you can control everything that happens in your life’ or ‘you control your destiny’, when like you just said, only to an extent. No one controls what they look like, where they’re born, what type of parents they have. Some people luck out and cash in on their fortunes, like Jennifer Lawrence, and are living amazing lives. And then some of us aren’t as fortunate and we’re just here, existing. Not exactly living, though.
We play the hand we’re dealt. Some people get winning hands, others don’t.
I agree that in 100 years from now we’ll be dust (or ashes), and it won’t matter if you were a winner or a loser. It only seems important now because we’re so immersed in the present reality of our lives. Its all temporary, the here and now will eventually fade into oblivion and our achievements and failures will ultimately be inconsequential.
That probably didn’t help. I like reading your posts. You seem philosophical.
Maybe the trick is adopting a certain perspective or mindset where even if you find yourself holding a losing hand, you still play out the game to the best of your ability. If the outcome is intrinsically meaningless, why worry about it?
A lot of people come to this conclusion, even I did. Nature wants immortality which is why people who don’t want to live defy convention. The afterlife has to exist for our lives to have meaning. If it doesn’t they don’t get to laugh.
@C4…curious to know….if the outcome is intrinsically meaningless then why continue playing a losing hand? What could ever be the benefit? Since I know I have a losing hand, and I know that playing the game of life only hurts me, and I know in the end there is nothing to be gained.
Hi Rach; The only thing worse than losing is giving up. As long as you’re still alive, a glimmer of hope exists despite how dim it may be.
That’s just my opinion by the way. Enough people have accused me of being a perpetual optimist that I suspect they’re not all wrong. 🙂
You only get a finite amount of time alive, but you’ll have all of eternity to be dead (depending on your beliefs in an afterlife). You might as well milk this ride for all its worth.
hah, i disagree; it’s better to not play a game you can only lose, than to waste yourself on a guaranteed loss.
@rach: the only “benefit” is the enjoyment of as many moments of “the now” as possible, before the change of state to unconscious dust, makes all beneficial experience impossible. I realize that’s a low-yield benefit for you… it is for me as well, but that’s the benefit. Enjoy what you can, as much as you can, while you can, before it’s all gone. I know it seems… insufficient… but that’s the answer. It’s not about amassing stuff to keep, but about gaining the experience of enjoyable moments, even if the rest of the world sucks and is horrible. You wouldn’t want it to be ALL bad, would you? Then again, maybe letting it be “all bad,” makes it easier to discard, when it cannot be sufficiently cultivated into something more appealing.
Unless you can accurately forecast the future, nothing is guaranteed. You’ll never know with certainty what’s going to happen until it happens.
Giving up is an option. If you feel that’s the best route given your circumstances, that’s your call.
Everyone’s got their own threshold for tolerating pain, I suppose.
Rach you didn’t post for a while and I did wonder what had happened to you and I’m sure there were others who were thinking about you too.
@ C4 We came to these conclusions a long time ago and although little has really changed since then, suicide is further from our thoughts. Life doesn’t always get better and some lives can’t get better but we can learn to live with it.
For me there is such torture in existence (physical and mental tortures of being completely disfigured) that it can never be worthwhile. I don’t have any happy memories of feeling pleasure since I was 2 or 3 years old. The journey from there to here was only one of increasing pain, and it has gotten so that I cannot and am not willing to continue.
I can accurately forecast many things. It’s just that i can’t seem to apply that to anything profitable… which itself is a predominant factor in my own forecast. If i can’t do anything significantly profitable, i will not be able to afford to change my own forecast in any significant way. As long as i can’t afford to make the needed changes, i won’t be able to afford to make the needed changes. Recursion is a ***** sometimes. But other times, such as in the case of Ms. Lawrence, recursion is awesome. She started out with the right stuff to have a great life… and so she had a great life, because nothing prevented it. I started out with the wrong stuff to have a great life… and since nothing prevented me from having a non-great life, i had a non-great life. I sure tried, for many years… but i just didn’t have what it takes.
Sometimes, all you need to know is that A goes to B. If you can’t get to B, C-Z is superfluous.
@Duke; Yeah, I visit this site occasionally out of habit.
Life has gotten better since I first came here. I’ve got a motorcycle, a hawt g/f and a decent income now. I can’t complain.
Peace out, y’all.
I wish you the best, Rach. (And everyone else).
Rach, we understand. It’s your decision that you’ve given a lot of thought. If you think we don’t know because we haven’t seen you or been through it ourselves, we do have some idea. If a person isn’t having a good time which is unlikely to change then there isn’t much point to being alive for them. That doesn’t mean they haven’t contributed to the world in some way. Your posts definitely help people here.
I’m not prepared to encourage somebody to commit suicide unless I’m prepared to follow them which is why I don’t support suicide. I do support peoples rights to make decisions about their lives. There’s nothing anyone can say or do other than just be there for you.
@rach
you write extremely well, and i mean not just the ideas; the cadence of your writing is very melodic, the sentences flow beautifully
Thank you everyone for commenting it means a lot.
@ clevername: what you wrote, man I hear ya. It’s like having a perpetual brick wall in front of you. Well, unless youre superman or can pay to have a bulldozer come by, you’re just stuck. You cant stand in front of a brick wall forever. What’s keeping you from getting to “point B”? Is it finances or health?
@ C4 I am really happy for you. I always wondered what a motorcycle would be like
@ Duke your understanding means a lot. I can’t talk to my parents about these things because they think its’ all “Gods will” and that I should be content laying in bed forever with my disabilities (and being operated on indefinitely). I can’t be content this way, nobody could. Historically they used to call people like me “monstrous births”. That’s all I feel myself to be. I had meant/hoped to contribute a lot to the world, obviously circumstances prevented that.
@ duderino thank you for the compliment. It is amazing in the sense that I am truly mentally retarded. I am the kind of person that needs help to order and pay for food at McDonalds. Somehow it seems that most areas of my brain were damaged while the “reading and writing area” developed just fine.
more the former than the latter… though they are intertwined.
@ Rach
I used to drink at an Irish bar a few years. There was a guy just like you who used to show up and listen to the Karaoke. He was severely deformed from birth, disabled, couldn’t go to the toilet, couldn’t order his own drinks and on top of that had a speech impairment so no one could understand him. But he had a mobility scooter and that was his independence so he escaped the nurses and carers on his scooter to come out and drink with us. He drank through a straw and would get in such a state he could hardly drive his scooter home. People would patronise him talk to him like a baby but he knew what was going on. They used to say why we allowed him to get in that state and start talking nonsense but that was their problem. Those nights were his adventure, his experience and he had a good time. I’m not sure whether he found the meaning of life but that was his meaning and way of coping. I promise you this guy was in the same if not worse condition than you are but he found a way.
if you say you are truly mentally retarded, then we have to completely redefine the term
if you enjoy writing, then you should do a lot of it, because you have immense talent
@ dude yes I am truly mentally retarded (obviously I say that with shame and not pride). It took about 15 years for me to learn how to clean my teeth properly. Many people like me whose skulls and faces did not form right also have brain damage. I can read, write and philosophize (if that’s a word). Beyond that I am useless.
good for you. 🙂
Rach, you have a strong and singular voice. Your writing struck me so that I just went back and read a number of your previous posts. You’ve said you “had meant/hoped to contribute a lot to the world, obviously circumstances prevented that.†This is a wholly understandable statement given what you suffer and have suffered, but as a stranger looking in, I say you are mistaken: you have eloquence and poetry in you, clearly, and are contributing here and now.
You express the strength of your pain and your vision of the world in a way that can, could, does give a voice to others who do not have your ability. You say you are ‘retarded’ because of your other disabilities, but nobody who writes like this could be called so — it is an injustice to who you are, truly. Many who are talented — indeed many who are counted genius — are in other areas of their lives damaged. That does not diminish their particular gift; indeed it may add a depth of insight impossible to achieve within one of those sleek ‘Oscars’ lives.
I am an artist, and live partly by weaving my own wounds into my work. Your voice resonates with me, and while I can only attempt to imagine what you have experienced, I feel a kinship with the way you are metabolizing it into your words.
It’s clear from comments that others have noticed these things. How could they not. You prove with your words that you have become, against brutal odds, a forceful, memorable, resonant presence.
How long it took you to learn and navigate the mundane things — brushing your teeth or fast-food combat — is a testament to your endurance and does not lessen your obvious intelligence one whit. The evidence of that is in front of me on this screen.