I finally got around to seeing the movie Avatar and ended up regretting putting it off for so long as it was no longer showing in 3D nor on an Imax screen. Still, the movie surprised me in a number of ways. First of all it was spectacular, not so much that the images were so realistic, which helped immensely when it came to showing close-ups of the CGI models’ faces, but that the scenery itself was a sight to behold. The surreal world of Pandora was so wild and colorful and lifelike that it looked like a real place populated by real aliens, so much so that when I walked out of the theater it seemed more like I was stepping off of a star cruiser that had just arrived from another planet. Indeed, it felt as if I’d really been there, like I’d used one of those virtual reality machines they are always showing in sci-fi shows, and while I was expecting the special effects to blow me away, I wasn’t expecting them to be quite so immersive.

My second surprise was how deeply this movie made me think, inspiring me to start writing this edition of the newsletter the moment that I got home from the theater. Not about the plot or the theme of course, I’d read enough reviews of the movie to know exactly what to expect, and even if I hadn’t the movie followed a storyline so overused that there were no true surprises in store, but I found myself thinking about how this movie captured the essence of our modern ideology both on and off the screen. Whereas so much of the talk about Avatar was about the naturalistic religion of the Na’vi what it really got me thinking about was our ideology of extreme individualism, or narcissism as I have described it before, and how it might be more aptly and accurately described by the name Avatarism.

First a little background. An avatar is a representation of one’s self inside another realm, for example, a remote control toy car you drive around a track, or the character you play in a video game, or the living, breathing creature controlled by the main character’s thoughts in the movie. In these examples the avatar is a real thing, separate from you, and existing in a real world of some sort even if it is just a computer server somewhere in Des Moines. There is no physical connection between you and your avatar, save for the tools and wires which send signals back and forth. However, the more things that you do with your avatar the more that your mind begins to see your avatar as a part of yourself and the more your mind constructs an internal version of the virtual world that the avatar "lives" in. Of course, this isn’t particularly new. For centuries books have provided people with the ability to dive into fantasy worlds and experience them alongside the main character, and before that storytellers were providing the same experience long before Homer spoke of the Iliad. But what is new today is that computers and the internet are opening up a way for people to pilot their avatars and interact with other people’s avatars in a virtual world and not be forced along a plot written by someone else. No longer do people have to live vicariously through a main character controlled by an author, actor, or director, now they can step inside a virtual world and in essence be the main character in a narrative that they control, or at least partly control. This is virtual reality, or at least a relatively crude version of it, for as impressive as some of these computer simulations are the feeling of truly stepping into another world is still substantially further off technologically speaking. And until I saw Avatar I felt that movies had a ways to go too.

Avatarism is the projection of the self onto one’s avatar. Of course, we all do this to some degree when we are using an avatar. When we’re racing it’s not our friend’s remote control car cutting off our remote control car, it’s our friend cutting us off personally. How dare he? Yes, it’s easy to blur the distinction between one’s self and one’s avatar, that’s what makes it so much fun after all, but for Avatarism to have any objective meaning it needs to have some sort of threshold beyond which a person is no longer merely relating to their avatar but suffering from Avatarism. I think that a good reference to use is personal preference. If a person prefers to play their avatar and interact with a virtual world instead of doing things personally in the real world then that person has crossed over into Avatarism. Certainly internet addicts fall into this category, but I think that a further criterion is needed since the name Avatarism implies that it is some sort of ideology, and someone who merely enjoys video games isn’t serving anything more than his content provider by sending out a handful of bucks every month. To truly be an ideology, Avatarism must induce a set of behaviors in those who follow it such that they make sacrifices to support the ideology in exchange for virtual rewards and such that they propagate the ideology to others. Furthermore, Avatarism must alter people’s behavior in ways beyond merely playing the game obsessively, it must change the way that they see and behave in the real world as well. In other words it’s not just that the person prefers to play in the virtual world, it is that the person actually lives in the virtual world, that they are their avatar, and that their real world self is merely a tool to facilitate their achievements in the virtual realm. Their virtual life has become more important than their real life.

This is not particularly new either. Many religions construct virtual worlds in the minds of their believers and some of those believers can be said to be suffering from Avatarism just as much as any internet addict. Christianity, for example, has believers imagining themselves to have souls and that their choices on Earth determine whether they enter a paradise or are damned when they die. Heaven, hell, souls, and the spiritual world are all components of the Christian virtual realm. Now, this alone isn’t Avatarism, but when Christians see the world as a battleground between good and evil where demons lurk around every corner and where resisting temptation and preventing sin become duels between one’s spiritual warrior self and the malicious hellspawn inhabiting others then one can say that their belief in an inner fantasy world has taken over their concept of reality. They are no longer people believing in a religion, nor are they crusaders fighting for a cause; no, they see themselves as spirit beings inhabiting human vessels temporarily as they do their god’s good work. Their physical bodies are avatars controlled by their virtual, in this case spiritual, selves.

The key to the successful spread of Avatarism is to present a virtual world that is so much better than the real one that people not only want to believe that they are a part of it but that they embrace their avatar stronger than they embrace their physical selves. To do this the formula is very straight forward. In the case of a religion the trick is to convince people that they don’t have to die but instead that they can rejoice in the afterlife for eternity, thus taking away their fear of death, however, such a glorious fate can only be gained if they do things that propagate the religion, such as helping others, converting them, and acquiring real world resources for the church. Similarly, in the case of something like a movie, video game, or book series which can grow into a multi-million dollar franchise, the trick is to make the fantasy world so alluring and rewarding that people will immerse themselves in it as deeply as they can in order to receive their virtual fix and keep them doing so for as long as possible. For example, if you’ve been wooed by the movie Avatar you can watch it over and over, but the effect will wear off with repeated viewings. So then you can buy the video game and get your fix that way, but that thrill will wear off too. So then you can buy movie posters, go online and talk about the movie with other fans, and read or write fan fiction set in Pandora, potentially becoming a fan for life, similar to the Trekkie phenomenon. But how does one woo millions of fanboys and fangirls in the first place? The basics are fairly straight forward and I will use the movie Avatar as an example.

The plot of Avatar is your basic garden variety hero’s quest. In a nutshell, this plot starts off with the main character, who is lacking in something, and who goes on a quest to gain that thing. Along the way he meets a number of friends who help him to become that which he is destined to be and who in the end help him to defeat some scary menace. So many forms of story-like entertainment follow this formula with only minor variations on the theme, so if you look for it you can find it everywhere. Many popular movies such as Star Wars and Spiderman follow this theme as well as the successful Harry Potter book series, but the hero’s quest story has been around for thousands of years, going back at least as far as the ancient epic story of "Gilgamesh". The reason why the hero’s quest plot is so successful is that the average person can relate to the main character at the start of the story. The hero is flawed and struggling with their life just like you and me. To make this connection more personal, the story is usually told from the main character’s point of view and is carefully crafted to allow the viewer or reader to relate to the hero to be. We go through the learning experiences alongside the main character and discover his wonderful new world and his special powers at the same time he does. Once this connection is established we will live and die with the hero’s successes and failures and eventually we will feel exhilarated and personally rewarded when he wins in the end. For a while we become the hero, we live in his world, and we vicariously experience intense emotions, heartfelt losses, and gratifying victories. Then we go home to our drab little lives where exciting things like those in the story don’t happen at all, or at least don’t happen very often and where we aren’t nearly as talented, attractive, and wise as the hero. Ah well. But perhaps we wish that we could be him for a little while, escaping into his world, or maybe doing the next best thing and changing who we are in order to become more like the hero, transforming our life story into a hero’s quest of our own.

Many of us, perhaps all of us, do this to some degree. We paint our normal trials and tribulations in the more exciting and dramatic terms we see in our forms of entertainment. A mistakenly sent bill is seen as an injustice perpetrated by a heartless corporation, a wrong that needs to be righted by a hero channeling his favorite character from a popular courtroom drama series. When our quest for take out food for our friends back at the office is thwarted by a lackluster waitress she instead becomes a villain to be vanquished, and when she is defeated and her manager is summoned then it is up to the heroine to defeat this level’s "boss" and move on to the next screen. Yes, seeing our life events in this way not only makes thing seem more exciting, but it also turns us into strong individualists as every problem that comes along becomes a challenge which we must defeat personally and which gives us a boost of self esteem when we do. Of course, if we personalize and magnify everything too much then we will turn into drama queens where every little thing is transformed into a big freaking deal. So let’s not do that shall we?

Anyway, by making virtual worlds so much more interesting than our real lives, movies like Avatar pull at our desires to embrace a fantastic virtual world in favor of our mundane one. They start by making us painfully aware of our own limitations, of the drab reality of our world, and of our menial positions within it. We are like the marine Jake Sully: a part of the machine that is destroying a beautiful world. He is handicapped, inadequately trained to control an avatar, seen as a nobody to be used and thrown away, and who willingly plays out his traitorous role as those in power dangle promises of wealth and health over his head. This is what the main character throws away to become a Na’vi and how can we say that we wouldn’t do the same if we were in his place? As a Na’vi he is strong and healthy, meets interesting new people, learns all about a strange and fascinating world, accomplishes amazing things like being able to ride a dragon-like creature, is accepted by the clan and is thus allowed to speak his mind to everyone (and be heard!), and falls in love with and marries a beautiful, sexy, strong woman. This is a dream come true. His former reality can’t even come close to his virtual world. But it gets better. Jake goes on to become a great hero, doing the impossible by subduing the biggest flying predator in the skies, uniting all of the clans, even getting the Na’vi’s "goddess" on their side, and defeating a powerful military force bent on destroying the Na’vi’s spiritual core. Jake isn’t just their hero, he’s their savior. It’s the ultimate fantasy. And given how fantastic the main character’s adventure was in Avatar even someone who was relatively successful in real life would desire to live in such a world instead of his own, or at least embrace the general themes expressed in the hero’s quest plot.

Now, there is no shortage of such epic heroic movies, especially in fantasy settings in which Avatar grounds one of its feet, but what makes Avatar different is simply how immersive the movie is. I didn’t see it in 3D or on an Imax screen, but I sat close enough to the screen so that the picture filled my vision. And with the digital sound production that studios use these days they can make the lows so intense that they shake the theater and so you feel the movie as well as see it and hear it. The camera angles were also chosen in a way to put you in the hero’s footsteps and the bouncing camera technique also gives you the impression that you are there, sometimes confusing and disorienting you during actions sequences which is all by design, making you feel the way that you would if you were really experiencing it all. And of course the computer generated images were incredibly realistic with the movement captured with a truly life-like quality, which is where a lot of CGI films fall short. All these things will make you feel like you are really there, but what got to me the most was the attention to detail. When the hero is first in the jungle he doesn’t just wander off and get in danger, he plays with the collapsing flowers, which fascinate and delight us as much as they fascinate and delight him. When the seeds fall from the sacred tree they are so beautiful, glowing, delicate, and mysterious that you feel like you can reach out and touch them. And the hero and his love interest didn’t just fly around on dragon-like creatures, they sat up in a tree afterwards and talked and joked and laughed about how they flew, capturing those wonderful moments in a young relationship where everything is free and easy and you want nothing more than to be in each other’s company. It’s true that the movie makers did the big spectacular things too and did them well, but they also took the time to do the small things, like showing how Jake was so eager to get back into his Na’vi body that he wolfed down his breakfast and jumped into the pod. All of these things worked together in concert. Not only does Jake experience Pandora through an avatar, but he also serves as our avatar as well. We experience Pandora is if we were him, just not quite as vividly.

The main message of the movie is an environmental one, which I’ll address as well, but of particular importance is the message that goes along with the well worn hero’s quest storyline. The hero’s quest is very much about individualism and it has become a vital part of many of our modern ideologies. This is our religion: the triumph of the self. The belief that one can achieve greatness, become the best there is, and stand against overwhelming odds to win everything. Individualism is hero worship, and yes we still worship heroes – but only as long as they win as Dylan’s quote at the beginning of the newsletter points out our fickleness – but our heroes are our avatars. Like our sports heroes whose jerseys we wear proudly and whom we sometimes pretend to be. Like our action heroes who serve as our avatars in movies and video games. Like our more subtle movie and storybook heroes who champion charity and sacrifice for love; they are fictional characters in fictional worlds that we wish were real and would love to meet. So how deep do our fantasy lives go? How often do we imagine our favorite teams winning it all? How often do we imagine that we are helping them out somehow by being behind them in spirit and cheering loudly for them from the stands? How often do we dream of economic success, or that of our company or our nation? How often do we dream that we are the ones who made the difference in the successes of our teams? How often do we dream of military victory overseas? How often do we dream of personally inflicting violent retribution against those whom we feel truly deserve it? How often do we hope for fictional characters to fall in love so that their romance can give us hope and comfort? And how often do we long for that special someone who can fill our own hearts to overflowing, just like we see in romantic dramas? We seek to accomplish things far beyond our drab little lives and we make demands of our avatars to do those things for us so that we can experience what we so deeply long to feel. Slowly but surely we favor the virtual over the real. The virtual can deliver wonders that the real simply cannot.

Of course, we demand modesty of our avatars too, like our sports heroes, or at least we’ve tried to in the past, admonishing them if they don’t espouse the ideal of teamwork and downplay their drive for personal success. But do we demand the same of ourselves? Do we dutifully play our roles to make victory happen or do we strive to be the lone warrior fighting our own battle to serve the greater cause? Do we really come together and work as a team, or are we really just pursuing our personal dreams, aching to feel that wonderful rush as we play the role of the hero or at least take a few bold steps down the path to glory? Most sports stars know that teamwork is critical to success, the proof is on the scoreboard, but most of us are so immersed in individualism and heroism due to the ideological bombardment we get from our entertainment sources that we not only dream of individual success but we feel disappointed when we fall short, and fall short most of us will. We can’t all be heroes, but we can all dream of being heroes, and as long as we are all still dreaming our dreams can motivate us to greatness.

Our ideology says that personal motivation is the most powerful motivation there is and so we see nothing wrong in grabbing for all the gusto we can. The drive for personal glory can indeed bring out the greatness in people and Avatar is an example of that as well. The director surely did something heroic, producing yet another landmark movie against which so many other films will be measured for years to come, but heroic efforts were required on the parts of so many others involved in making it. From those who worked long hours to create the stunningly realistic special effects to those who designed the world and how it all fit together, and from those who painted the amazing creatures so vividly and vibrantly to those who dreamed up the religion of the Na’vi, Avatar required so many people working so hard to push the boundaries of what had been done before and create something truly fantastic. And thus we have an entire team of people all chasing their own hero’s dreams, producing a movie about someone living the hero’s dream, so that millions across the world could vicariously fulfill their need to be a hero, if only for a few hours, and propagate the ideology of individualism. A number of people became very rich in the process, another part of our ideology in that it rewards those heroes who do something truly remarkable. And thus I would say that individualism is the only ideology that was truly championed in Avatar regardless of the environmentalist theme of the movie.

Ah yes, the theme. As it seems to infect all things these days, political ideology reared its two ugly heads over the subject of Avatar and they engaged in another pointless shouting match about how liberal Hollywood was pushing propaganda down our throats as well as how conservative Wall Street was destroying the planet with greed and exploitation. To be sure Avatar is obviously a depiction the systematic slaughter of Native Americans and the destruction of their culture over a century ago, with a far different ending of course, but the parallels to the United States’ current wars for oil and natural gas are very clear and thus many took up sides regarding the movie based on their political stance towards the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is all well and good but the deeper point seemed to be missed and that is that if we truly want to change the world we are in desperate need of finding a new ideology, one that actually unites us rather than champions foolish notions of heroism and personal glory. If this movie is pro-environmental propaganda I feel that it failed. I left the theater wondering how the movie could possibly be something that awakens us all to embrace our environment and bond with our fellow humans.

When one watches Avatar one does not feel a bond with nature. After all we do not ride personal dragons, live in a majestic tropical paradise complete with islands floating in the air, or have a way of mentally (and spiritually) connecting with the animals and even the earth itself. Far from it, in our version of nature most living things in the wild will run away from us, attack us, sting us, exploit us, or take what we have. Our world is no Garden of Eden. Mother Nature may give us what we need but at the same time she is also trying to kill us and she will eventually succeed, but if we are strong and if we are smart we can survive in her world, fighting back against the predators and the parasites, and propagating our genetic heritage. That is reality. Nature isn’t harmonious, it’s brutal, and often it’s war, but of course that doesn’t mean that we can just lay waste to our ecosystem. The movie tries and succeeds in making the point that all living things are interconnected, which they are, but not in some pseudo neural network that gives the forest an intelligence and spiritual consciousness far above ours (although that is a brilliant idea). Mother Nature can’t summon up rhinos to stop bulldozers nor induce swarms of birds or insects to prevent human penetration into sacred lands, we have to do those things ourselves, but it’s possible for us to modify things in nature and still make it all work. We need to understand it though and take care of it better than we have, which the movie hints at now and then. But I feel that the failure of the film is that it portrays a version of nature that is so wonderful that one would be far more inspired to reshape our environment to be more like Pandora rather than revel in all that it is, mundane and unpleasant as it can be in comparison. I feel that we would think it acceptable to destroy a vast expanse of natural habitat to put up an Avatar theme park so that we can appreciate something better than Mother Nature could ever conjure up. And maybe one day we will simply be able to create our own creatures and worlds, just like those in the movie or in so many video games, and eventually master nature to such a degree that we have no need for that which has given us birth. I feel that the movie presents a virtual version of nature that is so wonderful and enchanting that we would sacrifice the real thing to live there instead.

Perhaps I’m going a little too far though. I know that places like zoos, aquariums, botanical gardens, and national parks occasionally inspire a lifelong love of nature in children who later grow up to do much to preserve the environment. The fact that we are keeping animals in captivity for life where they do little but eat, sleep, and have their pictures taken can be seen as a sacrifice that some animals make so that their wild counterparts can keep something alive that is important to us in ways that most of us don’t fully realize. However, I see Avatar as being far too steeped in fantasy to accomplish what it set out to do. It will inspire children to love nature about as much as Harry Potter inspires them to love school.

And when one watches Avatar one does not feel a bond with their fellow humans either. While the hero gets accepted into the clan he really doesn’t become a part of the clan. Instead he goes from being the outcast to being the traitor to being the heroic leader and not once does he become just another Na’vi. He is always special to some degree and usually in some exceptional way, good or bad. He is trained not by some aging warrior but by the daughter of the clan leader who eventually he takes as his wife. When he needs help for his dying friend or needs to gather an army to defeat the space marines all of the other Na’vi come together to serve his interests and do their part in his important missions. He need not sully his hands in the conformism of the community, or take part in the ritual chanting, or to really listen to the concerns of others. He is always right. When the Na’vi follow his advice they do well, and when they don’t they suffer. When he first met the Na’vi they spurned him, saying that he and his people would not learn their ways, and by the end of the movie I think that it can still be said that he didn’t learn their ways and neither did we. It’s true that they accepted him but did he accept them? He joined them after all, physically becoming his avatar, but only after becoming a hero and only after doing things his way and succeeding. The message that it sends is less of becoming one with a clan, bonding with mother earth, and accepting one’s place in the world, but rather that one must change the world to make it into what you need it to be. This is the narcissism of the modern age where one says to the world, "I refuse to do what anyone tells me and you will hate me for that, but I will do something so wonderful and so grand that you will realize that I am right and that you are wrong and thus you will accept me and give me the accolades and rewards that I deserve."

This is what we have been told for decades. This is the ideology of individualism reinforcing itself through those who have succeeded in our economic, political, and educational systems. Even those who have failed in their heroic attempts often continue to embrace this ideology, dreaming that they will one day succeed, or that you will if they can convince you to do things a little differently and take one more valiant try at achieving greatness. I also believe that we are witnessing this ideology slowly exploding in our faces, but that we are so enchanted with it that we see the solutions to our problems as ones which require even more heroism, individualism, and forcefully applied changes.

But I have to confess that I too am a victim of that very same mindset. I have been all of my life. Fireaxe is one of my efforts to be the hero, doing it all my way and trying to excel so grandly that everyone must validate my accomplishments.

And I feel that I need to change.

It’s cruel what we do to each other and ourselves in service to our individualist ideology. The way that I’ve pounded away on my body, abusing it even, to become a better musician, producer, and artist, is something that I could never bring myself to demand of another person and I have demanded a lot of those I’ve loved. Even in play, like when I ride my bike for example, I turn it into a contest, trying to pedal faster, climb higher, and achieve more than I did the year before. I know that demanding so much of myself contributed to why I ended up with cancer and chronic fatigue syndrome and yet it felt so good to push so hard. The aches and pains of sore muscles could be swept aside by the knowledge that I had ridden farther and harder than I’d ever gone and that next time I would be able to go farther and harder still. At some point cycling changed from being recreation into an obsession, from exercise into an ordeal, and from a joy ride into a test of my willpower, and yet inside I was always yearning for more. It’s madness.

In the musical realm it’s much the same. The time and effort it takes to produce a CD all on your own is like taking on a second job. You pour your heart and soul into a tiny chunk of plastic and then hear the criticisms drowning out the positives. And it hurts because you know that a lot of them are true and that you need to work harder, demand more perfection, and spend more money to have a shot at greatness. It all works to make you better, but it’s an ordeal all the same, and you wonder if when you make it to the top, or at least to a place where you can be satisfied, that you will feel like it was all worth it. Why does my music need to be so good? Why does an orchestra have to work so hard? Why do we need to go to such extremes to make a movie like Avatar? Our economic system is so harsh, demanding the best and depriving lesser efforts of the funds to continue. But this is about more than just economics; our individualist ideology has infected so many other parts of our lives. So many areas have become a marketplace and so many things now compete against each other for our attention, our wealth, our accolades, and our love. And in return we’ve become fickle, demanding, and needing of something better than what came before to satisfy us anew. We’ve become like addicts seeking fixes, demanding more of others and more of ourselves so that we can feel that warm rush of pure bliss. It’s not enough for our idols to repeat as champions, they must exceed what they did in the past, and when they remain the same do we see them as strong or as stagnant? Again, it’s madness.

Sometimes I feel like throwing it all in, disappearing into the desert somewhere and shutting out the world. Maybe I can find a way to shut myself out so that I’m not demanding more of myself than I can ever accomplish. A person can be their own worse critic and who wants to live with someone like that? But doing so reminds me of Ayn Rand’s failed Objectivist ideology and the theme of "The Fountainhead". The book is narcissism plain and simple. The main character refuses to contribute if something cannot be done his way, preferring menial manual labor to lucrative architectural design. That would be what I’d end up doing no doubt, trying to learn to be average and appreciate all that comes with it. But I’d diverge from the main character in Rand’s book when it came to his extreme sense of self importance, destroying something of his own design just because someone else changed it. And to think that we are all slowly but surely becoming more and more like him. It’s disheartening.

At other times I feel that the world needs to change, but isn’t that just more of the same exaggerated sense of self importance, trying to make others do what I need them to do? After all when I complain about the fact that there are too many people trying to gain accolades and not enough people giving them away aren’t I just trying to get all those other people whom I see as less talented than I am to set aside their dreams so that they can fulfill mine? Well, as I described when I mapped out the life cycle of the ideology there are times when the dominant ideology becomes overly burdened by its own successes. Ideologies are based on false promises and eventually too many people cling too tightly to that which they feel entitled to and deserve that the ideology simply cannot satisfy on them all no matter how hard everyone is worked. Things break down and the powerful take what they need while the numbers of the deprived grow larger. Cooperation gives way to competition. The leaders cling to power through the use of lies and sheer force and are oblivious to the fact that their ideology has failed. At times like that, change is needed.

I’m not the only one who feels that change is needed, in fact with so many unsatisfied people out there it seems that everyone is in agreement with me about that, but everyone disagrees about the kind of change we need and so there is a cacophony of ideological solutions out there, most of which aren’t based at all on models proven to work but upon fixing only one or two things that appear to be the problem. If I am to posit a solution I feel that I need to get something to work in real life, otherwise I’m just mouthing off like the multitudes of ideologues which deserve, and hopefully receive, derision.

But how does one work together with narcissists? They all want to do things their own way, they tend to take more than they give back, they’ll throw a tantrum or even quit at the slightest offense, they make demands of others and won’t reciprocate, they argue to win instead of trying to find a compromise, they compete with each other, aggressively and passively, trying to prove that they are the best in the group, and they are in constant need of praise. So you can give them that praise and feed them what they need in the hopes that they will loosen up and begin to give more, but some narcissists are just eating machines that take and take and take no matter how much you give them. Also, taking charge of a group will make you a target of derision and blame, and you don’t really lead them you just try to hold everything together by doing all the mundane things that they refuse to do. It’s like herding cats.

It can be done though. One option is for me to lead my own charismatic movement and convert other narcissists to a new way based on false promises. I know that this works but I have no stomach for fanaticism and lies, and some narcissists are so flighty that even if I did convert one to my new way they would jump ship not long after when something better came along. The only real solution in that vein in this day and age is to become a serial liar, jumping on to whatever big new trend has come up or trying to make an outrageous new one myself and milking it for all that it is worth until something new comes along. It seems so pathological though, like serial monogamy or drug addiction, you’re bored, lonely, and unsatisfied most of the time except for those rare moments of sheer pleasure. That just isn’t for me.

I’d rather go with the truth. Maybe things will become so bad, and people will end up so unfulfilled by their narcissistic ways, that something that isn’t as awesome as total and spectacular fulfillment, just partial but more consistent fulfillment, will look better by comparison. Until then I think that I’ll just have to keep shooting the moon and hoping that something sticks. It’s a quandary for me though, and I honestly welcome your thoughts.

(bev at neptune dot net)