Chapter 44

It was a fugue. It was spectacular. But I was convinced the visions were real. That everything was limpid. The waves from the sky, leading to society’s anomie, that it all was real.

But slowly, fortunately, for me, and countless others, who might have been slapped or kicked and shot in the face with piss or had seen me running the streets naked, my visions unraveled. And I don’t know how. The ghosts dissipated. The fog cleared. The floaters vanished. I began to see the satellites as space junk. I began to see my mind as filled, painted with lies. I began to understand my hate for myself and realize that my antipathy towards others was a manifestation of my own demons.

I started to study game theory. Then I began to believe in nothing. Became a nihilist. And for a time, a solipsist. And for a time, an existentialist. Then my hate, my obsession with mass face and head slapping sprees, pissing on people, and baby punting, shooting babies from catapults, that was my own rage displaying itself. And I knew my emerging belief that murder was freedom was because I wanted to be part of something. I wanted to be known. Be part of a cause. Because I was lost, a lost soul, without meaning, a rebel searching for a cause.

I wanted to believe in conspiracy because it allowed me structure, a lattice, an order, and a reason. I came to realize that this is why conspiracy theory was so popular, because it bestowed reason, provided a scaffold.

9/11 being an inside job, devised by satellites or the CIA, was an easier answer because it had meaning. More meaning than a small crew of crazed assholes armed with boxcutters and divine lunatic ideology.

Sandy Hook had to be a stunt to repossess guns because no one as frail and weird as Adam Lanza could perpetrate such horror. As per one conspiracy video on YouTube, Adam Lanza didn’t even have a Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn profile. So he couldn’t have really existed!

Kennedy couldn’t have been shot by Oswald, certainly not alone. Oswald? The guy was a putz!

My ideas of satellites, dark actors, floaters and ghosts, were visions, yes, but were figments of my imagination, as are most all conspiracy theories.

I was seeing that there was no absolute truth. There was no order or predetermination.

There was nothing other than randomness and what I created.

My failures weren’t failures. They were attempts, and I was happy that I’d made the attempts, rather than been a coward, sitting on the sidelines, snarking on others all day online, snarking on those who did try, feebly trying to scare away those who create!

I could have been a film, music, or literary critic, dammit! Written book reviews, bashing authors on Goodreads! Fucking Goodreads! Thank heavens I didn’t devolve into such depravity!

I had nothing to feel bad about. I lived in a first world country. I was a weirdo with a mohawk, living like a hermit, but at least I wasn’t living on the street. I had a job! I had a place to live! I wasn’t a fucking bum!

I’d pass by homeless, dirty, stinking of piss, sprawled out on sidewalks or begging for change, and I’d wonder why this was. Why this man was smeared in shit and why Jeff Bezos was in a penthouse. How did their paths diverge? If there was a God or satellite control or heavens or meaning, why was there this disparity, this suffering, this waste? Why was this creature allowed to live in torment?

Why did war, rape, natural disaster happen? It made no sense that God or gods or satellites willed such events. Why then would anyone believe in them? Wouldn’t we think of them as malevolent and rise to destroy them, eventually? Could they contain us with Putin and microwave rays and lizard people and vampires, digital ghosts forever?

No. There was nothing but randomness. No such thing as fate. I would write my own script. I would write my own book!

I shaved off my mohawk and snapped out of my visions, began to exercise far more intensively, and set out to embrace the randomness, chaos. I’d be water. I’d be happy that part of me was made up of matter from the Big Bang. That the universe, time, was infinite. That me being a cosmic speck, a blip, was, actually, in its own way, a beautiful, serene thing...

And, really, at the end of the day, I was spending too much time alone, online too much, and needed to make new friends, and get out more, and find a new girlfriend. I aver that possibly countless social media posts and countless tragedies could have been stopped if only some of those guys had a friend or a two and certainly if they had a girlfriend...