Stupid Epiphanies

What good are they, anyway? You see something, and it grabs your worldview and starts shaking it pretty hard. And before long, things are a good sight stranger than you're used to, only you're what's changed. Things you were doing don't make so much sense anymore. Sometimes, I'm apt to think these different modes pick up into our brains, and we eventually tear ourselves from it and settle someplace else for a while. I figure if something shook us too long, we'd just go crazy.

I've been shaking for a solid three weeks. The normal flow of my life is so off, I have to reevaluate everything I see. Things that never bothered me before are riling my up. Some things that used to bother me are completely intolerable, and the rest just doesn't matter anymore.

It's something like unrequited love. You know the feeling. You find a sort of person that makes sense to you. Have a certain rapport with them. But at a level, the world is sitting and glowering down on you. And why? Well, a good man (by your own accounting) can't make headway with such a woman. Much less not embarrass himself. It's a miserable little circle. Finding someone you very much like, and having to detest yourself every day. Coward sits in and hides from the emotion. Brave one goes off and gets himself fired.

What's worse, I look down the road, and back up it... and I see where this has all happened before. And exactly where it got me. But there's not a thing that can be done differently. For all you can try and change, actually being different is a hard trick.

The nagging feeling I get is that my world is shaking because change is at hand. It happens. Things accelerate around me until I can't stand the sight of it all, and I start acting very much like a diplomatically minded wrecking ball. Knock out the pieces that aren't working. Things calm down again. Thing is, I'm not yet to the point where I know what's wrong or right. I'm just winding up.

I guess the thing I'm really worried about most in the world is me. That may sound egotistical, and it really is. But it's not quite as straightforward as all that. See, I often worry that I'm just going to become an intolerable bastard, fed up with the world, and not enough hope to fill a shot glass.

People always ask what you want to be in life. I always had less trouble figuring out what I didn't want to be. Almost everybody in my life holds some private judgment from me, but it's not actually anything against them. It's a reminder from me of the things I don't want to do myself. To not anger easily. To not bear a hateful sorrow. To not get stuck in something I hate.

And somewhere down deep, I know that envy and resent are very similar. That the things we hate most fervently echo something we hate about ourselves. The people I really can't stand are often similar to me in some horrible way. A me a could've been, but wasn't.

Being a good person... is it really just not acting on bad impulses?

... Anyway. That's what's in my head. Had to put it somewhere.