The waiting room for life

Welcome to The waiting room for life.

Here you will face mortality without actually being alive.

You will become a living ghost, watching other people live out their lives.

Acts of apparent self-destruction, reckless moments, are acts of desperation – having tried every other option to get out, but to no avail, destructiveness becomes instinctive.

Humans intuitively know the difference between existing and living. Our ego’s will try to deny it, but alienation clings to our every breath.

I am thinking of the philosopher Spinoza when he equates the fullest embrace of living with being in ones ‘true state of nature’. With our complex systems of cooperation with our multitudes, we inherently live by structures that push us out of our true state of nature.

Animals are always in their true state of nature, and by existing, fully immersed in living – unless they are brought into human social systems (the horror we encounter when we see the suffering in the shapes of battery farmed chicken is inter-species; we share a pain with our para-human companions, more than any primitive hunter gather, or any wild chicken could ever do).

None of this can explain away how those damned ‘other people’ manage to live out their lives, and achieve the one thing that I now believe is sacred to our sanity: passing through rites of passage.

Us pub bore ‘intellectuals’ are far too quick to denounce ‘illusions’ – social constructs that seem, to all intents and purposes, made up; grounded in nothing but convenient self con-tricks, to keep the peace, to keep social order.

2024

Since 2010, we’ve been living through a collective trauma. An economic system that to all intents and purposes failed and died in 2008, but has been aloud to continue, as an asset-feasting zombie, creating an end-game, nihilistic culture.

At the exact same time the total take-off of what Mark Fisher called ‘touch-screen capture’ technologies has soldered the collective trauma and nihilistic ‘go getting’ into something unprecedented for our emotional and cognitive capabilities to deal with.

All of this can make everything seem tainted with the same nihilism and alien-glaze CGI perfectionism.

The desire can be to quit everything – fuck everyone and everything off. A nihilistic attack on an overarching nihilism that smiles back as us, as if nothing is the matter: “what’s wrong with you? Don’t you like nice cafes and hand written chalk signs?”

Yet, what if it is no longer possible to reject society?

What if it is no longer possible to get get out, to drop out, be a true punk? What if they all end up street alcoholics, street ghosts in some Westcoast American city? Or Barnsley, South Yorkshire?

I’m not saying it is impossible, I’m saying what I’m feeling after years of ploughing my own furrow, trying, even if failing, to stay true to myself, only to feel washed up and washed out, watching generation after generation of temporary outcast adults, who momentarily sit in this waiting room with me, only to be routinely reified, re-dressed and ultimately reunited with conventional rites of passage. Whilst I remain stuck here.

I’ve seen myself in so many window reflections, which in turn becomes a reflection of the many lost souls I have seen every more desperately roaming our post-everything streets of Peaky Blinder haircunts (accidental typo, soz).

But I have felt locked behind a glass screen that mediates all messages for so long, I don’t know where it began, and I don’t know how to end it.

If one is a living ghost; the erotic body, the mortal body that finds its joy in the flowering processes of rites of passage, all seem impossible.

Over the past few years my behaviour has become more desperate and reckless, as any hope of getting to that stage where I am finally alive has become harder to be convinced about.

As a living ghost you see everything from the other side of life. You see what life is shored up to defend us against, in all its cold reptilian ambivalence.

Humans are fragile creates. We see ourselves as heroes, conquerers of universes. But more than anything we are deeply fragile and vulnerable. We need safe houses from the cold ambivalent reptilian suffering that surrounds us.

Rites of passage in a society like ours are far from ideal. But by god, a life without any is far worse.

Limbo will end. Limbo must end.

2024 WILL be better, because anything is better than being stuck in limbo.