latenightnoir

So, I recently moved back in my old neighborhood and it got a LOT noisier in the almost two years I spent elsewhere. Music pumping out of every third car which passes through, and it's by no means a main road. Either that, or the neighbors using thin walls as an excuse, in that we just have to sit there and take it from their perspective. A lot of younger people, students and fresh graduates by the look of things.

I started trying to limit it a bit by assertively (just that, although I will admit that it takes some effort to keep things polite in many cases) approaching the mix masters and asking them to tone it down a notch, or take it elsewhere. I still have good relations with a few of the old neighbors, some people with well-behaved kids who do their best to keep to themselves, and many others who are elderly and have essentially given up on trying - not judging, but I'm pretty much alone in doing this.

Yesterday afternoon, a rando pops into the neighborhood, music thumping out of her car like it was the main stage. She parks, exits, music still thumping. I ask her what's the deal.

"Oh, pardon me! I didn't realise we were in the rich part of town!"

It was then that I experienced my first flood of intrusive thoughts, "there was blood everywhere... splashing..."

I could only reply with "no, it's a residential area, and besides a basic sense of decency, there are clear regulations about pumping techno for the full three blocks of town we're in," as I didn't trust myself with going off script while my brain was boiling with pure rage.

I'm fucking reeling still. It's all coming out as a nonsensical jumble of half-started sentences, my frustration and anger have become nonverbal.

And I hate that I have to pull out the "it's fucking illegal" card, too, but it's the only one which has any sort of traction. Otherwise, you get laughed off at best.

*I'm genuinely not exaggerating about this. I spend most of my day with headphones on, so I couldn't care less if my neighbor's washing machine starts taking tapdancing lessons, or if someone else's TV can be heard if you sit and listen quietly. I'm not the type to complain about footsteps in the night, but rehearsing porn lines in the AMs or trying out one's new trunk subwoofer's max volume tends to set me off. My rule is, if I can hear you clearly through decent-ish (Sennheiser M3 in-ears) noise cancelling, you're being too fucking loud.

I'm not even sure I can explain this to myself in a sufficiently coherent manner, it may be the biggest cognitive dissonance I've ever had to digest.

I look around me and, while I know everything I see is real, that it's happening, that I can reach out and touch it at any time, I just... it doesn't make any sense. I'm talking about society, about the weather, about how I see people behaving with other people (or, to be more specific, seeing how people behave as though they alone are real and everyone else around them is... I don't know what, but most certainly not people, considering how they treat eachother), I look at everything that surrounds me on this planet, and I feel more detached, more distant from reality than ever before.

At the same time, I've never in my life felt more connected to existence beyond that. I can feel as though I belong in the Universe. I feel it unfolding around me, inside me, I feel tied to every atom, feel my atoms fitting in with the rest, perfectly, as though I were calmly floating in a pleasantly warm river of Everything. I feel my beginning, I feel my end, and while it both overjoys and saddens me, it doesn't disturb me. I am here, exactly where I'm supposed to be, in this Universe, tied to everything else which is, which has been, which will be. I am part of the endless oscillation and am at peace with the ride, overjoyed I get to see it, to understand it, to be aware of it.

I've worked so hard to get here, to finally feel like I deserve to exist, to breathe from one moment to the next, to take up space alongside everyone and everything else. To feel like I belong to something, like I have a place somewhere, for whatever reason. And I finally have it. Well, technically I've always had it, even before I as a consciousness existed concretely, and will continue to have it even after that, because in a physical system, energy is neither created, nor destroyed. I have always been and will always be, in one form or another, of the Universe.

How, then, am I supposed to reconcile this with the shit surrounding me now? How can I believe my eyes seeing the horrors we're doing to ourselves? How can I feel as though I belong to this world, our world, our society, when it is now as different from my Core Nugget of Truth as it's ever been? I don't feel alien, I don't even know how to describe how I feel, because feeling alien would imply a shared scale of comparison, but things have become so vile, so hateful, so habitually shitty, that it's like trying to conceptualise a 4th dimension. Something which clearly exists, but is completely unknowable to me. I can barely believe I feel like this, because this is how so many people have referred to divinity, something known, but which is unknowable, but this feels like a perversion of everything I hold dear.

I feel outside of time and space. It's not depersonalisation, because I am clearly within myself, looking through my own eyes, feeling through my own skin, hearing through my own ears. I am anchored to myself, it is inescapable. And it makes me... I don't have a word for the type of sadness, the despondency, the hopelesness, the everything I feel for things nowadays. I am in utter disbelief, not because I can't accept what is happening, I cannot but accept what is happening. I am in disbelief that it IS happening.

Or maybe that's just how I'm trying to protect myself, by trying my hardest to convince myself that I don't understand it. But I think I do. I think I understand it as well as anyone else could. It's nothing more or less than what I had to go through during my childhood, at the hands of people who were supposed to protect me, to love me, multiplied by billions. And I know EXACTLY how it feels. It is inescapable. This evil is inescapable, and it is evil. It is pure and simply evil, for what other word could be used to describe what is happening. It is a self-aware cancer. Self-perpetuating, all-consuming, entirely wilful cancer.

Foreword: Just My Opinion™

Pessimists are creatives who are able to see the worst possible outcomes. To me, this means we have people who are able to effectively sound the alarm, and it's worth at least listening to what they have to say.

I feel Pessimism is shunned nowadays because it comes close enough to Realism so as to be uncomfortably familiar, as what we're seeing unfold is one of the worst potentialities we had at our disposal (I think most if not all of us agree that we couldn't have anticipated a dystopia THIS fucking stupid).

In a healthy society, however, one in which things work in favour of the citizens and every soul has the necessities of life assured, Pessimism would serve as a cautionary element. It would demonstrate the disasters we're avoiding or will have to avoid.

I feel this has always been its role, from Ancient Greek Tragedies to contemporary dystopian sci-fi, but somewhere along the way it became something to be avoided like the plague (see Toxic Optimism/Positivism).