I feel sad as if everything is useless. There’s this sinking feeling, a draining and emptying feeling inside of me, and it’s growing stronger, tearing every structure down.

What is it good for? What is it for? Why should I work for something that I know that I will never have? I don’t have hope and I can’t see a future. Everybody is selfish and that’s the cause of the ruin of everything.

I don’t get it at all. I don’t understand selflessness, or love, because in practice it’s unfair. One person gets taken care of while another languishes. There’s one winner and everybody else loses. To succeed, you have to drive your opponents to failure. To do this, you have to control people and make them do what you want. That’s why there are lies everywhere and they’re so interwoven and mixed up that you can’t even try to tell the truth without unintentionally lying. It’s impossible to trust in this atmosphere of insincerity. The smiles are meant to sell things that we don’t need. That’s why everybody smiles and sings the same song, so everybody can benefit. If you’re honest enough to refuse to smile for no reason, the others exclude you from the benefits.

I just want something other than selfishness to dominate society, but this is impossible and I can’t change it. I can’t change people or make them want to be selfless. I can’t change myself. In reality, nothing is possible. I can’t figure out the contradictions between professed beliefs and actions.

Maybe faith is a substitute for personal understanding. Maybe faith in the understanding of a superior being is preferable to my stand-in understanding of the situation. My understanding is incomplete and subject to change. I refuse to put my faith in the made-up understanding of anybody who is selfish or any society run by people who are selfish. It’s not worth it. In the end, they’re all disappointments, jeweled crowns being cast into furnaces.

I want somebody to say something to make this stop, but there isn’t anybody or anything that can be said. I don’t have anything to say either. We’re all pretending to be well even when we’re sick. That makes me sad. It’s not like people can live on their own or anything like that. People need people in order to live, but people can’t understand people. That’s why communication involves huge risks of misunderstanding. Truth can be distorted in an infinite variety of ways. Life is painful and short and people are always fighting to avoid death, eating and taking nutrients to try to ward off the inevitable bitter endings.

Under the cold sky with the threat of rain, leaves are thrown incessantly down from the trees and scattered by the wind. The leaves look like yellow corn flakes disintegrating in soggy stacks upon the sidewalks and streets. The shadows are yellow, golden and soggy, not crisp or clear, and the sky overcast with no hint of brown, only pale blue and almost-featureless white, like the middle of a bowl of cream when stirred with a knife.

If I don’t take the sedative I can’t sleep. I stay awake thinking. I have so much to say to myself! If only I could remember any of it when I turn the computer on and stare at the bright rectangle of the screen! If I could, I’d write it here. I’d write it down and reread it a hundred times and for some odd reason it would make me feel better. I’d find that odd, and then I’d think about it and wonder what I was thinking about it for. Sometimes I think, everything in this world that we think matters is a matter of thinking and doing. We think and do things. That’s the essence of life.

Falling. Keeping still. Watching out. Looking out for more. Incessant desire, incessant falling of leaves. Cold ice cream in a waffle cone. Condensation slowly sliding down the sides of an old, tall glass filled to the brim with pink lemonade. Afraid to touch it for fear of spilling. Gnarled old oak trees staggering next to short young evergreens. Payment in advance. Plans. Pennies lying on the sidewalk. Having a future, or the illusion of a future. Triage. Realizing too late that you only did things because there was a reward for you, an invisible reward with no shape or form, a hallucination. Hard Christmas candies in a soap dish on the bedside table.

Fall is beautiful, but why is death so beautiful? Why is the decay of the leaves an event that brings joy to my heart? Why do I enjoy the orange and red leaves falling like snow on the cobblestones? Why do I enjoy the squirrels scampering up the tree trunks, or the ducks cavorting in the drainage canals? The leaves die and become new fresh soil for new things to grow in, next spring.

This is the first October… blah blah blah. I was going to say something but I blanked it out.

Wanting to see what happens next. Is that what keeps us alive? The chance to witness a change, a development? It is the unfolding of a rose, the growth of grain or the outcome of a melody. Everything hints at that which is to come. Everything is a teaser trailer offering the promise of many future feature presentations.

It’s an instinct, an urge within us, saying with tears in the eyes, “Stay here, stay here, wait and see what will happen next!”

“Stay, don’t leave me unseen.”

We’re all trying for immortality, competing for it, really. We want somebody to learn from us, to appreciate our hard work. Some of us value our virtue or honor enough to suffer pain or death protecting it. We consider those things to be a measure of our value as human beings. But virtue and honor are invisible things, qualities that cannot be measured. This is a paradox. Why care so much about some sense of right or wrong, of justice– if that sense is misunderstood and misrepresented by everybody else around you, by all the other people who make up the society in which you live? If they all misunderstand it, then they misunderstand you. What if you drop out of what they consider to be the competition, the race, the game?

They stare and squint at you, then turn their backs to you and walk away, whispering words you cannot hear.

They force you to contribute money to a fund that provides goods and services to various other people. The fund is a giant pot full of money contributed by every individual member of the society in which you live. You know for a fact that the people in charge of spending this money spend it in ways that you disagree with. You know that some of these causes are to you unjust and irrational, not in your best interests but in the best interests of corporations and union leaders, the decision-makers with money to spend. You also know that they have a tendency to borrow millions and billions and trillions of dollars without any rational idea of how they are going to pay any of it back, let alone the interest charges. They have hope in the future, and so do you. They know that one day the bill will become due, and by then the benefit will have been enjoyed, and that the end justifies the means. Unfortunately for your sense of virtue and honor, the end that the keepers of the money seek may not be the end that you, as the provider of the money, seek. They may consider “good” what you consider “bad”.

They force you to live. What is a fate worse than life? They tolerate you so long as you are obedient, but if you resist, they have the weaponry to wipe you and your town off the face of the earth, to rain brimstone and sulfur from the skies down upon you, to ruin your life with intolerable diseases.

A president. A nation of 300 million people choose one person to act as President, as commander in chief of the armed forces. What great trust people place in their president! Would you choose a spouse, or a friend, or anybody who would have the power to pull a knife or a gun on you, without first knowing and understanding how they act and think? You’d want to know something about the person before trusting them with your life. We seek unity. 300 million Americans want a single person to represent all of their conflicting desires in some sort of unified manner. Care to guess what happens in reality? That single person, the president, represents his conflicting desires. This cannot make all the people happy.

Marriage is a contract, a social contract. So is choosing a president, or any government leader. It’s a contract between citizens and their chosen representatives; a contract between citizens and the creators, enforcers, or interpreters of the law. The law exists to describe justice, to explain what justice looks like, in practical terms that everybody can understand.

Power and fear. Coercion. The power to put people in prison and keep them there. The power to send ground forces into any nation in the world, or to launch nuclear missiles from submarines hidden in the ocean. It’s a power so great that it becomes a deterrent. Only a madman would dare insult such a mighty and hideous force. Only madmen would not surrender at the mere rumor of the ease of their own demise. But what if that’s what they want? What if they desire for the world to be thrown into chaos? What if that makes them happy and they have at their fingerprints all the power that hundreds of millions of citizens have entrusted them with?

Strange things happen, often without notice or expectation.

Balance of power. The world is a porcelain plate precariously balanced upon the tip of a pencil. Atop the plate are several lead weights of various shapes and sizes, scattered disproportionately atop the surface of the plate– yet it remains balanced. One might conclude that there was an invisible hand gripping the plate and holding it steady for our own sake and against all rational odds since we can’t seem to be trusted to keep things balanced.

There’s plenty of wealth, but we haven’t learned how to share. Technology enables… a few men to bully many men. Good men eat well while better men starve to death. Good men enjoy life while better men suffer at the hands of the slaves of dictators. Perhaps the good men aren’t all that good after all, since they look away while the better men suffer and die. Or maybe it doesn’t matter what the good men do. Maybe it’s not your job as a good person to care if the better people live or die, since we aren’t omnipresent or anything. We can only take care of what’s in front of our own faces, and even then we find ourselves hamstrung and limited in what we can do. We can’t even move without hurting ourselves.

Uncover the hidden things. Shine light on things that are ignored. Make those realities impossible to ignore. Uncover them, and they will knock people breathless.

In the past the wielders of iron weapons defeated those with bronze weapons. Later on, chariots were the tool that enabled a few men to conquer empires of millions. We learn from our mistakes. We grow up. We build complex tools to counter the simpler tools of our fathers. We move faster and faster, in ever-wider circles. We are grateful to each other for being there. Where would we be without the fast-food restaurants?

The old church buildings built of stone seem so intense and shrill, like screaming bearded great-grandfathers out of some decadent era. Unlike the hotels or the city buildings or the markets, they aren’t the center of any great activity during the weekdays. On the sidewalk, passers-by hunch over and scurry past in the shadow of the buildings.

The patterns become more intricate and the electrical blueprints become exponentially more complex, but do these things make our lives better? Were the old days better? Are things better now? Can we prove it to ourselves, or is everything exactly the same, for always, like some status quo, like the conservation of mass and energy? Do we change the color of things without changing the things themselves?

You’re part of this big, big world. You’re there, right? In the crowd, or lurking like a snake around the trees?

“See what happens!”

The new always gets old. It’s what we’re used to, but one day the old will be made new in a terrifying reversal of the natural order. It will be a change from what we are used to expecting, and therefore terrifying.

Today I opened my eyes in the morning to wake up out of a dream that was only sound, a dream in which I heard the songs Tori no Uta by Lia and later LUCY by Anna Tsuchiya ‘inspi NANA, and while I heard these songs I was praying with my right arm up in the air, reaching for the ceiling. I didn’t realize that I was lifting my arm until after I had woken up. I felt a hope that had been extended to me, not one that I had come up with on my own.

I looked at my clock and saw that it was 7:15. This might have been only the second time in two weeks that I’ve managed to get up before noon. This time it could be the result of a medication I took the night before to knock myself out and force myself to sleep earlier instead of staying awake because of thinking. Right now I feel more energetic compared to the days before. My head is still spinning in several ways, but for a moment it seemed as if that didn’t matter.

It was one of those rare spiritual waking-up moments, in the space between dreams, in which you aren’t sure whether your thoughts or the physical world around you can be quite as real as the spiritual space you are reaching for.

I uploaded the video for LUCY to YouTube.

Time for a long explanation of the name of this website!

Soap bubbles are beautiful in the extreme, but they live very short lives. Bubbles also tend to be found together, congregating, in groups, in league. They don’t really do anything except float from place to place on the whims of the wind. Bubbles may settle on a suitable surface. The more of them that stick together, the longer they can all exist. Inevitably bubbles burst and are taken up into the atmosphere in fragments too small to be seen. That’s all they’re capable of doing–floating either now or later. It’s their job to appear superfluous. It’s what they were made to do–float about then burn out under the heat of the sun or after getting poked. Bubbles, unlike mushrooms, aren’t actually alive. They only seem as if they are. They aren’t capable of growth, only slow decay.

Bubble also refers to “bubblegum”. In music, “bubblegum” can be used loosely as a genre label for music that is energetic, vibrant, peppy, lyrically stupid and entertaining. Bubble gum is a food that is not meant to be eaten. It’s meant to be chewed for sugary flavor then spit out when the flavor is gone, preferably into a trash receptacle. It also allows for the creation of bubbles. These bubbles of gum are temporary but unlike soap bubbles, the same piece of gum can be used to create a new bubble many times before the gum turns too tough to create any bubbles.

Bubble also refers to economic states that are based on assumptions and hopes about the future (speculation), such as “when I grow old Social Security will have money for me to live on” or “the money in my retirement account is safe in the hands of reputable investment bankers” or “my money will keep its value.”