The Fantastic Mr. Faux

On consistency…

When you live in the same place, in the same house, with the same friends, and the same job, and the same possessions, you start to believe that all this is your identity.

I have none of those things, or rather I do, but none of them ever really feel like they belong to me.

I have no consistency. But I like that, I like how things change all the time. I’ve noticed that when you become accustomed to change and you’re used to everything changing around you that you become more aware of all your personal consistencies. Preferences, opinions, beliefs, thoughts, feelings, all the things you’d associate with the self and with individualism.

I don’t think there is such thing as an individual though. We’re all just a collection of each other’s influence on each other. The things you hear people say, the things you see people do, art, literature, poetry, television, tears, laughter, where you go, who you fuck, what you eat, your friends, your parents, your children, experience, existence, everything. That’s all we are. A collective of uniquely intermingling ideas.

We’ve got form, we matter, we are matter, and we can perceive and influence space and time from a single point. That’s the whole idea of course, the universe needs us to interact with one another because interaction breeds chaos, and chaos breeds evolution, and evolution, from stars collapsing in on themselves, to you and me remembering to flush, keeps the universe going.

I write for a living, and everything I’ve ever written is just me trying to make sense of that chaos, of the random assortment of pasts, presents and predictions that are floating about in my memory. It’s how I find purpose, it’s how I justify my meaning, and while what I do is minutely exclusive to me, it’s still the result of a hodgepodge involvement of millions. Remove even the tiniest fraction of that, and what I am now would cease to be.

Feelings too. If I’m angered, then that emotion delves deep into my memories and picks out all the tiny little fragments that I use to define it. Bits of this, bits of that, a song I’ve heard, a line from a book, a girl I once knew, anything. They all come out as one. The things that occur to me when I emote, won’t ever occur to anyone else.

I suppose then, the only consistency I really have is talking total piss on the internet. Thanks for reading.

WHEN SOMEONE AT A PARTY TELLS ME HE READS OUR MAGAZINE

editorrealtalk:

Nailed it.

minicorrect:

adamclery replied to your photo: Going to see Slow Club in a bit. I’m technically…

Has something terrifying just flown in through the window as you’ve taken this?

It’s a little known fact that you become 50% more attractive on the Internet if you pout, look at the screen rather than the webcam, assume a vaguely confused/scared expression, and turn your head to the side slightly. Duh.