Alright, I’m going to take a quick break for a second from my riveting replay of GoldenEye 64, as it is monday, where I take the time every week to help lighten the load, by sharing some much needed words of wisdom…

As is often the case with the hunt for wisdom, it’s not about finding a good answer, it’s about finding a way to ask better questions.


Such a lurid lot of perverted scoundrels…the infamy of it all

I’m going the complete opposite direction today with my Words of Wisdom (W.o.W), as I think it’s great to not have an over reliance on a single standard, always coming equipped with a lot on one’s tool belt, and generally not to be afeared of experimentation. I think people are really use to having this amorphous voice online offering them bright, sparkling mentalities or chipper turns of phrase, in an appeal to a sense of their humanity, in order to grant them some comfort.

Well, no worries, you aren’t going to get any of that from me today, because life is a big old pile of dog shit, and you’re just an animal drowning in it, when you aren’t being paralyzed by your own fucking stupidity. Which is fine, it just means you’re human, and like I stated at the top: definitely an idiot, and don’t forget broken, so that’s what we’ve got to work with, which might be enough by day’s end, give me like five minutes of your time and you may be able to walk away from this article being happy with what kind of idiot you truly are.

Where as I usually appeal to rationality on W.o.W, I’m going to say fuck that right now, because as I’ve espoused before, in sharing wisdom from the past from much “thinkier” men than I, “Men are ruled by their passions”, which is a great place to start, because maybe what is helping to make you such a fucking idiot is because you don’t even know what your passion is, whether it be you still haven’t found it yet, or you’re chasing some shiny specter of your past that once made you passionate before, and the reason you can’t catch up with it is because that is all it is: it is a haunting memory. Whether it be of failure or rejection or misery, perhaps crippling self-doubt, any number of dejections that has kept you tethered to this one idea of happiness or fulfillment that didn’t work out, and your pride or ego just wouldn’t allow you to acknowledge the defeat or the failure to accept it, because it just didn’t work out and you weren’t able to allow yourself to come to terms with it….sound familiar? Sit in that terrifying doubt for a second, just in case there was a quiet resonance that occurred that helped to touch something within you.

Obviously, this isn’t an actual one on one conversation, and because this article will likely be up for years to come, maybe even a decade from now, and the number of different people that are “currently” reading it at this moment is a staggering variety, a myriad of personalities, all with different mileages of what kind of idiot they are, perhaps future idiot-me is laughing reading it to himself and thinking internally “I can’t believe what a shitty writer I was back then”, great, glad we’re all in the same dumb boat. However, though our problems do vary, there exists some commonality in what plagues us, so we have to paint with some level of broad strokes, if we are to have a chance at excavating some helpful truth here

Apologies to all of the idiots this doesn’t help at the moment, but let’s assume that the appeal to what haunts you is the loss of passion or an absence of it, that may be a good place to start in rekindling the idiot’s flame in making you burn for something again This is why I wanted to say fuck rationality, but cite the quote about ruling passions, it is very much akin to my citations that ego and selfishness aren’t inherently flawed notions, they’ve been tainted by over-analysis and excessive exaggeration that has compartmentalized them into one easy to define box, which is not how life works. You can pretend that’s how life works, but as we’ve covered: you’re an idiot, but that’s what we’ve got to work with, so let’s just fine tune it a bit.

To that point, a lot of people don’t use logic, or rationality, or reason on a regular basis…or they only use it when it’s convenient, or they have a broken definition of it, so their version of it is actually a warped version of the “idealized” version of the concept in the purest sense, or they are truly arrogant and see no point at all to attach values to anything because they are a nihilist fuck wit who can’t really be helped. And you know what? None of these are actually wrong, per say, I think where someone goes wrong is being narrow in either conception of self or the notion there is only one answer, this is where the idiocy starts to backfire on us, cause if we are operating by outdated standards, or misunderstanding of conception of self, or are suffering from some deep delusion or cognitive dissonance that we are just lost in our own mental woods, and as a result, can’t see the forest for the trees, then you truly will just be wandering around in circular self-doubt instead of getting somewhere.

My point being: it’s okay to be ruled by something, in fact, most people paradoxically like to be let off the proverbial hook of making their own decisions by passing the buck; this helps to explain the insane historical standard that continues to flare up every 100 years or so, when people unabashedly start to yearn for something as bat-shit crazy as fascism. This, is not what I advocate for, but the example stands that the freedom of existence, and the power that anxiety holds over us when we consider the free agency we have as autonomous individuals frightens us so deeply, we would rather hand the reigns of our freedom over to anyone else, just so we don’t have to deal with the guilt or shame of being the one who possibly fucks it all up, which is option A, an unfortunately yet terribly popular option many choose to go with.

Option B is one we convince ourselves lacks our complicity, as we frame it in the view of not actively choosing; the non-choice: remain muted in the same place, as if some kind of monolith to human failure, a gargoyled tribute to indecision, nay, a monument to all of humanity’s anxious uncertainty, for all to gawk at, cause at least it would give us something to do! Something we don’t even need to aspire to, cause now we’ve just fallen into vocational work, we don’t even need to seek out purpose anymore, our trials and tribulations have led us to our fated future as this marbled signifier of idiotic damnation, and a chiseled embodiment of how not to get anywhere in life. What a marvelous inspiration of what not to be, others may think; at least you’ll have admirers for your impressively rock solid level of idiotically flawed self, in setting the standard of how to accomplish absolutely nothing, while looking foolish enough to make people laugh during the process.

An inspirational ideal of anxious architecture, certainly, though, I’m guessing what I just described is not something you’d want them to write on your comically, oversized gravestone (like the clown you are) to fit that entire description in, yeah?

I’m guessing after considering the first two proposed options I mentioned, you’re crossing your fingers this is one of those trinary moments of opportunity, and you aren’t stuck holding the bag with this awful binary to choose between. Take a deep breath and relax those shoulders; cause we can close out by considering option C.

As a start, I’ll amend my recent accusation from two paragraphs ago, *the clown you might turn out to be, if you don’t look for a third choice that is, as it doesn’t have to turn out that way. Me taking the piss out of you in your hypothetically comical levels of indecisiveness was more of a long winded metaphoric ruse of self-deprecating brevity then an actual factual reality….yet…which is the big key word there, but like I said, it’s important to “sit in that terrifying doubt for a second“, cause it might just snap you back into reality as you scare the ever loving shit out of yourself that you may have just taken a moment to understand yourself for a change, in what you don’t want to be, while also accepting the other horrifying reality: it’s something you almost never take the time to do in the first place, which brings us back to our own self-created, idiotic problems, in ignoring the intuition that leads us to our passion in the first place.

I always like to make these punchy and brief, and to hold myself to that standard, and in reference to my honestly respectful ask that was about five minutes ago, when I requested you share those precious minutes with me, to help sow some seeds of self-reflection within your senses, or, to put it in a more joyfully terse manner, help you hold up a metaphysical mirror up to your dumb self, as you sit there and consider redefining the reflection you now contemplate, we now reach our conclusion, and the self-evident worth of option C.

I don’t pretend to have all of the answers, though I always practice what I preach before doling out advice, and within the spirit of laughing at one’s self, in having the humility to admit when something goes wrong, accepting our own failures and the idiotic conception of self that goes along with them, the parts we like about the idiot we happen to be, and what drives the parts we want to like better about ourselves, on the road to who we may become, and then lean into that broken standard, in unrepentantly letting your flawed self be ruled by that passion that keeps you burning beyond reason….

…all because you went back to square one, and asked yourself that everlastingly, unyielding, totally earnest question without holding anything back, honest warts and all…

So you’re a broken idiot; now what?
~Pashford