But Michael, you might object, you have to eat. You have to have a roof over your head.
And i answer (tongue only partly in cheek) is the function of a human then to earn money? The human body is certainly built to eat, and it ate before McDonald's, before the institution of any bank or currency, before a standard minimum wage. To eat and seek shelter is certainly natural, but to equate that with the thoroughly unnatural and unnecesarry paraphernalia of our financial system, etc...
It's an illusion to think that the one dependes upon, or cannot exist without, the other. Because the tone and purpose of our society is not sustenance but, an almost opposed idea, gluttony. The emphasis is not on shelter but upon protection for acquired products...
(spin out these ideas ad infinitum nauseam...)

Is it possible to do nothing? To need no-one? To write about nothingness? Answer that with a glance from your window...
The novel as blank sheet. Art with its tongue cut out. Only then will Art speak the truth.
I'll get rid of my paperbacks and CD's... my TV, my excess clothes, my magazines... Live in a bare room, one lightbulb, a mattress in a corner.
At 7 A.M. i'll rise, have a cup of tea, set out for work.
At 5 P.M. i arrive home and heat up a microwave meal. Till it's time for bed at 10:30 i sit in a kitchen chair and stare into space. When i receive my paltry pay i pay rent and purchase food.
On weekends i sit in my kitchen chair and stare into space. The ideal life! No risks, crime, violence, no potential for danger, and above all no hope, no art, no poetry, no love.
What is the ideal, the proper function of a man? If the government, for instance, were to pry into a man's life what would its ideal be?
The ideal citizen i think should above all be productive and have a sense of purpose. To this end he should be healthy in mind and body, not given to excessive violence or lust, and unquestioningly accepting of every tenet and principle of capitalism.
The ideal citizen i think is lower middle class- so as to feel the occasional sting of poverty but not to be completely enmeshed in it- and should have social aspirations. He should be moderately centralist liberal in politics, steering clear almost instinctively of anything "extreme". He should like football, television, and nights out with the lads. University education? Probably but not necesarilly. What's important is that he should be a productive unit in the economy, pay taxes, and be obsessed with earning money to buy products. He should at some point (ideally when interlocked in a chain of pressures, economic, social and otherwise, which make him likely to continue such a level of "responsibility") acquire a partner and start to consider reproduction, to supply the state with further citizens. He should finance his twilight years with his own money privately invested in a sound pension scheme, and should die not after the age of eighty, quietly and inexpensively.
What is my problem with all this? Doesn't it seem reasonable enough? You get a degree of fun, entertainment, a modicum of fullfillment?
Merely that i reject it all. Simply that i detest and disbelieve it. I have no political or philosophical basis for what i say. It is an instinctive, clod-headed, clumsy aversion, having its basis in nothing more than spite and perverse boredom. Yet i reject the ideal citizen. I constantly buy products and enjoy (short-term) consumerism and yet in the same breath i reject consumerism. I reject making money. I reject marriage and the siring of bairns.
I reject it all out of sheer perversion.

Those of us who are "sensitive", or are considered to be, are under a kind of curse. Those of us who are habitually untidy, in the whole sphere of our lives, are left with strange options.
What will the intelligent kids do with themselves? Left too often in some bare room in a rented DSS flat: bare bulb, paperbacks in a corner, confusion, too much thought.
My room a ghetto, solitude. It's easy out of sheer confusion to envision a rope around your neck, your tongue forced out. It's sheer confusion that does it, although you may scrawl "despair" in your note; sheer confusion, wordless foreknowledge of future disaster, indeed a prescient and informed loss of faith in the symbols of the modern world- And isn't that the point? That it's all too easy to lose faith in our modern icons, our empty ideals?
It would seem unusual if a loss of faith did not occur. Those of us who have tried desperately, heartsick, to succeed, may succeed in at least this.
After the lights go out, and morbid thought begins... sudden visions of the rope.
What did the young man die of? Sheer confusion.

After all, what is there for young people these days?
Vile, blank hedonism, moribund, zombie-like consumption of endless trash-
The falsely beguiling zigurrat of rotten capitalism-
No idealism, not a trace of something that can be passionately believed in, nothing to die for...

And so, the bare facts of my life: my birth, the seperation of my parents, my school problems, my childhood games, Oakely, my dad's paintings, the Socialist tradition, the Catholic church, my friends, my instability, my foolish infatuations, my failure upon failure, to lead myself somewhere worthwhile, to get a proper job, and more importantly to sustain belief in having a proper job, to reconcile my contradictions, to make something of my "gifts", to accept my own foulness and lack of grace, my own huge indecision, in short my failure to conceive even a portion of belief or hope in everything i see around me- My hopes for the future: none. My loves and hates: none. My achievements: zilch. My dreams: a blank state.
Too blanked and sated to be passionate about anything.

And myself as a lump of flesh, not knowing particularly why i was brought into the world, sees the lack of sense, the bare abject state of everything.
In other words a life without meaning. Can't play out on my own wall those rigid old stories anymore. Stories are just a means to amuse oneself. Like talking to yourself in a corner.
'Member Shakespeare said all the world is a stage? Well what i wonder is who are the audience and are they deriving satisfaction from such an empty and meaningless production? And moping mumbling actors like me, under-acting, making futile gestures, asking myself unanswerable questions.
The audience must've left long ago. More likely there never was an audience.

Christ, so long the paragon, looks somehow subdued. And in this state i've suffered too long.
Then what's left? Bare self-promotion? Building up wealth? Preparing for death?
This is the state of a secular life. For centuries, there was a ready-made mythology, for artists to slip into, albeit laden with dogma and laced with intolerance.
A completely secularized artistic state, or a philosophical one, is founded on uncertainty. Is its first principle humankind? Lost confidence even in that. Mankind as a virus infecting the planet.
Our first principle must then be the individual. Merely personal musings, insubstantial fluctuations of the heart. And our "way to heaven", our "salvation"? You might say there never
was such a thing, that it's all an empty myth, but at least it was a goal, and a goal whose spirit was perhaps more important than its substance.
So, what to do with my soul and what to give myself to? Shall i give myself to TV? Give myself to videogames? Give myself to endless gorging of an appetite? Give myself to myself, to my own caprice and whimsy? Give myself to love, another disproved myth?
The good old libertarian Aquarian approach would be to give myself to "an ideal"; some principle, some humanitarian cause or other, or such a vague idea as "freedom", personal or general.
America has got "liberty" enscribed on its coins- But what is the nature of that liberty? Liberty is an end in itself is a beautiful idea, but a deceptive and unrealistic one. Personal liberty, for me, is great up to a point. How do i stave off the anxiety that comes from such a surfeit of freedom, as a thoroughly secularized, too-well-read, disappointed western man of the 21st century?
Coping, as well, with the layers of real bondage and lack of freedom i see in this country.
My problem is that it's hard for me to enjoy things.