Observations from the Armchair

 he looked upon everything with disgust, he looked down upon the world and its creations. he frowned upon the world. everything therein is rotten, it is sick. he could not be moved by spectacle, or any human achievement of significance. for him it was all just matter piled up. what happened to the olden days when congregations used to be awe inspired by the organ, now it was just a whining windbag. it is better that it all just ceased to be, that we stop trying to produce great works of art, that instead we just focus inwards in tranquility and calm and peace, and strive to escape the world. we should all be working on our sand mandalas in order to pour them away on the beach. what are all these projects, but a tribute to mans vanity, but an expression of mans vanity. he builds a great monument but to please himself, then he sits down and eats a hotdog, out of disgust. he had already concluded that there was nothing to explain. that every explanation required its own explanation, and so an ad infinitum. radical skepticism had already got a hold of him, and now there was nothing left to do but enjoy life's simple pleasures, cooking and eating a good meal, going for a swim at the beach, having a a glass of wine before watching some pornographic movies. there was no reason to undertake anything, after all, everything was futile, there was not point in exceeding oneself, there was not point in reaching beyond ones grasp. it was better to stick to the tried and tested, the known, the secure, and live a life of comfort and ease. not necessarily causing any disturbance, being a good neighbour, not going out of ones way to help anyone but neither harming or causing harm to others. what was there left to produce in the arts, that wouldn't be produced by someone else, what was there left in science that someone would discover someday. progress was going to guarantee that someone, someday would create or discover what had not hitherto existed. articles did not interest him, since they filled his mind with useless jargon and vocabulary that only confused him and left his mind aching. it was better just to read a few headlines and skim read the first paragraph. reading fiction was equally pointless, because stories were just stories. that's all they were. they were concocted plots with characters based on some sequence of events that wound up nicely to serve poetic justice. heroes won and villains lost, there is a love interest. even the new movies had more or less the same structure. but life was not like fiction, it was unpredictable, more of a repetition of the same pointless events with no beginning middle or ending.  there were no villains, there were no goodies or baddies. there was simply the bare facts, the raw stuff of time, the bare events that occurred and these must be forgotten about as soon as they occurred. or at least shelved and categorized economically. public intellectuals railed against the nihilistic outlook, and encouraged the young men to take action in their lives. but they were just selling a lifestyle, the truth is that the nihilists had long since won. there really was no meaning to behind it all, it was just a cheap trick, behind the facade was emptiness, glaring silence, the void. there was no relief from the existential crisis, there was no eureka moment to escape the midlife crisis, it was simply an ongoing depression, an ongoing valley, not merely a slump but a continuous rift in mood, that held sway since the beginning of time. there was no need to explore, anymore. everything that could be explore would be put on film one day, every nook and cranny of the earth had been put on celluloid. there was nothing which had not been marketed already. there was nowhere to go, there was no escape. even his mind was not escape, because it meant nothing to use the imagination, that was all implanted there by the screens. you thought that you were saved once you discovered jesus, you felt the warm wash of light like jesus when he was baptized, you felt the presence of the lord, then you went back to scrolling on your tablet and watching pornos. the leap of faith was merely a brief standing up from ones bed, looking around, washing the face, then climbing back into bed again and continuing the same as before.

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