I dare you to have any respect for your fellow man after you read this:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/09/27/immigrant.money/index.html

Look, before you say Fufflebee, emo is ungodly, here’s the warning. Nobody said you have to read this. In fact, it’s probably better if nobody ever read this. This is a free country, at least for now, so if you don’t want to hear me whine about it, then go to candystand dot com or something. I don’t want to hear me whine about it, but I had to write this.

But, this is where Fuffletonia is going. I’m putting myself up here, and that is that. I’m shoving my facade out the window, and even if people turn and look away, I’ll still be proud to have done it.

_~

First Terrace – Perverted Love

Do you know that game, Lights Out? It’s had a bunch of other names, too, but the premise is you activate and deactivate lights located on a square grid of buttons, and when you alter these lights, others around them will toggle, as well. And, depending on how you’re oriented, the goal is to turn off or turn on all of the lights available. Every incarnation has different rules about when and where lights change, so each is a unique game from others, with varying degrees of difficulty and strategy.

For the past few years, I’ve felt that way about the people in my life. To summarize this notion: what I mean is that certain people are wholly incompatible with others, that there exist loyalties where people must choose between one person and another to favor, and, the terrible but necessary moments where we decide that people must be let go. To analogize this into Lights Out, there are certain buttons that I would press frequently, removing or re-adding individuals at a rapid pace, and there are those lights that I thought would either stay on or remain off forever, and yet eventually other buttons pressed would force them in and out of play.

I could never get the board to sustain all of the lights, and this frustration would lead me to wonder, would it be easier to win if I started shutting off the ones that gave me the most trouble, or should I snuff them out, and then hope they’d get re-activated along the way? Also, I’d look at other people’s boards, and see that not only would their grids filled with so many more squares, they lit up with such an intensity.

I failed to bother noticing that their boards had no complicated rules: push a button, it turned on, and that was it. Even then I’m sure I would’ve never figured out that the rules came from my own ignorant reckoning: either I felt like I could only keep so many lights on at once, or that if a light stayed on for too long, it’d burn out all by itself, so I’d best be careful about time durations.

It turns out Life isn’t made for stupid lights, it isn’t made for trying to balance everything out, especially when it comes to relationships. Only finally I’m seeing how terrible the playing field is, with a bunch of lit-up bulbs, and a few very important dark spaces scattered about, with little chance of being ignited again. I’d spent my time concentrating on some sort of…endgame, some sort of best-strategy, and every time something came up that really mattered, I was busy with something stupid and awful, making sure it all fit into this pathetic framework, that would Eventually get me somewhere in the end.

I decided to smash Lights Out into pieces. I don’t care who is here and who is not any more, just as long as I’m not acting like a damn sociopath ever again. I need some dead air time, even though I’m finally seeing how short life really is, and I’ve wasted enough time already. When I come out of this, I’m not going to open myself up in desperation, and cling to delusions because I’m afraid of wasting years invested in someone, or shit like that.

Everything’s going to start happening on my terms, and I’m not going to be afraid of what happens out there.