Nullius in Verba

 Since I was a young child, I had one overwhelming drive, far before the drive to document everything, and was likely what let to the drive to demand extraordinary: question and defy.  Question, because I need all of these things I am being told I have to do to be rationally explained to me, and I need them to make practical sense or I don't want to do them; and defy, because fuck you, you didn't give me a good enough answer to my question.  I see this drive in a lot of people, but it wanes with age, as people fall into their comfortable little pockets of mundane society.

None of my questioning of the demands placed on me were ever satiated, generally answered with the vague "just because," or "that's just the way it is," the un-fucking-bearable "because the Bible says so," or the ever present "you'll understand when you're older."  I am officially older now, and all I truly understand is that everyone is still just doing what they are told to do, regardless of sense or reason; most are still mulling around in the mundane, spinning the wheel ever faster, and perpetuating the ridiculous machine that everyone bitches about, but no one seems to truly understand or recognize.  Stop.  Step back.  Observe.  Look at what's really going on.  Lately I've been butting heads with people who accuse me of being full of shit, citing that my philosophy contradicts my work.  On a basic and shallow aesthetic level, I suppose it does, but I have been very vocal about why I shoot who I shoot, and have apparently failed at getting people to understand that I can't afford, financially or emotionally, to shoot everyone.

 Sifting through the emotional retardation that comes with our society's conditioning is a lot to deal with, and, even in suffering younger, less affected souls, I find it to be near unbearable.  Anyone who has any features or qualities that even remotely resemble anything that exists in the delusion of the unacceptable or not good enough categories that we are force fed from the moment we are born are near impossible to work with.  You can explain the possibilities of a more beautiful reality to them until you're blue in the face, but they won't hear a word of it because their world is flat.  It has always been flat; it will always be flat. 

 They cannot be swayed from this fact, and their only rational excuse is that someone told them this truth when they were too young to intelligently defend themselves, so that is their reality.  I live in a world that is round, and I am surrounded by people who don't understand that to be an option.  I specifically chose that metaphor because you, the reader, both of you, know how absurd it is that the earth could possibly be flat, and that absurdity relates directly to how I feel about people's fears and insecurities, and especially their judgement and assumptions.  I've invested too much energy into trying to explain to people why the world is round, only to have them throw my investment away and wander off onto their disk shaped planet.  I have been thrown away one too many times.  I have been given up on enough.  The obviously reality for me has been lost in the fog of assumption and delusion; fears and issues; mis-perception and understanding.

Ich aufgeben.

It ended in a graveyard.

If you believe that things should be done differently, then do them differently.  I am not here to do things the way you think they should be done.  I am doing things that make sense to me, based on what I understand, which comes from doing this for 25 years, on a much deeper level than I can get anyone to appreciate, much less on the level that I currently exist on, and with the resources I actually have.  Help me or don't.  Understand me or don't.  Appreciate me or don't.

On top of my existing in this world like a bad windshield wiper on a snow globe, I've also been attempting to brand this philosophy that is completely contradictory to my reality.  In my attempting to wrap my head around that, I have been in an epically defiant place, and I still can't seem to find anyone who wants to go with me.

"Men have an opinion on everything and know nothing."  ~ Voltaire

There I go... off on a tangent again.

I shall now disappear for a while.