Insomnia and amateur philosophy

Well, I'm still alive. I have not much enjoyed this past week. My mind is not a peaceful place right now. I try to fill it up with books, in fact I've been on a reading binge the last few weeks. I have had a few days where concentration was a very serious problem. Sleeping is feast or famine.

I'm not feeling altogether civilized lately. I keep craving isolation. I want to go off into the woods somewhere, far away from people. I've never been a social animal. I dislike most people irrevocably and instantaneously.

I'm not on solid ground right now, and I know it. Everything feels slippery. I've been a lot of different things in my life, not all of them righteous, but these last few years of feeling like my identity has been adrift...it's hard to take. Being hard-headed, stubborn and spiteful even, have kept me going when I had no hope. No hope, no direction, no motivation, and hardly an iota of self-respect left.

Joining the military was a bad choice for me. Even if all the really bad shit had never gone down, I think I would still be struggling in some ways. The one thing the army really taught me, was how to hone apathy to a fine, sharp edge. All the time, it was MOVE, MOVE, MOVE, even when there was nothing going on. Some jackass NCO would just get bored, and start everyone hustling for no reason. You get crammed into tiny spaces, are given the minimum you need to remember that you are a human being, and shuffled around like a card in a cheap magic trick. Once you get adapted to that way of life, or maybe I'm just screwy, it's hard to shake that apathy loose. Really, once you get to the point where getting shot at can't penetrate that apathy, you are seriously messed up. Even in the barracks life, you just adjust to the fact that nothing you do will ever be right enough for some nit-picky fucker. Getting insulted was routine. They say that they tear you down in basic so they build you back up as a soldier, but it didn't happen like that for me. Build up, tear down, build up, tear down, just over and over. They did the minimum they needed to do to make you do your job when it counted.

I don't believe in the military way of life, that's for damn sure. It's why I never re-upped. The ideals I signed up for, those are still there. I don't have any perspective anymore. If anything it illustrated brilliantly every flaw in our society as a whole. I find myself constantly examining those flaws, trying to be objective. At the end of the day it comes down to the same answer every time. I don't like people. I don't understand them. We are a strange and improbable animal. There are too many of us. I have no empirical evidence to support this theory, but I feel very strongly that we are stagnating as a species. I could probably write a book about everything that is wrong with the world. It would be very science fiction, and extremely macabre. I feel the urge to spout doomsday prophecies. That probably means I should stop writing for now.