A Return

  

 Yeah yeah yeah I’m back. 

Let’s get this post out of the way, so that we can get back to business. 

It may shock some, but the person who writes in this blog has an almost impossibly strong idealistic streak in him. It has gotten me almost nothing but trouble my whole life. In fact I’d argue that my life is one large proof against just about any form of idealism, at all. 

Idealism: As defined by this blogger, an intellectual framework that helps you skip the boring steps in thinking. A complete and thorough killer of actual thought and genuine experience.

Idealism helps you act. Idealism doesn't necessarily help you act well. And yes, not doing something may be a lot better than doing the wrong thing. I've seen that repeatedly: moving before full information always goes wrong, always, and if you don't think that's accurate you clearly don't pay attention to the world long enough before going back to your phone. Cause things go wrong even when you've actually tried to get the right information. I have fought throughout my whole life to get rid of as much idealism as possible. I have never found the effort to be worthless. The fight against idealism is everlasting. To fight against your own filters is almost too much, but I find that if I don't I wind up doing stupid things.

Like walking away from All the Things Under Heaven and Earth.

When I finished Lilith I felt that something within me had changed. And it had. Lilith allowed me to see the world as I had always seen it, and that gave me peace. But, no matter how much I try to strangle the life out of my idealistic tendencies, there's always something down there. And it turns out there was something down there. Biding its time. I wanted to be like Mr. MacDonald, which is a well-intentioned ideal, to be sure! I set out to simply be a game designer. Try to be simple and let the complexity rest elsewhere.

It's a nice ideal.

Fuck ideals.

The last few months I've been feeling that something was missing. A spark. It wasn't very loud, and it wasn't major, but I found that, just like every time I try to be idealistic - every time!!! - it fails. Maybe, once upon a time, culture allowed us split the difference on the cost of idealism. Because idealism's cost is hard upon you. You deny your individuality to become part of a collective. And that's okay enough if you're part of a real society, where you can roll out of your bed and actually have a culture to support you and make up the difference, idealism might work out for you. We don't live in a culture. We're in a wasteland of awfulness that doesn't know it's dead yet. And so the cost is too high to do anything other than deal with things with as little a perceptual filter as possible and to refuse the filters that others now assume.

Well, last night I didn't sleep so well. And, lying there in the dark, I realized I'd not been expressing something very basic, very powerful, real, within my soul... and that it wasn't happening because I wasn't here.

Well, I'm back.

For the five people who read this blog, I hope you'll find your way back. I'm going to keep relating my journey, however strange it is, along with just the random things I find myself getting into.

I hope you're along for the ride. I'm driving, no matter who tags along.