Thirty-five years, more or less

Mismatches between physical and psychological longevity are not limited to fatal illnesses and chronic dementia

I think I only “needed” about thirty-five years of experience on Earth before it was time for me to leave the party regardless of the guests, the band, or the refreshments served. By then I’d already made my version of the full rounds of the premises and was already wandering in circles, synthetic grin faltering and eyes darting around looking for the fire exits. In reality, however, thanks to chronic binge-drinking that persisted until 2016, it took forty-five or so actual trips around the sun before my mind had collected the equivalent of thirty-five-ish years of clear, somewhat trustable thoughts.

Basically, my brain was already full at that point. That’s why my life today consists largely of cognitive bulimia: Whenever new “nourishment” finds its way into my soft yet inelastic head through its various holes and sensors, I have to disgorge a similar mass of long-fermenting, shit-encrusted thoughts to keep my skull from exploding. Which I should just let happen.

I was “officially” committed to remaining childless by the time I was in my early thirties. My reasons were the same as most people’s, led by the certainty that any human to which I contributed DNA would be a freakish, insectile, ugly, neurotic mess—something out of a Clive Barker phantasm that I and others would chase around and smash with huge Bugs Bunny-cartoon-style mallets until its chittering was silenced for the good of one and all. (Since, as I’ve mentioned, almost all parents deeply love their children, things would likely have gone differently, but strong deterrents are needed to combat strong if unpalatable realities.)

This essentially meant committing to being even lonelier than most people in old age. And since I was also almost certain by this time that I had no interest in anything resembling a stable career in any industry, I wouldn’t have anything to sink my mind and energies into in geezerhood or even middle age compensate for the loneliness. I probably wouldn’t be able to run much, maybe not even walk much. Merely waking up would be enough to piss me off.

I had a dim awareness of these factors twenty or so years ago, in the middle of a five-year window in which I accomplished everything of value I ever would as an adult (and I’m grading myself on a generous curve). But again, going on drinking binges every few months scuttled any baseline sense of how myself and my place in the world.

The past few years have been so divorced in every aspect from anything I ever anticipated or desired that I’d probably be looking for an escape hatch even had I constructed a life worth protecting and nourishing, wasn’t annoyed at being a genetic misfit, liked people, and so on. Jimmy Dore captures every reason for this in the video below, especially his determination to see dupes and potential allies instead of philosophical enemies wherever possible. (Wokish people—as morally reprehensible as they are intellectually crippled—are an exception and deserve no pity or forgiveness.)

Extreme mismatches occur between physical and psychological longevity, especially in a society steeped in technology that has created whole novel classes of neurocognitive toxins. Obviously, illnesses that claim people in their first decades of life are abominations, whereas the minds of physically hardy people can slide into oblivion years before their other cells are prepared to succumb.

My father’s mother lived to be 100 years old, but the last decade of that was lost in an Alzheimer’s fog. And my father’s older sister, a brilliant doctorate-holding psychiatric nurse, lost the ability to dial a telephone soon after turning 80 a few years ago. Apart from organic mayhem like that, I think some people’s minds have just had enough before they begin to physically unravel. Especially people who, say, require at least 21 hours a day of solitude, and are nauseated by humankind itself well before noon unless they avoid the Internet completely.

I have no hope that the future will get better for me or anyone I know or care about in the ways that matter to me, and I have no real reason to keep shoving swallowable gunk into my face other than an obligation to a dog. I hate life far more than I enjoy it. I was probably constituted to be this way regardless of ambient factors, but I’ve had it with ambient factors. I never knew people were as morbidly pliable as they are. I always knew I was a nonstandard person, but figured I could carve out an enjoyable enough niche surrounded by a small number of loved ones.

Eh, fuck that noise. Whatever I had to contribute to this circus expired long ago. And on that note, while I made some concessions recently about maybe not using certain words and terms as often no matter how perfectly they describe the people to whom I apply them, please don’t start in with the “You won’t reach as many people if you curse” bullshit. Every one of you has your own sins to answer for. Besides, the last thing I want is a site popular with thousands of people and thus appealing to people of average and below-average intelligence, like Letsrun.com and Citius Mag and Fast-Women and the rest of those sites are for different but transparent reasons.

All of those outlets and sites pretend for different reasons that pro running isn’t a doping carnival when they all know that it is, and the ones that don’t push Transgenderism, Inc. absurdities cave to the wild-eyed, spittle-spraying bullies in this area. They either embrace racism or refuse to push back against that or any of the rottenness. So in this sense, every one of these outlets, no matter their outward stance, is assuming a role in the whole charade.

Adam Goucher complains about cancel-culture; meanwhile, his while his wife Kara, through praising clown-figures like Latoya Snell and co-signing the delusions of “nonbinary” people, embraces it. And everywhere you look, inside and outside of sports, it’s the same morass of contradictions, self-dealing, floor-humping, and grifting, including even the displacement of standard gay people in favor of a whirling circular sawblade of ridiculous metafaggotries. It’s sad.

But not unexpected. The average person is, as resigned regulars are used to reading in some form, a drool-slicked, asshole-fingering, loudly uncertain and overconfident vulgar halfwit; accordingly, the average running podcast (including some of the ones you people have recommended to me) is the sonic equivalent of a cheese-grater basted in alcohol and run rapidly back and forth across newly shaved scrotal or vulvar skin. I sometimes can’t believe how low all of running has sunk until I turn on a television or look at a “news” site and think “Oh yeah, that’s every goddamn thing now.”

So, while I don’t hunt within my mind for intentionally off-putting topics or phraseologies, I’ve just had it, and that goes for any kind of speech- or tone-policing. This is an opt-in reading experience that is clearly not for everyone, created by someone who admits he’s outlived his functional expiration date.