Sleeping awake, living asleep.

I slept. My first perfect night in a while. You know that kind of night that makes you feel alive and limber in the morning.
Where you can't detect that frontier between the dying hours of night and the opening bliss of dreamworld.

Dreamworld is a mysterious place. It separates the days that pull our life together, and grind our life forwards, no matter how hard you try to bring back the past. We've all ventured into it.
Some of us remember our stay perfectly, and can proudly announce the content of our dream to our friends in the morning.
Others remember a few weird details, and can proudly announce them to their friends in the morning.
And some others don't remember. They can just remember the fall. That nauseous sensation of skydiving into nothingness. I feel it.
Maybe our brain doesn't want us to know the crazy things that happen there. Because it might affect us. Change the person we are during the day.

Because there are no limits in dreams. Your mind is able to take a break, and separate itself from your body. It can just drool away at wonders it couldn't access with you awake. Because if it could, your integrity and ethnicity would be given a lifeline, and you wouldn't survive in the world.

Because in real life, there are limits. You've got to stick to whatever is planned out for you. At work, at school, at home.
Even when you go on holiday. When you deliberately try to move away from your usual surroundings, to get something new pouring over your eyes and ears, while remaining unfazed.

You live your life asleep. We live our lives asleep. We do things so automatically that everything becomes meaningless. The routine is agonizingly monotone. You barely use your human capacities. Those things you can do. But that the world you live in will tolerate, but dissuade you from. Saying that they would rather you didn't. Which is a polite way of saying: "If you do this, you're in shitland."

Single men or women, who have nothing to come home to, who try not to fade away into their own self-righteous misery, live asleep. Even people who do have something to come home to, live asleep.
We all do.

We just let things pass. Trying to achieve the minimum. Ignoring what doesn't concern us. Because you can't fit all of that into one day. Or into two, since days are separated by nights.
And by night, when your mind is given a free pass around the island that is your brain, you feel alive. It's then that everyone is truly awake.

Whether we feel shame after it, is defined by the fact that some of us remember, some of us don't, and others choose not to.
That is the only time when you can truly keep yourself company. Because time doesn't exist. Colors, shades, objects, walls, matter itself, blend together and mix. And your mind likes to experiment with that, just for the thrill of it. That unknown sensation when you are your daily self.

That daily self, that can contain what it's really thinking. Contain what it really feels.

I don't expect the day will come when we will not live our lives asleep. We're in too deep in what we've built. We can't back up the tunnel now.

So I slept. It was a good night. I don't remember anything. Just an endless freefall. I'm pretty sure I did many adventurous things. My mind chose not to keep them. It actually intercepted that thought before I could get to the mail box. But I don't want to get to the mail box. Because I know that my daily self is very different from my mind in its entire purity. When it isn't intoxicated by my surroundings.

But I can't help that. I'm forced to be too busy during the day.
So I keep the bliss of dreamworld away.
Just for now.

The blind leading the blind.

Trust is fucked up. Trust is a stupid word anyway.
Who ever said anyone needed trust? If we'd all just stayed monkeys with that same simple formula: "Birth. Hunt. Feed. Mate. Death." we wouldn't want trust. We wouldn't know of trust.

I put my trust in certain people. In other people, I find the corridor too dark to throw a mousetrap into. Some people disappoint me, they throw back the trust in the form of pure dislike. Everyone has those people in their lives. You like them and appreciate their presence. So do they, but that doesn't mean they trust you, or that they think you should trust them. Trust has nothing to do with that. Trust is a complicated minefield that stretches out in the spaces between people.
When you trust someone, you give them that possibility to access that part of you, that inner scar that makes me itch every time I see a show defending something I don't agree with, every time I talk to people I find capable of persuading me to eat at a mexican restaurant, only to find that they knew I hated mexican food.

Trust barges in when you find the need to share something with an exterior being, because you think it's better for you. Only when you trust people, you're obliged to lie. Because that's what trust is. You can confide in someone, show them you trust them, and not tell them the whole truth...you can tell them the truth in a way that conveniences you, so that it gives some value to your friendship with the person, but not too personal so that you don't sell yourself to them.

That's what trust should mean.
Even that doesn't mean much.

But it's not that simple, when you make your way to those pointless sociology and individual help classes that you are forced to take. They tell you a bunch of bullshit about "talking to people" and "Confiding in people is easy! That's how you get out of shit creek when you're down."

That's lies. You're supposed to trust those specially trained "teachers" and they actually say "It's so easy" to be open. "It's so easy" to get better.

It's not "so easy". Simply because men didn't stay monkeys. We evolved. Got ourselves some brains. A mind. And it's that particular intelligence that makes you wonder all the dangerous things that people wonder...like "Do I really trust myself?".

Once that thought has stopped by at one of the rest areas in the motorway of your mind. You're stuck with it for a while.
You wonder if you really are telling yourself everything. You wonder if, your mind is just playing tricks on itself and forcing you to lie to yourself. To do things that other, reasonable, part of you won't do.
You're a different person when you're around different people. You could do things with your friends that you would never do at a family dinner, because you can shut down that reasonable part of yourself and...move along. Like any animal in need of fun would do.

It makes you wonder that if you're too lazy to clean your room, comb your hair or stop your best friend from breaking his spine. Can you trust yourself?
Because the basic human being doesn't know of trust. He just feels he has to survive without anyones help.

Alone.

That's all he's there to do. He's been put on a world he hardly knows, for a purpose he isn't aware of, and he must avoid the dead, and survive, until the day he joins them.
But again, we've evolved. Sadly, now every teenager can think for himself. Wonder, if he (or she) really should trust himself, and by listening to all the mainstream bullshit on the TV, radio, or in certain "sacred" buildings, he ends up trusting himself. But that trust isn't sincere.
So that teenager thinks he does. He thinks he's fine, just going along, fitting in with the system he was born in to.
So he thinks he can broadcast that trust to the other teenagers he's around. Because we think we're nice.

But that trust was never there.

There's still that spider crawling in the back of all our heads telling us that we're asking too many questions, that trust is a mirage. A clot that imprisons us in our own minds.

That trust is never there. We create that trust, and pass it on to others. It makes us think we can trust others, that they are all about the peace, and the brotherhood.
It makes us believe that all those religious things that they teach us, "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth etc.". They tell us that a crime can be fixed by another crime, that this is trust that we should all behold and live in peace with (while respecting and honouring an imaginary ghost somewhere in the sky). I respect people's faith, I have great admirations of certain people that have faith, but I can honestly tell you that Gandhi was right all along: "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."

Yes. We are all blind.

We're blinded by what the world has carved us out to be. We're blinded by that little asshole called society. We're blinded by ethical laws telling us how we should be. We're blinded by our "leaders", by our social systems...

Is that what you can call trusting yourself?
No, my friends, trust does not exist. Trust could exist, but it never saw the light of day. The light of our days.
So we're trusting the shadow of trust.

I don't trust myself. That's how I've managed to put this message forward to you.
Don't trust. Just live, love, and enjoy it while you can.

Reasons behind the fever.

We're all just the same. A lot of people will go on ranting about how "everyone is unique", "everyone is special in their own way".
Those people are...how should I put it?...douchebags.

Yeah, OK, I guess we all think differently and we act in slightly different ways. But all this doesn't have any consequence whatsoever on who you are. And by "who you are", I don't mean what your favourite band is, or what types of movies you like to watch while gulping down full tubs of Ice-Cream when in a couple of hours you'll be dancing in a club wondering why your intestines are punching your skin.
No, "who you are" isn't what you think or any of your opinions on very seriously taken subjects like abortion or euthanasia. That "who you are" is the "who you are" from the end of a Hollywood movie. Or from the end of a life lesson from a teacher that thinks he is communicating and reaching out to you.

"Who you are" is a term that's bullied around and given a lot of shit. No matter how many cheeseball lines people throw at you, no matter how many morals are given to you at the end of predictable movies, "who you are" is not what you think about yourself and others.

"Who you are" is the big picture.
The fact that you're one of millions of others that are on this planet, trying to pick out some understanding and trying to develop thoughts that many others have thought before them. And they won't make a difference.
Nothing an individual does will ever make a difference.

But here's the catch: the fact is, that life is short. Very short. And you've just got to grab every chance of reason, insight, or happiness. But that isn't "who you are", it's just "what you're making the best of". "Who you are" has nothing to do with that.

People tend to make that confusion. Because it's convenient. It's easy.

"Who you are" differs with the point of view. Because humans are capable of lying. You could think all the vicious, sadistic, racist, psychopathic thoughts in your mind. But come out as a gentle flower to other people. That just brings us into the massive universe of human hypocrisy. I won't dive into it too deep, because I might find something that could incriminate me. Yeah, I don't want that. Isn't that hypocritical too?
You see! What I think or do doesn't stop me from being a hypocrit, even though I am an insightful hypocrit. That isn't "who I am".

Speaking of hypocrisy, the debate about the differences between men and women will always make me itch. It will make that scar (that I talked about in my last article) itch.
First of all, men have always been considered the superior sex. For many years. Now, women come out of nowhere claiming that they are equal to us, men. Their claims are completely legitimate and it would be stupid not to consider them. Women are equal to men. There's no doubt about it.
But the thing is, men are physically superior to women, and they have demonstrated it by shunning and smothering them throughout the years. That's why men have gained that "superior" reputation.

Now, I'm not against women who claim they are equal. No way. Men who are macho and see themselves as this year's Dennis the Menace, are moronic.
But women who consider themselves superior simply because the clichés of higher and lower society see men as "simple" or "easily controlled". And even if they claim that they are superior and all men retarded, they still pronounce these ridiculous phrases like "Ladies first!" or "Let the women do the honours". All of those phrases are correct and polite, but not when you claim you are superior!
Those women are just as foolish, if not more.

Those women try to define themselves as "who they are" by ranting on about what they think, what clouds up their mind and increases that frenzied pulse.
But that isn't "who we are" or who anyone "is". Women and men are equal. They always were and always will be. Men and women have always had two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears, one nose and one mouth. They both need each other.
The way they think is what's stirring up that unnecessary chaos.

Because that's the way it is. Humans are capable of lying, distorting the truth, reversing the truth, or just shoving the truth in other's faces even more violently. That clouds up "who we are". Who we all "are". Just creatures wandering around. Aiming to make a difference somewhere, somehow. Some of us give up. Others succeed, but that success stays personal.

It's simply because we can think that we can change "who we are".
It's an eternal fever traveling from the deep universe of hypocrisy to the galaxy of reason, to a world of lies, into a civilisation full of intelligence, but also full of crap, into the small space that this very article occupies.

But this article isn't "who I am".
I think differently, but on the outside, we're all just the same.

Beyond scarhood (chronophenia revisited).

Someone is born. A new one. Into a vast world.
Hopefully, born to live, and to last.
But that someone will not go through his life unscathed. There is no way. But that's the nature of the experiment, the way we were supposed to experience it.
That someone comes into this world. He doesn't know it to begin with, but as I said in my last article, time has done a lot before him, and will do a lot more after him. His life doesn't have much of a purpose, compared to time.

That's false.

Someone is about to die. An old one. Out of a vast world.
Hopefully, he will die in peace, and without regret.
But that someone didn't go through his life unscathed. There is no way. But that was the nature of the experiment. His experiment. Or, more accurately, the experiment they played on him. "They" being time. That uncontainable bitch that I talked about in my last article, while in the meantime, I wasted some of it, time.
His life didn't have much of a purpose, compared to time. Did it?

That's false.

We all go through this. We all will, or we all have.
Life.
I've barely cut into the cake. I still have a lot of mushy chocolate and vanilla to bite through, plenty of soft icing to lick of the top, but I still have plenty of gravel to spit out and swallow too.
We always pray for the best. To have the best life possible. Many people have finished the cake and are just waiting for it to digest and to just float away... Some of them have said to me: "I wish I hadn't suffered so much in my life." The fact is, that's impossible.

People will suffer. From the day they are born to the day they die, they are open to it. That's the nature of the experiment. Even if you are rich, and people will do all your chores and jobs for you, you will still have bad days.
That's not where the experiment lies.
No.
The experiment lies in the fact that we're put through a test. We will all end up scarred. Some of us will end up made out of scars. These scars can be buried deep beneath the skin, some childhood trauma that will resurface whenever you fly dangerously close to the bottom of the whirlpool. Other scars are shallow, superficial. They'll sting, sometimes atrociously, for a few days, when eventually, they'll hide away and not bother you anymore. Well not directly.

Then there's that third type of scar. That type that many people don't know exist. The kind of scar that if you mention it to people, they'll turn away, thinking you're delusional. That type of scar that is planted there in the beginning. It's always there, itching. Throbbing.

That scar is the power of your mind. That scar makes you think, wonder, hope for impossible things to happen. That scar is also there when those impossible things stay impossible, and everything comes crashing down.
That scar will always be there, laughing at you. But by laughing at you, it provokes you. For the precise reason that it wants you to react. It wants you to get off the secluded island and head for the mainland. Back with the living. Well, no one really "lives" anyway.
That scar is the people you don't want to disappoint. That scar is the things you've always wanted to do. The goals you've always wanted to achieve.

I have that scar. All I can say is that it's been bleeding profusely ever since I started to think for myself. It's that scar that makes me think all of these thoughts.
It makes me think beyond scarhood.
Beyond, in a world with no borders, no boundaries, no limits.
But when the time comes to get through another week, that bliss crumbles.
And yet that scar is there, laughing at me. And it makes me think, "Fuck. I shouldn't still be here." So it drags me, or I drag myself, out of that wonderland, back into reality, and I start walking around again, interacting with all the others that were born with that scar. That is to say, everyone. Even the ones who choose to live their life on the surface, without digging into the deep layers of the cake.

That scar lives with us. Sometimes, that scar is us. Just to make us wonder.
That's the nature of the experiment.

Chronophenia.

Time isn't on our side. I can't really see time on anyone's side. If time is on our side, who's on the other side? What a stupid phrase...I can't remember the name of the douchebag philosopher who said it. No, time isn't on anyone's side.
Time is unbendable, unbreakable and desperately scary to look into. We think we can juggle with time. We think we can fit everything into as little time as we want.

Time doesn't bend one way or the other just to accomodate you. It's like what water will be in 50 years time: precious, rare and only coming a couple drops at a time. I can't bare to think of the number of people I see that spill the hour glass of time all over them, not taking any time to appreciate the slow fall of every grain...

Time is infinite, but we are not. The time we spend making sure we can live well enough to have the heating on 9 consecutive months and the air conditioning the next 3, should be spent savouring the presence of other people.
Time goes by and living like this, we won't take long walks in the evening , have long conversations that carve words and images in our souls, we won't make the best of a mariage, we won't see our friends, we won't see our children grow up.

By the time you're pulled into something you are really interested in, that you crave with all the witts you have left, you get pulled away to something else, when you're called by someone you know, and you utter those fateful words: "I'm coming, wait a minute."
We don't think to watch time go by and look back to gaze in amazement at all the grains of sand that we have seen fall, even though they weren't the first, and won't be the last.
We're not aware that time isn't controlled by us. We can't make it flexible just to make our day more convenient. Time has existed, ironically, since the beginning of time.
We don't know that every fucking minute we spend lamenting on how we should of handled a few grains of sand, a lot more grains have already fallen and the clocks are tick tocking us towards the grave.

When we shut our eyes, the world is still there behind your eyelids. It has aged a few more seconds and time is still working on flooding hilltops and digging valleys.
It's kind of selfish, really. But we are all part of the same hypocrisy. The hypocrisy of human nature. How proud, dominant and ignorant we have become.
Sticking to a tight schedule won't buy you time, it will just leave you with a few seconds, a few grains of sand, to think about how you could have used these seconds.

It will just give you a few more seconds to feel even more useless. Helpless.

It will just give you a few more seconds to wonder why you are wasting time doing things such as watching TV, reading magazines, cooking undersized meals for a family of 7 billion, or wondering how you wasted the time you wasted.

I wonder right now why I'm wasting my time posting this article while I could be making the best of how lucky I am, and while I could be spending time with people I didn't know I admired so much.

We all think we can juggle with time. But time is juggling with us.
Time is on its own side.

Happy accidents and peaceful riots.

What is happiness? No one really knows. No one wants to know... Everyone just drinks the juice, but doesn't care where the juice comes from.
Happiness is the only thing we can't recycle. Along with love, although that depends on the country and religion... The thing is, when you feel the heat of joy burning down on your skin and the cleansing oasis of happiness fall down on your shoulder, you don't really care.

Happiness isn't a grace from "above" or "below" or "in between your mother's legs" if you want to go that far. Happiness is just uncontainable...it spreads like a jolly sickness, dodging some and hitting others with full force. The lucky ones.
With happiness comes luck, another uncontainable bastard that comes and goes, dodging through the spaces between us (as I mentioned in my previous article).

But maybe it isn't life that brings these. Maybe our mind just brings them to ourselves. What if all those emotions were just coming from your head? One big elaborate dream. And this is where that stupid phrase: "I think therefore I am." comes into play again. If you "think" all of your emotions, then how can you "be"? If everything comes from you, then it was just as if you were dreaming! Your mind "is". Not you...your mind controls you...but then again, what is your mind? Isn't that a part of your brain, controlled by you?

So who's who? Or more importantly what is who?

So how do you explain the fact that you can't control yourself when you cry, or laugh, or scream?
My own mind is dictating this messed up text right now, but it's stopping from saying how fucking mad I am at certain people of my entourage. It's just something unexplainable. Religious people label it as "God did this", "God was here", "God made this", "God machine-gunned this".
I think it's just part of the unknown surrounding us. Emotions like love, revenge, guilt, sadness, fear are triggered by something firing in our conscience...if there is such a thing as a conscience.

People will tell you that "love conquers all". That's bullshit. Honestly. No matter how strong, how passionate, how violent, how extreme love is. It will never crawl up the tower of awareness. Darkness will always make it first.

Look at the news: you never see a joyful story about how a couple fell in love and stayed in love forever, or how great and loving a father/son relationship is. No. It's always about the dark events: revenge, blood feud, vandalism, terror. The face of the world will not consent to show happiness. But then again, what is happiness?.

Happiness isn't always a good thing. Happiness for a vandal is burning down cars. Happiness for a murderer is swimming in the translucid liquid of his victim's insides. Happiness for a schizophrenic is not hearing that little voice, that glitchy conscience, screaming in his head, deafening the silence.

Emotions are made to toy with you. But isn't paranoia an emotion too?...
What is happiness? What is love? What is revenge? What is fear? What is rage? Something the ant colony that humanity is wasn't supposed to know.
But we will continue feeling emotions.
Forever.

Dealing with the spaces between.

Tastes. If there's one thing in the world that I find confusing and illogical is tastes. Taste in music, movies, books, places, activites...and people.

You're always challenged into developping a taste for something. Rather than staying neutral, out of way of the mock remarks, stupid jokes and the barrel of a shotgun stuck in your mouth.
What's the point of tastes? It's not a question of "want". You don't choose your tastes. You're born and they just..."are". Once you're assigned a "taste" from what Christians call God, Jews call Yahvé, Muslims call Allah, Buddhists call Buddha and what scientists call chromosomes, you're left to appreciate them and deal with them and their consequences. People will question your tastes, praise them, or spit on them. Then you can answer them, thank them, or spit back.

The problem gets more complicated when someone is rambling on about their tastes. How good they are, how worthy they are, or how cool they are. Then you're left with that bubbling anger in the pit of your guts.
You don't want to let it out, so not to break some "valuable" ethical laws. But the bubbling anger won't cease. Should you shut up not to hurt the person? Or burst out defending your own tastes and diminishing theirs?
You see, that choice is pretty messed up. Whichever choice you make, you're fucked.
Should we deny the fact that we're all different just to conserve a decent relationship? Makes me think...it depends on the person.

We all know it's hard to accept things you don't understand. As much as many things you don't understand make your stomach turn and your head dizzy...or is it the other way around?...
I know that I don't understand goddamn pop culture. But I don't get too involved, since I know that pop culture is embraced by the majority.
Sometimes I question my own tastes. Asking myself if there's anything rational or fucking terrestrial in what I like.
But maybe that's it...questioning yourself is the path to knowing that you're reasonable. Just like that phrase "I think therefore I am." by a philosopher who's name I can't remember. I only half understand that phrase. I never bought the whole "I am" thing. Nobody "is". You're just another human being living in a place thats been infected by you and your ancestors and will later be shot down by the little morons you will have spawned.

We're just an ant colony that's slowly breaking through the glass.

But we can be a happy ant colony. And that's what makes us different. There are spaces between us. Spaces where we can stretch...grab what we like and what we don't like. Spaces where we can step back, and look at what we've accomplished, built, or destroyed. Spaces where we are able to see what we have left behind, and we can choose to help it, or leave it to rot away.

I told you this was a fucked up blog. But it's just me trying to reach out to something different.
And again, I am a happy person. I'm not depressed, schizophrenic, or genuinely sad.. That's the only reason why I can put what I see in the spaces between into words. These words.

Looking around.

I don't have a sad life. I never have, and, hopefully, I never will. Hopefully.

People surround me, although I try not to surround them. If I've ever felt like someone thought I was annoying them, I would probably just back down and not talk to them for a while. Some people I've known for a very short time but seem to know them off by heart. Some people I've known all my life and I still can't see through them.

Days went by years ago when I spent my time with the son of a pharmacist, that I still know today, and other people from an old school that seems too far away. All I care to remember is that they were great people.

Now, I spend my time alternating hanging out with my wonderful girlfriend, or with members of my band: a tall black dude with all the right words to say, a jewish guy with old school style glasses and a wicked sense of humour and a blunt blonde guy that knows all the angles of our society. My other twisted friends include a guy who has hair like the top of a mushroom, a hyperactive girl with a passed obsession with the Jonas Brothers, a guy who lives for handball, a girl I call by the name of a famous Indian spicy sauce, the next LeBron James, a chick I spend endless amounts of time talking to (albeit not consecutive) and many others that would make the list too long.

You see, I am far from alone. Yet when my music plays loudly in my ears and I stare into nothingness, I can't help but feel a need to run to the shore, a clifftop, a vast cornfield, somewhere.

People will tell you it's teenage angst. Fuck that. You're living your life inside your young mind. Sure, you don't know the world. Sure, you haven't seen all the dying kids in Africa and you haven't seen the freezing homeless people in Mongolia. You haven't seen the poor people dying of AIDS in South America.

You probably haven't even seen the end of your own street, if you are that shallow.

You live inside a small world. You react to it in a big way.

That's the law of nature, you can't just...contradict it and start living like an adult. Even though you so badly want to.

I'm aware of this. Maybe that's why I think too much. I've seen so much of the world in books, television and shitty side streets where people live in supermarket trolleys.

I'm not saying that I've seen a lot of shit. I haven't. I just know it's there. So I think: whatever path I take, it will lead me to something I already know.

"Knowing" the future isn't a good thing, I know I'm gonna grow up, finish secondary school, move to some place to go to university, start a family and work for the rest of my life.

There is no other path that leads to that safety. It's only because I know this that I'm able to write down this messed up thought. "Teenage angst" is nothing, just something people tell you exists so that you will think about it and grow up to be another "normal" adult...or a tramp living in a supermarket trolley...

Later. Peace.

This is pointless.

No, I'm not emo, if that's what you think this blog is about. I'm just some kid living peacefully in France. I have everything to be happy. But I've never really stood out before in my life. Always felt like going with the crowd was worth more than my own ideas.

I was wrong.

This isn't a blog where random people post stuff about how much they love their best friends or how sunny and great every day of their life is. No. We already know how great life can be, we don't need a permanent reminder.

I don't even know why I created this blog. If people ask me, I'll probably tell them it was out of boredom, not to sound stupid. No. It isn't because of boredom. I just felt that every fucked up thought that goes through my mind deserved to be written down somewhere. This seems like a reasonable place.

I've always wanted to believe in anti-conformism. Being different.

Original.

I have these thoughts. Maybe I don't think them loud enough.

I just want you to bear in mind that if you are reading this blog (and I see no clear reason why you should be), that everything that goes down here can be incomprehensible, personal, confusing, or some other kind of bullshit. It will just be some kind of truth played backwards.

The thing is, I'm not different.

I don't show it. I like being in with the crowd. Living close to other people. Yeah, I like that. I have a sociable nature. I have fantastic friends, and I love the crowd. But my mind thinks differently. I ache to do something else. Start a whole new movement of...SOMETHING DIFFERENT. I know that day will never come. In the meantime these thoughts will just be planted here, where whoever has the random idea to come here, will find them.