Respecting the Crazy

“Even the most primitive of societies have an innate respect for the insane.”
-The Motorcycle Boy

If you keep doing something long without any gain at all, some will call you a fool. If you keep doing that thing, you’ll be accused of being addicted. Or obsessed with something yielding no sort of fruit. It’s like pouring water in the desert and being upset a forest has not grown there. You continue and maybe you are a little addicted to the process. To the ritual of it or the sting of failure makes you clench your jaw, crack your knuckles in determinate, setting out again on a trek with no end, a goal of goalless efforts. The act of doing because you have to and feel like you’ll perish if you don’t.

I won’t stop because I can’t stop. If I refuse to declare failure, I can’t lose. This is what it is like to write without an audience. One hand clapping only moves the air around a little bit. Barely enough to muss your hair. Here is the tale of the painter who made their art only to burn it to cinders. Maybe I would be more satisfied writing this all down onto rolling paper so I can put my weed in it and smoke my thoughts. My words in flame. The smoke in my lungs lingering like a daydream. I’ll blow it out of my body into the sky where it can dissipate into the world. Forever gone. Lost. Possibly never here at all. Words. Smoke. Memory. Ambition. Time. All these ideas barely real like ghosts or religion or writing itself. I’m a cog in the universe doing my best. Making my way before my last post or my final breath vanishes into the next plane.