Sunday, March 30, 2008

Look on my sweaty bread, ye mighty, and despair.

No matter where you live or what you do, eventually, the dust gets in. The dust is everywhere, always trying to reclaim it all. It’s a constant reminder of mortality, of the fact that no matter how advanced the human race thinks it is, we're all still bound to the dust of this planet, the stuff of our origin. The gnostics knew this, they called it the qellipot, meaning the inherent impurity of all that is. The great tragedy of mass and solidity. Pure energy, the breath of the unbeheld, tainted by the filth of matter, the common dross of the world. The authors of the bible, quick to appropriate this fundamental of esoteric philosophy, reshaped it as "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.".

Indeed, from dust we came, and to dust shall we all return. But in the meantime, is it too much to ask for some respite from all this goddamned dust in my room!? I sweep, and I clean, and I wipe and still the damn stuff gets in! Some days I feel like Howard Hughes must have felt, shutting himself off from the outside world, hiding from his life, obsessively and compulsively sanitizing his room, peeing into empty milk bottles… Okay, scratch that last bit..but you get the gist of it. This morning, I could barely see the keys on the laptop for all the dust coating it!..and now I've lost my train of thought..

Oh fuck it all, I'm locked up in here writing a fucking ode to dust, and there's a ton of stuff I should be doing instead. What a waste of a perfectly good life. And then it hits me, why I started writing this piece of crap in the first place.. I saw my brand new laptop all covered up with dust, and I realized what a perfect fucking metaphor it was for my life. Like I have all these awesome tools, and skills, and instead of using them and pushing them to their limits, I'm just sitting around, wasting time, wasting breath, allowing the dust to lay claim to it all.

And when its all finally gone, I can sit on my throne of dust, and say, "Call me Ozymandias; king of kings".