What Do We Do When the Ouroboros Is Full?

I've been doing this a long time, over 14 years now. Blogging I mean, not sitting alone in my bedroom at night trying recall the dying memory of another human's touch.

If you put in enough volume as a writer, you're going to end up repeating yourself. It's a natural human thing as you're limited to the one brain and the one linear set of progressive experiences with which to build the perspective and context for processing information. Put the same cuts of meat through the same grinder and you're going to get a very samey sausage from time to time. It's unavoidable, so I suppose the question is: was it an accident of circumstance as a sort of statistical predestination OR are you an unimaginative, untalented hack trying to stretch out one half-assed idea over a lifetime of typed linguistic output? Are you crafting hand-formed artisan cervelas de Lyon spiced with truffles and pistachios or are you making a machine-gun-fired rope of American hot dogs out of discarded pig appendixes?* It's the age-old question. And any self-loathing writer (un)worth(y of) his or her iodized table salt will immediately and unwaveringly answer the latter.

That said: I know I've talked several times over the years about living in the end times. The deep insight is supposed to be that if you look at human history, every iteration of humanity as a generation has been utterly convinced to some degree that theirs will be the Very Important Generation that gets to witness the end of the world. Part of it is just a chance for me to ponder morbidly on the most human of impulses, the rationalization and denial in the contemplation of the absurdity of one's own death. It's not meaningless if everyone dies with me, right? Or is it just that I like to use the word "eschatology"? I mean, five syllables! And it's got a "ch" in it that don't make a "ch" sound. THAT'S SO FANCY, YOU GUYS.

For serious though, the trap is that you can't really tell what the fuck is going on in the present. I hate to send you a homework link to a video, but it's a good question to ask: when is the present? It's not now certainly because as soon as another human registers that you've said it, it's already in the past. And you certainly can't anticipate the present because that would necessarily make it THE FUTURE. It's a physics question muddled up by Einsteinian relativity and a metaphysical one muddled up by the fact that metaphysics un-muddled is no longer metaphysics.

Historically of course, there most certainly is a "now" but the trap is you won't know you were in it until it's over. You can't know you're in a moment. Only whole historical actions are knowable because they rely on a classification in context. Without knowing an event or a period's volume (height, length, width) you certainly can't begin to evaluate its weight. And for that, you have to reach the End of it. It's like when I binge watched the updated series of Battlestar Galactica. Everyone said it was so great, but I couldn't tell at all while I was watching it. All I knew was I despaired more than once that it would never, ever actually be over, or (more likely) that I'd die (maybe willingly?) before I got to the last one. All I remember is right at the end there was some inscrutable horse-shit about God maybe? Katee Sackhoff disappeared and some people were immortal robot avatars? Anyway, all very much like real life and when it was over: not only was it not clear what all the fuss was about, I was kind of pissed at the people who insisted I experience it.

Since you can't see the end of a thing while you yourself are in the midst of it, there is no difference in the present between a fad and an epoch. Except certain fads which seem self-evidently short-lived, I guess, but even amidst the worst ones, like Limp Bizkit or something, a part of us went "Well, I guess this is what music is now" and conspired to do literally anything but experience this ear-violence voluntarily. And lo the golden age of television was born.

Is global warming really the thing that's going to kill us all, imminently, for real and for certain? Maybe I guess. And are we living in a new paradigm of post-truth? Or is the Trump schtick an accident of circumstance and already showing signs of wearing thin? Look, a certain percentage of us started using the term "post-racial" when Obama was elected. The robustness of that as an idea has been autopsied thoroughly by now.

We won't know what this era looks like until this era is done with us. Politically, meteorologically, morally, legally, whatever. However that end comes, we mostly can't plan for it, let alone hasten or delay it. All I know for sure is that it will, as all things do, finally cease to be. And then we can hold the whole thing up, contained and entire, and judge it for what it was. And then some percentage of assholes will inevitably insist that these were the good old days.

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*I know the plural of appendix is appendices, but "pig appendices" sounds like the reference material in the back of a book owned by a literate pig. Somehow that just makes everything worse.