false heart 3

Hello fellow pretenders.

Here in the sickly arc-lamp glow of the death throes of western civilization, lit up in pale green like the aisles of a Wal-Mart at 1:00 a.m., illuminating all our sad, inevitable flaws, it’s easy to be fooled by visions that entered our heads in childhood and after. Our imaginations are clouded by pretty pictures from an imagined past and from a future that now will never exist, visions that trick us into behaving as if the world is a different place. It tells us that we come from a cleaner place, a purer place, and that while we now live in a dirtier world, it still can be a hopeful one. These visions tell us love exists and that humanity will progress towards an inevitable utopia. We either pine for a perfect past that never existed, or we pray for a future that will never come.

It won’t. We’re done. We traded our souls long ago, perhaps without even knowing it. Mankind bargained away its lease on truth and beauty and love--if indeed it ever even held such a lease--for comfort and power and luxury at the expense of others. It could even be argued that these concepts never existed except in our ever-so fertile imaginations. We are short-sighted, selfish monkeys with much, much more power than any sane god would ever bestow upon such brutish, nasty creatures.

Who hasn’t betrayed someone? Who hasn’t been betrayed? Who hasn’t justified it and rationalized away his reprehensible behavior and gone on with life pretending that he’s not a horrible fucking person who destroyed someone else’s hopes and dreams for no good reason?

Love can’t exist because we are ignorant, blinkered apes who want what we want when we want it, and nothing else will do. We will justify anything, as long as our needs are taken care of. And we will live on, blissfully unaware of our own slime, our shittiness, because if you were to wear your inherent shittiness in the forefront of your mind, you wouldn’t be able to face life for single second more.

So you pretend.

We are all liars and cheats and thieves. There is no purity. There is no love except the love of oneself. Why pretend otherwise? Why not revel in it, why not dance on the grave of these dying notions and hold a wake, the biggest drunken orgy in history, as our false, imaginary world goes up in flames and reveals us for what we truly are?

The light of the fires will illuminate our true selves, eclipsing the false cleanness of that Wal-Mart light, and we can finally be free.

No more pretending.