Oh, and Nick Cave. Yes.

Just like the stars

Things are going well tonight, right now. I have many problems, and I'm probably going to be depressed about all of them in due time. But right now I'm watching Stranger Than Paradise and I'm lying in my bed and I have some whiskey and there's this girl I really like and things are good. I have no idea why, but I felt like sharing that with all three of you. I actually like having such a small audience, though. Nothing I say really matters at all, does it?

Hail Eris! All hail Discordia!

Okay, children. Today, I'll be telling you all about your very special friend, an insane lady called Eris.

Eris (or Discordia, depending on whether the weather be weathered or not) is basically like a mind-blowing genius with a terrible case of ADHD. She truly, honestly loves each and every one of us, down to our last atom, but she gets distracted, and she has a vindictive sense of humour.

She operates a lot like this: Your brain contains roughly a hundred billion neurons, all constantly sending messages via unique pathways that are formed by your experiences and your genes. Nature and nurture. There is not a single human being on this planet with the same neural pathways as you, because no other person could possibly have had the exact same genes, or the same interpretations of the same experiences in the same order. You are a snowflake, blah blah blah.

So, what exactly is necessary for you, in all your beauty and glory, to exist? It's simple. First, you need a planet. It needs to be the right size, made up from the right stuff, orbiting at the right speed, at the right distance from a star of appropriate weight and size. A few thousand factors later, you might have a planet capable of supporting carbon-based life. All you need then is that magic spark that spawned the first amoeba and a few billion years of evolution, and you'll have the human race (provided nothing goes wrong, of course). From here, it's easy. Your exact ancestry, as well as that of everybody who has ever made an impact on your life, and then every one of the billions of moments you have experienced up to this point. The product of that is you, with your thoughts and your emotions. Your quirks and everything that other people cannot stand about you.

Now, what are the odds of that?

I think calling it a hundred billion to one would be optimistic. And that, children, is how Eris works. Out of an infinite flux of possibility, out of all that could have been, this manifested. The intricate, delicate pattern of your brain, and every cell in your body right where it belongs, performing a task that was never given to it. Even if that task is cancer, what are the odds?

That is Eris. That is Chaos. Sometimes good, sometimes terrible. Sometimes almost invisible, sometimes glaring. But the pattern is there. The perfect balance between order and disorder. From infinity, we have arisen. I do not claim to understand this pattern in the least, and I cannot even tell you with any measure of surety that it really exists. But it makes sense to me.

This probably seems so garbled and inclusive that you won't even read half of it. I apologize for that. Sometimes it's difficult to make my words come out right. Malaclypse the Younger explained it better in Principia Discordia. If you'd like, I can e-mail it to you. If not, then I won't.

Anyway, listen to The Drones. Really.

Sweet sound of relief

I'm far too tired to make the effort of thinking of some clever, witty way to start this post, so I'm afraid this will have to do. I feel good about life at the moment. I haven't slept in a while, and I can feel that it's going to happen tonight. Tonight, I am going to sleep like a corpse, and my brain is far too exhausted to bother me with all my usual trite bullshit. I am tired and numb, and I like it. I especially like the fact that I won't feel at all like this when I wake up.

Jhonen Vasquez said that sleep is the enemy. Even though I have nothing but admiration and awe for the man's work, I must respectfully disagree. He looks upon it as wasted time, but I think that's a slightly morbid outlook. I love my sleep. The entire process is just so appealing. I love selecting the music I'm going to fall asleep to (Eels, tonight), I love reading (Hannibal by Thomas Harris – my third reading) until my eyes go on strike and make everything fuzzy, but most of all, I love switching off the light and sinking, sinking, drowning in myself. And the best of it all is that when you wake up, you might just as well be someone else.

But now, after saying absolutely nothing, I will leave you. The goddess is calling. To you, my audience of none, I bid farewell. I shall return to continue my melodrama in this empty theatre. The ending is going to be spectacular.