Dronings of a Disenchanted Diarist

Few people have had the pleasure of beholding such a ridiculous figure as I cut in my own conception of myself.  I am among the most theoretical, polemical, cognitively dissonanced egoistic monomaniacs  I've had the misfortune of knowing (although admittedly I cannot claim to have great firsthand experience of humankind and their ways).

One of my weak attempts at self preservation consists in surrounding myself with objects and activities that I consider "intellectual" : books, arthouse cinema, artwork of other kinds, and most significantly a pursuit of knowledge gleaned from endless hours spent sifting online resources, on a grand ensemble of topics, in a misdirected quest for universality.  At the back of my mind I am well aware that the incessant flitting from one topic to the next is mere pain-avoidance, a stratagem to keep at bay the duller, more necessary chores of life. I neglect to groom myself, to keep my room in order, to invest effort and serotonin on food, to sleep at regular hours - all justified by the pursuit of some higher unifying purpose - what an abject instance of self deception!  Yet what else could I do in a world divested of any sense of callow and certain purpose.  Sometimes, i.e. the times when I allow myself to be distracted from the world's pressing superficialities, I can see the pointlessness of it all.  What is life but an unfortunate accident on a pale blue dot on the vast, dark, forbidding, almost Gothic and grotesque fabric of the spacetime continuum -  a single sperm cell out of a few million that happens to be there at the right place at the right time?

Weed, smoke, pacifism, Hare Krishna, existential angst, love, cosmology, karma, the postmodern elements of  the "more is different" physics of condensed matter - I envy the people who are able to inhabit this hazy shady world of thought-continuum and rapidly establish analogies between such disparate things.  To me these appear as mere distractions designed to keep us from killing and eating each other, or worse, like having sex with our sisters. 

Ah grad school! The concentrated pursuit of knowledge, the focussed value addition to a specialized subfield, the self-directed investigative enterprise mentored by a very capable adviser - all that begins to ring a bit hollow when you realize the papers you worked so hard on producing (more time spent on putting frills on it rather than thinking up the actual message itself) will be barely read, will hardly even be used to wipe unclean bottoms with.  And this concentrated endeavor is often interrupted by biological needs, by unrelated thoughts, by pretensions to allround intellectual prowess - in the end, the apprentice emerges as confused as he was before if not more than in college.  

And yes there is of course the prolixity of my blogs - another desperate effort to create some sense of self-worth.

disclaimer :  Woody Allen and Dostoevsky's "Notes from the Underground" have more to do with this rant than substance abuse.