Some Under-Informed, Embittered Ranting

I want to write about America's present condition. Our tentative standing on the world stage has come at the steep price of spilled patriotic blood, and our golden towers stand on foundations of groaning, suffering, and deluded laborers. The great lie of this nation has brought it enormous prosperity through investment. The investment of capital, of time, and of countless millions of lives. Only the attractive illusion that nothing stands in the way of success but sloth and idleness still sustains this country. In fact, this is a nation where few frolic in luxury and many work for the upkeep of a monolith that provides just enough of the essential to keep them working. In short, this is scarcely a special place. It is a nation like so many other nations, with one of the few points of difference being that the forces of our oppression cannot be as easily named as a single dictator or coercive polity. Our framework of exploitation harnesses the forces of capitalistic competition to act as an engine for ceaseless striving, and it would really be no exploitation at all if what the common person could attain through back-breaking pursuits were not capped from the start. In the United States of America, the butcher's boy, in almost every single case, remains the butcher's boy until his dying day. The underdog billionaires serve as his idols as he puts slab after slab of beef on the chopping block, as he invests his meager earnings and dreams of a meat processing conglomerate owned and managed by him.

The Bill Gates' and Steve Jobs' of this country are the ones who beat the odds, who overcame through sheer force of circumstance, timely innovation, and perhaps a measure of brilliance. But that, wish as he might, try as he might, shall not be the fate of the butcher's boy. To talk about change in this system and the subversion of the oppressive force of the long-dead-or-maybe-never-real American dream would require political and economic insight I do not possess, but I believe that the negative impact of this superstructure on the common man can be lessened by his attainment of self-consciousness (yes, hello Marx). Again, my goal as I present this idea is not systemic change through revolution, because that would be inherently political in nature. The laborer's self-consciousness should arise because it will, following a period of violent disillusionment, lead to the development of a far more psychologically healthy conception of his place and prospects in this nation. Work must never stop, but he who works in constant striving for the realistically unattainable tempts eternal discontentment. This nation's chief commodity is the concept of "not enough", with the government as its distributor and the highly visible elite as its self-interested promoter.

 "Work hard and you can be just like me!"...sounds real good coming from the king of the metaphorical castle, with his pearly white teeth and Italian shoes buffed to a shine by black servants who are likely the direct descendants of the slaves his family once owned in droves. The common man cannot be content in his place if he whole-heartedly believes that his labor, his only selling point, can earn him a drastically better place. The unlikelihood of radical upwards mobility is a truth interestingly not-so-evident to this nation's poor and lower middle class. Would it not be better, would it not alleviate many of the symptoms of this sweeping social disease of discontentment, if those in the muck did not dream of shitting into golden toilets? If they did not, perhaps no one could afford to actually do so. And that, to me, seems proper. Shit is bound for the sewers, so why the fancy medium?

-Artem Potemkin 

Private Thoughts Become Easier to Share with Time

I shake my head but cannot shake this feeling. This sense of fundamental inadequacy, powerlessness, and utter confusion that turns my waking hours into an anxious dreamstate. The effort put into this line, into the next idea, cannot be captured by machine ink (note: as ever, this is digitized after the fact). I sat down with so much to express, so much unspecific anguish to pour onto this page...and I mustered a sad two lines of any value to describe my condition, to seek my direction. But I write on, connecting character after aimless character into words, sentences. I believe that a reader reading a manuscript is better able to connect to the author, to share in the elements of the human experience that gave birth to the ideas on the page. Machine ink takes something away.

I have not written in a very long time...I have forgotten the extent to which these conversations with myself sustain me. But whenever I am at this pursuit, the ways in which I perpetually waste my time tug at me...they beckon. I reckon there is a problem in one's life when, with an excess of leisure time, they cannot comfortably allot a measure of it to doing something they truly love, to work at it and nurture what even they are convinced is a precious gift. Yes, a problem exists. It has one name, and humans are as susceptible to it as any other creature I am familiar with. Addiction. People struggle with it all over the globe, and a recent trend is to seek refuge in the label, to write off the force of human will and claim that the human spirit cannot conquer the external, cannot even broadly govern a single human body. But I will not do that. I cannot bear to do that, both because I know it would doom me by allowing me to make peace with the unacceptable, and because a rarely-heard-from voice deep inside cries out against living by what I perceive to be a tremendous falsehood. Addiction rules me now, in ways I never imagined it could, but it is not the totality of me. I will never let it be me; I have faith that I will rebel against it consuming my personhood.

There are few things that I feel are in my power to change, but I am one of those things. My father always told me to be my own master, and there was wisdom in those words, for if you do not govern yourself, then someone or something else will. As of this moment, I am not my own master. I exert free will, but it is only free insofar as it is human will, because it is profoundly influenced by decidedly negative forces. But I WILL, god dammit, I WILL establish a firmer grip on myself. One day I'll wake up and say: shit, this is a mess. And I'll fix it. If it is not too late by that fateful moment of my radical awakening...

"You will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not."

-Artem Potemkin