Doktor Holocaust and the Heart-shaped paper.

first off, go read Simmone’s fable “The True Heart’s Longing.“

At the end, she asks, “Well what would you write if you really asked yourself, what is my true heart’s longing? What would you write?” 

I would hesitate at first, not wanting to tie myself down to some single wish, when I know that as I grow and change and mutate and whatever, i will wish for different things. Then i will have a fit of cleverness and write “The power to grant all my own wishes.”   And now for the stuff that I didn’t post in my comment over there, because I knew it was getting too long to really be a comment.

The thing is, I suspect that people already have this power to grant their own wishes.  Maybe not in a Chuck-Palahniuk-novel-Killing-Thought sense, but in subtler, no-special-effects-budget sorts of ways.  They have this power to figure out what they want and, through cleverness, luck, patience, perseverance, smarminess, or whatever characteristic they possess in heroic quantities, they get it.

The other thing is, I also suspect that there are people who don’t want you to have what you want, because if you HAVE what you want, you’re less likely to buy their distractions, less inclined to run their mazes to get their money to buy those distractions with, etc.  or maybe it’s a bunch of people, different factions who all happen to benefit from the unhappiness of a lot of other people.

In between these two major points, there is the issue that people are human.  we’re bags of meat and water and our brains alone are full of a very carefully proportioned mix of chemicals, and anything from eating the wrong foods to an argument to not getting enough sleep can mess with this chemical soup and, through that, our brain-functioning to the point where people can’t tell what it is they want and can’t activate whatever latent heroic-characteristic they have even if they DID know, so we fall for it.

We get distracted and cahse things we think we want until we figure out which of them is the one we really want.  But yes, we all have the power to grant our own wishes.  This must not ever be put on some cute motivational poster with kittens or inspirational landscapes, because things like that activate the power of Cynicism, which, for some, is indeed their Heroic Characteristic, but it can be a detriment on rare occasions, as sometimes the good shit (and I don’t mean jenkem, folks) looks a lot like the bullshit.  

So don’t put it on a poster, don’t put it in a sigfile, don’t inscribe it on anything where you’ll see it every goddamn day, but know, in the back of your mind, that the power to grant your own wishes is there, and know ALSO that FORGETTING YOU HAVE THIS POWER IS GOOD.

I know I just said it is bad, which is true, but it is also good, because if you always had it and could always use it you’d overuse it to the point of it no longer having any significance.  Having lost it for a time makes you appreciate it more when you regain it, and once regained and appreciated it is put to better use.

So now print all this out and burn the paper, flush it down the toilet, never read it again.  Remember to remember it, Remember to forget it when you’re done, and don’t forget to remember it again afterwards.