...well,
very few people do, at any rate.
This is actually
my curse, but it's a
secret; if you
stumbled on this node you got
brutally, nastily lucky.
I always wanted to be a
thinker, not an
iconoclast; a
bringer of higher understanding, not a
destroyer of beliefs. But sadly, I've found that you don't get to
choose your labels--you do what you do, you say what you say, and sooner or later *
wham!*. You're a
bitch. A
firestarter. A
mental patient. An
iconoclast.
Now the
beautiful part is, a
label is not something you can
hang your hat on, which is good, because it keeps the label from getting
more real than you. Er...I've seen that happen, actually, but only with
very weak people. That's not me, or you. I'm just a
struggling writer; you're just an
E2 resident reading some of my more
minor strugglings. See how that all works out?
Back on
E1, I was a little...um...
more liked, than I am on
E2. I would
swear I didn't change a thing, but how would I know, since I would have changed if I did? The point is, my
huge reps, my lovely
nodes of mass popularity, have been for the last several months in the process of
polarizing: Becoming nodes of
vastly negative appreciation.
Cess-pits for
neophobic hatred. I look at them and I
go a bit green: I never wanted to
node cess-pits. And when I go back and look at them,
most of the time I still like them; most of the time they look even
better, more
polished and
in-depth than the
buds of philosophy I used to strew in E1.
My
theory is that I've stepped
neck-deep in the pile of
poo that is the
Iconoclastic Reputation. Too many of my
nodes, I think, did more to
challenge noders' current beliefs rather than simply
suggest new ones. This was not my
intention, but it's been pointed out to me before that I have a
peculiar skill for
accumulating vastly conflicting information and somehow remaining relatively at peace. See, I can
understand and
sympathize with the principles of
Satanism and
Catholicism in the same breath, and I'm not
either one. Agreeing with
one or
both does nothing, really, to where I stand, except
perhaps to sometimes give me a
better definition of it.
Neil Gaiman, who is the
shit, at least to us struggling writers, pointed out in
The Sandman series (all of which I own) that
there is no such thing as a one-sided coin. The
anthropomorphic projections he creates of
Desire and
Dream, by their very
existence,
DEFINE the boundaries across which lie--you
guessed it--
Hatred, and
Reality. This
flipside phenomenon is everywhere, but when you're dealing with
particulars and not
archetypes, it gets
confusing. I'll
posit, though, that maybe I'm a victim of it--or perhaps a
tool of it. My only
desire when I write my
cess-pool nodes (which used to be my
Stellar Nodes, remember), is to
plant seeds for new
beliefs, to open doors into
new sections of the Void for people's minds to
wander in. As a
direct result, people get reeeeeealy pissed at me for
throwing seeds on their carpet, and
cutting holes in their walls.
Don't worry; you
know me. As long as I can
think about it, I don't mind
living with it. Who knows what I'll be in
E3?