Imaginary Worlds

We become unwitting liars, deceiving others and ourselves when being too social. Ready-made cliches are adopted without careful inspection because they are conveniently close at hand and help build plausible explanations for events and sensations. This inadvertent deception subjects innocents to fraud and coercion, making them complicit in a conspiracy to affirm false narratives made binding upon the world through repetition.

Like a good Ponzi scheme, it can run for a while before the dangling loose ends attract someone to pull them, toppling the pyramid of nonsense, in turn making many years of busy work for forensic accountants trying to salvage any lasting remainder of the original value.

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

One teenage summer, the second prettiest woman I've ever seen propelled me for months. She was pale and pink with a perfectly feminine face, gorgeous golden hair, sweet eyes, and a tight, fully mature woman's body despite being 14, regularly mistaken as mid-20s by bartenders.

I worked 80 hours a week that summer, talking with her for hours each night after a full day, energized by regular makeout sessions and pulsing desire. Sleep and its need became minimal; work felt like an effortless non-burden, so blissful was she to me. Everything else in the universe seemed insignificant.

For the longest time, I called this phenomenon love and used that experience as its proof, but eventually came to find the same phenomenon appearing with all beautiful women, and entirely lacking from those that were not beautiful. Beauty intoxicates and inspires, but that is not love, for when the beauty is gone, we are neither intoxicated nor inspired, yet fresh new beauty at once revives that wonderful stirring and pull. Nor is it anything special about the person, as all beautiful women produce the same effect during their precious few years of beauty. For such women, college and graduate school are an epic squandering of magic.

We watch silly movies that incorrectly portray love and then in order to lie in accordance with these culture expectations, we repeat common misconceptions to affirm them as truths, reality and factual assessment be damned.

Our wretched attempts at communication become riddled with these intrusions, infused as standards of accepted discourse until they are eventually excised and burned as parasites that mislead, waste time, and leave us blind in exchange for a temporarily pleasant lie.

No mercy for parasites and their enablers!