I'm trying to make a difference in this world. I'm trying to keep philosophy alive. I'm trying to influence your mind all the while mine is traveling an a billion directions at once.
I believe a little insanity is a good thing.
I'm inspired by life and I'm inspired by brains and nature and love and happiness and obsessiveness and anything else that's in this universe and outside of it. I think too much. I write compulsively. I don't want society to stop reading. I don't want society to stop creating. I want to contribute to this planet's literature that is so often hidden under media, pop culture, and other things that won't really matter in fifty years.
These are my thoughts, and I can't control them. I can't control the words that flow out of my brain and through my body.
This is word vomit. And I'm not cleaning it up.
of you
fiend·ing [feend-ing] v. to really crave something, to do something: I’m fiending for her touch.¹
Fiending. (I’m sitting here unusually attracted to the painted stucco on my wall when) I realize that’s all that college really is. If not fiending for marijuana—seriously considering if “maybe it’s not such a bad choice to smoke the stems” would actually be accepted in the society of your neurons—but also fiending for other things. (And maybe I realized this when my sober roommate was scraping resin for me or maybe) I still haven’t even realized how desperate we all are.
It’s all want and gain in these years, isn’t it? (And rightfully so.) Because we all wouldn’t even be here if we didn’t want gain. But speaking on a smaller population, I’m talking about gain for other things. And you know what those other things are: food, money, sex, love, education, knowledge. The tripartite system, perhaps, as expressed by Socrates (cue my thank-you-speech for Philosophy 101), in which we all desire the appetitive, the spirited, and the reason. The reason, if you will, being that which governs above everything else.
But let’s not drift away too far here (and let’s try not to get distracted by the current unusually high temperature of my feet), and let us thoroughly describe the three above desires in college jargon.
- Appetitive: We are starving students, naturally. It is written in our name. Embedded in our moral code. And it is virtually impossible to be starving without an appetite (psychologically, physiologically, psychophysiologically, what have you). Therefore, we’re all so starving. Starving for food, because you’re fresh out of 18¢ Ramen packets; starving for money, because you’re slowly beginning to realize that money is the feeble, filthy, fucked up ground for everything; starving for approval, because you can’t venture into this forest alone. We are starving students.
- Spirited: Spirited, spiritual, what have you. Anything that’s beyond our reach, because you can’t touch love or orgasms or God. We fiend for that which we have no perceptual tangibility of, because it makes us feel safe. You wanna know why? Because even though we can’t see or touch the perfections of these things, we also can’t see when these perfections crumble. We can’t touch the rubble that scattered amongst our feet, so we pretend it never did.
- Reason: ”Knowledge and knowing.” Stop scoffing and guffawing because you’re still young enough to think that you can live a completely fulfilling life without being intelligible in at least two of the four following subjects: literature, mathematics, science, and arts & aesthetics. And I’m not talking completely school-based graded knowledge, either. I’m talking about the complete act of knowing; because that is surely, completely, only the one thing we want and need in life. It governs above the two lower levels; it is the gain that guides all other endeavors to gains. Because we want the knowledge of knowing we’re full (from a delicious bowl of Ramen), we want the knowledge of knowing we can live in this college-side apartment without getting evicted (we want to know we’re financially stable), we want the knowledge of knowing how many people we’ve slept with this semester (and being damn proud of it), we want the knowledge of knowing there’s another hit in the bowl, we want the knowledge of knowing there’s a higher being governing all (or maybe not), and—arguably the most important—we want the knowledge of knowing we’re loved. We want to know people, bands, cool professors, who’s in Coffin & Keys, who fucked who, best beers, what day the rival game is on, which drug dealer has a “crush” on you, what your roommates are thinking, what that perfect human who just sat next to you in class is thinking, what it’s like to hook up with the same gender, whether she or he is single or not, whether he or she is DTF or not, whether the test will be cumulative, how to write in APA style, what the results of the test(s) are, when the next Bassnectar concert is, when your final paper is due, how many calories are in these seven beers, how many parties you can fit into one Halloween weekend, which way would be the best way to get fired, etc., etc.
But most of all, I (thoroughly) believe, we just want to get high. High on the green you salvaged, high on his breath in your ear, high on love, high on happiness, high on GPA, “high on life.”
So the next time you’re fiending, don’t feel so bad. Don’t feel so pathetic and desperate. And even if you do, grab those feelings, laugh in their faces, (take a shot with them, make out with them,) and then toss them away.
Because I can guarantee you that every single person you know has fiended today too.
¹ Kashmoney. “Fiending.” Urban Dictionary. 14 Oct. 2005. Web. 30 Sept.
2011. <http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fiending>.
