Viva la Vida; Lost Greatness; I Want To Be Irrationally Exuberant Again

5/3/10 7:02:20 AM

This blog might be somewhat jumbled, because I just got home from work and I haven't slept yet, and I'm very tired.

I heard that song, 'Viva la Vida' by Coldplay ('When I Ruled The World'). I never heard it in 2008 when it was originally released - I only heard it more recently when it was playing on the Spamzak at McDonald's. (Muzak: I hate muzak - pop songs, boring songs, same songs over and over, same songs I've heard all my life). I'd be mopping the lobby and hearing this song that I started to really like, and I heard it on the radio once or twice in my car. So I looked it up on the internet and then I liked it even more each time I heard it.

This song has the theme of 'lost greatness' or 'fallen greatness' - the loss of an entire time period, a world, a part of one's life, not just one small thing, and not just the loss of one person, but the loss of everything. I get that theme in another song, too, 'Back On The Chain Gang' by the Pretenders. You had a wonderful life, and then a terrible thing happened, and you lost everything.

This is hard to explain, but there is a spirit and a melody that I hear in several of these songs, something in the way they sing, that reminds me of how I felt in the 1980s. And I liked Lady Gaga's music because I could hear a little bit of that, and I also like some songs by Pet Shop Boys because I can hear that melody in there. So it was really interesting when I found out that Lady Gaga and Pet Shop Boys both did a cover of Viva la Vida, which I read about on Wikipedia. Not only that, and this is going to sound funny, but the title, Viva la Vida, came from a picture by Frida Kahlo, an artist who is known for openly painting pictures of herself with her thick connected eyebrows and female mustache, both of which are taboo in modern mainstream American culture. So she's an artist that I like, even though I don't really like everything she painted, but I like her for her special kind of beauty that you can't find anywhere in the mainstream media.

Alan Greenspan (who used to be an Objectivist, in Ayn Rand's inner circle) described the 'irrational exuberance' that made people buy into the 'dotcom bubble' around 2000. People were (supposedly) hopeful and optimistic about the future, about how the internet would change the world and make everybody rich. Suddenly it all fell apart. I experienced it - I was working for the temp agencies back then, so I got jobs doing data entry in the offices of some of the dotcoms that went bankrupt. (After that, I read books to find out why we have these recurring economic collapses.) I was making $12 an hour at one of my jobs when they went bankrupt.

Later on, after Alan Greenspan said 'irrational exuberance,' it became a popular phrase, and there was a bumper sticker that said 'I want to be irrationally exuberant again!' I know how that feels.

I came from a wealthy family. I was in all three 'gifted' classes: intellectually gifted, musically gifted, and artistically gifted. I thought that I would be able to do anything I wanted when I grew up. I felt a sort of mania back then: all these ideas, all these gigantic projects that I wanted to do, but there were so many things that I couldn't possibly do them all. I was very ADHD back then, but also happy and hopeful. I thought that I was going to someday find a way to express myself, to do my art and my music and my story writing and to make money by doing these things. I thought I would make money doing all these millions of projects I wanted to do. But I didn't know which things to choose, because there wasn't enough time to do them all.

Then when I dropped out of college, after a few years of not doing my homework at all, and getting zeroes, and passing some of the classes anyway, while failing some of the others - after all that, I was exiled to Pennsylvania. I wasn't allowed to stay at my parents' house in West Virginia, because Dad didn't want me to be living at home, mooching off him, taking money and not working, and fighting with him all the time, so instead, I came here to State College and moved into my brother's apartment (he attended Penn State for a while, and then left - I think that's when he moved to Boston). I didn't really want to be here.

I started working, and my goal in life was to become financially independent so that I could stop taking money from my parents. That was all that I was trying to do, all this time - earn enough money that I didn't have to take Mom and Dad's money anymore. I have worked all these years at various jobs, sometimes at the temp agencies, and sometimes in grocery stores and restaurants, sometimes in offices, and I have been exhausted all this time. I developed chronic fatigue sometime in, maybe, 1999 or so, and I have never really been the same since then. Also, there isn't enough time to do art, music, writing, learning, reading, creating, sewing, arts-and-crafts, and all the projects I had in my mind, when I'm working so many hours.

I have never succeeded in earning enough money to be permanently stable and not have to get help from my parents. Only for short periods of time. Then I'd get laid off from a job, or get fired, or quit, or get sick for a long time and not be able to work, or get evicted from my apartment, or have some other disaster. It's been one disaster after another, all these years. The latest disaster is the drug residue contamination, which is still going on.

I know the feeling of losing everything. I had hopes and I had potential. A long time ago, I felt as though my mind was free. When I look back, I see signs that I was probably being attacked even when I was a child, but it was different back then - the attacks were less severe, I could sleep at night, and I could think a thought without being zapped. The severe electronic harassment attacks were sort of the last straw on all the hopes that I had, when they began in about 2003-2004. All the other victims have written that you can't escape from the attacks, and that they follow you for decades.

Even after all that, I hear the songs with that melody in them, that spirit, and I still feel as though it is possible to be free and to be happy. I feel as though that's the truth under all the suffering, as though it will always be true, no matter what happens to me, no matter what happens in my life. They have silenced my soul right now, so that I can't sleep, I can't feel, I can't think, I can't be myself. But if they stopped, if the attacks were stopped and I could be myself again, I would immediately return, right away, to this truth, this feeling of hope and freedom, as though nothing had ever happened.

That is why I choose life.