(I’ve been writing this in my head for four years. Four years and seven months, to be precise.)

So one last touch and then you’ll go
And we’ll pretend that it meant something so much more
But it was vile, and it was cheap
And you are beautiful but you don’t mean a thing to me

—Death Cab for Cutie, Tiny Vessels

I got this picture in New Jersey. It’s the most peculiar size for a photograph: 3 7/16 by 4 13/16 inches.

For some reason, I see it properly like this — landscape orientation, with the white stripe on the left — when it could just as well be rotated any other way. This is the bias I place on it. The way I view it.

It almost looks like a room with a wall in frame on the left, and the camera has metered for a flash off the wall, underexposing the rest of the picture. There are two smears in the blackness. Maybe an out-of-focus object, maybe a fingerprint on the lens.

I didn’t take the picture. Someone else did, thought it was bad, and was about to throw it out before I asked for it. Someone who took me for granted. Someone who’s world I lived in but for a week, in the midst of the intense summer humidity and coitus interruptus.

I’ve kept it in one of my notebooks since. The edges have turned yellow, and the corners blunt from handling.

Every time I look at it, I like to think that I see something in that grain and that noise. That something’s there; I just don’t see it because there isn’t enough light to expose it, but it exists nonetheless. Some photographic kōan, where I become that which I seek.

But I know there isn’t, the way I know it was nothing more than passing moment, a week forgotten, a life unchanged.

And I’ve been happily fooling myself ever since.

I know the hatred and envy of your hearts. You are not great enough to not know hatred and envy. So be great enough not to be ashamed of them!

—Of War and Warriors, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Ah, back into this again. I wasn’t planning on writing this tonight, but something set me off.

I like how Nietzsche believes that two human “flaws”, which some view as sins no less, should be embraced instead of shunned. Most likely, he’s attacking Christianity, and it’s view of hatred and envy as sins (he goes on to attack other beliefs in sweeping subject dances). Personally, I think that he’s pointing out the fact that humans are, in fact, human, and prone to err. After all, who is good enough to not feel such base emotions, even if only once-in-a-while?

It’s made me realize that sometimes I shouldn’t be so hard on myself. I shouldn’t blame myself for feeling a certain way, or having a certain flaw. It doesn’t even matter if painful emotions don’t generate something beneficial, like self-improvement.

Of course, if my base assumption is wrong, then I’m reading too deeply into this. Such things are always a hazard of reading translated material, and all that really matters is whether or not it helps.

It’s taken me this long to realize that the best that one can do is try, not succeed. That doesn’t mean that I’m going to settle for a life without self-improvement, it just means that I should learn to forgive myself before I learn to forgive others.

Because the former has always been harder than the latter.

I should believe only in a God who understood how to dance.

—Of Reading And Writing, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

I don’t currently believe in a god, but if I did, I would imagine that he, being a god, would understand all the things that I hold as important. I couldn’t imagine a god without a great sense of humour, a good sense of musical taste, or a nice bowel movement or a regular basis.

And how megalomaniacal is that?