It’s hard. It’s really hard. It doesn’t matter how strong you are or how many maxims you’ve told yourself–when it comes right down to it, many of us are fighting something inside us that we wish we weren’t. That we wish we could move past.

Maybe it was childhood trauma, maybe your parents didn’t love you all that much, maybe it’s your sexuality, maybe you can’t figure out why you’re so lazy. Maybe you don’t feel anything at all.

It’s a strange balance trying to struggle towards strength without relinquishing your humanness. We all fail. We all have buttons that people can push–that thumbscrew that we hope no one notices. You give yourself away to pickpockets when you check for your wallet; it means you have something worth stealing. We are the same way with vulnerabilities. We think we’re hiding them but reveal them in the process.

And the blessing: It is a process. The second dirty secret is that Cicero wrote his finest works in a fit of depression, alone in his country home, following the death of his daughter and a divorce. He did it as an utter hypocrite. By now you’ve seen some of my frenetic, crazy posts. The ones where I’m clearing struggling with something or trying to navigate the chasm between what I want to be and where I actually am. No question, I try to be as honest as possible here but you wouldn’t pick up on that socially. So what is your mask? What do you put up to compensate for where you feel lacking? Because unless you acknowledge it, you’re just living in an illusion and that very often comes crashing down. Tucker quotes Pericles a lot–something to the effect of “there is nothing wrong with poverty, only not doing something about it.”

I know for me, all I want to do is get to point where perturbation doesn’t control me; where the littlest thing doesn’t throw me off; where when I understand that a person shouldn’t affect me I actually don’t let them; where lulls are moments of relaxation instead of worry; where I am as calm as I am after a run, every second of everyday. And I am so far from this that it’s not even funny.

But when you fail–and you surely will: today, tomorrow and the week after–understand that it is a process. And to embark on that process is a journey required for enlightenment and happiness. “Who am I?” “What makes me act the way that I do?” It doesn’t matter what it is, or what you’re trying to “fix,” someone else has done it already and they’d love to talk to you about it. More than anything, don’t compare yourself to where you suspect other people are. Seneca the Stoic is widely considered to just be complete artifice–he mentored Nero for Christ’s sake. Chances are, they’re just pretending.

So back to the question: Can you be happy on the rack; tortured and bloody? Someone can, but I can’t, at least not today. But I’d like to be. I’d like to get to that point. Because really, if your happiness depends on how other people treat you and on the circumstances of life, you’ll find yourself in some dark, dark places. Like the point in your life where you cross streets and just pray for a car.

You don’t want that. No one does.

Whatever you’re after–if it’s influence like I am or solitude like Thoreau–none of it is going to matter if you can’t find tranquility. A thousand additions or a hundred subtractions, the core remains the same. And that has to be the focus of your efforts if you ever want to enjoy the fruits of your labor. You can realize that now or you can wait until time is almost up; that is your call

But lastly, it’s just not fair to treat that journey as anything but a process. You can’t wake up tomorrow unbothered by things or free from a certain sadness, but you can, everyday, get a little closer to where you want to be. Each second you shave off from that is one you can spend enjoying yourself, un-enslaved to the tyranny of fate or circumstance, and actually be happy.

Like all things, homosexuality is both biological and sociologically influenced. And if homosexuality is indeed hereditary, the “gay gene” can still only be passed down by heterosexual copulation. While exclusive homosexuality is rare (most homosexual men actually lose their virginity to a woman earlier than straight men) it seems like society is slowly becoming more accepting.

So, as gay marriage brings the pressures of monogamy and youthful experimentation with homosexuality is considered a little more normal and less of something to hide (or cover with bearded relationships), should we see a decrease in the proliferation of the gene? I would think that the gay gene find it harder and harder to be passed on to another generation. Obviously it would take a long time for such changes to be noticeable, if I wouldn’t be surprised if ultimately the data showed a peak and then a gradual decline–that is of course if the conditions remain stable.

And from “Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters“:

“If a woman meets a strange man, she has no basis on which to form an opinion of him. He can be a high-quality man, or he can be a low-quality man; she just doesn’t know. However, if he has a wife, that means that at least one woman, who presumably closely inspected his quality before marrying him, found him good enough to marry. So he couldn’t be that bad after all; at least one woman found him desirable. So being married is one cross-culturally transportable ornamentation or lekking device that signifies men’s superior mate value.”

So it seems like a rather small leap to apply informational cascades to sexual selection. It takes but a small patterned consistency to tip it either negatively or positively in the way of a cascade: yes, no, yes, yes yes yes ad infinitum. But the converse is that they can be thrown off equally easily. I’m not sure if the statistical data bears it out by I would imagine that each subsequent divorce makes a mate less attractive to a potential mate. That is, if you had subjects rate identical hypothetical suitors, each divorce on their record would lead to a substantial decrease in appeal. And this is probably why rejection breeds rejections or the whole “when it rains, it pours” aspect of dating.

Stuff is going well for me. I am starting to see the tracking signs of success and of hitting a larger audience–the audience I have always wanted. No question there is a long way to go but the wheels are in motion. A college professor in Virginia is teaching my paper format in one of her classes. Some of the smartest people on the internet–in America–read my site and apparently consider me of enough potential to give feedback. Traffic is up and every few weeks I wake up to find myself with an avalanche of new readers.

But here is the dirty little secret: None of it means anything. It doesn’t mean a thing. And it wouldn’t if it was multiplied by thousand. It won’t fix who you are. No amount of people liking you or reading your thoughts or talking about you is going to change the person you look at in the mirror. Because as far as your daily existence goes, the effects are negligible. Facebook friends don’t exist, they are just bits of computer data. And I know this sounds heretical and a ton of kids would kill for these opportunities–I thought the exact same things when I didn’t have them. They matter sure, and they are fantastic but it they don’t alter the fundamentals of life.

You have to be happy with you. There is that Herodotus line about going out to enslave and coming back in the same chains you brought with you. I’m starting to feel that life is the same way–that the world, if you’re not careful, can end up being your master instead of the other way around. Or as Durden said “the things you own, end up owning you.” Layne Staley used to say that no matter who you are or what you’ve done, you still go home to yourself every night. And that is the fucking truth. So more than anything, getting that right is your first priority.

There is no excuse to ever stop working on that. It is the ultimate project, the one thing that determines all other things. But people are lazy and substances and delusions and dissonance are tempting alternatives. And I hate to tell you this, but they just don’t work.

I might not even be close to achieving the balance I am after but I do know that without it, I will never be happy. The whole “using the fear of not winning to keep winning” is to always be a tool and never an addiction. From what little I have seen so far, the game always lasts longer than the victory–you spend more time getting there than you spend there. So it stands to reason that unless you can enjoy the journey, the nature of things has predisposed you to an unfavorable ratio.

Cicero‘s view was that you unless you can be happy on the rack, you can never be happy anywhere. Because if your contentment depends on anything that can be taken away from you then you’ll always be plagued with the fear of losing it. So the solution is to give in a little, embrace the chaos–the art of acquiescence. That there is no good and bad, only perception. And the secret then is to understand the transient nature of things–to appreciate them while they are here and look upon them fondly when they are gone. But who does that really? Who honestly can say that their happiness depends on little externally and that a quick punch from fate couldn’t knock down the things they’ve built?

I know I can’t. But I’m working on it.

To be continued…