Look Closer...

Just like many of the other things that I've been motivated to attempt over the last several years of my life, I owe my stab at web-authoring to Mike Rocks. Good guy. Notoriously smart. Notoriously unique. We'll be in dialogue, please visit his blog.

I think that mirrors are one of the most interesting and overlooked staples of the human condition. Jacques Lacan theorized that infants first begin to encounter struggles with selfhood and identity when they first encounter their reflection in a mirror. The complete body that the infant sees doesn't correspond with his or her underdeveloped physicality. The rest of our lives are simply spent trying to live up to that ideal image we first see as infants. Inadequacy starts young.

Wouldn't it be fucked up to have a kid and never let her see herself in a mirror? There are far too few 'human experiments.' If ethics wasn't such a demanding bitch then we could watch half-wits race through giant mazes. Only the winner gets to eat. 

Looking at yourself in a mirror is a random experience. For me, anyway. What do you think when you're staring at yourself in the morning before that big important meeting? I look good? You look good? Are you talking to yourself? Or yourself in some Narnia-like mirror world full of goat people and talking lions? Personally, looking in a mirror only serves as a means to further push me into a state of mind-blowingly random self reflection. Go look at yourself. Not just to make your hair look elegantly disheveled or pluck your eyebrows. Look and think. Here's my best attempt at self-reflection (pun?), stream of consciousness style:
 

You. There you are. You love dark, heavy beer. Stout. You love to simplify things. You always complicate. A true champion of contradictions. And incomplete sentences. You squander all your cash; it’s not as much fun in the bank. You are capable of writing long, wordy sentences that vaguely justify seven years of college and reflect the ubiquity of literature in your life as a perpetually confused, drunk, and potentially intelligent human being. But instead you spend hours on practically nothing; you squander time like you squander cash. You wish you could put some time in the bank and earn interest on it. Nine percent. Or maybe 11. You hate MLA format.  You must  be  close to bankruptcy by now. You have so many student loans that the Internal Revenue Service has deemed you their honorary “sugar daddy.” You wonder about the first person that cracked open a sea urchin and tried eating it. You think, “What the fuck were they thinking?” You associate with similar intelligent idiots. Your closest friend says things like “Every time I hear that song ‘Bring the funk Bring the noise’ I get a painful erection that won't go away until I kill a migrant farm worker.” You think it’s hilarious. You wonder what Freud would think. Or any other stuck up intellectual whose sense of humor is undoubtedly as poor as their sex life. You can’t figure out if it’s “whose” or “who’s.” You know that it doesn’t really matter. You enjoy randomness. Your  mother loves cats. You are allergic to cats.  You know a lot of useless facts, but you don’t think that Jeopardy is a feasible option. You write all the time and marinate your metaphors in the vomit induced by last night’s overconsumption. You are disgusted with that last sentence – the metaphor makes you want to vomit. You think that vegans will be fucked if some bored scientist proves that trees can feel pain instead of finding a cure for cancer. Your favorite kind of doughnut is jelly; you don’t really care for the taste but you love the concept. You think ‘sea urchin’ vaguely sounds like ‘searching.’ You want some brave soul to try eating you. You really enjoy sexual innuendos. There you are. You.

Some of my blogs will take this form - mostly incoherent rambling. Some people have called me unique, but I'm just an infant, baby. Time to live up to my reflection.