The Bitter Old Man
Keep those holograms to yourself!
The bitter old man remembers so many things! They weigh down on him, voices of people he hates chatter in his brain until a real human interrupts it and furthers his aggravation. Through the lies he told himself and was told by others and then forgot the details of he’s built a projector in his head, the world becomes a disappointing hologram that shows him “how it really is” and he loves being angry at how it really is. It is his sentimental hobby to scream at this out-there thing that is “the world” and assert his non-similarity to it. He will tell you of how all those politicians just lie, he has never taken political action. He will tell you how X and Y do this and that and how awful it is, he knows no X’s or Y’s.
There is a blooming fascination with this sentimental hobby, the process of alienation from ghosts and self-staged disillusionment. The bitter old men sit and chatter, idly. “The world should be as such, it should be no more, I will eat this fucking world whole if I have to!”
But why do you want to eat that which hosts you? You sit in spaces full of other bitter old men who will tell you they are anything but, this is how you know precisely that they are!
We shouldn’t be too mean to these people though, they come in all forms and all ages and all duel with sentimentalities, springing from their mouths and screens, dulled to the point of uselessness against anyone who has not also dulled themselves as such. Sparks fly with each clash, old men gather and watch, hoping the sparks set them alight and burn themselves down along with “this world” they wish could be altered.
“This world” isn’t really this world. Its another, much like ours, captured with atomic detail by our own. The banality and violence of that which is real is scary stuff, hard to look at, you’ll either die of boredom or just die. If you can tame it and wrestle it into something plausible its much easier to fall within, to sit comfortably in, to ignore. But we don’t ignore. We, as bitter old men, cannot help but sear our eyes with the lurid walls of our retina.
The world, to be made into “the world” must be shared, its too finite to go toppling and restructuring to accommodate our whims, the world outsources this duty to the resonant cavity between our ears, swimming around, listlessly as we race to keep up as to not look back outside at what put it in us in there in the first place.
I think the tower of Babel was the birth of the bitter old man. The unified structure, rising to create a literal, physical, real metaphor for transcendence was toppled and language became divided, I forget who said it but someone said it would be hard to argue the pyramids were built by language but arguing that they couldn’t have been made without it is much more easily done. I think it is the same here. Babel needed unified language to be even feasible. Humanity, instead of using this tool to understand the transcendence they share and that exists outside of them, in their hubris they tried to make it a thing. An object. Something a single man could own or rule. This was the sin of it.
God divided these foolish men into different languages and created the bitter old man, he put transcendence back inside of us after we tried to tear it out. It wasn’t punishment, it was salvation from what would essentially have amounted to ripping our own hearts out.
So the bitter old man is insular and “doesn’t quite get it” but he was never supposed to, the party in his brain is how he bears the party under his feet. The squirming of a million microbes on a banks front-door handle can become a scintillating blaze of meaning for those who touch it.
“Am I grasping the entrance to opportunity?”
“I am entering a den of evil!”
“God, I hate lines.”
All these statements differ, they are not equivalent. They shouldn’t be but because we cannot share this insular projection we must carry it with us, speak it in spaces that are not harmonious to it, mould it against our wills or even knowledge. Over time we lose track of how it came to be and just accept “the world” for the world.
The inconsistencies in our interpretation become ontological and in that moment we become a bitter old man.
