Baatar stepped his right foot to the edge, shifted his weight to his right foot and pivoted on his right foot. In his pivot, his gaze swept into the abyss that was now directly off his right boot and Baatar the Immortal Monster, the Slayer, the Will, the Psyche, the Lust for Living, the Hero of His Own Story, the Only Character in the Only Story, paused. Baatar paused and stared. The tip of his sword dipped to the stone floor. There was Nothing to be seen.

But something must matter, mustn't it? And I must care about something, mustn't I? I care about beauty, but surely beauty doesn't matter. I care about poetry. Nothing could matter less than poetry.

Intelligence cannot be faked. But I try.

Do coincidences mean anything to you? I'll offer: they mean nothing to me. No evidence of secret order to the universe, no guiding forces, no supernatural intelligences. The human mind, so successful at increasing the evolutionary adaptability of the human species because it is so adept at identifying patterns, is also so flawed by the same talent because it so often sees patterns where none exist.

But maybe you believe in Magic?

What a great love I once had.

What a common belief.

I like listening to the goings-on of the world at 2:30 at night.

Tell me about it, the loneliness of literature.

I do not recycle for the same reason that I do not play the lottery: because I understand mathematics.

The United States produces annually 254,000,000.00 short tons of garbage. One United States resident produces annually 0.84 short tons of garbage.(1)

For comparison, represent the garbage that one U.S. resident annually produces as one second. The garbage that the U.S. annually produces is then represented as nine and a half years. The difference that one second makes over a span of nine and a half years is incomprehensibly inconsequential. The garbage that any single U.S. resident produces is incomprehensibly inconsequential.

To act, one must be so vain as to believe that one's actions are of consequence; to recycle, you must believe that you make a difference, despite the mathematical truth that you do not make a difference.

Humans motivate their actions through egregious irrationality or outrageous vanity.

To be rational and undeluded about your relative value as a member of human society is to be philosophically closer to oblivion.

(1) United States Environmental Protection Agency, Municipal Solid Waste Generation, Recycling, and Disposal in the United States: Facts and Figures for 2007

Is it really okay? It's a missed connection, isn't it? It's a fear and a sadness, and a sense that each individual is not worth so very much, because there are so many individuals, and how to distinguish them?

People are generally not interested in other people, so to be forthcoming is to be boring, because no one really cares. At the same time, people are generally vain, so they like to be forthcoming. This means that people are generally boring to one another.

The most difficult thing about being alone is remaining alone; other people regularly challenge your aloneness.

Humans are not very interesting creatures. Their behavior is simple and repetitive, and established and basically unchangeable by the time they're eight years old.

I have a bad and worsening habit of ignoring people.

I have a good and improving habit of ignoring people.

What I write is not disturbing. Conscious existence is disturbing.

I don't understand other humans' emotions and motivations. I can perceive them and ape them and cognitively diagram them, but I can't overlook the pointlessness. These soft organic unhardy precariously organized creatures are going to die. They know they are going to die. Why do they not act like they are going to die?

I have a terminal condition. It is my life. Why does this condition bother me when the same condition does not bother you? You do not think about the circumscribed epoch of your life. I think about it.

Nothing exists beyond this moment, so nothing can be lost.

I do not like religious fantasy, and all religious thought is fantasy.

You do not want to know my thoughts, you would not like them, you would never accept them, and, most hopeless of all, you could not understand them.

On every occasion, accept chewing gum when it is offered.

Maintain in your possession a tangible symbol of life yet to come. A train schedule, a folded map, an unopened condom—each in its iconization of promise may serve as a talisman against daily pain.

We don't bury goods with the dead; we keep those for the living. We don't believe in sentiment; we don't feel it. We don't lose time over emotion for there is only limited time for action. We don't weep, we don't agonize, we don't idealize; we kill whenever there is benefit in it. We eat you, because you are made of meat.

I like you because you don't know who I am.

Until every child already in existence lives without suffering, there is no justification for creating another child.

Everything at four o'clock a.m. is eerily beautiful.

The laughter of others reminds me that death is approaching.

Every laugh is a laugh in the face of death. A laugh is a rebuff of death. A laugh is wholly irrational, as life in an expanding, freezing, and dying universe is.

Death -- obliteration -- comes regardless.

...like almost everything else humans do, it's pointless.

I seek what is unfindable.

Theological noncognitivism: 'god' is an incomprehensible idea. How can something exist outside of the natural world, unmeasureable, unknowable, unperceivable, yet have an effect upon the natural world? It is incoherent. Yet there is something that exists with certainty outside of the natural world and has an effect upon the natural world: thought. So now the idea of 'god' is thinkable. And because all of the universe is created by the consciousness and exists only as thought, we have in fact found 'god the creator.' It is the ukhaan; it is I.

Choosing to not act is as worthy as choosing to act; choosing to cease is as worthy as choosing to live.

"The ineluctable destiny of each of us is to be forgotten."

Existence itself -- any kind of existence -- is horrific.

Pretending that the universe has meaning does give it meaning, but it is just pretend, but it is real, because reality is pretend.

I am not special; there are thousands identical to me. You are not special; there are thousands identical to you. But I held your head in my hands, and we were gentle, and the memory of that, lived or imagined, is the only thing that is real and certain and persisting, and important.

"I don't want your god; I would cut your god into steaks and eat him with horseradish."

Life is much easier if you don't have anything to do with other people.

accepting nothing
challenging the void itself to prove itself
and nothing to support him or catch him
spins through the void
true intellectual fortitude is required to embrace uncertainty
is independent, free in the world, and unconcerned with the ridiculousness that has come before

You see, the atheist derives childish reassurance from a logically unsupportable system of belief concerning the nature of existence, and in this way is no different from your average born-again Jesus-fellating Christian, secure in his “knowledge” of something that cannot be known, whereas the agnostic exhibits true intellectual fortitude through the difficult and uncomfortable acceptance of all-pervading uncertainty. The atheist mind rests untroubled in its cradle of certainty, spitting up all over logic and using rationalism as its diaper while cuddling self-satisfaction to its uncreased cheek, but the agnostic mind careens through the existential void at uncontrollable velocities in defiance of any effort to delimit what is and is not possible, demanding each viewpoint (including cherished atheism, precious and sacrosanct to the weaker minds) to prove itself, and remaining unsurprised though bemused as each fails, and the uncompromising agnostic mind rockets ever onward toward unknown destiny.

I remember.

You are but a muse to me; the world is unreal to me.

It doesn't have anything to do with intelligence; it has to do with existential indifference.

Much poetry that is designated as "poetry" is uncreative, uninteresting free verse; song lyrics, however, rigidly adhere to the poetic standards of rhyme and meter. Songwriter-as-poet and lyrics-as-poetry are particularly apparent in hip-hop or rap, with the musicality reduced to a minimum, and the merit of the art judged not on musicianship but on the imagery and poetry of the verse. Hip-hop is produced and is popular in what seems every language in the world. It's cool to be a "hip-hop artist;" it's dorky to be a "poet," but broad appreciation of evocative and linguistically acrobatic poetry is certain.

The only incontestable fact of existence: I cannot know whether I am alone.

In order to live, I must ignore the only incontestable fact of existence.

I like girls who know how to enjoy themselves. I love women who know how to enjoy men.

Now tell me something that you know you shouldn't tell me, but that you really want to tell me.

"Do you drink?"
"I should."

No! I want to wake up Sunday mornings in white sheets entwined with you.

No! I want to wake up face down in dusty alleys in Polynesia.

No. I do not want to wake up.

I enjoy general and specific perversion.

These moments, these moments, these moments.

You've had lovers, do you think about them?, are we not supposed to think about them?, then what are we to think about?, it's 6:30 AM.

Writing is a terrible thing.

Sitting alone in a room.

Talking to yourself.

One woman is more dangerous than a tumen of men.

I got a new ring. It's made of solid gold, covered in plastic.

It looks just like a plastic ring, but mine's made of solid gold.

Words, like life, have no meaning.

Where there is consciousness, there is a wish for eternal consciousness.

Passion fell upon me like an avalanche today, belaboring my breathing, crushing my clear head.

Life exists in the blur, in the fuzz at the edges. Life exists in the blur.

Life is too awful. Let's live in
the contemplated possibilities.

Politics is ephemeral.

Art, less so.

"I love you. Were that it enough."

Flipping the coin: 50% heads, 50% tails. No odds are given for the coin landing upright on its edge, yet sometimes it does.

The implications of philosophical truth are so horrifying that the human mind cannot comprehend them and remain sane.

Humans are irrational. You must be irrational to be conscious and to exist in a meaningless world.

She said, “I didn’t believe they would.”
She said, “I couldn’t believe they did.”

The more I think, the less human I become.

Why is this? Isn’t thinking exactly what distinguishes humans from everything else in existence?

This is what I am. And it is nothing.

I do not believe in the existence of other people, but I do not believe in the non-existence of other people, either. It is an inhuman way to live, but it is the only way that is logically consistent. Logic, it turns out, is not for humans.

“Did you ever have that happen where you’re sitting in front of the computer all day and then you go outside and you’re amazed by the resolution of everything? Like, ‘Wow! Look at the leaves on that tree!’”

“Yeah, the pixels in meatspace are really small.”

“Who are you?”
“I am nobody, and so are you.”

I am living vicariously through myself.

"Fun but pointless: I guess that pretty much sums it up. In fact, I guess that pretty much sums up existence."

Ambition poisons a life.

I want to be the white whale, a solitary whale, alone and roaming a wide world, eating my squid.

Nationalism encourages war. Do not associate yourself with any nation; associate yourself only with humanity.

Yes, I think in language. Yes, I organize all of reality in language. Yes, I exist in language. But language is not my existence.

There is only one story. That is the story of my life, this life, the life.

“You shouldn’t be here.”
“I shouldn’t be anywhere.”

“Did you sleep well?”
“Never.”

Humans really like killing each other. They do it again and again, on massive scales. Humans do not like being killed and they do not like those humans to whom they are close being killed. This is a paradox.

Everything goes away. Life __ death. Everything __ fine __ pain __ dead __ goes away.

I cannot go to bed. I am never done with the night.

The white whale weighs on my mind.

"We all have our little ideas about what life is. If we don’t have those ideas, we don’t go on living."

The weak die. The strong die also.

Entropy is constantly grinding each of us to nothingness, but it grinds down some of us so much sooner than others, whether it is that we begin with so much less energy, or that entropy grinds us down at such a higher rate, or some sum of these.

Our great unanswered mystery of philosophy, medicine, neuroscience, psychology: how is it that an immaterial thing—consciousness—can act upon, and be acted upon by, a material universe? How can the immaterial and the material causally interact?

One resolution: the perceived material universe is immaterial, for it exists only within the immaterial consciousness. For example: I am a Boltzmann brain, and all of my perceived reality is in fact imagined by me and therefore immaterial; my consciousness can interact with this perceived reality unparadoxically because there is no interaction between the immaterial and the material: my immaterial consciousness is interacting only with itself. The true material reality of the Boltzmann brain that gives rise to my consciousness is unperceived—and perhaps unperceivable—by my consciousness.

The Internet might already be conscious, in a way that we cannot conceive. It might not be able to comprehend, relate to, or communicate with us, just as I cannot comprehend, relate to, or communicate with the neurons of my brain.

Imagine the Internet believing itself to exist in a material universe, but that universe in fact existing only immaterially within the Internet. This is analogous to me as a Boltzmann brain believing myself to exist in a material universe, but that universe in fact existing only immaterially within my consciousness.

Death is not evil, it is not malignant; it is indifferent.

“Honor will not change our fate. Nothing will change our fate.”

“She’s allergic to garlic.”

“That bloodsucking, nightwalking bitch!”

“I will be dead, and you will hear about it, and you will think, ‘It was a tragedy that he ever lived.’”

"Ha ha. You ask me whether a story actually happened? I tell you, I am not certain and cannot be certain whether any event has ever occurred. You ask me whether I invented a story? I tell you, I have a suspicion that I am inventing everything, including you, but of the validity of this suspicion I am not certain, and--and this is the important part--I cannot be certain."

“We be in Hell, and he be the Devil.”

“If we be in Hell, then those be demons,” and he gestured at the hundreds of winking glowering eyes in the crimson dark surrounding them. Then nodding at the sleeping form of Baatar, “And he be the angel conducting us through them.”

no fear of death, no hope for immortality

“And it doesn’t happen. Nothing happens. Life doesn’t happen.”

“Black is the color of space; black is the absence of light.”

“Writing things down is civilization. It is how the living receive ideas from each other and from the dead; it is how the living pass on ideas to each other and to the unborn.”

"Where are you going with your life? Here, do you see this? This is my life. ...If I am alive in twenty-nineteen, this is what I will be doing. It does not matter who else is alive at that time. It does not matter if I am the only one alive at that time. It does not matter if I am limbless, sightless, whatever. This is what I will be doing."

"...This is a chart of thoughts."

"These are thoughts that need to be thought out."

"What is this column of numbers?"

"The mythical birth of some hippie in a desert is not the beginning of time for me. This system begins time from the date of my first recorded thought, which corresponds to nineteen-eighty-eight in this Christian system."

"...This goes on for a hundred years. Do you think you're going to live to a hundred and thirty?"

"If I am alive in twenty-one-oh-eight, this is what I will be doing. I don't know if I will be alive in twenty-one-oh-eight, and I don't know if I'll be alive in twenty-oh-nine, but if I am, this is what I will be doing."

"...You think so differently from other people."

"I think. I wonder whether other people think."

"You are such an asshole."

"I plainly am not and cannot be certain whether other people think."

"Because you are a solipsist."

"Because I am the Solipsist. Logic concludes that there is only one for certain."

She was crying again.

“I’ve just never had any use for people. And people get angry when you don’t have any use for them.”

Nocturnal in habit, and thought.

Nobody is interested in my stuff more than I am, and I am not interested in anybody's stuff more than my own.

This is what life is: creating a world for oneself.