You Are the Bull, We Are the China Shop

Greetings from Planet Rebel.

Well, not really. I'll explain.

I'm meant to be in school now, but I'm not, for a couple of reasons. One being, naturally, that I'm a lazy cunt. Fair enough. When my mam left for work this morning before I was out of bed, that sent a message to my brain saying 'hullo, maybe you could just stay here.' I didn't, as it turned out- got up, with all the best intentions and had breakfast. And then said fuck it, I'm too lazy.

There's another reason though, that's not entirely to do with bald laziness, but some something far more interesting. And it's this: I quite enjoy subverting that which we're told so frequently we must do. It's the 'we must' part that I find interesting, because I don't really understand what it means. We must. I get the literal translation, but it's well known that literal translations have fuck-all to do with communication. So something you 'must' do goes a lot deeper than what you may think.

The thing is, there's no real reason why you must do something. Rules are just made by other people to impose their will on you. But more often than not, we follow them. Why? Because it has been embedded into our brains- do this, do this, don't do that- from such an early age that in most cases the thought sticks. Also, we learn as kids that if we try to ignore that thought, we are punished, so we don't do it again. There's a word in psychology for it: Negative Reinforcement, and Operant Conditioning.

I realised all this quite recently, while under the odd influence of Prozac. For those that don't know, Prozac is a standard-issue anti-depressant that I've been taking for a few weeks. It's effects only kick in during week three, and in my case this happened rather strongly. I was sitting at the computer, and discovered that all my worries had melted away. My sense of the future, and moreover, punishment, was abstract and distant. I'd be lying if I said that was an unpleasant feeling, because it wasn't; it was bliss.

What was strange however was how frail my reality became as a result of the drugs. I had quite frequents moments where I'd look around, and have this bizarre 'where am I?' feeling. Like the world was this vast, unfamiliar thing that didn't feel quite real. It was then that I began to think about rules and about how brittle and unnesseccary they are. You see, in the end, it's our everyone else's thoughts that stop us from being properly free, not our's. Thanks to years of conditioning, we have been trained to think 'I can't do that' or 'I must do this', until they become subconscious thoughts, and we consider them our own. But our existences are seperate and unique and the only thing that we really have that belongs to us, so why should they be dictated by someone else?

Fuck that.

That's why I'm not in school.

Peace and chicken grease,
S.xxx