by Anton Martin Smith antonmartinsmithwrites@gmail.com or martinantonsmith@gmail.com
(0)
You could say he was the “King Of Mediocre Environments”.
Well – to be exact – he was the “King Of Muddling through Mediocre Environments”.
You see his biggest crime was not being a ‘neurotypical, Type A personality’.
He was just one of a large minority of these undeclared underclasses.
Put simply the world was not made for people like he.
For Truth and Authenticity were a threat to the ‘neurotypical anti-world’.
What was the core feature or premise of this world?
The neurotypicals based it on “The Five Core Maxims of Bad”:
Bad is Good and Good is Bad.
Those being good must be mocked, excluded, and shackled.
Those being bad must be exalted, included, and rewarded.
The currency is lies made believable – aka Twoface-ism.
The weapons of this war are of psycho-culturo-economic type.
This is the World War he and all like him had to endure.
He liked to call this War and its battlefields an alias – ‘The Swamp’
These words are a small window into his, and by extension all the other non-neurotypicals’ lives.
It is a casual walk through the battlefield of the War they wage on us daily.
But I wonder – have the Neurotypicals allocated themselves too much rope?
(Or should I say “Nero-Typicals”)
(i)
At school he excelled intellectually so of course he was hated –
Yes he did go to a state school after all.
The “Private schools” have a lot wrong – but at least they are not anti-intellectual.
So he was hated by the ones who gossiped with rapier tongues,
By the oafs who kicked pigskins around a field – and badly.
Then as the years rolled by he got an office job & was too good at his job there too.
Again they hated him for that – in true quasi-high school culture.
He was punished by being good by being the work of two jobs.
Then – of course – he had to do the brain work of his manager –
All without extra pay of course.
Yes we live in very un-enlightened times – if only it was the 1800s again.
Of course he had his unhealthy distractions –
But they are “too stock” to mention.
Yes you could say he was “The King Of Mediocre Environments”.
Although this is of course a misnomer – for he was just a twenty-first century pauper.
In that century they were good at making paupers think they weren’t paupers but had ‘lifestyles’.
All because you could have a rushed coffee and a salad in some grimy urban cafe.
(ii)
Yes – he’d spent his whole life up until then – in these shabby transmogrified environments.
Of course he was quite stoic – he rebelled and created a rolling ‘private universe’ of hobbies.
This helped him literally survive while swimming amongst the mediocrity-swamps.
This allowed him to keep sitting next to those that hated him so.
But of course they all hated each other as well – let’s not deny that fact.
If you have brains you are hated, but not having them does not preclude you from being hated.
Yes let there be no chicanery abound throughout the realm on that matter.
Anyway let us return to our man – ‘He’.
In this case at thirty-five he couldn’t take it anymore.
Or should I say his mind couldn’t take it no more.
So he quit the “official mediocre workplaces” –
The places where everyone works in big cities.
They are too heartbreakingly dull to even describe.
And anyway everyone knows what a modern grey office space 1864 – Present is like.
Damn you Bismarck for perfecting the bureaucratic state!
For nothing has changed since then –
But Durkheim’s state of ‘anomie’ (alienation from the whole) has been perfected.
(iii)
So he retired to a form of ‘unofficial mediocrity’ – well that was his aim at least.
He would go to places where he could indulge his ‘private universes’ more.
Of course madmen often state the same aims – the adage is true:
The line between the madman and the genius is a thin one – often entirely invisible in fact.
But perhaps ‘retire’ is the wrong word to use of him.
It was more that he felt he had three pressing and stark choices:
Stay & become a ‘Totalised Calcified Urban Zombie’,
Stay – & ‘Die Suddenly’,
Leave & ‘Avoid Death’s Ringing Knock Knock Knock’.
So he chose the latter option – a kind of ‘hollow victory’ you might say.
Yes you might accuse him of being a ‘beggar’ who thought he was a ‘chooser’.
This of course was how they ‘did people in’ in this age – they made beggars all think they could choose.
The age was indeed marked by a ubiquitous sleight of hand.
For it knew ’twas always best to ‘hide in plain sight’.
(iv)
Now back to our ‘he’.
Sadly there was an option that did not appear & he now could not take:
“Thrive by backing your intelligence & skills wisely – go it alone”.
You see he had swum around as a “King of Mediocrity” too long – well pauper.
That swamp that was the age of his times had by now ontologically pruned off all branches of ‘true freedom’.
The ages he lived in had learnt a lot since 1864 after all – it was no dummy by now.
All that was left for him was to enter this slow life kind of “alternate-life state”.
Sadly – like practically all the others like him in these ages – he had left his run too late.
“The Swamp” very much has its own distinct immovable ‘sociological event horizon’.
(v)
So anyway back to our man ‘he’.
Recall he (naively?) – chose to ‘live imperfectly’ and not stay to be a metropolis zombie and/or die.
It was like a half-pie-stolen Thoreau-like “Walden, Life In The Woods” situation.
The details of which are again far too stock & dull to delineate.
You see for all his talent –
He underestimated the long-term effects of swimming among the choking weeds of swampish mediocrity.
Living amongst those who casually hated him in those urban low level passive aggressive cubicle-hellscapes.
And to re-iterate – yes he was not ‘alone’ in that – not by any absolute measure at least.
He was a distinct minority in daily repetitive relative terms only.
In theory the people suffering just like him were there somewhere but always hidden.
Almost all the truly talented fall into these metropolis murderous weeds.
And their multitudinous city-brothers die just like them in other swamps ‘sight unseen’.
In fact the ones you do see (‘lauded intellectuals’) are a false version of the true ones that surely are all ‘sifted out’.
Once in a blue moon of course someone like him slips through the veil un-reproducibly.
After all – no system of desolation and repression of the ‘beautiful flowing mind’ can be totally perfect.
(vi)
I have a theory about those like this that aren’t swamp-fakes but genuinely rise up like Icarus:
It is a mixture of chance, natural confidence, & pigheaded ‘will’ –
And I am tempted to say that all three are of an a-priori nature.
And yes – I am ok with being accused of ‘thinking like Schopenhauer’.
Of course a big part of me rebels against my own theory.
After all – no one likes to admit he does not have a-priori confidence and iron will.
No one really wants to admit to being ‘unlucky’.
For no one wants to admit to being ‘trapped forever’,
No matter how thick his life’s ‘prison walls’ may be.
For once all this is truly admitted deeply and psychically –
Surely this is when a man ends it all – must end it all.
(vii)
Sometimes despite all this – our ‘he’ was able to lift his spirits above the swamp’s natural abyss.
Yes – he knew there was a songbird of true redemption soaring from mediocrity’s foul swamps.
But it was a ‘Bukowskian songbird’ – covered up by an amalgam of neurotic forces.
Yes he also knew the last man to write about seeing this songbird is now long gone.
Yes he had his idle thoughts on his life of swimming in mediocre swamps & crawling out half-alive.
Perhaps what the wags that occupied the recesses of his mind said was true.
Perhaps he was really just ‘Shoppin’ with Schopenhauer’ (again).
But that thought sounded far too glib and enjoyable for his liking.
Schopenhauer wouldn’t like it like that – he thought.
Come to think of it – neither would Bukowski either – he again thought.
And while swamp-swimming at mediocrity’s inlets it’s surely ok to have the odd ‘anti-hero’ –
If not a bloody requirement!
After all – me thinking like this might just be the only thing that was now keeping me alive.
Yes he did enjoy listening to his inner thoughts – he was indeed his own audience.
And somehow he stayed alive long enough to once write his unique ‘swamp filled’ story.
(viii)
And not long before he drew his last breath he did conjecturise,
Was I finally able to leave ‘The Swamp’ behind?
Was my redemption always going to happen?.
Well if Earth isn’t hell then it can’t be identically equal to the ‘bad side of hades’ – can it?
While one is still drawing breath on this mortal coil –
It must be possible to crawl out of even the both most viscous and vicious swamp.
What would Schopenhauer say to that?
He might disagree.
I know that oh dear Bukowski would agree.
Buk did say that life was all about how well you wade through the effluent,
And not how well you avoid it.
They are fine words indeed, I think.
And now I can finally leave ‘the swamp’ that I thought I had already long ago left.
For the great adage is true – ‘you cannot wrap your arms around a memory’.
(ix)
And so this was the tale of ‘he’ – the man who tried his best in the War against the non-neurotypicals.
No he didn’t amass a soldier-army of his glorious Neurodivergents to defeat the ghouls of the ‘Big Five Maxims’.
He was just dealing with the day-to-day officially undeclared battle-scape he’d known his whole life.
Was he distracted by the minutiae of the War’s myriad of energy sapping tricks? – maybe he was.
But perhaps he was doing what he was destined to do all along.
Perhaps he was put inside the early part of the War as a ‘Thomas Paine figure’.
For he was aware of another ‘non-bad-five’ – and now banned – maxim:
The Pen is mightier than the sword.
Sure in his case his words were to him just a ‘glorified hobby’ –
Something to get him through daily pains of War as one of millions, perhaps billions nominated –
Nominated to be the enemy of the ‘Nero-Typicals’.
But I have a deadly suspicion that Thomas Paine of circa 1776 was of much the same ilk.
You can see it in his writing, after all – can you not?.
Yes – sometimes a man’s place in the world is decided retrospectively.
And always always always by the eventual victors of said War.
So if you are reading this in one hundred years time –
Perhaps we almost certainly won the War against the Nero-Typicals.
Unless of course these words were smuggled out by a soldier –
A remnant of the almost extinct ‘non-neurotypical rebel force’,
Which continues to hide in the cracks and ruins of a ‘Forever War’ as they always have –
Just trying to survive, hoping for a better day, and wishing for the War to finally be over.
Kidding themselves that it is not already long over and irrevocably lost?
And hoping that this week’s new ‘Grand Revolutionary Plan’ will free them at last.
Whichever the case I can only hope for ‘Glorious Victory’ and that these words will survive.
And if indeed the War is lost – let us not suffer the ignominy of suing for a ‘good peace settlement’.
For while the Non-Neurotypical Soldier is prone to dreaming
– he should refrain from being delusional.
And in closing and at the risk of flogging a now grossly overused quotation –
I fear we will have to follow what Patrick Henry said to rouse his fellow rebels in 1775:
Give me victory or give me death!!!
Anton Martin Smith Writer 