Getting Mercator'd
2026-04-30
You ever just feel like all you'll ever amount to is just a series of impulses that can only see life as a series of unreliable snapshots and not the full, fluid thing it actually is?
Yeah, me neither.
Anyway, when I got home from trivia last night, I was having a cig before going inside and I was thinking about how unreliable a self-construct really is. The ego, the essence of who we are—whatever you want to call it—is this constantly dynamic thing, yet we can only perceive it as a concrete and static image constructed entirely of symbols. Whack! But yeah, it makes me hearken back to yesterday's thread on not trusting my own judgment. How can one expect to get where they're going when they can't even see the full map? Baudrillard would retort here by saying "yeah, that's the whole point, buddy. Just make the map yourself because that's all there really is anyway." But how can I call myself any kind of reality cartographer when it is physically impossible to see the whole territory? I can only stand in one spot at a time. Slight tangent, but you know how some people pride themselves as multitaskers despite that being literally impossible? You don't have to make your ADHD a flex, lil bro. But anyway, cartography, like many pursuits, is subject to the total limits of our bodies.
At trivia, we have a fun little joke we say when we're trying to answer geography questions and one of us gets caught up on the spatial part of it. When a place up north is farther away than we think it is, we'll say "you're getting Mercator'd" because that's the most common map one would see in their classrooms growing up. And yeah, even in this weirdly self-aware presence I establish in these entries, I still know that I'm getting Mercator'd intellectually and emotionally speaking. Sorry to get so meta on you there, but hey, at least I don't know where I'm getting Mercator'd, amirite ladies? Don't worry, I'm not going to ruminate on those possibilities for the rest of this entry because I've come to see that is just a bad habit of mine.
But hey, sometimes going through those series of thoughts and emotions and landing on a somewhat decent resolution is satisfying, right? I've talked about pursuits before and how I disagree with the notion of the pursuit of desire being the greatest desire, and I think it's important for me to elaborate on that further, perhaps remix it a bit. Anyone who has struggled with some kind of addiction knows that the pursuit of chasing a feeling gets tiring, especially when the subsequent rushes get less and less potent. You get to a point where you just sit there with yourself and say "ah shit, what am I even doing?" And you feel like an idiot for constantly pursuing that high so intently. If the addiction is particularly dangerous, there might've been plenty of damage to relationships and property to mull over too. So in that way, it really is important to know what you're chasing and why.
Many great thinkers throughout history have posited that there is always going to be some kind of thing we've got to be up to, some kind of next step to take, or something greater to aspire to; the only thing we really have control over is our choice as to what that is, so we've got to make it count, right? I think it's important to aspire to things and find ways to get toward those aspirations, but industrialized society has this way of perpetuating motion so that we get frequently disoriented. Don't worry, I'm not going to fall into that boring rhetorical argument of "and that's why we need to slow down and why you should buy my course about it." No, pursuing stuff is good, being fast is fine, but why be so intent on always locking in? Why be so intent on getting anywhere? If you're somewhere and you've got everything you need, why bother making stupid problems for yourself? If you want to meditate (or pray to Christ if you're really cool), there's no need to focus on it as a pursuit of any kind.
Pursue the non-pursuit and you will find that next step in your pursuit, pursuer.
Movement sucks. Well, industrialized movement at least. I struggle with time anxiety—feeling like I always have to check the clock, be on time, get to where I need to go or whatever, you know? I guess we want cartography so that we can get our bearings. Even outside of industrialization and time being invented to sell clocks, life itself is just always going to be some degree of disorienting. Every check of the watch, every time I inadvertently ask for reassurance—it's all in an effort to figure out where, who, when, how, and what, but not always why I am. Is there comfort in disorientation? There could be, but I'd be lying if I claimed those efforts to find that comfort are actually meaningful in the way I want them to be. I think everyone has that desire for agency, to feel like they're here (whatever that means) and that they're impacting the world in some way. But is that really even so important? Everyone on this planet only knows what it's like to be alive, and the question of what comes after that is something no one can really answer.
"Be in the moment. Live in the here and now," a stoic with a drinking problem would probably try to tell you. But honestly, I just want to rest in my impulses, and those impulses—due to the power of my mind—have the opportunity to go elsewhere, albeit briefly and with less certainty than the current moment. Why be so concerned with certainty? That whole idea of the right now is a harrowing and uncertain thing too (peep a story on this theme if you feel so inclined), so even outside of comfort, discomfort, serenity, and chaos, there exists just that snapshot. All we can really do is analyze that frame piece by piece, and only make conjectures about its conclusions. And that's fine, really. It's a good thing to not know stuff. Not knowing stuff is awesome. I'm reminded of the classic verse in Psalm 119, the longest in the Book of Psalms by far. I've dropped it before, but here it is again:
Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.
As a writer, it's a tough thing to say that all the most important words have already been written, but I think that's awesome. Honestly, it's great that my job here is easier because of that. But more important than my words here, it's important to understand what we're actually up against in these small, thoughtful conjectures I write here every day. I read up a bit on Saint Fursey, an Irish pre-Schism saint who had visions of demons and angels fighting for his soul. He got to see the heights of Heaven and the depths of Hell. In Heaven, the language of the angels was song—beautiful singing. In Hell, it was argumentation—bickering, posturing, rationalization. I know that my register tends to oscillate between informal speech and quasi-academic loquaciousness, and there's an important reason for that. In these personal confessions to you, I attempt to discern the bickering from the beautiful in a way that helps me come to further understand the intent of my mission: to find God. Not for you, but for me. I hope when you read these vignettes, you don't hear me arguing into the void.
If I did my job right, it should sound like singing toward the sky.
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