The Knower
I have a secret. Several secrets, actually, but one big one that I am finally going to tell you. You can't blab it around though; okay?
You know that philosper or whatever, the new age guru person who is all the hype this year? That one they call The Knower, which is a ridiculously dramatic name, if you ask me? The one who is either being worshipped as the new Jesus/Buddha combo, or called a sham because of this whole anonymity thing? Well, I happen to know the reason why The Knower's identity has not been revealed. And I also happen to know that the public is being ripped off, but it is not by The Knower, himself. It is by the people who found the writings, and who are passing them off for more than they really are. And I know all this because the precious writings that are now hardbound, softbound, on t-shirts, and making millions for The Finders are from my lousy journal that I lost last year. In the 8th grade.
If you are alive while all this is happening, you know what I'm talking about. You have been bombarded with all things The Knower. It is possible that you've even read the stuff. And you might be a really decent, normal person, which is why I can't go forward now and tell everyone that it is my stuff. Just think how humiliating it would be to know that you were changing your life around the words of a thirteen-year-old girl who wears way too much black eyeliner, lets older guys feel her up, and is hated by her whole neighborhood and stepdad?
It's just all so weird. I didn't even realize I'd lost the journal until school started this year. Our English class, the first semester of my high school career, did this assignment where we were creating like a timeline of our thoughts or something, so I wanted to look back through my old journals a little. And when I went through the box of them, the one from the beginning of last year wasn't there. It was a black, spiral-bound notebook, unremarkable, and was just missing from the box. I am careful to never put my name or any personal information in my journals (that is saved for my diaries, or for fiction), so it didn't freak me out in an exposure way, but I really like to keep my thoughts with me, and I looked hard for that journal. All over our house, cars, etc. But nowhere. I figured I must have just left it somewhere I was writing last year toward the end, at an improbably convenient time near the end of it so I already had the next one to start, or maybe just dropped it out of my bag or something. Weird, no answers, but what can you do? I moved on.
Then for Christmas, my mom gets this book from her Overeaters Anonymous sponsor. It is called "Title of Amber's Journal" and the cover is all dreamy and clouds and typically annoying in it's intimation of having The Answers and of knowing who is going to be reading it in some interpersonal and smug way. That is all, no biggee, we all open other presents, life moves on.
Well, she starts thinking this book is genius, the Lord speaking to her in some interpersonal way that born again Christians always think is reserved for them. So she starts talking about it a lot. At dinner, on the way to the store in the car, whenever. And why would I listen to that crap, or pay any attention whatsoever, when she is increasing hypocritical and insane in her clinging to the thinking of others so that she can quit any responsibility to think for herself? Don't even get me going there; another day, maybe. So she's all The Knower this and The Knower that, and one day I am grounded for some retarded reason like breathing wrong around Nick, and they are not home and that stupid book is on the bathroom counter, and I had to do, you know, spend a while sitting there on the commode and didn't think to bring any reading material--it was sort of a surprise attach, I'm sure you more than enough know what I mean. So, I pick up the book by her beloved Knower, open randomly to a page, and read the following:
"Living the unexamined life is not worth living, as our friend Socrates clued us into so long ago. But what about the overexamined life? Did Socrates not have time in his life to get to this side of the coin, or are the times we live in now simply calling for a different philosophical and spiritual approach? Because while I don't know what my examination to happiness level might be if I spent my days sitting around on stone steps and under trees, thinking and sucking up the adoration of the people, I do know that examining my own life beyond a certain point opens a circular vortex that sucks me into a hopeless blackness."
Thank god I was on the toilet when I read this, that's all I can say. Because I can remember when I wrote it, lying on my stomach under a loading dock behind the Foam Made factory next to the tracks on a sunny but cold Fall afternoon last year. It was just the normal kind of stuff that goes through my brain constantly, and sometimes it's a temporary reliever to write it down. That's what my journals are for. And now my mom is reading it? And the rest of the freaking world? And they think they've discovered the greatest thinker in two thousand years? ... HA HA HA HA HA HA HAH A HA AH HA HA!
Okay, granted, part of me feels like it's evil that someone else is making money--a lot of money--of my own stuff. But what am I really supposed to do? There's just no way I could go forward about this. I mean, take just the personal life of me. How is my mom going to feel knowing she's been, literally, preaching to the choir for the past two months!? Ha ha ha. It is all so ridiculous and I'm going crazy in my head alone with this reality. I don't trust anybody enough to tell them this absurdity. Probaby nobody would believe it, anyway. Who could? But it's true, and I have six more journals full of similar brain sludge to prove it. There are just so many angles to look at this.
The world thinks I'm brilliant?
For wondering and thinking about the kind of stuff I try pretty hard to rid my mind of?
Is it truly that possible that I am surrounded by idiots?
Who ever really gets the chance to find out, and now live with the depressing truth.
I half want to seek out people that hate the Knower books. Oh, yeah---there are four of them. They took the journal and split it up into four books. Artful little blurbs on each page, lots of white space all around, fancy fonts, and quotes in the margins from my "contemporaries"---Socrates, Jesus, Buddha. HA HA HA HA HA HA! What would the world do if it knew the author was grounded right now, sitting on the roof outside her bedroom window, smoking a cigarette? That I have been grounded for going on three weeks now, and have not left my room except for school and the mandatory showing downstairs at the dinner table? If they knew that I am so non-revered in my own house that a grown man can take out his lifetime of fury on me, and people just watch alternatively sadly and irritatedly from the sidelines? That one of these passive audience members is my own mother, who has--get this!--actually used my own words to rationalize this fucked up situation to me in the past month! AH AH HA HA HA! It is all too sick. How can I be expected to come out all right from this kind of surreal madness that is actual life?
You know that philosper or whatever, the new age guru person who is all the hype this year? That one they call The Knower, which is a ridiculously dramatic name, if you ask me? The one who is either being worshipped as the new Jesus/Buddha combo, or called a sham because of this whole anonymity thing? Well, I happen to know the reason why The Knower's identity has not been revealed. And I also happen to know that the public is being ripped off, but it is not by The Knower, himself. It is by the people who found the writings, and who are passing them off for more than they really are. And I know all this because the precious writings that are now hardbound, softbound, on t-shirts, and making millions for The Finders are from my lousy journal that I lost last year. In the 8th grade.
If you are alive while all this is happening, you know what I'm talking about. You have been bombarded with all things The Knower. It is possible that you've even read the stuff. And you might be a really decent, normal person, which is why I can't go forward now and tell everyone that it is my stuff. Just think how humiliating it would be to know that you were changing your life around the words of a thirteen-year-old girl who wears way too much black eyeliner, lets older guys feel her up, and is hated by her whole neighborhood and stepdad?
It's just all so weird. I didn't even realize I'd lost the journal until school started this year. Our English class, the first semester of my high school career, did this assignment where we were creating like a timeline of our thoughts or something, so I wanted to look back through my old journals a little. And when I went through the box of them, the one from the beginning of last year wasn't there. It was a black, spiral-bound notebook, unremarkable, and was just missing from the box. I am careful to never put my name or any personal information in my journals (that is saved for my diaries, or for fiction), so it didn't freak me out in an exposure way, but I really like to keep my thoughts with me, and I looked hard for that journal. All over our house, cars, etc. But nowhere. I figured I must have just left it somewhere I was writing last year toward the end, at an improbably convenient time near the end of it so I already had the next one to start, or maybe just dropped it out of my bag or something. Weird, no answers, but what can you do? I moved on.
Then for Christmas, my mom gets this book from her Overeaters Anonymous sponsor. It is called "Title of Amber's Journal" and the cover is all dreamy and clouds and typically annoying in it's intimation of having The Answers and of knowing who is going to be reading it in some interpersonal and smug way. That is all, no biggee, we all open other presents, life moves on.
Well, she starts thinking this book is genius, the Lord speaking to her in some interpersonal way that born again Christians always think is reserved for them. So she starts talking about it a lot. At dinner, on the way to the store in the car, whenever. And why would I listen to that crap, or pay any attention whatsoever, when she is increasing hypocritical and insane in her clinging to the thinking of others so that she can quit any responsibility to think for herself? Don't even get me going there; another day, maybe. So she's all The Knower this and The Knower that, and one day I am grounded for some retarded reason like breathing wrong around Nick, and they are not home and that stupid book is on the bathroom counter, and I had to do, you know, spend a while sitting there on the commode and didn't think to bring any reading material--it was sort of a surprise attach, I'm sure you more than enough know what I mean. So, I pick up the book by her beloved Knower, open randomly to a page, and read the following:
"Living the unexamined life is not worth living, as our friend Socrates clued us into so long ago. But what about the overexamined life? Did Socrates not have time in his life to get to this side of the coin, or are the times we live in now simply calling for a different philosophical and spiritual approach? Because while I don't know what my examination to happiness level might be if I spent my days sitting around on stone steps and under trees, thinking and sucking up the adoration of the people, I do know that examining my own life beyond a certain point opens a circular vortex that sucks me into a hopeless blackness."
Thank god I was on the toilet when I read this, that's all I can say. Because I can remember when I wrote it, lying on my stomach under a loading dock behind the Foam Made factory next to the tracks on a sunny but cold Fall afternoon last year. It was just the normal kind of stuff that goes through my brain constantly, and sometimes it's a temporary reliever to write it down. That's what my journals are for. And now my mom is reading it? And the rest of the freaking world? And they think they've discovered the greatest thinker in two thousand years? ... HA HA HA HA HA HA HAH A HA AH HA HA!
Okay, granted, part of me feels like it's evil that someone else is making money--a lot of money--of my own stuff. But what am I really supposed to do? There's just no way I could go forward about this. I mean, take just the personal life of me. How is my mom going to feel knowing she's been, literally, preaching to the choir for the past two months!? Ha ha ha. It is all so ridiculous and I'm going crazy in my head alone with this reality. I don't trust anybody enough to tell them this absurdity. Probaby nobody would believe it, anyway. Who could? But it's true, and I have six more journals full of similar brain sludge to prove it. There are just so many angles to look at this.
The world thinks I'm brilliant?
For wondering and thinking about the kind of stuff I try pretty hard to rid my mind of?
Is it truly that possible that I am surrounded by idiots?
Who ever really gets the chance to find out, and now live with the depressing truth.
I half want to seek out people that hate the Knower books. Oh, yeah---there are four of them. They took the journal and split it up into four books. Artful little blurbs on each page, lots of white space all around, fancy fonts, and quotes in the margins from my "contemporaries"---Socrates, Jesus, Buddha. HA HA HA HA HA HA! What would the world do if it knew the author was grounded right now, sitting on the roof outside her bedroom window, smoking a cigarette? That I have been grounded for going on three weeks now, and have not left my room except for school and the mandatory showing downstairs at the dinner table? If they knew that I am so non-revered in my own house that a grown man can take out his lifetime of fury on me, and people just watch alternatively sadly and irritatedly from the sidelines? That one of these passive audience members is my own mother, who has--get this!--actually used my own words to rationalize this fucked up situation to me in the past month! AH AH HA HA HA! It is all too sick. How can I be expected to come out all right from this kind of surreal madness that is actual life?
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