I hate the past. I hate the past with a passion I reserve for my worst enemies, because that’s what the past is — my worst enemy. The past burdens me in the following ways:

• Residual learned helplessness from repeated failure, when those failures have incurred consequences, infinite friction outside of the bounds in which I have previously found success.

• Injuries, and scars, physical and mental destructive events that leave me in many ways less than I once was.

• Calcification; doing the same thing the same way for too long, a hoary crust running along those joints I tend not to use, regardless of how much potential that sinew may hold.

• Grooves in the ground. The easy way. The path walked before is the simplest one to walk next time. The relative competitive advantage of similarity increases with time and repetition.

• Accretion of responsibility, increasing indefinitely commensurate to your ability. You are a steam engine on the rails. You are running effectively and efficiently, so more people get on at the next stop. They latch a car full of coal to your back. They latch a dining car back there. A cattle car. These things become you. You are no longer simply a steam engine. You are a chimney, you are a restaurant, you are cattle.

What, exactly, the fuck am I to do, then, with all this useless nostalgia? The past is my enemy, the past is my abuser that I just can’t quit.

• Steins;Gate instilled in me a sense of wonder at the miracle of love and hollowed out a hole in my heart that I have filled with unthinking serial monogamy ever since.

• Yu-Gi-Oh! Duelists of the Roses for the Playstation Two encouraged me to accelerate my way through increasingly intricate and arcane puzzles until I broke through the barrier of introversion and became a being of supreme confidence and power. Still working on that one.

• Kanye West, the Soap Opera Superstar of the New Millennium, taught me to swerve and switch the whole style up mid stream just stop doing the thing you’re doing and do something else, whatever interests you, accumulate as many different random skillsets as possible and browbeat the world into accepting them. Sometimes, I have learned, the world beats brows back.

The problem for me is that these are some of my favorite things. I love new things but my capacity is limited. It takes work, effort, mental energy and fortitude to engage with something new and learn from it and give it the respect it deserves, and as a fundamentally very judgmental person if I don’t give it due respect the first time around I will dismiss it out of hand and never look at it again.

These are the flaws of ego, of identity, of a perforation but not a clean separation between identities. The solution is to become a Baby on the TL — every new account is a new Person, and I am more than one Person by virtue of my manifold Hats. Humans are not built to behave this way… and yet the best of us have done it for millennia. Channelers and soothsayers, method actors, people in the Bible Belt speaking in tongues, anyone capable of conjuring up beings beyond themselves, they are who we strive to be. By emptying themselves, they created the space for Another to enter, good or evil, and expand the possibilities of the world, expand the minds of others — not themselves, they are (of course) never around to witness the miracles of identity they produce.

We call someone who allows themselves to be controlled by others a puppet and we use the term pejoratively. We should be more clear. It’s only the marionette variety that is contemptible. Fully present extant wood blocks wired together, with their strings bound up in a useful little cross for others to jerk around and elicit reactions. Hand puppets, however, are to be lauded. A hand puppet is egoless, devoid of content, free for anyone to use, to express themselves in a way they may not if they themselves were present. Pinocchio, Moralist Icon of the Global Elite, is a marionette. Triumph the Insult Comic Dog is a hand puppet.

I guess, in the end, this is the value of the past: pop culture references. The past provides us with a language with which we may discuss the present and the future, and in that role it is, I suppose, irreplaceable. I will use it in that way, then, because I love to hear myself speak. But, beyond that, I’ll do whatever I can to keep it in its place.

I hate the past. I hate the past with a passion I reserve for my worst enemies, because that’s what the past is — my worst enemy. The past burdens me in the following ways:

• Residual learned helplessness from repeated failure, when those failures have incurred consequences, infinite friction outside of the bounds in which I have previously found success.

• Injuries, and scars, physical and mental destructive events that leave me in many ways less than I once was.

• Calcification; doing the same thing the same way for too long, a hoary crust running along those joints I tend not to use, regardless of how much potential that sinew may hold.

• Grooves in the ground. The easy way. The path walked before is the simplest one to walk next time. The relative competitive advantage of similarity increases with time and repetition.

• Accretion of responsibility, increasing indefinitely commensurate to your ability. You are a steam engine on the rails. You are running effectively and efficiently, so more people get on at the next stop. They latch a car full of coal to your back. They latch a dining car back there. A cattle car. These things become you. You are no longer simply a steam engine. You are a chimney, you are a restaurant, you are cattle.

What, exactly, the fuck am I to do, then, with all this useless nostalgia? The past is my enemy, the past is my abuser that I just can’t quit.

• Steins;Gate instilled in me a sense of wonder at the miracle of love and hollowed out a hole in my heart that I have filled with unthinking serial monogamy ever since.

• Yu-Gi-Oh! Duelists of the Roses for the Playstation Two encouraged me to accelerate my way through increasingly intricate and arcane puzzles until I broke through the barrier of introversion and became a being of supreme confidence and power. Still working on that one.

• Kanye West, the Soap Opera Superstar of the New Millennium, taught me to swerve and switch the whole style up mid stream just stop doing the thing you’re doing and do something else, whatever interests you, accumulate as many different random skillsets as possible and browbeat the world into accepting them. Sometimes, I have learned, the world beats brows back.

The problem for me is that these are some of my favorite things. I love new things but my capacity is limited. It takes work, effort, mental energy and fortitude to engage with something new and learn from it and give it the respect it deserves, and as a fundamentally very judgmental person if I don’t give it due respect the first time around I will dismiss it out of hand and never look at it again.

These are the flaws of ego, of identity, of a perforation but not a clean separation between identities. The solution is to become a Baby on the TL — every new account is a new Person, and I am more than one Person by virtue of my manifold Hats. Humans are not built to behave this way… and yet the best of us have done it for millennia. Channelers and soothsayers, method actors, people in the Bible Belt speaking in tongues, anyone capable of conjuring up beings beyond themselves, they are who we strive to be. By emptying themselves, they created the space for Another to enter, good or evil, and expand the possibilities of the world, expand the minds of others — not themselves, they are (of course) never around to witness the miracles of identity they produce.

We call someone who allows themselves to be controlled by others a puppet and we use the term pejoratively. We should be more clear. It’s only the marionette variety that is contemptible. Fully present extant wood blocks wired together, with their strings bound up in a useful little cross for others to jerk around and elicit reactions. Hand puppets, however, are to be lauded. A hand puppet is egoless, devoid of content, free for anyone to use, to express themselves in a way they may not if they themselves were present. Pinocchio, Moralist Icon of the Global Elite, is a marionette. Triumph the Insult Comic Dog is a hand puppet.

I guess, in the end, this is the value of the past: pop culture references. The past provides us with a language with which we may discuss the present and the future, and in that role it is, I suppose, irreplaceable. I will use it in that way, then, because I love to hear myself speak. But, beyond that, I’ll do whatever I can to keep it in its place.