Waste, Excess, & My Last Blunt

I ceased my use of marijuana. The resulting withdrawals (the coughing, the irritability) are simply the biological cost of the previous era's consumption. It is the "vice" exacting its toll.

This brings to mind Georges Bataille and his rigorous analysis of expenditure. The accursed share.

Conventional economics dictates efficiency. Save and accumulate. Avoid waste. But Bataille observed that the sun is a colossal engine of waste; it expends energy without expectation of return. Life is not defined by accumulation (a bourgeois fantasy) but by how we dispose of the inevitable excess.

I analyze my own patterns of squandering.

I engaged in the "vice" of pornography before; probably related to my cannibalism dream. The ensuing reaction was shame. A feeling of being "malformed." But this shame is a social construct; it is the friction of the "productive" world rubbing against the reality of the improper expenditure.

Bataille argues that this transgression is structural. The profane world of work (where I manage rent and debt) necessitates the sacred world of violence and excess to maintain equilibrium. The system must burn.

It feels destructive because we are taught to value preservation. But preservation is stasis.

"The inner experience is the opposite of action" Bataille wrote. I am currently localized in that inner experience. I am paralyzed by excess thought, unable to translate it into the "legitimate" action demanded by the marketplace.

Refusing to be productive is a rebellion. It is a rebellion that results in financial precarity in a small apartment. But it is a valid philosophical stance. I am attempting to redirect the expenditure. If not through self-destruction, then art. I sometimes fancy myself a poet. Maybe I may redeem myself through this text.

One must sit with the fire. The goal is not to extinguish it, but to direct the burn.