Month 10, Part 2. Cheesy faces autumn.

One day you sit back and realize it's gone out of your system. Whatever was once spicy has become bland. Nostalgia begins to appear disgusting rather than romantic. And you'll say to yourself, "Forget about the past." And for once, it will be a genuine urge. There's something depressing but relieving about moving on with life. It's like breaking an addiction. You want to want it again, but you just can't anymore. It's a deflated passion. The world loses its sparkle and falls back into grayscale.

Cheesy knew this was happening to her. She suspected that it was directly related to her having settled down. Urges and passions were giving way to old habits. It was calming but boring. The worst was that she found no desire to un-bore herself. It was nice to get up before everyone else in the house, to walk to the market, to cook a big lunch, to draw a bit, to write a bit, to read a bit, to walk to work in the evenings, to wander home, to go for a run, to have a glass of wine and slip into bed. Maybe she needed a bit of brain-death after months of constant turbulence.

But hand in hand with the return of routine, existential thoughts crept back into her mind. Once everything is habit, then everything is meaningless. That was what shocked her about the headscarves in Turkey – women put them on and took them off unthinkingly. Their conviction had turned into habit. Cheesy could no longer fool herself into thinking that routines were harmless. Routines veiled the truth. The truth was twofold: (a) there was some original purpose to the actions (like pleasure!), which has become lost through routine, and (b) the universe is actually chaotic, and to give into a routine is to be in denial of the true nature of existence. Cheesy thought both versions of the truth were related. Sometimes, after the purpose of an action is lost through routine, then routine becomes the purpose of that action. Thus we live unconsciously, for the sake of routine. And here was the danger: the entire world could open up to us if we simply let go of the routine. If the universe is chaotic, we might as well do whatever we want. We cannot if we are constrained by habit.

But why that sinking feeling, with all this freedom that Sartre and Camus offer? There is something demotivating about existentialism. If the universe is chaotic, we might as well stay home. To follow a habit is to deceive oneself, to break a habit is to face meaninglessness. The worst curse is really awareness of the conflict. What to do? Camus tries really, really hard to answer this in The Myth of Sisyphus. Basically he says to have a lot of sex and be an artist. Cheesy suspected that if Camus had pursued his reasoning just a bit further, the whole thing would have amounted to one grand justification of hedonism. Not such a bad deal. But in between the swigs of booze and cries of passion, the existentialist would still have to face the truth that everything is just for show, and when he dies there will be absolutely nothing to remember him by. And that kind of awareness sucks.

Cheesy thought it was possible to be driven completely mad deciding between the masquerade of routine and pointless frivolity in life – especially so if one is aware that this decision must be made. Because if one is aware of the need to decide, one is already aware that routine is just a masquerade of self-comfort in a chaotic universe. So the first choice is automatically eliminated (unless you can really re-deceive yourself after having become aware of the truth). So one is forced to admit the pointlessness of life. And yeah, it's fun to be frivolous, knowing that nothing matters. But somehow frivolousness never quite makes up for pointlessness. So one tries to lose oneself in routine again, tries to find a purpose. Eventually one turns back to frivolousness, disgruntled by no longer being able to deceive oneself by routine. And so the teeter-tottering begins. And (Cheesy knew Camus would roll over in his grave for this) Cheesy thought that suicides were often the result of people getting tired of teeter-tottering. There is no "decision" being made in suicide. It's just tiredness, of having to decide something all the time, of always having to deal with one's own thoughts, of never really being able to just live. Bah what did she know. Is it ever more than a thought that drives a person to suicide?

But wasn't there a testament to the danger of routine simply in the fact that Cheesy had begun to think about all these things again?