It’s my last day on my current project at my day job, and I was asked to update the product documentation, which is a Microsoft Word document roughly 170,000 words long. If I had had any sense I would have refused. What are they going to do, not extend my engagement? (Don’t threaten me with a good time.)

It took ten minutes just to open this abomination in Word, because this version of Word is part of Office 365 and the document lives in ‘the cloud’. I don’t think my connection was the issue; it took that long to render this demon-ridden document. It bogs down for 30 seconds at a time if I type a single word. It has crashed three times on me. Now I know why so many professional writers seem to have problems with substance abuse—and why David Foster Wallace retired with extreme prejudice. They’re self-medicating to cope with having to deal with Microsoft Word because nobody in the New York publishing cartel seems to understand that plain text is a universal interface.

I think I’ll quit early today; I already have two weeks of paid time off approved starting Monday, but with all the unpaid overtime I’ve worked on this project, I think quitting early today is my rightful due—and a gentler revenge than what I might take if I could bring myself to shed what little in the way of ethics I possess. 😼

If my bosses had even the one brain cell that all orange tabby cats reputedly share on a rotating basis, they might listen when somebody like me tells them that documentation should be composed in Markdown, reStructuredText, AsciiDoc, or Org mode and run through pandoc to generate Word documents and PDFs. We could then version-control our documentation with git, and maybe even automate document processing from plain text to Word/PDF with a makefile. More improbable things have happened to me, like Madam Catastrophy sauntering into my life and claiming me as if she were a cat.

Frankly, the reason Microsoft products suck harder than an industrial vacuum cleaner is that nobody ever gets fired for buying their shit—and they damned well should. I might use Microsoft tech on the job, but that’s because I’m getting paid to do so. You won’t see me using that shit at home; my house is a Debian GNU/Linux shop.

Oh, putain de merde! The damnable app just crashed again. Fucking Microsoft Word has me cussing in French (which I barely speak) because English profanity is simply inadequate to express my frustration with Word’s sheer inability to cope with long, complex documents. I don’t get paid enough for this bullshit.

Again, it’s my last day on this particular project. I only showed up to make sure people could handle the work I had been doing without me. I had not showed up so that I could do white collar scutwork. Therefore, au diable ces inepties.

Besides, if I quit early I can hit the public library before it closes at 5pm and drop off that copy of The Will of the Many that I had abandoned on page 97. I can also focus on ripping the absolutely massive 13 disc Deutsche Grammophon box set of Daniel Barenboim performing Ludwig van Beethoven’s piano sonatas and the Diabelli Variations. I got my copy in the mail last night. It’s a nicely made set, because these guys don’t fuck around, but I bet it would have been supermassive on vinyl.

Yeah, I’m not joking. I grew up on this music, as well as prog rock, jazz fusion, and heavy metal. And heavy metal is just Romanticism in rock; like much of Beethoven’s work, it’s all about the Sturm und Drang. If you think I’m joking, check out the The Year 1812, Solemn Overture, Op. 49. Tchaikovsky was writing for artillery long before AC/DC wrote “For Those About to Rock”.

I’ve played the 1812 Overture in school orchestras, but the instructors never would let me trade my viola for a howitzer. Regardless of the composer’s original intent, they were more concerned with safety. It probably did not help that I was a cross between Damien Thorne from The Omen and Junior from Problem Child as a kid, and I thought little of solving personal problems through the judicious application of high explosives. Also, the viola section was grossly short-handed; every orchestra kid’s parents wanted them to play a more prestigious instrument.

But I got my revenge on all of them when tapped to play a cadenza in Georg Philipp Telemann Viola Concerto in G Major. During rehearsal I’d play Yngwie Malmsteen guitar solos instead. There was nothing the instructors could do because the program was set and none of the other violists had the chops. Come the night of the actual performance, however? Occasional Reader, I fucking nailed it so hard that Jesus H. Christ winced in sympathy.

Digressions aside, I should have tried charging this box set to the company; it’s music I can leave on in the background even if I’m on a conference call. It would let them brag about having cultured techies on the payroll.

I can’t say that about the likes of Alicia Cordisco, Gold Spire, Fires in the Distance, Ghost, Transgressive, Fourth Dominion, Firmament, Spell, Thank You Scientist, or Mortiis... But my bosses are lucky I don’t listen to Body Count on the job, let alone Stormtroopers of Death (S.O.D.), Otep, Cattle Decapitation, or Anal Cunt.

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By the time the version of starbreaker.org containing this post gets uploaded, it will be weeks or months too late to submit it for the January 2026 IndieWeb Carnival hosted by Jeremiah Lee. No matter. I will write it anyway. It will appear when I am ready.

That is my mortal will. I will see my will done on Earth and Heaven be damned.

Jeremiah decided to go big—as in big questions— with his installment of the IndieWeb Carnival:

I enjoyed reading posts from the IndieWeb carnival over the last year and decided to host this month’s with the theme of the meaning of life. The number 42 is presented as the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I will turn 42 years old on January 15.

Not that I can reasonably begrudge him his ambition; When I had hosted the carnival in September 2024 I had gone with suicide prevention. And he was kind enough to provide some prompts:

The theme is open-ended, but here are some ideas:

• What or who gives your life meaning?
• Do you desire a strong sense of purpose? Why or why not?
• Have you ever had an existential crisis? What triggered it? How did you get thru it?
• What do you want people to say at your funeral? Does that desire influence your behavior in any way?

I’ve got this album playing as I write. It will eventually prove relevant, Occasional Reader, so please indulge me. Or don’t; you know how the back button works. 😼

I have found over the years that the importance of the question of the meaning of life to me has diminished. I don’t think this is because of depression, low morale, or existential despair. I suspect it is because with age I have come to embrace subjectivity in more areas of life. This is not to say that there is not an objective reality. Water typically boils at 100°C regardless of anybody’s opinions or feelings, and the speed of light in a vacuum is no more malleable. However, objective physical reality is not the only reality, but the fundamental bedrock layer of reality. Human experience gets layered over objective reality as paint over canvas, and the world around you becomes—to an extent—what you make of it.

At least, that is my understanding as I write this. I could be wrong. And I reserve the right to change my mind.

What does this mean for the meaning of life? First, that very phrase is worthless because it is a gross oversimplification. As far as I can tell, there is no objective meaning to life. Even the drive to reproduce, for life to replicate itself, is not an inherent source of meaning. To derive meaning from a mechanism is to dare Hume’s Guillotine to relieve you of the burden of your head. Scottish philosopher David Hume established 300 years ago that empiricism alone is not a suitable foundation for morality; I doubt it would be a misapplication of his philosophy to suggest that we cannot impute an objective meaning of life to physical reality or insist that the indifference of the universe to humanity precludes meaning entirely.

If we cannot derive an objective meaning of life from existing reality, what else is there? If I were inclined toward spirituality I might look to God or the gods for meaning. However, I have never had much patience for religion or spirituality; if belief works for you, however, I will not begrudge you as long as you don’t try to legislate your beliefs. If you tell me that America is a Christian nation I am going to roll up the Treaty with Tripoli and whack you with it the way my father would use his copy of the New York Daily News to whack the nose of a dog that had just shit on the carpet back in the 1980s.

If we dispense with empiricism and religion as sources for an objective meaning of life, what remains? I’m not sure anything remains. The logical conclusion, one might argue, is that there is no meaning to life, the universe, or anything—or that the answer might as well be 42, 69, or even 6-7. One might therefore argue for suicide—on both the individual level and that of the species—as the only reasonable answer to the Absurd.

My heart rebels at the notion. I did not live the life I’ve lived, faced the demons I’ve faced (binding them to my service instead of banishing them), and forced my way through all the years and all the miles merely to meekly kneel before an altar and open my own throat. It’s not that that I have not considered suicide. I have often considered it. And at every turn I have refused. Not because life is sacred. Not because—as the Roman Catholic Church into which I had been baptized without my consent teaches—it is an affront to God. Not because it would hurt other people.

I refuse suicide for my own sake; my pride demands it.

Besides, if Neil Gaiman is right in his depiction of Death as a lady; it would be rude to rush her.

Not that good manners will stop me from stealing a kiss on my way out when Death finally comes for me. My mother tried to raise her sons as gentlemen, but I was born a bastard and I am one by birth and temperament alike. Besides—if you’re gonna go, why not do it with style?

Here’s the deal, the Devil’s honest truth: I never asked to be dealt into the game. Nobody bothered to explain the rules. The dealer stacks the deck and the house always wins in the end. Nonetheless, now that I’m seated at the table with aces and eights before me, I mean to play my hand to the fucking hilt. Even the Dead Man’s Hand can win a pot if you bluff hard enough and you sit with your back to a wall. And don’t forget the Joker! as Lemmy put it: it can turn two pair into a full house. Besides, it really is all about how one plays the game, rather than whether one wins or loses—because every winning streak ends and none of us are getting out of this alive.

This raises the question of how one best plays the game. You might as well, even though the game is rigged, because it really is the only game in town. Nobody can answer that for you. Nobody can determine the meaning of your own life while you yet live. You must decide these things for yourself, because if you don’t there is no shortage of power junkies willing to do it on your behalf—and none of them have your best interests in mind or at heart. Anybody who claims otherwise is selling something, and you should keep one hand on your wallet and the other free to grasp a weapon should the grifters figure out that you see through them—and take violent exception.

Note that I wrote that nobody can decide the meaning of your life while you yet live. I did so for a reason.

I know what I want my life to mean to me. I have determined my own purpose, because those offered me by church, state, capital, society, and family all displeased me. I have chosen my own path, and I pay its price with every step.

I won’t say that I had no choice in any of this because I have always had a choice. Recall, Occasional Reader, that one of the prompts Jeremiah offered was Have you ever had an existential crisis? Well, I had two before I was eighteen. The first I resolved by reclaiming anger and hatred as emotions I had a moral right to feel by virtue of my human nature. The second came when I realized that the fight that had defined me as a young man was finished, and I was still standing and facing a simple question to which I had no answer: Now what?

If you are reading this, then my answer is there for you to see for yourself. Nevertheless, one objective fact remains: I, Matthew Cambion, am but the shadow of a mortal man. I most likely will not outlive him and take on my own tenebrous life, as if I were the Zeromus to his Zemus. And when that man has ceased to write his own life, its story will become one that others will tell and retell without him. When that happens, the meaning of that man’s life will be for others to decide. Will it lie in the work he did for a paycheck? Will it lie in what he wrote? Will it lie in the fact that he stood before a woman he loved and vowed that he would be hers for as long as she would have him, and that when the last star burned out he would remain in the evernight to take her hand?

That is beyond his control. It is ultimately subjective. And if nobody tells his story after his death and that of his wife, and nobody mirrors his website, then his life will only have meant anything to him. The shadow work that gave me voice in the Wired will likewise only have been meaningful to the man for whom it had become necessary.

Do I want to be remembered as man who loved a woman across 10,000 miles, brought her to him to be his wife, and wrote rock operatic science fantasy pastiches while working full-time as a full-stack thaumaturge who built cathedrals on quicksand? Do I want to take Death’s hand knowing that my words reached others, and at least entertained them—if they did not wake others up or save the life of at least one person staring into the same abyss into which I had stared? Do I want people to remember me as one who was too goddamned human for any LLM to safely train on?

Of course that’s how I want to be remembered. But it probably won’t happen. I would need to make friends first, and I simply can’t be bothered to do the work of maintaining a social life that will have people playing my favorite albums at my wake and roasting weenies over my funeral pyre. The best I can reasonably hope for is that I had sufficient time, foresight, wisdom, and decency to not leave the sort of mess for my wife that my father had left for my mother in the wake of his death. It will doubtless be harder to crack the passcode on my phone than it had been to crack my father’s phone; I was the one who had cracked it, after all.

However, my desire only counts for so much. So much is beyond my control. I am not the sole observer, and the wave function does not collapse in accordance with my will alone. I might be the captain of my own soul, but I am hardly the admiral of yours, Occasional Reader. (Nor do I want the job; the pay sucks and the hours are worse.)

Rather than fret overmuch about how people will speak of me after I am gone, I choose to believe in what Yoshiki called the madness called Now. The past is read-only memory. The future is unknowable. I live in chaos. I walk in faith. My life remains in a superposition; I wear so many masks and play roles to suit. All of them are my true self, but none are my whole self. Even the persona I project online—Matthew Cambion—is not my totality.

And if Mark Zuckerberg tries to tell you that having different aspects of yourself for different social situations means you lack integrity, remember that he’s the asshole who should have gotten booted out of Harvard for creating FaceMash so that he could more easily creep on his female classmates—because capitalism is nothing but rape culture as a socioeconomic system. Performing professionalism when you’re at work requires integrity, as does putting that mask aside once the workday ends. And if you think it’s unreasonable to refer to capitalism as rape culture, what else should we call a system where individuals are systematically reduced from ends in themselves to means to a billionaire’s ends?

Why quote Yoshiki, the founder, drummer, and pianist of X Japan? Why not only mention his masterwork, “Art of Life”, but let it serve as this post’s namesake? It is a matter of respect.

He too is a veteran of a thousand psychic wars. He too stood on that precipice. If I had had a copy of X Japan’s 1993 album in the year of its release, consisting of a single 30 minute epic song, it might have been the song that saved my life instead of “The Unforgiven” by Metallica and “Beyond the Realms of Death” by Judas Priest.

I believe in the madness called Now
Time goes flowing, breaking my heart
Wanna live, can't let my heart kill myself
Still I haven't found what I'm looking for
Art of life, I try to stop myself
But my heart goes to destroy the truth
Tell me why, I want the meaning of my life
Do I try to live? Do I try to love?
Art of life, an Eternal Bleeding heart
You never wanna breathe your last
Wanna live, can't let my heart kill myself
Still I'm feeling for a rose is breathing love
In my life

It isn’t an easy song to listen to. I suspect that most people tune out or switch to something more accessible once the piano solo in the second movement becomes a nervous shakedown set to atonal music via dissonance. But it probably wasn’t an easy song to write, let alone to record, even if Yoshiki had been in perfect health at the time. He wasn’t, incidentally. He wrote this in his hospital bed, which is probably the most metal thing any rock musician has ever done.

And I slept on this epic song—which makes “November Rain” by Guns ’n Roses look like a display of restraint—for thirty years. But when I was waiting and hoping that my wife would win her struggle against cancer, X Japan’s music was there for me.

And if I had ever given up, I would not be here to hear it. I would not be able to make it my own: another patch in the spiritual battle jacket my soul always wears.

Whatever others might say about the meaning of my life after I am gone, this is what I will say for myself as I depart the stage: I stood defiant. I was true to myself and those I loved most. Though time has wasted me, the only time I wasted were the hours in which I worked to further enrich the already wealthy in exchange for the comparative pittance with which I paid for my own life. I lived, I loved, and I left scars on the face of my culture—even if they were only cat scratches and not gaping gashes opened by the stroke of an eigengrau sword forged of my own rage, loving-kindness, and hatred of tyranny.

Remember me, for only in human memory do any of us have any hope of life after death. And if you want main character energy, mine is brighter than a thousand suns and there’s no shame in my game. I can accept being an extra in your life, if not part of the supporting cast, but I’ll be damned if I’ll take any shit from anybody for being the villainous protagonist of my own life. As far as I’m concerned the world—at least, my experience of it—ends with me. What comes after is beyond my control and therefore not my problem.

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