Man Is A Contradiction

There is this contradiction inside me. I scarcely comprehend it. A desire to both at once be so utterly loved but also to be torn to shreds. How does one even vivisect themselves enough to lay such things bare for the world to see? It's this hunger for a romance, a love, so real that it dwarfs all else. A connection that just levels you entirely. It's just... them. Then there's this need to bloody and bruise my fists, to wear my body down until there's nothing left at all but the cinders of a man. It's a chaos—a violence—and it will not abate. Unfortunately, the two are diametrically opposed to one another; mutually exclusive. That isn't to say that love cannot be violent, raw, or passionate. I think, my ultimate expression of love is something raw, but at the same time it is also this vision of some quiet, solitary life away from the noise and pollution inherent to clusters of humanity. It's a very real need. It's more than a need. It's this complete and total fucking ache. his picturesque life in the quiet of a pine forest with naught but the chirring of bugs and birdsong to keep us and our children company. Beyond that is the chaos. It's a blackness; darker than pitch. It's a maelstrom of something that could be considered a hatred, but it's more abstract; oblique. It is the feeling of taking a sledgehammer to a block of concrete—the split second before the steel makes contact with stone as time seems to slow—and it is the shockwave that reverberates up your arm, through your musculature, and through your bone and marrow, into your shoulder. It is the rush of adrenaline and endorphins, a haze falls over you, and all there is... is obliteration. All men have it swirling around somewhere, beneath the pressure crush of your identity and the learned calm of your personality, beneath the layer upon layer of dull repression society has heaped down upon you. There is that kernel for blood thickening, testosterone fuelled, bloodlust. There's simply no other word for it. Except perhaps savagery. It is easy to dismiss such a concept because we have spent hundreds of years suppressing the very traits that took our species—of the dozen and probably more in the genus homo—and drove all others to literal extinction. Traces of their DNA still exists within modern man but for the most part we skirmished and warred our way to supremacy. You cannot simply stifle a million years of bloodthirsty tribalism in a matter of a hundred—even thousands—of years. That isn't how this all works. I know, having gone through the meatgrinder of the tertiary education systems and spent my entire adult career observing people, that we are no different than we ever were. This, the screens in front of us, the advanced technology we surround ourselves with every day, it's just window dressing; a pretty façade. The reality is that technology has merely enabled to kill one another in less personal ways. None of this technology has aided in our betterment. People are only just starting to wake up to that fact. So, therein lies the dilemma that churns and roils within me like dark waves smashing against granite cliff faces and salt caked ancient stone. It's this conflict between two disparate ways of life and mindset. That elemental fucking human drive for peace on hand and war on the other. Such is life, hey?