yin yang mentality

So there's this sexual pathology called sacrificial ethos, where you engage in something terrible and ominous like sadomasochism or unprotected sex with an HIV positive person, in order to serve yourself up like a lamb for slaughter, chasing pain for pain, negativity for negativity, and death for death.

Maybe they're walking the line between living and dying, I say. Maybe they only desire it for the foreclosed (but still remembered) possibility of pleasure. Without contrast, there is no meaning, I insist.

There doesn't have to be meaning, you say. No need for meaning for wanting pain. They want it to want it, no need to ground it, no rhyme to it, and no reason for it. You rattle this off like a rap song that rattles the conservatives in Alabama.

There is no shadow if there is no light! I shout inside my head as the rattle enters deeper layers of my gray matter. Because we are rational creatures tethered to animal passions, so we are doomed for imperfection, and will always fall from grace, and always have dark and light, and will always try to understand that which we cannot. So we need paradoxes of meaning and meaninglessness, so shadow alone is not an option, so your nihilism will never come to be. Retreat, with your serpent and its clinking tail! Your rattles will not get to me.

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