Saturday, November 06, 2010

Life sometimes can be a huge disappointment. The drab, colorless drudgery of day-to-day living, punching a clock to establish that you're in the race toward the conventional dream of retirement.
Death sometimes can be a boring, uneventful slog through the sameness of nothingness. People making wills and buying grave plots, or signing contracts for burning the corpse to ash, "I'll take that $5,000 urn, the one with the walrus tusk handles and the ruby on top.
Routine and routine and routine, learning to accomplish a thing, only to find that it's not the thing you wanted to learn. Disappointment, disappointment, disappointment.
The hope for a world in which people truly learn to love one another, without requisites or class structures to separate them. That dream of a world where no one goes hungry, or lacks medical care, or struggles to find a safe, comfortable place to lay their heads at night. That dream, it turns out, is not what the human psyche desires.
No, it's flames and chaos and enormous forces ripping worlds apart that sets the human psyche salivating.
What kind of person takes a machete and cuts off the head of another person? What goes on in the mind of a killer whose soul is blacker than pitch? And what kind of world tolerates the constant lies, greed and indifference that seems to be the bulwark of our political systems? Time trickles through a hole in the glass and piles up an indecipherable mass of lost, unattainable grains and we, spectators all, allow our lives to simply wither, dry and blow away. Good-bye youth. Good-bye amazement. Good-bye passion, lust, joy, curiosity, and wonder.
Turbulent, yes. I knew turbulence early on. And savagery, yes, that too!
But nothing prepared me for apathy. The soul-sucking uselessness that apathy delivers to the heart. It's pitiable, to say the least. And I refuse to allow it into my life. I simply refuse to die without a smile in my mind's eye.