Verbal Emesis from my Soul

Lies, confusion and conspiracies. I sit here, thinking about expressing my feelings. I want to vomit my thoughts into words. But what is it that I feel? A numbness perhaps. Periods of boredom tinged with euphoria and sadness. I sit here and watch the world through a screen. Then I take a break and watch a bigger screen. When I'm tired, I go and watch a story on a huge screen in a cinema. Then I'm told that I'm living a lie, that I have false consciousness - no shit. But wait, the person telling me this is also watching screens, but his screens show a different picture. So somebody is pushing through two different stories to the same people - like this is some cruel joke. Just to see what will happen. Maybe we can drive these people against each other like mice in a laboratory.

Who is it that I'm railing against? I've studied philosophy goddamnit! I know about Plato and his allegory of the cave. I'm supposed to be f*cking enlightened. Or am I? Didn't I side with those that I thought were seeing the big picture? I did, and I was confident that things would work out. I just didn't realise that this big picture was crushing people until I started to recognise some of them. Did that mean I was wrong? I still don't think so, you can have a big picture, there's just no excuse to use it destroy lives. Who the hell knows? To the people who are watching different stories on their screens I ask you, whether it is real or not, how can you justify killing somebody? Well I already know the answer to that. I always knew the answer to that.

The videos I see of people who speak my language, with my accent, killing other people. They're human, not monsters. I could be just like them if I wanted to. You don't just tell a man off the street to kill other people. First you put him in a uniform or give him a gun. You tell him the other people are coming to kill him. You tell him they will rape your women and bayonet your children. You turn the other into a monster, into something inhuman. Then, when you've filled this man's head with your own stories, you set him loose. He will kill for you. You have to make it impossible for him to see humanity in the other. And if his actions force a reaction, all the better. You have now created war and strife. You are a corrupter of the earth - it is that easy.

That is a big thing, to be a corrupter. What does it mean? To corrupt something, to make it become utterly spoilt, ruined, the opposite of what it once was? There is something I find seductive about it, seductive and repulsive at the same time. Like a virgin whom you know will sleep with you after the first date. On the one level, there is that hunger in your belly which drives you down the path to ruin and sadness, yet at the same time you feel ill inside with where it is driving you. So instead you begin to project that illness elsewhere. The beginnings of some psychosis. Either you choose to erase your memories and that awful time. You blank it out. Or you constantly reinvent yourself, escaping from yourself. I don't know, I'm not a psychiatrist and I don't wish to go down that path. I'm just telling you that there is something wrong with you.

Wrong with you? Wrong with who? Who am I talking to? Never mind; during the 1991 Gulf War there was this French philosopher who point out how unreal everything seemed. We were watching a war on our television screens. As far as we are concerned the Gulf War never happened. Nothing has ever happened. We're just sitting here staring at screens, reacting and arguing. Some people I know overcompensate their guilt for not feeling outraged at the death of innocents by expressing hysterical outrage. Other's feel guilty for not having the balls to say no in the face of injustice, so they defend their outrageous positions with even more stubborn blindness. People I was enemies with in Part Une of this drama we are watching on screen are now siding with me, and people who were my friends when the show first started are now against me. At some point we started watching different screens. Or maybe somebody swapped the screens for some of us when we weren't looking? Who knows.

Life for me at the moment is a series (if we can even call it that) of existential episodes chained together by my existence only. There are people I know, but whose names I do not. There are names I know of, but I don't know the people. There is just a sea filled with disembodied names and nameless people. An orgy of riotous interaction and chaos that used to be shocking, but with which I am now used to. Like obscenity made familiar. A bit like watching The Last Tango in Paris today instead of when it was first released. I've always like the song for that film though. The guttural cries at the start, the jazziness of it. I never thought it was possible to express such vivid wild sensuality and sexual energy using just music. The film might not be shocking anymore for some, but the music is still true to the original feeling you were supposed to get. It is wanton, excessive and throws me into the warm soup of chaos which is existence. I exist, I've said what I said and I've written what I wrote. To hell with it if I am just a pile of dust tomorrow. The past is not mine, the future is not made. All we have is an ever present now. Because nothing really matters, nothing except for what I've done. That's the only thing that will stay of me. Like a drowning man's hat...