I sit in this room, this crumbling room I grew to love, cluttered by the mementoes of a crumbled life. Framed photographs of friends, lovers and family, all long gone. My bookshelves filled with the greatest wisdom the world can offer, written in the most eloquent of ways, and yet all it did was lead me here. And very soon lead me somewhere else because of a landlady who is in my opinion certifiably insane and subleased apartments to me and several others without having the authority to do so. I would’ve thought that was fraud but it seems the police have no interest in fraud these days. I guess there’s too much of it to deal with.
So good luck out there trying to deal with people in good faith. I have written in the past about the death of common sense. But I also believe we have lived to see the death of basic common ethics. All of this of course is flamed by apathy. Nobody cares anymore. We are too emotionally burnt out by watching the end of the world live on the internet.
Einstein could see things the rest of us couldn’t. And yet quite often was unaware he had odd socks on. John Lennon was so acutely insightful and sensitive about himself and yet could not pick a mad man who meant him harm. We can, allegedly, put men on the moon and yet so much of ourselves is left untouched. How deep does that darkness go? That inner space we fear to go lest there be no coming back?
They say to kill someone also kills a part of ourselves. So, after a few more what is it to kill six million? It just becomes a number. We live in a society that does much to take away our dignity, dehumanise us, mock our integrity, and reduce the truth of our lives to third hand gossip because we have lost the will, the pride and the energy to correct it. No wonder we have become the most dangerous species of all. In fact, if we went away the world would thrive. What a sad epitaph to our existence. The proof that there is intelligent life elsewhere is their very reluctance to make contact with us.
Is it easier for us to hate than to love? Yes. But we weren’t born like that. The act that creates us, most times, is love and we are programmed to be born into it. But if that love is not waiting there, and all we get from a mother is regret and tears, and from a father anger and blame, how could we ever wish for the capacity to hope, or know of its existence? Monkey do as monkey see.
Some of us are born into great love and a warm bed. We are shielded by our parents in our formative years so that we don’t experience too much hurt, rejection, violence, and any physically harmful mishaps. They sing us lullabies and read us stories about heroes who laid down their lives for something bigger than themselves and are loved for it. We are nurtured like this until we are old enough and adequately delusional to go forth into this world in search of a love of our own. For we’re told we are not one until we are two. Complete. Our better half. Ready to be wedded to each other and to a mortgage, a job that pays us enough money to sacrifice our self-esteem, 500 pay channels of crap and fake news to dumb us down, and a long slow road to that retirement village and watery vegetable soup until one day we surrender back into that inner space. And if we have lived that accepted life without complaining we are deemed to be the lucky ones in society’s eyes.
But what happens if you are full of love for everyone and yet never find the right partner? Or waste your best years on the wrong ones? Well buddy, you’re on the scrap heap of life. Banished to Regret on the outskirts of Shame. Always finding yourself standing in the rain on somebody else’s property, constantly being moved on. Looked at suspiciously. Labelled a possible future threat. Told that we just don’t “fit in.” A gypsy. A fugitive. An unwanted man. As doomed as Jeffrey Dahmer.
I once wrote the following lines for a Keith Potger song, “The cowboys pine for the open range, the sailors stand looking out to sea, the gangsters get gun-shy and start acting strange, and the lovers end up like me.”
So, if the very foundations of our existence are either gone or, at the very least, shaky and unpredictable, is it any wonder we make such poor decisions in regard to everything else? And to the many of us who have lost all hope and are locked away in our rented tombs, are we not ticking bombs? The most dangerous person in this world is the man who has nothing left to lose. In effect, he is already dead. He no longer fears the police, or jail (he’s been living in his own for far too long), pain, slander, or meeting God. The government hate this person because they are considered a wild card and their actions cannot be predicted. You cannot bargain with him or her for there no longer exists anything they want. All those desires and needs and beliefs died long ago. The seeds were planted when we got too close to Santa Claus and realised he was just an out of work actor in a padded suit designed by Coca-Cola, hiding behind an ill-fitting false beard. In most cases this disillusionment make the disenchanted confrontational. They demand answers. If we have been expertly lied to about Santa for years where do the lies stop?
Man kills anything he can’t understand. And one of those things is love. We have a long history of murdering the messengers who preach it as our salvation. But if you promote hate and genocide and are paid big bucks to invent sophisticated lies a government can sell, you’ll most likely have a long life and die in your bed.
Recently a man who’d died for some time during an operation and brought back to life, was interviewed about this experience. During his dead time he said he’d had the usual white light sighting but then travelled on into the heart of it. He then became suddenly aware of a powerful presence behind him. He could sense it. When he went to turn, a voice of great authority said to him, “Don’t turn. For if you see my face you cannot return. And trust me you wouldn’t want to see me angry.” (The last statement proving God has a sense of humour.) The man asked, “Are you…?” To which the voice replied, “What do you think?” The nervous visitor then said, “May I ask you a question?” And the reply was “Yes. Of course.” The great presence was then asked, “What is the meaning of life?” There was laughter and then the response, “I get asked that a lot. It is very simple what life is about. Love. Love one another and be loved in return. This is not your time. You need to go back and appreciate the love you have. But when you return we will have much time to talk and you can ask all the questions you wish.”
The man was then hugged by the presence and the feeling of unconditional love filled him with a joy so intense he feared he was going to explode. And then he was back in this life. He weeps to this day because he misses that feeling of unconditional love. It seems that a love that pure without agenda could be addictive if we ever experience it.
Perhaps Life really was meant to be that simple. And man through his over-inflated ego has sought to make his own impression by complicating the natural balance and looting everything he can for his own benefit. In this lust to sell the world, pure true love has been replaced by how many women you can con into your bed for bragging rights to impress other con artists. But there is no love in carnal conquest just as there are no riches in financial wealth. Those who have acquired huge fortunes by walking over people often, at the end of their days, talk about the hollowness they feel inside. Having killed many lives with their fountain pens, and the excuse, “We’re just doing our job” they then attempt to fill their dead centre with booze, drugs, and sexual perversion. But that leads to feeling even less. “Pity the man who inherits the world but loses his soul”. You can lie to your conscious but not to your subconscious, for it records every con, lie, hurt, betrayal, etc,, until one day you cannot take any more, and so you don’t. The suicide rate is astonishing amongst the extremely wealthy. This doesn’t get much press because the power brokers of this world who push for more and more productivity are scared to inform us that our goals are wrong and that money is a false god.
I fear it’s too late for us to reprogram ourselves. This bullshit is too ingrained in our DNA. Or is it?
There’s a very insightful lyric by that mystical troubadour Bob Dylan, “Man has invented his doom, first step was touching the moon.” We have now invented technology that gives us the internet which we were told would open our minds, make our lives easier, and that the answers to every question would be at our fingertips. So how come the ignorance level has never been higher? We also don’t need to have to go to all that trouble inviting someone over to participate in sex because we have every porn clip in the world depicting every sexual fantasy anyone could possibly imagine, all performed by beautiful people. It saves being rejected, as well as all that energy. But should we be inspired by the sexual acrobatics upon our screen, we can get into Tinder and have a total stranger knock on our door within the hour. As easy as ordering a pizza. Too busy to establish personal friendships? Not a problem, grown men can play online games. It’s very exciting.
So, we become more and more isolated within ourselves, and reality is conveniently invented and programmed for our personal needs as easily as switching on the air conditioning to our perfect temperature. If there is a Satan could he have invented a more effective device to bring about our own hell?
But that’s where we are now. Perhaps the world has ended and nobody told us? Where are those madmen in the wilderness when you need them? Oh yes, that’s right, we probably killed them. Or at the very least, locked them up. Discredited them with a phoney scandal. Silenced them. This modern world doesn’t tolerate freedom of speech anymore. Yet it was those opposing voices and radical opinions that triggered spirited debate that led to positive changes. Today all the truth tellers have been very effectively silenced for fear of being labelled a Nazi, a sexist, a fascist, a racist, a bully, or just plain crazy. And in the present day world, if enough people unfriend us do we really exist anymore?
How clever of a higher being who initially gave us free will, to also have allowed us to orchestrate our own doom.
In spite of it all I still believe in love. And in the inherent good in the majority of people. We have just lost our way, that’s all. And the road back is very difficult to find in the dark.
(C) Frank Howson 2019
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