For Want Of A Better World

It’s a desert out here. Nothing but dust, cigarette butts and smoking ruins. As I sit here on the mountaintop of a grey, fast dwindling existence, I try to remember how it was that I ended up here, like this. Growing up, there always used to be this one motto: “Sticks and Stones won’t break My Bones; My Mom says I’m Quite Healthy” You could do whatever you wanted to; go wherever you wished, as long as mom said you were allowed to wish so. Running around the neighbourhood as a young, obedient little tyke, it wasn’t long before I realised that there really was no reason why mom should tell YOU to stay within the 4-street block and go out herself every single day, especially when those little ragamuffin friends of yours were so quick and so consistent in pointing this out. I took my first step outside the block into the alley way one day and it was the first time I got pummelled by street toughs. So, mother was right; but this had to be a one-off thing. Why would she scream at me then, if...

After a long sojourn, I sense a feeling of satisfaction in me when I state that I’ve finally regained a measure of my old self. Socially Deceased perhaps being the always unattainable idyllic phrase, perhaps Socially Withdrawn is something more akin to what I’ve achieved. It took some time because I have allowed myself to distance myself from people by associating with them more professionally than personally, and such a shift comes with its associated penalty. I do not think any better of my life, but I do feel a sense of emancipation when I sense prison bars being lifted from the confines of my mind and turning into an absolute, impermeable cage a fourteenth of an inch from my skin. I shall not pretend to fully understand why, after all this, I’m posting again; but such as it is, I believe an explanation was required to the few who read the last one. This shall not be the last post here; in fact, there shall be many more in the time to come. I shall endeavour, however, to limit the o...

My life is a sham. A sham in which I fool the people I associate with into associating with someone who is not really me. A sham in which I fool myself into being someone I'm not, to the extent that I don't even know which side of me is real anymore. On my behalf, I don't do this consciously; but at the end of the day I can't deny that that is exactly what I'm doing. I use language that changes with the person or group I'm conversing with; I lie about or hide my past (the one I care about) in order to make it seem more in agreement with the current state of affairs; analyse things no one really cares about and write stuff nobody has read to tell people that I have an identity that, I guess, is not really me. I read and get inspired by literary and philosophical greats in a world where I believe strictly in their ideologies that I know I don't even loosely adhere to. I steal words and expressions from people I am close to and use them on other people to get a...

Okay, the key to the solution is one premise, the premise being that a lot of people feel the same way at certain points in their life. By feeling the same way, I mean a feeling of insecurity towards the state of affairs in the not-so-distant future and a complacent sense of security when one looks back in the past, particularly the Dark Ages, where progress was at a standstill, compared to what it is today. The present seems all right, liveable, even enjoyable; but the future? Who knows what that might bring? So many things could go wrong; a nuclear winter might just happen, democracy might be thrown away for despotism, George Bush might not get his head out of his ass and supply some oxygen to his asphyxiated brain. But take a moment to think what the people back then were wondering when thinking of their future. Issues such as the king might be murdered, a gang of bandits might just ravage their town, no rain for the harvest, whatever. All I’m saying is that the future shall always ...

There are so many things that distinguish one sort of music from another. The emotions they want to express might be the same, but they can create such different feelings which, while they’re being conveyed, also give the genre its characteristic, well, feel. Take, for example, telling a woman that she looks beautiful, or that you love her: Soft Rock – Soft rock is about expressing the feeling of comfort that you have with the girl and the kind of comfort you want her to feel. Examples: You’re Beautiful – James Blunt, Southern Girl – Incubus Hard Rock – The feeling isn’t as much love as much as making love; hard rock songs tend to convey feelings like the night spent together was wild and completely worth it. Examples: Trampled Underfoot – Led Zeppelin, American Woman – Lenny Kravitz Soul – Here the songs are slow, more like ballads, what are typically classified as ‘love songs’. These songs involve crooning words of love strung together as a method of, well, ‘wooing’ a girl....

Why are we so intent upon wiping thought from everyone’s mind? Why must everyone be ‘In the Moment’? And more importantly, Why, once we’ve been ‘brought back’ against our will, must we insist upon ourselves staying there, trying desperately to create small talk, so that we don’t relapse into thinking again? Is that the subsistence of our thought? To occupy our mind only until someone else saves us from such an unrequited pursuit? Why do we, as a generation find it easy to talk and toil, but the intricacies of thought are too much for us to handle? A person is sitting alone thinking, having her food, next to a group of people, fairly loud and fairly acquainted with her. Why is it that when someone from this group of people espies her in all her solitude, that her solitude must be broken by any means possible? Why must it be assumed that she is thinking of someone and that said interest s romantic? Is love simply assumed to be the only thing that causes us to think, thought otherwise...

Progress seems surreal at times. Barely some 60 years ago, nobody had believed things like coloured televisions; men on the moon; a day that starts with a hurried shower, an omelette scrambled for breakfast, a cell phone, laptop, PDA grabbed and teleported to the office in the fastest cars money can buy; where said devices replace the ‘real’ world in an ever-more difficult race to keep in touch with it. Friends would be met in a virtual universe, in a ‘game’ where they are pitted against each other to take their lives again, and again, and again... Oh, the advancement of mankind! Why can’t we all just lay back, relax, live in a calmer world, without the perpetual overhearing of cell phone conversations of people passing by, the constant fear of people reading our text messages or the steady drain on our money over getting a fast internet connection? Why do we live in a world whose quality has so deteriorated over the ages? Where people just don’t have the time or decency to wait anym...