JADED

I’m fresh from watching a video where, in an unfortunate sequence of events a lady jumped off a roof. A rather morbid way to start a story, I know, but who am I if not your cultured purveyor of emotions, and it would seem that, after avoiding it for so long , its finally time for sorrow. (Or in this case, lack thereof?) The expected reaction, one would think, would be for my blood vessels to constrict, for me to recoil as if I was the sidewalk she’d just had a rather abrupt meeting with: one would think.

As circumstances would have it I felt all of an overwhelming wave of nothing. I had ,in fact, the presence of mind to calmly brew a cup of tea, the one I’m drinking right now as I sit here, pondering my evident disregard for life , and questioning my normality( and my sanity?) This situation as it is, is stirring up a very beautiful cocktail of existential angst, and loops upon loops of uncertainty, in a mojito glass, and what sort of host would I be if I didn’t invite you all?

Welcome to happy hour! I have a running theory that the world really did end in 2012, that God took away all the lovely, nice human beings. The ones who run rescue shelters for puppies (they should be sainted if you ask me), the ones who lend you pens when yours stops working during an exam and the ones who whisper the answer to you when the lecturer ambushes you with a question and you are just standing there, like a deer caught in headlights. The rest of us, the wretched of the earth, were plugged into machines like in the matrix movies, to eke out an ignoble existence, cursed to never feel joy, or anything else really, for the rest of our lives.

That would explain why life tastes like week old bread and over diluted juice cola right?Death, death, death, if you say it three times it sounds either like a very vigorous prayer by a Nigerian pastor or a curse from a third rate Bollywood movie , either way it leaves a rather bad taste in your mouth . In as much as I would love to pawn off my ingrained compassion fatigue to the rapture having already happened ,and us being in the matrix, I doubt even Olympic gymnasts can stretch that much.

The truth, in all its unappealing glory is that we have been in contact with death so much, for so long, we hardly care anymore.When I was a kid, which honestly isn’t that long ago, I adored computer lessons in school. The teacher would ramble on for some minutes and then leave us, she believed, to exercise our fingers on typing master. Immediately she left the lab, we would employ our freshly taught computer savy to explore the most exhilarating use of those old machines since they were invented, killing things without guilt! (Madam Goretti if you are reading this, I’m so very sorry). In hindsight, discovering that there are endless ways to kill everything at the age of eleven can’t have been very good for my mental development. To eleven year old me though, there was nothing more satisfying than running over a GTA vice city hooker and some cops before Mrs. Goretti came back in.

After every holiday (this was boarding school you see) we would sneak in copies of video games and then shove them in our pants before the first computer lesson so we could install them, oh what bliss! The romance with video game murder continued for years. That was of course, until we discovered porn, but that’s a story for another day.

Fast forward to 14, me and my little friends, in a flash flood of hormones called adolescence, discovered interesting new uses for our little friends (cough cough).What ensued, was the scramble and partition of the feminine population and discovering new ways to exploit our new found resources (cough, hem! damn this cold).

A smart Alek, discovered that horror movies tended to have girls jumping into the closest available pair of arms. As you can imagine, movies were sought from the depths of hell itself and bones, I mean arms, were jumped. And thus continued our romance with the morbid and the fatal. The results of our continued entanglement (cough! seriously, this cold!) with death is of course that we have become jaded, numb. I’m genuinely surprised that compassion fatigue hasn’t been added onto the list of mental illnesses, maybe because they can’t design a drug for it? It’s a bigger problem than it seems on the surface. For example, we’ve had a war ongoing, one that is still continuing, and one that we were all righteously indignant about at the beginning, but now, it isn’t even worth the meme space in our heads.

Unfortunately I don’t think I have enough page, or enough tea to talk about everything wrong with the world and Mututho would probably astral project and haunt me if I extended happy hour and thus, we run off to ponder, brood and brew (tea), until next time.Be nice, leave a comment, you’ve never heard of a quiet happy hour have you?

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