Metropolitan Bliss
Snow’s biting, can’t really hack it at the moment in the cold. I’ve got to take the dog for a walk in the ice and it does my head in proper, not that I’m complaining—but if I was, it’s something of a national sport so I’m safe. On the way to work (twice per week from the office, corporate quirks), I push into the cramped spaces at rush hour, fling my bag off of my back and onto the cruddy floor. There’s faces staring, I’m awash with eyes, blank in their regard for such otherness that isn’t always racial, purely human. We’re confronted with the strangeness of ordinary reality daily, and find ourselves largely unmoved by it. So much so that virtual otherness seems an inherently more interesting prospect worth taking up.
The despond that follows therefrom is monumental, the only outcome from being smothered by ennui in the cradle of a moving metal box at breakneck speeds. Once, on the way home, I couldn’t take the metro because someone offed themselves under the tracks, snuffed it for reasons the onlooking public at large will never know. A damn shame to watch inconvenience dovetail death so closely, but then again I’m awful with grief and it’s familiar territory. The strangeness is always familiar, never unknown, and I’m acquainted thoroughly. Weaviled in and crested in its furrowing brow, choking in its maw’s fumes.
If there are dreams to be had about material comfort, then damn them all. You’ll never know the buying price of a soul, or the bartered weight of a body under egyptian cotton. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. For what use hath a man to labour under the grey skies, away from all he has ever known and loved, for ambiguous but binding ends? I swivel in my office chair to another view, pivoting between shameless pragmatism and foolish lust. The answer that cleaves unto immediate sensemaking is mythical, non-existent. A colleague asks me a question. I’m darting out for lunch.
I dreamed about this all, I’m reminded. Down to the tiny flat and high-pressure showerhead. A life is simple in its unending complexity. A visage, half-sunken in the concrete, jeers at my ambition.
"Nature’s fool, a half-wit, self-deprecatory and shy—you will only become what you are."
So much for my will to power.