Before the memories comes the rain

If there wasn’t even the slightest hint of pleasure in any of our actions then we wouldn’t bother in the first place. There can be pleasure in expectations of outcomes through actions, too. Thus we often force ourselves to do things we wouldn’t normally want to do simply because there is something appealing at the end of it. What it really comes down to is selfishness and its spectrum. What is called survival instinct in the animal kingdom has morphed into a destructive machine in man’s world. If I can assume so easily about others’motives and wonder endlessly about the whys of a world then I can easily imagine how anynone else could have ideas of grandeur in their head instead, justifying every action as legitimate or necessary.

It’s all a foul pile of garbage. Excuses, excuses. Men are the masters of dellusions. If there’s anything they have finally tamed it is the wondrous realm of lies and make-believe.

Pretence. Faux-semblants. Projection. 

Here are our talents. We don’t see the world- or reality, for that matter- as it is; we see it as we please. We don’t choose knowingly - or freely- we do so out of lust or envy or sloth.

Words are my only solace. The rest is out of reach. Reality is a sham, akin to a set on which all the pretty things one day were gathered. Everything around us- the buildings, the streets, the nice, glowing lamp posts- is made of cardboard the wind can blow to the ground in one swift stroke. It is cartboard we decided to see as gold. And that is why reality is a sham, it is nothing more, nothing less, than what we make it to be.

Anyway... We’re so poor and always on the verge of perdition that I’ve come to kind of like that way of life- almost. There’s a certain unfathomable charm to it and it does make me smile when I think of our life so far. In all my mortal flaws my spirit remains unspoilt. Take Paris, for example, or what I remember of it now. We lived in that flat in some council estate and it sucked. Not the appartment in itself but ever since our first cat had caught flees we’d had to remove all the carpet and I ended up with a bedroom whose floor was the concrete itself. Mum’s always been a cleaning freak and we weren’t to blame for the infestation of flees. We had a family for neighbours who were SO filthy that the corridor of the whole building floor stunk. Not only did they not wash but the children wore rags and nits as hairclips. Oh, and the parents were rude and brash while the kids were simply too young to have turned half as bad. They had two dogs the man of the house used to beat senseless. You’d hear the poor skeletal beasts roar in pain, high-pitched moans from big German Shepherds full of flees and years of neglect. Sometimes I’d go out to play in the square and I’d see him walk his dog- the other one had just magically disapeared one day, never to be seen again- and I’d see the meaning of despair in the glaze of its eyes. 

No, it was rather a glimpse of what unhappiness truly looked like, not just in a dog but in general. That day it felt to me like the epitome of pain and unhappiness in its most basic, intrinsic form. I then came to realise for myself that if a person was capable to inflict such pain to an animal there is no telling what that person could do to another human being. That, if anything, showed me the true extend of being human. Now, of course, it will take at least a life time to truly understand and define that extend for it is one thing to realise something or get a glimpse of a reality or notion, quite something else to truly understand its significance, the ramification beyond superficial knowledge where one only comments or utter empty statements- no matter how true they really are in the end- instead of being able to get to the latter through a proper reasoning.