another dull day
repetition and routines
is this, what life is?
looking for escape
frantically I'm searching
my eyes, see nothing
Monday, May 17, 2010
Sunday, May 9, 2010
A Nice Hard Slap in the Face.
Foreword:
It's been a long time since I've posted anything on my blog and I'm happy to say that I've written something new. This piece is unlike anything I've ever written before. It's darker, sharper, wittier and hopefully a lot more powerful. If I predict correctly, eyebrows will raise, family members will worry and maybe even a hint of controversy will surround it. But please, don't worry, I assure you all that I am fine and happy.
This post is not my opinion or point of view on life, but I admit, some things I wrote do ring true to me. Instead I see this as maybe being part of a book that I might write, maybe as a monologue for a derranged, cynical protagonist. I might rewrite this again some day, make it more incitrate and elaborate, connect and interweave ideas a bit better.
But for now all I ask is that you suspend your ideas of the world, forget about about what you were taught was wrong or right and that for the duration of the piece, you place all your morals and principles on the shelf and simply, enjoy.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you my latest work:
CANCER PATIENT
I feel like a cancer patient.
Weak and decaying, slowly crawling towards his end.
I stare into the mirror and see myself slowly dying.
My life is ending one minute at a time.
And I can't do a damn thing about it.
I feel lethargic, I’ve got no hair, I’m stuck in the same spot, I can’t move, I feel as if there’s no hope.
All I’m missing is the damn IV drip.
Oh wait, I’ve just remembered that I do have that.
Every morning the cancer patient wakes up and clears his puffy bloodshot eyes.
He looks to the left of himself and he sees the IV rack next to him.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Every morning I wake up and look at the table beside my bed.
And I see the same clock that I’ve looked at for the past 3 years.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
One second of my life wasted, and another, and another.
The cancer patient gets out of bed so he can undergo treatment. So he can be “fixed”
I get out of bed, take a shower, brush my teeth, look at that hideous creature that I call “me” and I undergo treatment as well. I turn up at the treatment facility, I’m there for 6 hours a day, 5 days a week. This wonderful treatment facility is commonly referred to as school.
Here you are given all the correct medication, they place all the good stuff inside you and this fights all of the bad things inside your body.
-There’s 2 capsules of fear to treat that infection called free will.
-A spoonful of peer pressure to make sure that you don’t contract something like a personality.
-A glass of left wing ideals adds to your balanced diet and allows your body to receive all important nutrients such as propaganda.
-And a few injections of useless shit keeps you occupied so you don’t learn anything dangerous, or in non medical terms “something worthwhile”.
I look around the room and see the other patients, their treatment seems to be going along quite nicely. Free of opinions, unburdened by intellect, clear from infections such as ideals or reasoning and most of all unable to resist or put up a fight against the good doctors who run our lives. The treatment has worked, these kids are cured.
I’m still sick.
But luckily there are still good doctors trying to help me, these doctors are called teachers.
Teachers.
They treat their patients quite well.
If you slip up and misbehave, they beat you with the bedpan of detentions, marks and phone calls.
Every time you waste a minute of the teacher’s class time, they’ll waste 10 minutes of your lunch break. Every time you and your friends speak to loudly, the teacher’s eyes go wide, her chest puffs out and she screeches as if every bone in her body has just been broken. Take the student’s action, amplify it by ten times, throw it back at them and watch them quietly soil themselves.
Revenge is the best option, two eyes for an eye. These are the great lessons that they will teach you.
They scream and threaten until you piss yourself, then they pick up the bedpan and throw your own piss in your face.
Drenched in your own piss, you go back home
Freedom at last. You drop your heavy school bag and make your way to the couch. You turn on the television and you hold down the big plastic button in the middle of your controller for precisely 1.5 seconds until you hear that all familiar *beep*.
But no matter how many times you press those buttons and think of everything you hate, it doesn’t make it go away. You got a 10 kill streak? Your team won the round? You’ve got the highest kill count out of all of your friends?
Guess what?
Your grades still suck, you’re still failing year 10 and Mrs. So and Ao is still angry at you for being late.
All your problems are still there, you’re just bathing in an illusion.
Sometimes I envy the cancer patient, at least he’s fighting something real.
You think that you’re free, you think that sitting on your ass and letting the light from the digitally rendered gore and explosions wash over you makes you a rebel.
What you don’t realise is that your parents paid 500 dollars for that Sony Playstation 3™.
What you don’t think about is how Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2™costs $120 dollars from EB Games.
When your grubby little hands clasp themselves around the nice black plastic of the Sony Dualshock™ Analog™ Wireless™ controller, you feel like you’re in control. You feel like you’re Sgt. Soap MacTavish spear tackling a bad guy out of three storey building. You feel like you’re Captain Price busting out of the Gulag and scaring stereotypical middle eastern terrorists with your awesome handlebar moustache. You feel like you’re Makarov mowing down hundreds of innocent civilians and delaying dozens of flights with your M240 light machine gun. When in reality, you’re just that average teenage kid who goes to school every day and doesn’t really know what to do with his life.
When in reality, playing video games until the whites of your eyes become overgrown with branches of bulging red veins does not put you in control of anything but a few pixels that have absolutely no bearing on anything but the momentary illusion of your imaginary war-driven world. Instead, you forfeit what little control you have left to the corporations. You throw your money and time at the feet of fat stubby men in overpriced suits, who are probably sitting in nice mahogany furnished meeting rooms smirking and Hi-5™ing each other over your stupidity.
You could have given that money to a charity and changed a little bit of the world, made a difference in the life of an unfortunate, starving child. You could have spent your time helping at your local soup kitchen feeding the homeless, or reading to the terminally ill kids in the Royal Children’s Hospital.
Instead you spent your money on a damn video game, instead you wasted your time trying to get 500 headshots with the M4a1 so you could get a cool looking title that no person in the world would ever give half a shit about.
Infinity Ward has placed their leash around your neck.
Activision owns you.
You are Sony’s bitch.
These companies have taken you by the wrists and handcuffed you to the bedpost of your exploitability. Every time a new game comes out or another expansion pack is released, the same sadomasochistic ritual takes place.
They strike their whip against your pale white skin, the slapping sound of the black USB charging cable hitting your flesh and bones becomes a pulsing rhythm, a reminder of who owns who.
“BUY! BUY! BUY! GIVE ME EVERYTHING YOU’VE GOT! YOU NEED ME!”
The suit wearing Sony executive shouts from behind his leather mask.”
“YES! YES! YES! HIT ME AGAIN! I’LL GIVE YOU ANYTHING, JUST HIT ME ONE MORE TIME!”
Is what you scream back every time.
Gasping for breath, screaming for the next instalment, clawing for the new Call of Duty Map pack,
yeah, you’re totally in control.
After wiping the blood from your body, and applying ice to the big red welts that your sugar daddy had just slapped onto you, you go upstairs to take a break and relax.
You’ve had enough animated gore and sadomasochistic whipping for the day.
You drag yourself up the stairs, open up the door to your room and collapse into your bed. You reach over to the table and grab your brand new Apple iPod Nano, you just want to “chill” and listen to your generic pop music. And then you see it.
It’s in the furthest corner of your room, where you had thrown it so carelessly a few hours before. The jagged teeth of the half opened zipper send a cold chill down your spine. The mere sight of it wraps your body up in a blanket of cold sweat and goose bumps. Your heart has jumped into your throat, you nervously gulp it down. It’s your schoolbag, and its menacing stare beckons you to come closer. You cautiously pace towards the worn fabric, your heart beats faster with every step, you grab the zipper with your cold pale hand
and... BAM!
The long arm of the education system stretches out of the back compartment of your navy blue, standard issue schoolbag and slaps you in your stupid little passive-aggressive, brainwashed face.
Homework.
The government’s mental conditioning scheme even seeps into your home. The dark vines of the upcoming project creep into the walls of your house and wrap themselves around your neck. The house is the sanctuary of the family, and family is what the government cares the most about. After all, those politicians are all family men too. I’m sure Kevin Rudd is all about looking after his two kids and raising them up to be good and proper people who don’t break laws or say naughty words. The private jets and round the world flights are nothing but extras to his happy and complete family life.
And here is the government, all those nice family men who are meant to be looking after your families as well as they look after theirs.
And here they are pouring this mind numbing poison down all of our underdeveloped teenage throats.
Oh whoops, did I say poison?
I meant to say medicine.
After all, doctor Rudd knows what’s best for all of us.
So you stay up all night, furiously typing away on your laptop trying to get your project done on time. After several hours of writing and rewriting, of furious clicking and frustration, you finish it. You wait for that feeling of achievement to wash over you, but you’re too tired to feel anything. There isn't really anything to feel in this world anymore.
It's all just one big waiting room. We're all cancer patients, our lives under the thumbs of the select few who have the priviledge of running the hospital. The choking grip of the media, the brainwashing ideals pumped into us by the government, it sucks the life out of us just the way chemotherapy strips that poor kid of his hair. We all say that we're fighting it, that we're doing everything we can to get better, but they're just words, words that are never followed by actions. They are nothing but empty syllables that dribble out of our gaping mouths.
Because, in reality, we're all just waiting to die.
And that's why we treasure sleep so much, because those few hours are the closest thing we have to death. So you go to sleep, with big dark circles around your cold unfeeling eyes, signs that the treatment is working well.
Then you wake up the next morning, ready to undergo treatment again.
Afterword:
Is this what my life has become?
Is this endless sea of grey monotony all that I will ever swim in?
Maybe there’s nothing we can do.
Maybe it’s too late.
Maybe we’re too weak
Maybe we’re beyond hope.
Or
Maybe it’s up to us to break the shackles.
Maybe it’s up to us to tear down the boundaries.
Maybe, just maybe
it’s up to us to take control of our lives and breathe for the first time.
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