Misery loves

Oh, the joy of being a human. We get to deal with the real world, interacting as part of a hopeful social harmonic, engaged in politics and commerce and life, strung along by some unwritten and unsigned contract that we're figured to abide by. We ritualistically awaken each morning, prep our appearances and stomachs, deaden our thoughts and hearts, and then head out for an oh-so-trying day of good, honest, pointless labor, coming back home later in the day to get some much-needed, restful sleep; the cycle starts again the following morning.

We scoff at the less intelligent, the homeless and unfortunate, and at that which inconveniences us or doesn't add noticeably to the enjoyment and spectacle of our day. In this egocentric, circular existence we continue on, walking the virtually endless plank toward the bitter end that eventually beckons for us all.

And as the hobo paces his lonely streets and gathers the forgotten discarded clothing that we have left for him to run across, we pace our own streets, minds indifferently framed, sometimes hardly distinct from his own. We'll make merry and laugh and tell tall tales while other scrounge and scavenge for sustenance, but all the while we scrounge and scavenge ourselves! We're the same! It's a joke for which few know the punchline. There is no black and white, there's simply a mess of gray that is crammed on an endless jungle continent. Every square inch is removed from reality. And we want it that way.

We've got our mastery of circuits, electricity, and day and night. We've got our scientifically manufactured beds to better our sleep patterns. We've got chemically altered food sources - plants, animals, production facilities - so that we can eat and fatten up and enjoy the marvelous predictability of our blessed sense of taste. We're the mowers of man - the reapers of reality, wielding scythes of faked ignorance. We drape ourselves in sheets of debt and reliance upon a world and society that we're not so sure of. But we don't really want to be what we are. We just simply "are", living day to day, looking to those who reside in the mystical upper decks of magazine, television, celebrity and cliché. "We don't want to wake up!" we shout, "Let's go back to sleep; it's peaceful there!"

But live we must. And one day perhaps we'll find a better world, one that we may accurately compare to our own, and we'll notice the true existential faults that have always plagued us like little hidden leeches, stuck behind our ears where we could never see but always hear as they whispered fatalistic sweet nothings and suckled the energy from our minds, domesticating us and preparing us for slaughter in the same way that we chemically alter and numb the lives of the cattle that we liquidate and process into packages of pseudo-life-giving nutrients to be fed to soulless, emptied shells of plastic human bodies in mass quantities, promoting sickness and waste, a paradox to the initial purpose of sustaining and providing fuel to prompt the bountiful, wondrous creations mankind was once known to concoct. "The sun doesn't shine here, it's just photonic bombardment." It's misery, that's what it is! - thinly threaded into lines, weaving as stitches do, connecting the whole of humanity into frivolous, absurd acts of daily behavior and so-called character. Misery. Either real or contrived, but misery nonetheless. Humanity has become a virus, patrolling its wasteland, stimulating it by removing the flourishing and replacing it with landfill, reactor, plastic, decay, chemical, death, explanation, ourselves, waste, waste, waste, waste.

It's. All. Unavoidable.

I, for one, am going back to sleep.