Part 1: Forgiveness, and Other Morals to the F##king Story

It’s been a while since something really inspired these cogs into whirring. These days it's just easier to hit the gym for the two hours of each day I set aside to feeling alive. Eat and then nap the whole afternoon away before plugging into some brain-draining episodicals until I feel as if I’ve imbibed enough dribble to either make a good serial killer or be psychologically equipped to catch one. I was becoming one of you! But now this! A welcome reminder of the importance of distance.

(A portrait of herd-mentality in 2020)

I wasn’t sure how to start, so I’ve decided on the screwdriver inserted right in to the reader’s liver with the angry precision of someone who just realized they had their drink spiked. Something that pitches my tent over here and leaves the rest of the field empty, bar a few begrudgingly discarded tins of beans.  

“Black lives matter when a white cop kneels across a black guy’s throat for 9 minutes.” 

I thought I’d give that sentence some space, make it bold, make it more black. I know some people won’t get it otherwise. The same people who get emotionally nudged by a news headline handed around like a tearful Chinese whisper amongst approval-seeking brats, and then they put on their best Malcolm X outfit for the three seconds they have before being distracted by wanting a Dorito. 

Black lives matter, but so do hunger pangs.

There’s nothing like waking up to a long stream of solid-black boxes garnished with hashtag #I’mrighteousnow to find you’ve got no fucking Doritos in the cupboard. To be once again reminded that even some of the people you call family and friends are ‘knee-jerk-reactionary-blundering-around-in-the-dark-of-not-really-knowing-but-wanting-to-know-or-at-least-appear-as-if-they-know-bah-bah-black-sheep’ bespawlers. There’s a custom adjective for you. I’d only just got over your desperate pleas to step outside on a Thursday evening and clap, clap clappity-clap like that was going to move the world in the right direction.

Get it tattooed around your wrist next to your semi-fucking-colons. Show the world your empathy and all the knowledge and understanding your pain has brought you. Stop eating meat, clean a beach, do some charity work on your day off. Just make sure you fucking document it so I know you’re not one of those dreadful sociopath types. Show the world that you’ll conquer it with love. I just want to know where these temporary qualifications in making political and existential statements came from. Who hands them out? #I’mrighteousnow.

Yes you’re a human being. You very naturally begin to develop sympathy around the age of two. By age 12-14 your internal conscience works at a level high enough to give you a relatively good ability to spot a moral wrong when you see it. So well done you -or did you still need prompting on how you should react? A bit trickier when its a black guy right?  

I just wondered if anyone actually thought about what they were doing? What you as an individual were doing? What role do you play in the quest for racial equality and the end of racism? Do you deeper understand the workings of the human brain, especially as a member of a larger group in regards to how our opinions and moral constructs are formed and sometimes skewed? Or did your mate just do it first, and you thought it seemed like a nice idea, and at worst... If you didn’t do it, you might appear apathetic or even racist. You might even feel it.

I know, I know. This is no time to be riding around on a horse. What color even is my horse? I am not an expert on anything, but surely -and please educate me if I’m wrong- using ‘black lives matter’ as a pledge to stop the devastating manifestations of racism is a kind of ironic paradoxical oxymoron. In order to purge racism from the land then all lives have to matter equally and anything that highlights one kind of life over or under an other is an instrument of racism. But, really, a black box on your instagram feed, right between your breakfast and your fitness leggings. Captain fucking planet, right there.

Mister Rhodes’ Life 101: No human being should inflict physical pain or mental suffering on another, but they do. Perhaps, its some part of who we are at some level... Like it would be impossible for the human race to survive at 100% good. Maybe the struggle between good and evil is one of the conditions to our being here. Just please. Please don’t go pretending you’re a crusader, all at one with the world all of a sudden because someone died. It’s tasteless. Borderline sociopathic narcissism perhaps. You’re not united. You’d inevitably rot of boredom without your Netflix subscriptions; you probably haven’t read an educational book in the last year and the most you’ve done to help the human race in 2020 is stay inside and find a black rectangle for your profile photo. Did anyone use any filters? I probably shouldn’t wonder.    

I seem to be doing a lot of my thinking, against my will, just before 2am. Perhaps that’s why I’m cranky. I fall asleep sometime after midnight, and after ninety minutes or so I wake up. Sometimes my legs ache, other times I’m hungry or need to piss. I don’t really have anything to do with it. I just wake up, do what I need to do and lay back down where ideas attempt to have me attend to them. I lay still, knowing they’ll mostly be dead by the morning. By the afternoon all but one of those little fuckers are nothing but a nagging feeling that I had something to remember.

It keeps coming back to family. I finally let it get me out of bed. Its 00:26 so I’ll be able to cat-nap off any lethargy I bestow upon myself by the afternoon. You know my dad once told me, around the dinner table with my step-mother and step-sister, as I was beginning to exercise my interest in women, that if I ever brought a black girl home I’d have nowhere to live. Everyone at the table laughed apart from me. That was a daunting moment. As uncomfortable as they come. A real us and them. I didn’t know any black girls at the time so it didn’t seem a likely occurence, but the very concept of it! This isn’t a piece on racism though. I’m done with that.

There is a thunderstorm outside. Nothing like the ones I remember as a kid... Metaphorically and figuratively speaking. The window panes threaten to break at something like the sound of space and time being ripped apart. Even through the curtains, the lightning is intense enough to leave stains that I can see on the backs of my eyelids when I close my eyes. The rain drills holes in to anything that can’t find shelter. 

My mother didn’t leave my dad because he was racist. I think she just wanted more, or at least something that didn’t have a bag of shit sewn on to its stomach. My father recovered from that blow to the gonads and quickly remarried. Everyone kind of got what they wanted in the end. Or they got what you get when you don’t give yourself time to understand what drives you to want in the first place. Or perhaps you just get tired of fighting it.

My mum was subject to years of financial, verbal and sometimes physical abuse until cancer fucked her up more than her bad decisions ever could. Always seemed like something of a half-person to me after all of that. Guilt will eat up a person’s ability to fight for better existential conditions, because -on a personal level- you deserve what you get. You submit to that and its going to be hard keeping character alive. Character and shame don’t play nice.

My dad... Tricky one. I guess he was happy. Maybe there was love there. I’ll never know. I guess when your latest missus has a solicitor for a daughter -who still lives at home- and all of a sudden your will doesn’t contain your own kids and everything goes to your new family. Not even a mention of your actual descendants at your own funeral. You have to understand how it might trigger alarm bells in a few invested ears. The old fucker started to look much less like a dad and a lot more like someone’s short term financial investment. But, who am I to speak of the things we will do in order not to feel alone. 

Let’s not even get started on me.

Not many people actually know why we do what we do, but that doesn’t mean that no one knows. Its not really a mystery anymore. Hereditary, history and the environment; it all helps to carve us out. Those little wrong-doings of the early years turn out to be a left turn at the crossroads of empath or sociopath. Things make people scared to be alone. Others make people want more no matter what they have. We all have our little preprogrammed nuances. Some people prey and others fall victim. A worryingly vast amount of us don’t even comprehend the subconscious motives behind our actions. So we draw a blank when we’re called out for an obvious wrong. They stare at us like we’re crazy, and to them, perhaps we are. 

It’s a complex little puzzle we have here. One that the more these thoughts about family keep coming back to me, I realize that there’s only so much to fall back on. One is learning: Understanding as much of this as possible. It gives us tools to cope and instruments to better craft ourselves. Carrying on as we are, in a state of blind confidence because that’s what our upbringing instilled in us isn’t going to wash with me. Take every opinion you have and try and learn enough about it to prove yourself wrong, then you can consider your opinion an opinion and not an ignorant assumption. This common idea that we have better things to do than understand human nature is for another piece entirely, but its bullshit.   

The other is forgiveness. Life shapes us in ways that we can’t always comprehend. It takes a lot more than you might think to have a handle on yourself. Where possible, forgiveness should be given. It gives people the opportunity to understand how people are shaped, and it gives individuals the space necessary to consider themselves. All ‘evil’ comes from a lack of education at some level, usually with the self. No one learns shit when they’re being shouted at, other than how to shut up and do as they’re told, resentfully. I still have moments when I think about physical and emotional pain and how it would really suit the people that married my parents. I have revenge stories that run around upstairs from time to time. But i choose forgiveness -the consideration that people can be led by forces they do not have a handle on. It’s not a get out of jail free card, but it is an invite for compassion where it has previously been absent. Or perhaps we should just burn everything to the ground and take whatever we can fit under our coats.           

Perhaps that black box is more symbolic of what’s left when this shit-show is all over.

Namaste.