The Confessional: Part 2

 I should write this like a sigh.

Not a particularly deep one.

Then delete it all,

quickly, without self-reproach.

There are, after all,

parts of us that have not blossomed

to be shared. 

My dog is looking at me like I'm expected to do something. Immediately. We were out walking along an unlit dirt track the other evening. Some way out in front of us was the silhouette of a man using his bike as a seat, smoking cigarettes. Both dogs became upright, their ears tall. Low growls from both of them as we got closer. I wrapped their leashes around my right hand, freeing my left. A skinny Eastern European, possibly late for the sunset. As we walked passed him the dogs eased up, and I let one off the leash and continued on, listening for any sound of footsteps behind me. The dogs relaxed, and so did I. As I passed him, I took a short moment to eye what I could. His frame. What he had with him. How he was dressed. His expression. The notes of his voice when he said 'hello.' In a few seconds I was fairly confident that this man wasn't a threat, and in the few seconds that followed I realised there was no reason to exercise caution. 

What I realised, once we turned off the dirt track, was that you and I experience a completely different world. Sure, it looks the same to both of us, but it elicits different responses from us. We feel the world differently. I write this as that steady thud from outside, the one that I mention far too much, faintly bounces around the room. It sits in the walls like a heartbeat. You know the funny thing about the loud electronic music that plays outside from 4pm until ten-thirty? Behind that music is a poor sot sitting on a business they have invested in. Whether it be a juice stall, a place you can rent little electric bikes for the kids, or perhaps a jewellery stall for tourists. Whatever it is, there is a person or two sat behind that electronic noise under the impression that the din will bring people to them. Yet people steer away, they go where it is quieter, and eventually the businesses fail, and the money that was spent buying those small electric bikes, the tacky jewellery and the blenders, it all goes to waste. It is added to debt. Subtracted from the hopes of a better future for them and their wives and their children. That electronic music becomes the soundtrack to individual failure. And with that I learn to like it a little bit more than before.

We experience the world differently, you and I. There are things that I see and recoil, where you might move closer, excitedly. There are behaviours that whiten my knuckles, where you might not even notice them. So much is normal now. So much that shouldn't be. And that is why I stopped by today...

I often spend time wondering if I might not be a very good man. Sometimes I wonder if I might not be a man at all. Not in the same way as those people do. But then I spend a few short moments talking with a young child, petting a dog, or holding my wife. There are things and people that matter very much to me, and it pains me to see what they exist side by side with. So many of my acquaintances are lost. They preach hard on the latest news of some fad. They lose their identity inside squabbles they are far away from ever truly understanding. They even, sometimes, signal for support. Help fight their cause, that isn't theirs. That they don't understand. They shed tears, which is fine, but they film them and show them to us. They show them to us, and deep down I think its because they are trying to pull us closer to them. “How dare we sit back and let these things happen.” These things that make up the fabric of the world we live. These things that have always happened and always will. I would much rather push the world away while trying to understand it, than use its sob stories for my own celebrity.  

Meanwhile the world dresses a little louder and shouts about a lot more nothing. It's funny to me, how there is such a large and popular movement of people choosing their sexual preference as their chief personal characteristic. How everything is built on top of that. Such a peculiar thing to build upon. Such a peculiar thing to wear, to flavour your speech, to decide how you move. While I have absolutely no thoughts at all about the sexual preference a person may choose, I will always have plenty to say about the madness that must insist for it to become a movement. All of you, keep your voices down. Who and what you fuck is way down the list of your experience of human consciousness, or at least it should be. 

I am not anti-this-or-that. I mean well towards those that consciously and thoughtfully mean well, and I abhor the rest. What anyone does, or how anyone looks or feels away from that is none of my business. I don't care to know, and I don't care to be shown. Very little of what people are offering as upcoming movements in culture are in any way cultural. We are becoming closer and closer to computers. Alike and easily programmable. 

The car driver who overtakes recklessly on roads used by mothers driving their children to school on mopeds because he is late. The gym goer who leaves their weights on the bar. The man who wheels the portable Bluetooth speaker out in to the open to play the world his din. The close-to-naked men who parade in public, in front of children. The teachers who speak at length with young children about the mystery and malleability of gender. The dog walker who leaves little piles of shit where people walk. The drunks who chant rhythmically as they walk home. The bosses who take home the money while they palm their responsibilities off on those who are paid a fraction of what they earn. The women trying to edge in front of you in the supermarket queue. The late night karaoke singer. The unhealthy parents that raise their kids into illness and loss. 

These are the weak, and often those who will speak the highest of themselves. Speak of their place in the big fight. They do not know what it is to fight. They fight a battle that they have invented. They do not fight to exist within something that is already there. And this is my confession... For those lost completely in that world. That world where gratification is everything. Where discomfort is put off until it arrives forcibly. The lazy, the arrogant, the ignorant. The ego-led who sit with nothing other than their vices. The forever distracted. The veneer. Those who act disrespectfully to the greater world around them. Those who are led entirely by their urges. All of you. You are why I have not trained these two beautiful dogs to walk amongst people. There are far too many of you out there, and that hasn't always been the case. 

I will walk along that same dirt track tonight, and I will be able to hear the waves, and I will be able to breathe. But, there, if I stop to listen, really focus on the sounds of the distance, I will hear that electronic music thudding away like a dying heartbeat, as those who feel as if they matter intoxicate themselves, and shout loudly, and continue to drive humanity towards meaninglessness.

For the rest of you, the few. Enjoy your evenings.