untitlable

It was the autumn of my discontent. A time when the ghost of Midas, condemned to forever roam the living world, had come to roost in me. The eternity of aimlessness has mutated him, I can assure you, and instead of gold, which despite the moral of the story would actually have been rather nice, everything I touched during those beknighted months would turn instead to shit. And not regular shit either, massive Mastadonion shit. Shit so voluminous and so smelly that even though it was only allegorical it still managed to drive all the sources of happiness right on out of my life. They were dark days, desperate days. Days so heavy with the burden of despondence that waking up was more unpleasant than dreams of having died.

I have never fully recovered, to be honest. Life is probably better than it has ever been, in strictly socially viable terms, at least, but the sense of invulnerability is never coming back. This is a good thing, I’m sure I’ll be told, and in all earnestness too, I know we are basically helpless shapes just floating aimlessly within our own illusions of control, but it’s not. Not really. Not even for a minute. Invincibility is the greatest of all highs, you see. It’s the best of feelings. It’s top of the charts and will never ever be displaced. When you feel invincible you look at the world like it’s a puzzle you can solve, as opposed to one that you can’t even begin to understand. You know shit, when the feeling of invincibility is upon you, you believe shit. And belief, my god, is the strongest of all temptations. Belief, ultimately, is the root cause of all good and evil in the world, and the feeling of invincibility, both good and evil, much like the perfect woman, is ultimately a product of belief. But whatever it is, it was quite clearly upon me just when the mutated ghost of Midas the cursed king chose to hole up where my soul used to live.

Arguably, it was gods way, or the world’s way, or fate’s way of setting me straight and/or extracting the pomposity out of me. But one would have to believe in all those fancy things to subscribe to such an easy interpretation. I don’t know why it happened or to what end… I just know that it did come to pass and almost a decade later I’m still reeling from the assault.

There were lessons learnt… for better or worse… lessons that define whatthefuck I now am. I have no way of knowing whether I drew the right conclusions or not, because the lessons don’t really ever stop coming as long as you live, but one of the lessons itself is to make a fucking decision and then fucking stick to it because whether it works or not is not really up to you anyway and indecision is one of the worst weaknesses a person can be afflicted with. Also learnt that love mustMUSTmust always be embraced with your eyes open wider than your heart. And also that you can’t really help but be blinded by love. How the two can go hand in hand is a mystery to me, but believe me when I tell you, they can. And although even then love is 70 parts pain to 30 parts pleasure, once its chosen rather than assumed, it’s a lot more meaningful.

But most important, and perhaps also the most powerful of all the worms of wisdom Midas planted in me before he finally, mercifully left, is that we are not invulnerable, we just are not. Maybe we aren’t meant to be maybe we are incapable of it, but the bottom line is that the shit will hit the fan and it will catch us not only without an umbrella but with our pants down in a pool of quicksand which we will be unable to get out of ourselves and so we mustMustmust sink in, be submerged, drown and die and be absorbed in order to survive and get back up on our feet again. But none of this, none of the lessons/worms of wisdom can ever actually help because once the stupor of invincibility has been experienced, the rest of our lives our spent hung over from it. You will never ever stop missing it, or craving it, and you will never ever be able to experience it again because as soon as you do, the worms of wisdom will make you weary and clip your wings before they can even fully sprout and you will live the rest of your days in a state of Psuedo-existence, where you can never have what you want and know it too.