Monday 14 May 2012

Chapter 20

This is the twentieth chapter. This means that there are nineteen more. It might be alright to read just this one but bear in mind that your experience will be fragmented and this is not a good thing. It will be like when I started watching the new Dr Who episodes in a random order and it made my Dr-Who-fan-friends want to pull my hair. Or like when my friend made me watch the 330th episode of Bleach when I was at the 220th. It was an annoying spoiler.

Chapter @) (20): On Sadness and what followed the first Age of Reason

Mr BooHoo was sitting on the toilet observing the shapes formed in the tiles on the walls and the floor while pondering on the fact that he was a sad person. A year before, when he was suffering from some physical health issues, he had promised himself that in the year to come he would try to be happy. He put  great effort to make happy thoughts. He even left himself small motivational notes, that only helped for a splinter of a second. He was not catatonic, nor was his face constantly grim, but his happiness appeared to be rather fragile. What could he do? He consumed herbal infusions and a lot of sardines but none of these helped. He was happy with his partner and his dog but they did not help either. Could he be chemically unbalanced? Did he need to play more? Maybe it was the water or he might have made a habit of it.

He remembered his childhood as a sad period. Especially the summers. Not a bleeping happy memory. He remembered sitting in their living room (an ironic use of the name as in most houses during that period people spent more time in their kitchens and the living room was solemnly used for entertaining guests), with the blinds closed to keep the heat outside (as if this could be possible), reading old Communist books (both his parents had had the illusion of being communists and rebels when they were young, thus this was the subject of the biggest part of the available literature in their home) melting away on the blue, velvet couches. Books and sleep to avoid the dull reality. They seldom went swimming and less often on vacation. They had sent him a couple of times with his uncle to his aunt's summer house, a place filled with people, none of which had the same age as him. Furthermore, they always forgot to give him something. If he remembered well, because it might have been on an other occasion, once he had arrived there without a swimsuit and once without any money. He could not swim properly, he burnt easily and he preferred to spend his time reading there as well. Reading had two good aspects. It provided with a relief form boredom and it kept people away. See, reader? Not a single fucking happy memory. Unless you want to talk about books and naps.  

Mr BooHoo was always sort of jealous of other people's vacation, happiness and frivolity. But now that he was a grown-up and went for vacation when and where he pleased (well, almost, because a failure of the system had sinked the continent in debt, his country's economy and government was in a hideous shape, the situation was chaotic and in effect, like many others, he had not been payed adequately for almost two years) he could not put his finger on the source of his unhappiness. And the bloody thing suffocated him. It sat on his chest and blocked his throat and made big unreasonable tears run down his chicks.

The other thing that troubled him was a loss of faith in humanity. The majority of the people that surrounded him were complete morons. Something, somewhere had gone extremely wrong. Evolution had not made the right steps. The world must have been getting stupider,  otherwise his previous view of it had been terribly optimistic. He was loosing hope and he was afraid that if it kept going like that he would have to become one of these distrustful,  hateful hermits. He was not a genius but the level of stupidity was, well, "over 9000". He was thinking more and more of a small house, on a top of a hill, in the country, with trees, flowers and internet, and stuff to make stuff, with lots of antisocial dogs and perhaps a crossbow for the unwanted visitors. He would not kill them although he believed that some people should be deprived from the ability of spreading their hateful white-power genes and making stupid little children that would eventually dominate the world.

Right now Mr BooHoo felt like a hermit in the city. His ability to communicate verbally was overridden by all the above. Perhaps it was just the water, or the things they sprayed in the sky.    

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