I open my eyes but I can’t see anything. I am lying face down in my bed and my clothes are on. I lie here for a while longer, drifting in and out of dreamy places, before I start stirring and stretching a little. Streetlamps illuminate the curtains so that there is enough light in my room to see the things around me. I check my phone for the time and it is exactly 3:30. If it had been 3:33 I would have frozen for a moment, thinking of the 666 connection. Have you ever woken up to find it is 3:33 in the morning? I have. It is a little unsettling. Then I remind myself that I don’t believe in ‘God’ or the ‘Devil’ and laugh. But it was 3:30 on the dot, and I sat up and looked around me. There is a joint and a small bud of cheese wrapped in cling film next to me, my phone near my feet, and a cigarette box next to that.
Last night I came to my parents house after work, which was goddamn awful. I’m suffering a severe case of holiday blues having just come back from Thailand. I had dinner with my parents and then rolled a joint and smoked it outside. Then I asked my brother if he was ready for a game of chess but he was doing something, so I sat down feeling rather stoned and played the guitar. I can’t play much but I love messing around. I strummed the few chords I know and exhausted the variety of styles I could find to play with them today. When Mat is ready we play chess, but he is not on form and I decimate him quickly. Then I say goodnight, roll a joint in my room, and grab some porn and have a wank, getting scared once or twice that someone might walk in. When I’m finished I wrap a tissue, put my cock away and fall asleep on the bed.
I awake and it is 3:30am. The joint I rolled earlier sits by my side, eager to be smoked. I am happy to oblige. It is cold outside and I send a moment’s thought to all the hapless smokers and outdoor people who must endure a bad winter. Then I wonder why I am smoking this joint at 3:30am. Then I wonder why anyone in this world does any of the pointless, horrible, unbelievable, mundane, and downright fucking amazing things they do. Maybe they do it to escape, as I think I do. Consciousness is a curse in this concrete and metal jungle we’ve been grown into.
The next morning I wake late due to the joint at 3:30am, which was followed by an hour or so of writing, and by 9am I am on an underground tube train watching people mind their own ‘busyness’. I think the reason most people avoid eye contact on the tubes, and pretty much in general, is the coldness in everyone’s eyes. It reflects the emptyness and dissatisfaction in their hearts. People are told to separate their work and personal lives, to forge split personalities that they switch on and off each day at times designated by a contract. The tube is where the have their ‘transition time’, where they prepare themselves to transform from ‘mummy’ or ‘daddy’ into their daytime personas.
We are Jekkyl and Hydes, but unlike Dr Jekkyl we did not inflict this upon ourselves. That implies free will. We were born into a family then sent to school and maybe shipped off to uni, and by the time we are able to acknowledge our ‘free will’, it is so bent that it can no longer be called ‘free’. We are more a list of career potentials now, picking our careers with no idea or maybe no interest in the persona we will have to adopt every day in order to ‘do well’, and usually no idea or interest in the ‘bigger picture’ of what our work will be contributing to.
Some people absorb their work-imposed ‘job description’ personalities and have trouble maintaining a ‘healthy’ ‘social life’. Some people shun their positions and try desperately to hold on to something ‘real’, stopping them from ‘doing well’ for the company. Most in this category will break under the financial pressures of wanting a partner, a family, material possessions (which are usually requirements for the former in today’s ‘civilised’ ‘Western’ society), and to a large extent (~60-80% of their waking lives) they will become their jobs. Politicians make changes which promise for a harsher, more corrupt world in the future, then cuddle their children to sleep and tell them it was just a bad dream. Parents drink and smoke, but tell their children not to do touch either on pain of cancerous death. Couples fall out over lies told, but the lies go both ways. Parents sell drugs to the local kids, but tell their own kids not to go near them. Of course the same kids will be selling the drugs back to their offspring in a few years, and the cycle of dishonest hypocrisy perpetuates. Let me repeat that: DISHONEST HYPOCRISY PERPETUATES.
Dishonesty perpetuates itself. I think there is a belief among the dishonest that life is easier if you are able to act with dishonest intent when ‘required’. This is a fallacy. I was brought up in a non-religious family, but had a strong moral upbringing. The honesty I have attempted to maintain throughout my life has been infinitely easier to achieve than the perpetuation of some of my smallest lies. The only way I could ever be whole is if I could eliminate all dishonesty from my life, and unite all the subtly different yet distinct personas I have created for dealing with the different people in my life.
Have you ever told a secret to someone you had been dishonest to or even just kept quiet about an issue around, and felt free and refreshed? I have. That relief is the breaking down of a wall separating two personas; you, and the filtered you; which is you minus the ‘lie’ you had been sitting on. That lie has been hiding behind a wall of dishonesty, a subconscious barrier which you erected through a conscious decision to keep something from someone. Breaking this barrier brings you closer to that person. These barriers split you into pieces and prevent you from being whole.
It seems impossible to completely unite all the personalities you store for the different people you encounter, but it is not. Only fear prevents this. You are afraid that some people might not want anything to do with you, because they don’t like the aspects of your life and personality which you normally keep hidden. Well fuck those people. Be yourself! Those who matter will be there still. Those who don’t will be gone. You will be an honest, complete person, with nothing to hide. The people who really matter will still be there, whether they have their own personal feelings about your life or not. Make sure you are always honest, to those around you and to yourself.
Some people may try to impose their ideas onto you; allow them this; and allow yourself to listen and understand their words. You do not have to follow them if you do not agree. You do not even have to explain to them why, but be honest as far as possible, even if your honest position is to tell them that you don’t want to explain yourself.
The weekend worship of people working 9-5 is due to the fact that for most people this is the only time they can be themselves. The reason most people don’t enjoy their work is that it is not their work, it is someone else’s. They are adopting a personality dictated by the rules of a job description. Create your own job description.
Unite yourself.
'Thirty Fifth Blog Of Trig'
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