Deep, dark kak place

I hate what this does to me. I think that’s what this is. This malevolent thing with tentacles that creep and crawl underneath my skin and grab hold and then start sucking my life out like Harry Potter’s dementors.

That's it. Yep. Right there.

How utterly fucking self-absorbed it makes one. You feel yourself seeking deeper within, trying to focus outward, to see everything else in the world that’s worse – Norwegians being killed by a fundamentalist, a drug addicted singer burning out. But that only seems to fuel it.

It’s the grey jelly all over again. Stuck in the middle of it, looking at the rest of the world, screaming for aid but no one can hear because you’re in the jelly. Grey, that dull nothing non- colour. Even black and white turn away from it in horror. That’s where you’re stuck.

You then try screaming to yourself, try to will yourself out of it only to have a counter-voice of hate shout back even louder “You can’t!”

Ok, shut the fuck up. Isn’t this BS? Now all the voices start shouting over each other, making your head hurt. Your blood pressure starts rising. The lump starts to form in your throat.

You know it’s time to escape to a quiet place with walls. You run to the toilet, sit on the bowl and bang your fists on the walls, momentarily feeling more pain in your hands than in your head.

That’s better.

That’s depression.

I wrote this about two years ago when my dad was sick and I was terrified and there was so much I wanted to do and change. It's odd to look back on now. In good ways and bad ways. Oh just read it. Please.

It’s 12:05 in the very early morning. I’m at work as I sometimes find myself at this time of day. There’s a dirty plate with the crumbs of a chicken curry pie (which gave me gas) on it and a mug with cold cringe-inducing coffee in it. The mug was given by a good friend who loves me more than I think I’m worth.

My father loves me more than I think I’m worth but apparently less than he thinks (well, less than he thinks in his drug-induced state of mind) he should. He made me cry so much last week what with him being as close as I can remember to dying. He really shouldn’t die just yet. And neither should I. It’s incidents such as the almost-death of one’s father that gives one, or is supposed to give one, a new perspective on life.

You begin to think (in my case again) about what it is you really want from life, what you think life wants from you (if it gives enough of a shit). You begin to think why you do the things that you and don’t do the other things that you think you should do and want to do. You begin to wonder (again) what it is that you want to do. Oh, I’m rambling.

I want to run away to find a new life or more life and in my case that probably means both. I realised (again and like so many millions of others have before and will after me) that life is a precarious balancing act and that it’s more than easy to fall off the cotton that is life and on which most of us walk and some of us are daring enough to run.

I watched my father at his weakest and most regrettable. Yes, it was drug-induced but a part of me believes that enough of certain drugs can sometimes cause one to say things and reveal things that in a ‘rational’ completely lucid state of mind, one would not say. He cried at his own weaknesses and faults and shortcomings and regrets. He didn’t (from what I saw and remember) cry at his mother’s funeral.

And it brought me back to wondering about me and my regrets. Will I find myself lying on a hospital bed at the age of 59 with a gall bladder freshly plucked from my body while lamenting my regrets? Will I cry over a youth in which I was mostly bored, envious, confused and only mildly contented with far-too-brief flashes of bliss shared mainly in the company of the ones I love?

My life and I are in limbo. I feel as if I’ve paused for breath and badly need to exhale and inhale and then possibly cough. Will this too pass? Will I simply be another speck on the cog in the wheel of the gravy train that is… middle-class mundane existence?

I, you, me, we, our, they, them, us. People.

No comment...

A few days ago someone emailed me a link to an AP article about an 11-year-old girl in Texas who was gang-raped by a group of men ranging in age from teenage to in their late 20’s.

This person emailed me out of anger at the mention in the article that the child was raped because she dressed “older” and “wore make-up”. The article also mentioned that the girl’s parents didn’t look after her all that well and that because her and her attackers were of a different race, their arrests might have been racially motivated.

I completely understand his anger. There is not ever any justification for rape. Ever. Of anyone. That point is driven home even more when the victim is a child.

But what angered me as much as the article were the comments in response to it. Some thought rationally and questioned why her wearing make-up should have any bearing on being a reason for being attacked, others went way off the point.

“Looks to me that everytime a black/s are accused of any type of crime, they immediatly claim racial profiling. Rape is rape no matter what color or nationally is involved. While i'm not a racest, I see no reason not to convict these animals along with the parents for not caring for their child. (sic),” wrote one commenter.

This person claims to not be a racist and yet goes on to completely generalise about black people. Right. Dickhead.

“Cut off their junk and put it on display,” writes another.

I see comments like this all the time on articles on News24 (for instance) and other sites calling for rapist, robbers and killers to have all sorts of brutal, vengeful things done to them.

First things first, violence begets violence. This is a fact. When young men go to prison for whatever minor crime, what makes them hardened criminals is the violence they endure behind bars.

What we should be looking at is what lies at the root of this violence: what makes someone become a child rapist? Why do farm murderers brutally kill their victims instead of just making off with their loot?

Society wishes bloody revenge upon the perpetrators of these acts but never stops to think that there might be a reason for the gore. That’s what needs to be looked at and when we identify it we need to work on changing it.

I mean, vengeance, how far has that got us? Yeah, killers are still making with the killing and rapists are still doing the raping.

Secondly, in 99% of these comments, people ignore the victims of said acts. When that 11-year-old girl was raped, none of the commenters responded by asking how she was doing, wishing her well, maybe mentioning that they were feeling a sense of sadness for the suffering of this innocent little child.

They completely forgot about the victim, the most important person in this horrific situation! The person who needs the most focus of all.

It was all anger in the comments sections. It always is.

I guess that’s the problem with humans: It’s all anger. Mindless anger.