Ordinary Life!
It would have been quite interesting indeed to witness an actual transmogrification taking place in real time had it not been so personally relevant. As such, watching our simple lion cub as he metamorphoses into a full-fledged ass is no fun at all.
Nor is it any fun to watch, helplessly, and from afar, one’s own 60-something mother as she suffers from the pains of a broken shoulder blade, and one’s own 30-something friend as he goes through the anguish of chemo-therapy.
If only I could eat your cancer, my friend…
If only I can be your shoulder Mother. But look how important my ideals have made me! I should have been just another willingly naïve reformer working for the benefit of the regime-cum-country, I guess. Or just another hapless citizen groveling in some dark corner somewhere constantly licking his wounded pride, constantly trying to reassemble his all too shattered sense of humanity and dignity.
But no, I just had to be that loudmouth idealist-cum-narcissist-cum-messianic-buffoon, didn’t I Mother?, and end up being quite useless to the people that mean everything to me, in the hope of becoming of some use to people who wouldn’t give me the time of day, and most do indeed hate everything I stand for!!! That’s a pretty smart deal, don’t you think Mother? You must really be so proud of me lying motionless in your bed waiting for what you know cannot happen at this stage.
The funny thing, the really painful thing, is that I know you ARE proud of me, of all things, of all silly things.
Now I know that life is not supposed to be all fun and games, but lately it has become a little too much of a pain in the everywhere to be worth any Goddamn thing.
I truly desperately long these days for that place out there, that place that I can only hope that it does indeed exist and that it is not a hapless figment of my longing, where I can, I sincerely want to believe, live, in every sense of the word, Beyond Good and Evil and beyond Time and Being, to make it a place worth living in, worth spending one’s last few years in.
In the interim though, there is simply no escaping the necessities, absurdities and sheer pain, as ennobling as we wish it to be, of ordinary life.
Nor is it any fun to watch, helplessly, and from afar, one’s own 60-something mother as she suffers from the pains of a broken shoulder blade, and one’s own 30-something friend as he goes through the anguish of chemo-therapy.
If only I could eat your cancer, my friend…
If only I can be your shoulder Mother. But look how important my ideals have made me! I should have been just another willingly naïve reformer working for the benefit of the regime-cum-country, I guess. Or just another hapless citizen groveling in some dark corner somewhere constantly licking his wounded pride, constantly trying to reassemble his all too shattered sense of humanity and dignity.
But no, I just had to be that loudmouth idealist-cum-narcissist-cum-messianic-buffoon, didn’t I Mother?, and end up being quite useless to the people that mean everything to me, in the hope of becoming of some use to people who wouldn’t give me the time of day, and most do indeed hate everything I stand for!!! That’s a pretty smart deal, don’t you think Mother? You must really be so proud of me lying motionless in your bed waiting for what you know cannot happen at this stage.
The funny thing, the really painful thing, is that I know you ARE proud of me, of all things, of all silly things.
Now I know that life is not supposed to be all fun and games, but lately it has become a little too much of a pain in the everywhere to be worth any Goddamn thing.
I truly desperately long these days for that place out there, that place that I can only hope that it does indeed exist and that it is not a hapless figment of my longing, where I can, I sincerely want to believe, live, in every sense of the word, Beyond Good and Evil and beyond Time and Being, to make it a place worth living in, worth spending one’s last few years in.
In the interim though, there is simply no escaping the necessities, absurdities and sheer pain, as ennobling as we wish it to be, of ordinary life.
posted by Ammar | Wednesday, March 08, 2006
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