To Needlessly Ambulate

We are humans…

Not by our highly elevated state of emotions but by our powers. We can act, enact, perform and get paid for it. Every action we do empowers the next or weakens it, there are decisions we make with every microscopic tremor of our nerves.

For the sake of this conversation, let me give a brief introduction of an ill-bred emaciated mongrel that routinely and needlessly ambulates around me for a scrap of bread everyday as I leave my house. Though the sight disgusts me but adjacently makes me feel powerful.

Powerful, yes, I compare myself to menial things and feel powerful because that is the only true meaning of power. Power is not when you become strong but when you feel others are weak… destructible… and unquestionably expendable…

And not just me, it is you, who can read, write and pick the colour of the socks you wear. You are powerful because you can choose and determine.  You choose how you want your eggs every day, you choose the size of your wall mounted TVs adding inches to its screen as the zeros in your salary increase. You have shoes for running, stilettoes for getting drunk and slippers for when you take your morning dumps as you gently sip-sip-sip our coffee reading about what the other sip-sip-sippers did the last day.

Our options are endless unlike that ill-bred mongrel that searches for food every evening. You don’t travel for food, food travels to you with a few tap-tap-taps, blurring names scrolling down the screen like a hankering blizzard till you stop at… ummm, I donno, a Chinese place? Tap-tap-tap… The blizzard hankers and tankers… maybe Lebanese? Tap-tap-tap… the screen blurs in a hazy storm… perhaps a biryani? Tap-tap-tap ... Till midnight doth asunder thou wretched blizzard… for I and you have the power. The power of making decisions and not needlessly ambulate for something as banal as basic nourishment.

And then after a spree of tap-tap-taps your fingers get tired but god bless your kind you have a useful left hand, which now all of a sudden is not your designated shit wiper but a tool to help you keep going in a world of tap-tap-tappers.

Don’t get me wrong, this is power. Power of inscrutable, unflinching decision making. Power of choosing what you want, from the clothes you wear to the people you fuck and the ways you fuck. All manners and grotesque styles of carnal entanglement written in that lascivious book. Ah yes, that book, written by you… congratulations you powerful little guttersnipe!… Another book to fool another you in believing you have the power to do it.

How needless are other creatures compared to you? Utterly, isn’t it? Or is it? Questions that become difficult to answer as they become persistent. Questions linger because you have the power to think. 

In your heedless, but not so needless, desire to become powerful you end up opening a world of questions. Such penetrating, bone puncturing questions which begin and end in three syllables.

“Or is it?”

In your harmless predilection to play God, you tend to forget why God left us in the first place.

We… are humans… a wretched embodiment of everything detestable, discernible and sickening. 

God left us because we spawned like a malignant plague, and we wanted to consume it all… even God…

We live in a goddess abode, where millions play God. Every day you wake up counting the names on your fingertips of the people you will beguile, defile and usurp… just so you can wake up the next day a few steps higher on the ladder…

In this abhorrent quest to become God, you have churned and minced your innate desires, the desire fed into you by God... that is now no more. You will never be a rock n roll singer, you will never write that book you started, and you will never be able to travel to the vast extremities of nature breathing in a sigh of fresh air without the concern of pinging smartphones.

Pinging smartphones, popping notifications, sending emails to hundreds of people who are sending emails to hundreds of people who are sending emails to hundreds of people who are sending mails to you. After a long day of reading texts, sending smiling emoticons when you yourself frown upon them you come to realize that the only conversation you share with childhood friends is “Long time no see” followed by another “Long time no see” followed by another.

Amidst the raining chaos of meetings, coffee room discussions, emails, calls, texts and other godless communications you forget how you father sounds like but you can imitate your boss’s voice well. You forget how your mother’s breakfast taste like but you can easily distinguish your local Foodpanda restaurants… tap tap tap… you know them all…

Your elder sister has become an elder folklore which you had once heard about. Your brother visits often but his face is a constant blur like the million others you see in the metro. Your lover shares the same bed but a different world and somehow different sides of the bed now have a different story to tell… she closes her book… you close your tab… lights shut, eyes shut… lives… shut…

Counting the slowly diminishing seconds, counting the names you have obliterated today…

5… counting the sheep as they leap… 4… counting the “Long time no sees”…
3… counting  the pages in your unfinished novel…
2… counting the aging wrinkles on your guitar… 1… counting down till there is nothing to count…

0… hoping to change tomorrow, start anew, finally fight your way out of this… shit
0… hoping to be powerless tomorrow, away from this godless power struggling herd

0… hoping to be a dog… that needlessly ambulates…

0… hoping to be dead

0…

…sleep