For better or for worse, I'm enjoying being part of The System. I like having a government ID with everything linked up on a computer. Now I know my blood type. My clothes are in a machine washing themselves. The phone company knows my name when I call. There's a comfort in being a set of digits. Less to worry about without a soul. I like that my phone picks up the speaker in the room I’m in and reminds me what music I like. No thought required, the Invisible Hand ushers me to work every morning in the Company Car, serviced every 8,000km and delivered back to my door with the chrome polished and pine fresh inside. I flinch, now, when a bird or a wasp flies by. Life is buried under the city sands. What remains is order and vanity, cold perfect human vanity.
I like bring ushered along with the empty suits, watched over by the Invisible Hand in little ant-lines all throughout the city. I have long since forgotten how to love anyone but myself. These days I swipe my credit card without checking the price and tie an embossed Armani noose around my neck each morning. A mechanical arm polishes my wingtip leather shoes, and another wipes my ass while another feeds me succulent imported cuts for breakfast. I like it when the girls leave and I’ve already forgotten her name and sit on the sofa in silence, measuring the seconds on a golden manacle. Never just being there. It’s like a chain I’ve forged out of my own misery. Sayang, amor, azizam, ที่รัก, baby, mahal ko, дорогий, mpenzi, habibi. I’m someone’s darling in 9 different languages. But the bitter milk of withered teats tastes the same in any tongue. Grapes dead on the vine. Years now since I stepped out into the wild, or loved anyone besides the whims of my own desire. So I came quite easily to love this steel-glass graveyard, this air conditioned nightmare, where I’m reminded each morning that the world is one big waiting room. Please don’t reproach me for how empty my life has become, I had not forgotten. The thrills are fancy, but far from free. There are only so many exclamation points you can use on a single page. I’m surprised Blaise is coming back to visit. I blindfolded her so Jenny could lick her while I entered her from behind. She said we were both crazy, but couldn’t stop because of the pleasure. They both left later satisfied and uncertain. Both want to come back and do it again. Tables of lonely couples everywhere, ordering little plates of this and that. Little glasses of this and that. Little lives of this and that. Ordinary lives, instead of simple ones. Here there are no minor keys. The laughter has an edge of pain. The smiles mask contempt. People sentence you with a glance. Digital birdsongs piped over the loudspeakers while the Muslims masturbate in the name of Mohammad and fuck their cousins on the tables where the feast is finished. One dead-eyed stillborn goat after the next. One pristine air-conditioned nightmare after the next. “Work, sleep, fuck.” “A brighter future ahead.” “Work will set you free”. The loudspeakers all agree. The Sensation Junkies suckle at the neon trough, eyes to the ground, mucky asses proud in the air. We got lost in our own devices. Sometimes I hear children’s voices playing on the wind and remember something of the strangeness of life, something left behind, distant, the miracle of this being alive. The wind drops. The loudspeakers start up. I no longer ask why. I have forgotten how to read. What’s the use anyway? The Ikea instructions all have diagrams. The menus all have pictures nowadays. Even love is painting-by-numbers. Making love to create the misery we try to escape by making love. I touch them all the same. As though it were one long fold of flesh. As though I was caressing one of my own limbs. As though I was disinterestedly browsing the Sunday Times. A snake eating its own tail. In the final moments we cling to life for the first time. Mortality only lasts a second. All the gods have died. The only Belief there ever was, behind every idol, every prayer, is Order. Art is truly a sin, and should be burnt at the stake along with those who do not work. Love itself is subsumed by our whims. What I truly love are the high-powered engines, the gaudy neons, the polished alabaster railings, the Timetables, the right angles, The Supervisor’s cold pale handshake each year at Christmas. These days, if a shirt button comes loose, I toss the whole thing in the trash. I no longer notice the moon crossing the sky. I’ve forgotten breezes. Never close my eyes. Ay! The smell of fresh cut grass! I am in love with this sedentary life, it asks nothing of me. “The world is in the palm of your hand.” Instead I sit through life as though it were a matinee. Why try? The Flock is safe under surveillance. The supermarket is heaven on earth, the frozen meat section enough to make me sob out loud, the imported cut flowers from Rotterdam etc. There is nothing new under the sun. All is vanity. So why waste time chasing the wind? Watch it in HD. The revolution will be televised. There is real suffering in the world, real trouble, but none of it makes for decent viewing, so who really cares. When I’m 40 I’ll marry a honey-skinned Filipina and suck the marrow right out of her heart. Bright almond-shaped smiling eyes that light up the world. Die content, half drunk on a deserted strip of shore. I can hear the sound of the waves right now. The palm trees fanning the sky. But I don’t long for it anymore. I prefer the sound of the smog, the dreamless nights alone. There are no songs or differences or wine. Illness is airbrushed away, just swipe your card and the slate‘s wiped clean. The Ministry keeps the roads well paved, keeps The Workers’ bodies well hidden. While love comes this week 2 for the price of 1 pre-sealed shrink-wrapped and fancy-free. But not an orgy in sight. Not even a kiss out of desperation. I have forgotten how to enjoy life, it seems. I’m barely even here. I bore the plants to death. My friends are lucky, they only have to put up with me for a while. I have to endure this all day long. Like now, at 3am, writing my own wretched obituary. A throat dancing with wounds and legless songbirds. What can I say? I’m never even a part of what I do. Is there any greater crime? After Mean*ng and D*fference were eradicated, all speech is selected from the Ministry Approved Phrasebook. 1,000 words can be variously arranged to create 18,354,450 possible phrases. “The richest language in history,” profit-wise. Millions of years of evolution, the miracle of consciousness. Just think of it. The baffling complexity of living organisms, vast nebulas flung across the galaxies and we’re sat down here worrying about the frayed edge of a cushion, Tuesday’s 10:30am, a sun-faded photograph of a stranger you once knew. Is there anything sadder than holding on? Than watching them recede to a tiny black dot on the horizon?
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AuthorEnglish teacher from the UK. Living in Granada. Currently working in Doha. Archives
February 2022
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