WORRYING

I WAS SITTING at my typer but the words weren’t coming. It’s incredibly difficult to get out of dodge it seems. You know, I wonder how many people get themselves into situations they feel they can’t get themselves out of. The answer, I deliberated, is every, single, person, in, the, world.

For some reason that’s comforting. You hear of people getting themselves into terrible situations. I know a lady who feeds cats that come onto her property and now she’s worried there’s so many cats coming to get grub off her that the Council is going to sell her house or something. Some people have killed other people. Some people have done very bad things; I was just unemployed and nothing, and yet strangely everything, interested me.

Anyways, it was time to go. You know those times when it’s just time to leave it all behind and see what the next bit of life brings; I was in one of those. Where you’re searching for MEANING, which essentially means MONEY. Kafka, the great writer who rarely finished what he was writing said something like the meaning of life is that it ends. Another guy, a psychologist from Auschwitz, said the meaning of life is to give it meaning.

I don’t know anything about the MEANING of life but my AIM was to avoid as much of the terrible parts of it as possible, which MEANT other people.

But, of course, when you spend a lot of time alone you realise you need people around sometimes. Sometimes. Other times you need to be away from people so you can think about it – or at least I’m that way.

I was walking up a street to meet a friend I hadn’t seen in twelve years. Davo. I was nervous. I text messaged them about meeting up and the answer was yes – we arranged to see a movie. I couldn’t believe it. Sometimes things can work out that way. You suffer for a long time alone, sometimes to the point where you’re just laughing about how ridiculous it all is and then something comes along – the pain never last forever, no matter what it is; it comes in waves. It’s very strange how our brains work like that. Pain, then not so much pain, then pain again, laughter, etc. even when you’re alone and isolated you still go around the same range of emotions.

I guess I get around it sometimes by making up characters in my head – and that’s what I saw on the movie screen with this person, Davo. There were people running around, doing things, characters with OBJECTIVES. It was alien to all of us in the cinema and yet reassuring and soothing to see somebody else with our eyes do something with themselves to get out of a situation and then go into another and perhaps another until the finale.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter what’s on the screen; but if you’re sitting there with someone else there’s some kind of feeling, or sense, that you’re still part of the community.

As Davo and I walked out of the cinema, he said “why don’t I look and act like those people on the screen?”

“It’s all made up”

“Yeah, I guess so”

Davo was always looking down about life, and yet he was very social. That’s the strange thing, I felt the same way but I never said it out loud. Now it seems I just type it out.

I walked down to the park and found a seat. I opened up a book and started drawing a streetlamp, then a little dog; then I wrote furiously about something or other when two blokes took a seat by me.

One said to the other “thanks for this man”

“No worries mate, I knew a guy who was inside for eighteen years once”

“It was a long three years” replied the guy.

What was I sitting about here worried about. Was I the unfunctioning member of society. Were my problems that bad. This motherfucker had been in prison for years and here I was worried about LIFE in general. It was all so silly and yet so real at the same time.

I decided people don’t like reality in their stories. They like fantasy. People like to watch things that don’t exist to take their minds off of their own lives. People like to see others have GOALS. Maybe they don’t like it so much when it’s a real person because it’s threatening to them – but if it’s a character then we all want to barrack for them because it’s a CHARACTER and NOT somebody real.

It’s funny how we work that way. We’ll support a murderer in a film if they did the deed for the right reasons but we’ll cut someone down in real life for having a GOAL to sell printed jumpers online.

It’s a funny little world.

We exist in more than one place at the same time and all of our experiences are not necessarily ours but of those we see in public or watch on a screen. It’s all made up. No experience anyone has ever had has been shared by another. Our only perceptions are those that we make for ourselves. Sometimes we change them over time, just like a remake of a film. We can change the narrative of the past once we've gained more information in a future version of ourselves and look back and think:

What the hell was I worried about?