Still jarring and jarringly still

And the hunt fruitlessly continues...

The job hunt, that is. Torn between not wanting to be a graduate in the art of selling myself short and thereby being a trainee and between morons who after days of saying one thing, turn around and claim that their office is full, I find myself rather jobless. Undercurrents that alternate between self-pity, scorn, disappointment and grief are often beaten into submission by my unashamed optimism (it could be delusional, but I like it).

"Learn to enjoy losing," says a voice in my head — a very familiar voice that later tells me not to take any guff from these magazine swine.

Learn to enjoy losing.

Learn to enjoy losing?

Seems paradoxical, non? Especially in this society of ours with its ever-growing numbers, its ever-tightening and suffocating competition and its ever-increasing tendency to throw humourless, witless and frankly idiotic people in your path, just to make life that little bit harder for you. A society where winning is everything. Losing or failure is not an option. I'm rather familiar with those last two concepts. I like to believe they build character.

"Who wants to build character? I want to be made, paid and laid!!" some may cry. They have my deepest sympathy. Knowing that you are capable of taking a body blow and then, doubling over, spitting out a nasty cocktail of blood, saliva and fragmented teeth, breaking bones, maybe even falling down on your face AND YET, standing back up and saying, "Shoot me again. I ain't dead yet." That's character.

At this point, I feel it's very necessary to apologise for that shocking musical reference to the travesty that was Shoot me again..., which appeared on a catastrophe of an album that was St. Anger.

But my point is that I'm in an unknown and alien situation. The warm coziness of being a student and everything that goes with it is gone. I'd rather go through a few months of hell in this unfamiliar and unknown situation now and discover how much resilience I'm capable of mustering up. Then again, I could end up wilting, crying myself into a stupor or self-destructing (Psychologically, I mean!! Suicide is for the weak). All in all, pretty interesting times to be living in.

So why then, am I blanketed by this irreverent indifference? Why then do things still jar violently in me from time-to-time, while everything around me is so jarringly still?

Have you ever had the feeling...

... that you want to punch the ceiling?
So you step out of your house, you can't take it anymore
In your quest for absolution
There is only one solution...
Kicking pigeons in the park!!

The excellent lyrics of [spunge] aside, this frame of thought has passed through my brain on numerous occasions over the past few days. Talks about aliens secretly entering our plane of existence are a mere instance when those feelings subside. But the rest of the time, the urge for extreme violence aimed at my ceiling enter my head with alarming regularity.

And then, something as unexpectedly weird, yet unexpectedly pleasant as herding goats comes along and I find myself cackling like I used to in the Team 163 era. Oh those cackles... As rare as those cackles are, my feelings of being sane find themselves being even rarer. I need a neural shake-up... I need to be thrown against the wall, like Karl Urban (Reaper in the film Doom) was, by The Rock... I need some sort of electrifying slap that wakes me up. Clinging onto some place in my mind where I thought I used to live (until eviction) isn't very me.

They say that support from those around you helps. And 'they' may well be right. But for now, what really gets my engines pumping and gets me striving for that bigger score is the scornful and defiant apathy of certain people around me. This factor is one of the driving forces that I love to rely on to really light a fire under my ass and get me all rabid for action.

So, to those people, I invite your scornful defiance. Nothing drives me like you guys! Mucho thanks and tons of appreciation to you. While I may not see you lot again, you certainly will see me — maybe just my name — as you hold open your favourite publications. I will be there. As you turn the pages. I will be there. As you throw it on the floor, wishing your name was mentioned. I will be there.

I am destined to be there.

Liberation and psychological chemotherapy

Forty-odd days I'd waited for this and now, some six or seven hours after, I'm still bathed in that same wonderful liberated glow. This life truly teaches all sorts of lessons in the oddest possible way.

Like a cancer victim, struggling with that wretched tumour. The doctors walk in and pitifully shake their heads and scratch something into their clipboard-backed notepads. Well-wishers and relatives waltz in to "cheer the patient up" when all they end up doing is showering said patient with sympathy. No one really gets the feeling of being afflicted with cancer like the patient does...

And then, one day, he stands up and rips that tumour right out and hurls it into the garbage disposal furnace where it belongs. He then stretches and roars a mighty roar, as if to tell the world, "I'm back!!! Take your best shot at me!!!" Tearing off all the IV tubes and syringes, heart-monitor cables and dialysis chords, he struts out of the ward. Flipping off the doctors and nurses as he makes his way out of the hospital and into the street, the former patient is bathed in the glow of wondrous liberation. He laughs in the face of misery and death as calls are made to all those aforementioned well-wishers to request them to keep their sympathy to themselves.

"The infection has been removed... The soul of this machine has improved," says the now recuperated former patient as he quotes some Fear Factory. Gazing up at the sun as it dips behind a sky-scraper, he smiles because the worst is over. A little more rest and then the world is his oyster once again.

And the most glorious thing of all is that the patient-no-more fought it all by his lonesome, without any need for chemotherapy. The chemotherapy that gave him the strength to rip out his cancer was his own will - his own desire and his own self-respect that told him that he would no longer be a slave to this parasite. Of course, the scars will remain. But they shall for evermore serve as a reminder of this tumour and that cancers are to be fought, but some battle injuries will remain. "Wear them as a badge of honour and you will be fine, my son."

Oblivion. That is the location to which the cancerous tumour is now consigned.
Bliss. That is what the former patient and now potential world conqueror experiences.

This truly is a wondrous life, with its weird, yet oddly profound teachings...