Monday, September 27, 2004

Closet Catholic (or: hormonic ravings) 

Once in awhile I get an episode of world guilt. It goes beyond the everyday "haven't phoned grandma/returned letters/cleaned room/done homework" guilt, which is easily rectifiable with just a bit of self control and thoughtfulness. Rather, I call it a "why not me?" type of guilt. You know how people who suffer some tragedy or accident shake their fists at god, asking "why me"? It's like the opposite of that. I'm healthy, have people who love me, have all the material things I need and want, have had a decent education. And what have I done to deserve all this? Name a sin and I've probably committed it (all cept lust...just you wait!). I gossip. I've pinched a baby (ok, I was like 9, but it was on purpose and just to see what it would do: CRY, duh). I've bullied. I mouth foul words behind people's backs. I've done things I'll never tell anyone about. I'm lazy and feckless.

Meanwhile, musicians go deaf. Singers lose their voices. Supermen snap their spines. Geniuses are slowly paralysed.* And who knows, the next Ghandi might be buried under a pile of rubble in Afghanistan. The next Einstein could be starving to death in some third-world country. And all that is just the romantic shit. There are the banal tragedies as well. My grandma, who in another world would be sainted as Mother Teresa without all the corruption, is yoked to her senile psycho husband. The family to whom she dedicated her life is scattered across the globe, one son dead of dysentry, of all godawful ways to go, the others with multiple divorces and dysfunctional families of their own.

Bad things happen to good people. Shit happens. Life isn't fair. Or so the truisms go.
Shit, I just realised, this is why there is such thing as comedy.

*Not that deafness and quadriplegia mean your life is over, I mean Hawking and Reeve seem to be doing alright for themselves, and Beethoven composed some of his beautifulest stuff after he became deaf. It's just that they, uh...really. fucking. suck. compared to hearing and movement, or so I imagine. I mean I like being able to listen to Paris Combo and to have the possibility, one day, maybe, if I so wish, of climbing Mount Everest. Some might beg to differ, but that merits a footnote (/post/thesis) of its own and footnoting a footnote is even more self-indulgent than oh, I don't know, a blogpost about how it sucks to be privileged.

Edited because of premature senility.

# posted at 11:54 pm

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