And though I had slain a thousand foes less one,
The thousandth knife found my liver;
The thousandth enemy said to me,
'Now you shall die,
Now none shall know.'
And the fool, looking down, believed this,
Not seeing, above his shoulders, the naked stars,
Each one remembering.
--John M. Ford, The Final Reflection

The Asylum Director

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"The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any." - Russel Baker

Sunday, May 21, 2006

Did I...?

My head hurts. And I’m pretty sure I should know why. I’m not sure if I’ve somehow said or done something that may inevitably come back and bite me in horrible, horrible ways at some point in the future. I may have talked honestly about things that I should never speak honestly about. Let me go back to the start of the story here. It all began with cheesecake. Blueberry cheesecake to be specific.
I decided to bring some to work, you see. One of my workmates (one whom I confess I am not particularly close to) wanted to have some for her birthday. Naturally I had to be the one to bring it to the place where it was to be held. To be honest here, I really didn’t care much for the idea of attending the party but since I had the dessert I brushed it all off and stayed. After eating, we started drinking. Brandy at the start and I distinctly recall that 3 of us finished of the whole damn bottle by the shot – most of mine without anything to dull the alcohol. At some point about halfway through the second bottle – I am not really sure what it was – my hands became numb. About a half-hour worth of shots of that same stuff later, I lost feeling in most of my body. And yet I kept on drinking – or so I’m told. I must have, though. After Richard (another workmate) came, I think I started to fade out. Or at least, my memories are a complete and total blank a few minutes (I think) after that point. Beyond that, last I remember was waking up in one of the rooms to the sound of…something. I vaguely recall voices. Or something. Never mind. What happened in between appears to be something that the others feel would be something I’m better off not knowing. While part of me believes them, the rest of me is far too curious to find out exactly what I said and what I did. A few bits and pieces here and there were dropped by some people, including my supposedly revealing something that I consider to be something that I should never have spoken of to anyone else that I’d been keeping to myself.
Mihi In Odi Est
It is now official. I am well past the stage of boredom with my work. I am quite certain I've gone into the state of ennui. Ennui being the prolonged and constant weariness. The idea that my own capabilities are being limited by the ineptness by the people that call in for the dumbest reasons and the fact that a large chunk of my own performance scores are firmly in the hands of those same fools has driven me to a bitterness I'd not felt in...ever. With every day that I go to work, I feel less and less inclined to actually do a good job. Hell, I feel less and less inclined to do my job. I feel alienated from everything I held and still hold dear, not to mention the creeping sensation that everything I know and the knowledge I gained from years worth of pointless research are all fading away. I'm losing touch with what I know, with what matters, with what I should be aware of, with what I should be in control of. I'm afraid of the possibility that by the end of my contract here, regularized or not, I'll be little more than a mere shell of what I used to be.
A painful consequence is that I may be slowly going mad. I'm starting to generate images of the most unpleasant (well, to most people anyway) things and I am slowly working out a personal mythos in my head influenced heavily by H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, the Buffyverse of Joss Whedon and the game Valkyrie Profile, not to mention the D&D campaign setting of Ravenloft. The longer I work here, the more I realize the insignificance of humanity, the unimportance of anything and everything we have ever done or achieved (or we ourselves, for that matter) in the true scheme of things and that it only matters to ourselves. And if I ever find the time and the inclination, I might decide to weave all of them into some sort of narrative, or at the very least a collection of random writings on the nature of the beings I have deemed fit to call the Primeval Ones.
I don't know. Maybe insanity would be a good thing for me. If nothing else, it would break up the monotony of daily work. Yeah, that would be a good idea. Lose all pattern and order and descend my mind into a chaos that cannot and will not be denied. At the very least, it may relieve my ennui for a bit. But in all honesty, I really do feel insignificant at the moment. Granted, I've always understood that I really don't mean anything to anyone and I'm as replaceable as any old ballpoint pen that you've lost in your life. But to realize that I'm truly nothing, that we are all truly nothing, has made an impact on how I see things, how I perceive the world around me. In the end, I suppose, what matters is the here and now but if you think about it, the here and now is not all that glorious either. By the mere fact that we don't really mean anything and don't really matter is also somewhat...soothing to me. It feels comfortable, almost like a blanket. It implies that whatever you do doesn't really have any real impact in the grand scheme of things and that you are of even less importance than a cog in the machine. That, in the back of my mind, is actually a very good thing. Yes. Excellent.
With that, I choose to keep this one short and leave with this quote: The Universe is a yawning chasm, filled with emptiness and the puerile meanderings of sentience. Why should you deserve special consideration within it, above all else?