I was told that the gift of life is a blessing. In my mother’s womb, a long-nosed, plaid-suited salesman cajoled me into signing a contract for a chance at the most precious experience of all the beings of this world. Even before the ink dried, I saw the man walk away with a psychotic grin on his face, scandalously looking over his shoulder. Suddenly, darkness became fluorescent light. The terms and conditions on the document I signed made me second guess. The salesman was nowhere to be found. Somehow it became selfish of me to question a gift I never asked for. Years later, I find myself in a sense of apprehension. I drag myself through the mundane like a molasses swamp. The myths of the fall of man and the origins of the tragedy of existence compel me with a sense of nostalgia for a time that I never lived through. Like the lonely man trundling home late at night with raindrops streaming down his trench coat, who looks inside the department store window at a row of TVs displaying tropical islands and women in grass skirts reaching out a hand to come and join them. Everyone longs to go back somewhere, anywhere to escape the moment.
In the book of Genesis, mankind’s descent from divinity began with the bite of an apple from “The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil”. Man’s original sin was to gain consciousness: to attempt to make sense of the world around him through the lens of right and wrong. To go beyond the simple state of being, and enter into the folly of the rational. The golden age of myth and magic, of blissful ignorance, lies behind the most tragic of beings to walk the earth. The tension wraps tighter like a Chinese finger trap. We can’t find what we’re looking for. To err is human. The folly of every noble and pious man who spends his time retracing his path to Zion. To find his way back to an idyllic existence of warm embrace from his master and creator. To shed his tired mortal form and return to Eden again. We long to reset the story of humanity; to free it from the darkness and confusion within our hearts. To walk a straight path, the Ned Flanders altruistic mindset of the do-gooder feigned compassion sparking the smoldering embers of the good times. In a fit of madness, I grab a bucket of cold water and dump it on this whole scene, stomping out the smoke until the mud engulfs my sole. I don’t like your version of paradise.
I too was created by eternal love. The lesson of the story of Adam and Eve is that the very burden of our existence is the fact that we are aware that we exist. Nothing can liberate us from the anxiety of being alive. We can never learn to get past our “fallen nature”. We long for the presence and carelessness we admire in a dog or a camel. The very understanding we have of our mortality is our burden to bear. The tax collector of Father Time awaits with arms folded, to take stock, judge, and reap from our harvest for the next generations to come. I don’t think he is a man; he looks more like an old Italian woman sneering from her living room window at the children playing kiss-and-tell in the schoolyard. What was once a pure product, cut, repacked, and diluted into a shell of its former potency. They long to return to the garden, while I reach into my basket of forbidden fruit. Cast off into the abyss, set adrift with no guide and no compass of what awaits me on the other side. Into the darkness; I want to go.
My heart will never be pure enough to set foot in Eden, even if it could be found in this life. Pessimism looms over me like a dark cloud. You learn to feel trapped, and the cold steel comforts me, and the indiscriminate sound of the hammer drop of a .45 feels like a worthwhile escape; squeeze but don’t pull. Every time I close my eyes and wait for the bang. I scream out, “Forgive me for my sins! Here I come!” Tears stream down my eyes, but my blood doesn’t shed. My brain remains intact, I look down and it’s nothing but two fingers pointing back at me. What a fool I am. Soon a new vision comes to me as I catch my breath. I have shunned purity forever, I set my sights on somewhere new.
Somewhere deep within the ruins of a lost world covered up by dense forests and insurmountable hills- in our time, digital, legal, and concrete labyrinths; there lies a world of mystique and irrational charm. I presume instead of fields of gold, there is perhaps water and air so sweet and pure that no mortal has tasted or breathed in time immemorial. I shadowbox and draw my sword under the stars, fantasizing about my hero’s journey into the great beyond. With that, my soul turns from resignation to curiosity once more. El Dorado, the city of Gold, I must go there; my destiny awaits.
If human life were like the seasons, you and I are the children of the winter; a cold and “enlightened” bunch who have been completely disconnected from the richness of our metaphysics. Unfortunately, as the day is short in December, so too is the night long. We are children at the end of a cycle. Shibboleths withered away like leaves from an oak tree in the winter, buried in the frost and snow. Nothing feels like it used to anymore and no aspect of life is exempt from this despondency. When nothing is taboo, it is all taboo. Those who rule over us and their dead-eyed stares, with nothing but resentment and hunger for power. You are made to live for status while the empire crumbles around you. Most of mankind is the walking dead. I hear the echoes of Anastasia singing Journey to the Past. Somewhere far away, finally home is where I belong. Do you still feel like a do-gooder? If so, I must ask, is there anything in this wasteland that you wish to conserve?
My dear reader, you and I will probably never see eye to eye on everything. I have never met a person like myself in person. I walk alone, but the fire inside of me behooves me to light the way for a fellow traveler; that, or an insatiable desire to burn and consume all that stands in my way, I can’t tell. I bid you to choose not to accept defeat, but rather, to embrace a new beginning. You owe nothing to this wretched world. Let us revel in the blood of our enemies and the pointless, dull life they create. Let us merrily toast ale as our shadows dance naked under the stars. Let the darkest demons in Hell draw their weapons on us along the way, they satiate our hunger for a worthy challenge. Scream with me into the night sky. Let us lust for life once more. For I too was created by eternal love, your selfish desires are vindicated.
Those who are blessed (cursed?) enough to resonate with my words may hereby claim an exclusive invitation to a hunt, The Hunt for El Dorado. I promise you the best of me and the worst of me on this journey, but I will always promise you, my truest self. The spirit of nemesis embodies my flesh and into the words on your screen. Where fortune favors the bravest of souls; on the long road to El Dorado, we go…
Tuco- This is a great sentence: “I bid you to choose not to accept defeat, but rather, to embrace a new beginning.” Thank you.