£6.40

£6.40 is the monetary cost of this blog, but the spiritual cost has been much higher. This higher cost refers to the fact that my atman (self) will be affected for the next day. I have been made a victim to the modern world. As the hoodie scribbled on a wall in Oldham, modern life is rubbish. It is rubbish without doubt, but it is a wily predator and we are the prey. It sucks out your essence, not to mention your disposable income. Consider what has just happened to me. I arrived in an airport over five hours before the departure because I have nothing else to do. Certainly there is little sense in spending time in a city centre, getting manipulated by modern life into spending on drugs, cheap temporary clothes, and other useless pieces of consumerist nonsense. No sense in looking again at the buildings, which are, after all, just buildings. And in the art gallery we find not joy but the pain of life, the unrelenting angst. No furtherance in looking at the self-mutilated grown children with their self-loathing and desire for revenge. No use in going to the single chain of bookstores because they only stock material relevant to the very people I am trying to avoid. Alas, the graffiti was right. And I am no better myself. Once in the airport, finding myself a little tired, a little hungry, and no doubt not a little affected by a day or two of exile, I approached a ‘café’. It wasn’t a café at all and sold mostly the chemical-ridden, antibiotic-fattened flesh of corpses; flesh which until recently flowed with life and spirit, which buoyed the emotions of a conscious entity which is certainly far more evolved than the microbes on Mars which our species invests so much money in discovering. Cold, lonely, unloved, coloured dead flesh. They wanted me to eat this! And yet, I was already caught in the trap. There was a baguette which contained only milk products (not so great) and tomato. I bought it. ‘Something to drink?’, Fedor asked. I thought quickly. I am supposed to have conquered the desire for coffee, but something won a small victory, and while he made the cappuccino I also bought a chocolate-filled croissant. £6.40. Almost all the human beings in existence make less than this in a day. Many of them don’t make this in a week. I sat down and started to chew. The corruption flooded my soul. I continued to eat, but started to wonder why had I lost my battle so easily. The disgusting soggy baguette was already turning ill within my stomach and I flung it back into the warped blue food-tray. The supersized ‘regular’ cappuccino looked white and cold, but I sipped anyway. One millilitre was enough to reveal to me everything about why human beings enjoy mutilating everybody. They actually like killing! And this poisonous liquid, with its evil overtones was polluting. I set it aside. And then the croissant. It was dry and flaky and seemed like the first moment when you discover what betrayal is. It was as if I was a helpless country subjected to an act of anticipatory justice. It killed me. And I set it aside and rose from the table. The meagre food I had eaten had sickened and saddened me. It provided almost no nutrition but left me depressed and hopeless. And this is what the world teaches us we not only must eat, but that we should be unaware of the alternatives. It is also a requirement that we mustn’t simply lump it, but like it!

There is a pure water. Many of us have seen this ocean in our dreams. I need some, fast!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 29th, 2006 at 9:36 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.