Post by Benjamin Atreyu on Feb 23, 2014 17:41:22 GMT -5
Are you familiar with how this little world of ours works? No, you probably don’t. See, it’s really all just an illusion of structure constructed inside an illusion of chaos; the willingness of man to believe he knows what he is doing in the confines of a random universe, but the truth is that we are all bullshitting it, every single one of us, and the tragedy of this is that is going to happen over and over because the universe is really a giant structure of tiny patterns stretched across all of existence. If you stretch the scope of history trillions of trillions of years into the future, and if the universe is just a constantly contracting and expanding thing, then there is a chance that, after countless big bangs and subsequent dying of universes, eventually someone will do the exact same thing as you, will be just as confused as you, and will be trying to act as if they have some idea. Eventually, if given a long enough duration, the amount of possible new actions are reduced to zero and someone down the road will live your life. I’m sure we are all familiar with the fun little example that was contrived some time ago to simplify this idea; if you stick an infinite amount of monkeys in a room with a type writer, eventually you will get something akin to Shakespeare, but the truth is, I imagine the only thing that will be equally as full as shit as Willy will be the type writer.
Now, lets take a look at the man walking down the street who is currently suffering from a case of ‘trying to hard’; if you give him a not-to-close-look you can tell pretty quickly that he is balding pretty bad (and on the verge of graying I’m sure, granted there is nothing wrong with either of these two things), and with an equally inattentive gaze we can see he is wearing a pair of shitty/trendy sunglasses, a gold chain that even most gangsters would see as tacky, and an American Eagle t-shirt. If you look closer, though, you will see a soul crying out “OH dear god, please someone help me. I’m obviously dead inside and I can feel all the joy in my world getting sucked out through my wallet as I feel the need to buy trendy overpriced clothes to try and find acceptance from those far younger than me!” Oh, what a poor soul, if only his affliction wasn’t terminal.
What can we deduce from looking at this sniveling pile of wishing-I-were-dead? Well, middle-aged with a cliché case of mid-life-crisis; slowly losing his grip on what’s ‘cool’; obviously gives too much of a shit what everyone things of him; is unhappy, above all he is utterly, completely, totally, unequivocally unhappy. See, his hang ups are slowly sinking their hooks into his skin and are slowly pulling him into unfulfillment that will grow in him like a cancer and will eventually kill him in a fit of kicking and screaming disappointment. What’s my point? Well, it won’t take countless years for someone to repeat this mistake, in fact, someone will probably do the same thing tomorrow and make the tragic mistake of going into public like that. They try to give off this appearance that they are on top of everything, but the truth is that they are the greatest example of confusion as they walk through life without the faintest idea of what will make them happy, because if they had any idea, they wouldn’t be looking for acceptance from others.
This man is the kind of man that walks into Starbucks and tries to order the hippest sounding drink; this man is the kind of man that goes everywhere while talking on his smart phone just so everyone knows he has one and that he is important enough that someone would bother calling him; this man is the kind of man that goes home at night and contemplates killing himself because his wife is the faded star of what she once was and even she refuses to touch him; this is the kind of man who watches the teenage girl across the street and wishes he was just a few decades younger, not that this will stop him from trying to creep on her, because he constantly entertains the idea that she could be ‘kind of into him’ and won’t laugh at his attempts to socialize with people less than half his age; this man is the kind of man who will spend every night wide awake as he realizes that the twenty year old him who promised he would never settle down is now dead and even if he were alive in some sense, he would look down at the current incarnation of himself with a shake of the head and a disappointed glance; this is the man who will look himself in the mirror one day and realize he will never be a rock star, movie star, sex symbol, model, prodigy, or happy. He is one of many afflicted with crippling suffering of being an individual in a world of similar individuals, knowing he will never be important, but even in that, his suffering is unique and tailored just for him, so even in his similar hatred for himself shared with so many, he is unable to share his suffering with any effectiveness. That is the true pain of being an individual, to never be immersed in the safety of a hive mind, to never be lost, to always be aware of his singularity and the sort of silent existential internal breakdown that he holds deep inside as he walks down the street, pretending to be happy.
Why is this man walking down the sidewalk you ask? Why isn’t he driving some sort of outrageous sports car in order to impress college girls? Simple answer to that; he’s too broke to own one. That’s right, on top of being sad, delusional, and a bullshitter, he is also currently suffering from mountains of debt caused by spending one-too-many years in college trying to find a major before dropping out; so yes, this sort of ‘unsure’ and ‘beating around the bush’ nature of is has been that of a lifetime, and not just caused by the possibility of soon-approaching-death. Surely, faithful reader, this is the saddest animal on the planet; this man. However, today he would be the luckiest man in the world for the mere fact that he happened to be walking down the street on this particular day, because this was the day he would run into our hero, but more on that a bit later.
Now, what might be particularly interesting is his actual reason for this walk of his. Well, about an hour before hand, he had been asked by his wife of ten years to go to the grocery store to pick up a few things, which he did absolutely begrudgingly (you know, because him working on that ‘unfinished novel’ was so important, despite not having written a word in the last two years), but when he came back, he had forgotten most of the list (because ‘being a man’ means he doesn’t have time to write shit down, it’ll all stick in his memory). This perturbed his wife greatly, and she decided to voice her opinions in a fairly loudly. Granted, I wasn’t there, but if I had to recreate the conversation, this is how I imagine it might have gone;
“Seriously?” said the wife
“Seriously, what?” retorted the husband.
“I sent you out and you come back with like half the shit I asked you to get.” Oh, cursing early on, this should be fun.
“Oh for fuck sake, I’m sorry, I forgot.” With all the sarcastic and ingenuine force in his body.
“That’s why I told you to write it down!” Oh, you done fucked up, dude. She is mad now.
“I said I was sorry.” Yes, be indignant, that’ll fix the situation.
“It would be fine if this didn’t happen all the time. I ask you to do something you literally do the least you could do.” Oh shit, you gonna let her get away with that, buddy?...Because you totally should, you ain’t winning this fight.
“I do everything you ask!” Yep, yell louder, that should change her mind.
“You still need to fix the gutters, take our car for an oil change, I do the dishes after telling you a million times to do them, you always take the garbage out without the recycling, so its overflowing, and the last time I asked you to get groceries for dinner, you brought home fucking TV dinners!” That’s quite the list again you. I like to think that your next response will be you apologizing and giving a detailed account of how you’ll improve and stop acting like such a raging ass.
“I come home tired from work all the time only to be met with demand after demand. Just one I would like you to get off my back.” …or you could TOTALLY be a raging ass, it’s a free country.
“I do most of the work here, I just ask you to do little things, that’s all, but it seems you are incapable of doing that, and as far as your job, you sit around all day bullshitting, you hardly work!” The claws are coming out, better stop while you’re still breathing, man.
“You don’t fucking know! I work my ass of, you get to sit at home all day!” HAHAHAHA! Please, go on, I want to see what happens.
“You think I like this? Being a house wife, waiting for you to come home just to ignore me and stare at the little girl across the street? How old could she be, fifteen?” Uh oh, dude, abort, just say sorry and tell her she is amazing. You’ll have to sleep on the couch for a few days, but at least you’ll still have your balls.
“She’s eighteen.” That was THE wrong answer, man. Oh wait, I think you want to follow that up, “If you hate me so much, why don’t you leave me and go run off or some shit.”
“I don’t hate you, you idiot. I love you, that’s why I married you, but you’ve given up trying and I can’t sit around and sink with you.” Tell her you love her and lets be done with this, this could be so much easier…
“Oh, so I’m just a sinking ship, now? Fuck you.” …and nope.
“See, this is your problem, you just push things off. You never deal with a problem, you just scoff and insult people to try and win the argument. You need to man-up and start dealing with these issues, because some day you’re going to be on your own.” She definitely has a point, that hair isn’t exactly calling all the girls to the yard, better shape up.
“I don’t need this shit.” There he goes, walk to the door. Yep, running away is definitely a habit of the victorious.
“Where are you going?” Don’t say it, please don’t say it…
“OUT!” Fucking really, dude? Twenty bucks says the locks are changed by the time you get home.
Well, with that argument having taken place, that puts this failure of a character right in the perfect spot to be intercepted by our hero, Benjamin Atreyu (See, don’t worry, he was going to appear in this story). Oh, just so you know, the wife, while the rest of this story takes place, is now cheating on her husband with the neighbor, and I can’t blame her.
The man, his head buzzing with frustration, storms down the sidewalk as if he had somewhere to be. He was cursing out his wife in his head with every dirty four letter word he could think of, but none of it seemed to do her justice in his mind as he seemed to have the “ever-so-appropriate” thought of comparing her to Hitler. However, just as he was imagining her with a Chaplin moustache, a limo pulled up beside him. He stopped in mid-step and looked over at the back window as it rolled down, revealing a well-dressed men sitting in the back peering his sunglasses at him.
“Get in,” Benjamin spoke with authority, but the man just stood there with an eyebrow cocked.
“What?”
“You heard me,” Benjamin rolled his window up. The man figured that the limo would ride off then, that it would be some surreal joke just to throw him off, but it just sat there. He was hesitant, which is reasonable considering the whole could-be-a-serial-kill deal; I mean, yeah, we know he isn’t one, but he doesn’t, it would be ridiculous, but that’s what Benjamin is looking for, he wants to see if the man’s curiosity will overrule his caution. This was the first test, he wasn’t going to explain anything until the man got into the limo, it was completely up to the man on the sidewalk to make the choice. Why is Benjamin doing this? Cool it, we’ll get there.
The man made a step to walk away, but something in his mind pulled him back, his glance moved back over to the limo which didn’t budge a single inch. He looked both ways, as if worried what people would say if they saw him jump into a random car, no matter that it was a limo, but after another moment of hesitance, he walked over to the door and opened it. Benjamin scooted to the side to let the man in.
“Welcome,” Benjamin spoke with a sly grin forming on his face.
“To what?”
“To the rest of your life, my good friend.”
“Excuse me?”
“I can understand your confusion, but all will be explained soon. Think of this like the first act in The Matrix, I’m going to open your eyes and introduce you to a new world.”
“Why?”
“All in due time, my friend,” Benjamin slipped his sunglasses off.
“Do I know you?”
“You might know of me, I’m sort of a television personality so to speak, but that isn’t important at the moment. We have a lot to talk about, and I’m sure that neither one of us want to waste our whole day.”
“I swear I’ve seen you before.”
“See, that’s something you’re going to have to stop doing that. Life, as we know it, is filled with tangents. These tangents are a test, a distraction if you will, and if you sink into these tangents, you will get lost of them like most of the world. We live in a binary world, there are those who are struggling to make ends meet, because they lacked vision, and then there are those who keep their eyes on the road and make their dreams come true.”
“Okay?”
“See, life as we know it is chaos, but that is not the case. Chaos has theory, and theory is based off patterns; at one point everything is done and the only thing left are the paths left by those who have done it all before us.”
“Sounds fairly negative.”
“It’s not, I assure you, in fact, it’s one of the most positive things you’ll ever hear.”
“How so? You’re basically saying that there is no original thought, no original action.”
“Yes, but the difference between me and the others saying the same thing, is that I’m not using it as an excuse to give up. In fact, I’m using it as a reason to keep trying. See, in all those different paths, there are paths that will lead you to success.”
“Are you saying there is an ultimate formula to success.”
“Fuck no. There is a way to become successful, but that doesn’t mean you can just follow someone else directly and expect the same results, that’s not how it works. It’ll take work, but what I’m saying is that you can use it to your advantage.”
“So, why are you telling me this?”
“Another thing, no jumping ahead, just keep your head in the present and you will benefit from it. You can project, but never skin ahead when vital information is right in front of you. Now, I’m going to give you a very interesting offer, but it’s important that you understand that this isn’t a free lunch, I’m giving you an opportunity, but you need to do something for me.”
“What?”
“That, somewhere down the road, if you become successful, you offer someone the same offer to someone else. Also, you never coast, I want you to always push yourself to reach another level, you are to never take it for granted, because it’s important that you work for what you have every day.”
“Why?”
“Good question. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but there is a war going on around us. Of course you wouldn’t know, you’ve lived on the bottom rung without complaint, but there is a world of idiots looking to tear down the achievers. Not only that, but for every worker who has scrapped for every chance they get, there are five who accept what they have and use that as accuse enough to sit back and produce nothing for the world, another mouth and empty head to consume our goods and shit out nothing but waste. This slowly downgrades the terms by which we live by; people ask for less, people strive for less, our economy plummets, they do what they are told and our society as a whole slowly deconstructs itself until we are all mindless goods walking around waiting for the next commercial to be blasted in their eyes so they know what to buy.”
“Sounds fairly anti-consumerist for someone who is currently sitting in a limo and a suit.”
“Being a capitalist doesn’t mean I am an anti-intellectualist. If the world is a wasteland of mongoloids, then we all lose. Life becomes pointless, empty, meaningless as we all fuck like rabbits, spew out more empty headed babies to feed off of the land and give nothing back to it. See, what I love about capitalism is that civilization spawns from it. Dangle a carrot in front of a bunch of people, they all follow it until they fall off the cliff, but if you give the carrot to the best one, then suddenly everyone starts working for the carrot.
---“See, capitalism can exist in a world with smart people, because everyone likes reward, but this current capitalism isn’t reward for effort, it is reward for the guy who can make the worst idea sell the best, but it doesn’t matter how many times it brings this country to its knees, people will always fighting for the quick buck. That’s problem with the ‘good guys’ these days; they make everyone feel good because it gets them that instant attention and cheer, but its all a waste. The world gets nothing from compliments, no one has ever felt the need to better themselves when they are told they are doing just fine. It is through critique, it is through deconstruction that we rebuild ourselves into something stronger, and with how all these philistines live their lives, they need to rebuild themselves into something better, because really anything could be better.
---“See, I’m an athlete, and this week I’ve been put in a tournament to determine who is currently the top star in my company. I’ve always thrived in tournaments, because its forced me to look myself over and improve myself, but its hit me lately that my problem is that despite working hard to show people where they sit on the ladder, they won’t listen, and I’ve started realizing that’s because there have been no real witnesses to my climb to greatness. They don’t buy what I am selling, because they are skeptical. So, I decided that if I had someone who experienced it, maybe then people would believe it. So, that is why you are here, to be my experiment if you will.”
“So, I ask again, why?”
“Because, no offence, you are clearly dead on the inside. You are past your prime, you are on the losing end of this game, and you have clearly given up in all areas accept with how people think of you. That makes you the perfect candidate. I’ll take you and turn you around; no longer will you be a failure, no longer will you think of your best years as behind you, no longer will you care about trends or how people look at you, because these people don’t know shit.”
“I’m not supposed to take offence.”
“Not if you want to be successful. There is no room to make it personal, you have to treat all the world like a business, it doesn’t matter how they insult you if you are more successful.”
“…”
“So, are you in? Now or never, you don’t get any time to think about it except for here and now.”
“…”
“Time is ticking…”
“…Okay.”
“Okay?”
“I’ll do it, tell me what I need to do to be successful.”
-.-.-
(Ten years in the future)
Down the road walks a man who clearly is trying too hard; trendy shirt to compliment his gray hair, a goatee just like his son’s, and a pair of the latest head phones as if he were some sort of music producer. He is pissed about something, but he tries to look like he is just serious, completely in control, but his anger seeps out. A limo pulls up to his side and the man stops and looks over at it. The window rolls down and a bald man with a three piece suit looks out over at the man in the trendy shirt.
“Get in.”
“What?” The man is hesitant.
“You heard me.” The man rolls up the window, he is ready to fulfill his promise.
Now, lets take a look at the man walking down the street who is currently suffering from a case of ‘trying to hard’; if you give him a not-to-close-look you can tell pretty quickly that he is balding pretty bad (and on the verge of graying I’m sure, granted there is nothing wrong with either of these two things), and with an equally inattentive gaze we can see he is wearing a pair of shitty/trendy sunglasses, a gold chain that even most gangsters would see as tacky, and an American Eagle t-shirt. If you look closer, though, you will see a soul crying out “OH dear god, please someone help me. I’m obviously dead inside and I can feel all the joy in my world getting sucked out through my wallet as I feel the need to buy trendy overpriced clothes to try and find acceptance from those far younger than me!” Oh, what a poor soul, if only his affliction wasn’t terminal.
What can we deduce from looking at this sniveling pile of wishing-I-were-dead? Well, middle-aged with a cliché case of mid-life-crisis; slowly losing his grip on what’s ‘cool’; obviously gives too much of a shit what everyone things of him; is unhappy, above all he is utterly, completely, totally, unequivocally unhappy. See, his hang ups are slowly sinking their hooks into his skin and are slowly pulling him into unfulfillment that will grow in him like a cancer and will eventually kill him in a fit of kicking and screaming disappointment. What’s my point? Well, it won’t take countless years for someone to repeat this mistake, in fact, someone will probably do the same thing tomorrow and make the tragic mistake of going into public like that. They try to give off this appearance that they are on top of everything, but the truth is that they are the greatest example of confusion as they walk through life without the faintest idea of what will make them happy, because if they had any idea, they wouldn’t be looking for acceptance from others.
This man is the kind of man that walks into Starbucks and tries to order the hippest sounding drink; this man is the kind of man that goes everywhere while talking on his smart phone just so everyone knows he has one and that he is important enough that someone would bother calling him; this man is the kind of man that goes home at night and contemplates killing himself because his wife is the faded star of what she once was and even she refuses to touch him; this is the kind of man who watches the teenage girl across the street and wishes he was just a few decades younger, not that this will stop him from trying to creep on her, because he constantly entertains the idea that she could be ‘kind of into him’ and won’t laugh at his attempts to socialize with people less than half his age; this man is the kind of man who will spend every night wide awake as he realizes that the twenty year old him who promised he would never settle down is now dead and even if he were alive in some sense, he would look down at the current incarnation of himself with a shake of the head and a disappointed glance; this is the man who will look himself in the mirror one day and realize he will never be a rock star, movie star, sex symbol, model, prodigy, or happy. He is one of many afflicted with crippling suffering of being an individual in a world of similar individuals, knowing he will never be important, but even in that, his suffering is unique and tailored just for him, so even in his similar hatred for himself shared with so many, he is unable to share his suffering with any effectiveness. That is the true pain of being an individual, to never be immersed in the safety of a hive mind, to never be lost, to always be aware of his singularity and the sort of silent existential internal breakdown that he holds deep inside as he walks down the street, pretending to be happy.
Why is this man walking down the sidewalk you ask? Why isn’t he driving some sort of outrageous sports car in order to impress college girls? Simple answer to that; he’s too broke to own one. That’s right, on top of being sad, delusional, and a bullshitter, he is also currently suffering from mountains of debt caused by spending one-too-many years in college trying to find a major before dropping out; so yes, this sort of ‘unsure’ and ‘beating around the bush’ nature of is has been that of a lifetime, and not just caused by the possibility of soon-approaching-death. Surely, faithful reader, this is the saddest animal on the planet; this man. However, today he would be the luckiest man in the world for the mere fact that he happened to be walking down the street on this particular day, because this was the day he would run into our hero, but more on that a bit later.
Now, what might be particularly interesting is his actual reason for this walk of his. Well, about an hour before hand, he had been asked by his wife of ten years to go to the grocery store to pick up a few things, which he did absolutely begrudgingly (you know, because him working on that ‘unfinished novel’ was so important, despite not having written a word in the last two years), but when he came back, he had forgotten most of the list (because ‘being a man’ means he doesn’t have time to write shit down, it’ll all stick in his memory). This perturbed his wife greatly, and she decided to voice her opinions in a fairly loudly. Granted, I wasn’t there, but if I had to recreate the conversation, this is how I imagine it might have gone;
“Seriously?” said the wife
“Seriously, what?” retorted the husband.
“I sent you out and you come back with like half the shit I asked you to get.” Oh, cursing early on, this should be fun.
“Oh for fuck sake, I’m sorry, I forgot.” With all the sarcastic and ingenuine force in his body.
“That’s why I told you to write it down!” Oh, you done fucked up, dude. She is mad now.
“I said I was sorry.” Yes, be indignant, that’ll fix the situation.
“It would be fine if this didn’t happen all the time. I ask you to do something you literally do the least you could do.” Oh shit, you gonna let her get away with that, buddy?...Because you totally should, you ain’t winning this fight.
“I do everything you ask!” Yep, yell louder, that should change her mind.
“You still need to fix the gutters, take our car for an oil change, I do the dishes after telling you a million times to do them, you always take the garbage out without the recycling, so its overflowing, and the last time I asked you to get groceries for dinner, you brought home fucking TV dinners!” That’s quite the list again you. I like to think that your next response will be you apologizing and giving a detailed account of how you’ll improve and stop acting like such a raging ass.
“I come home tired from work all the time only to be met with demand after demand. Just one I would like you to get off my back.” …or you could TOTALLY be a raging ass, it’s a free country.
“I do most of the work here, I just ask you to do little things, that’s all, but it seems you are incapable of doing that, and as far as your job, you sit around all day bullshitting, you hardly work!” The claws are coming out, better stop while you’re still breathing, man.
“You don’t fucking know! I work my ass of, you get to sit at home all day!” HAHAHAHA! Please, go on, I want to see what happens.
“You think I like this? Being a house wife, waiting for you to come home just to ignore me and stare at the little girl across the street? How old could she be, fifteen?” Uh oh, dude, abort, just say sorry and tell her she is amazing. You’ll have to sleep on the couch for a few days, but at least you’ll still have your balls.
“She’s eighteen.” That was THE wrong answer, man. Oh wait, I think you want to follow that up, “If you hate me so much, why don’t you leave me and go run off or some shit.”
“I don’t hate you, you idiot. I love you, that’s why I married you, but you’ve given up trying and I can’t sit around and sink with you.” Tell her you love her and lets be done with this, this could be so much easier…
“Oh, so I’m just a sinking ship, now? Fuck you.” …and nope.
“See, this is your problem, you just push things off. You never deal with a problem, you just scoff and insult people to try and win the argument. You need to man-up and start dealing with these issues, because some day you’re going to be on your own.” She definitely has a point, that hair isn’t exactly calling all the girls to the yard, better shape up.
“I don’t need this shit.” There he goes, walk to the door. Yep, running away is definitely a habit of the victorious.
“Where are you going?” Don’t say it, please don’t say it…
“OUT!” Fucking really, dude? Twenty bucks says the locks are changed by the time you get home.
Well, with that argument having taken place, that puts this failure of a character right in the perfect spot to be intercepted by our hero, Benjamin Atreyu (See, don’t worry, he was going to appear in this story). Oh, just so you know, the wife, while the rest of this story takes place, is now cheating on her husband with the neighbor, and I can’t blame her.
The man, his head buzzing with frustration, storms down the sidewalk as if he had somewhere to be. He was cursing out his wife in his head with every dirty four letter word he could think of, but none of it seemed to do her justice in his mind as he seemed to have the “ever-so-appropriate” thought of comparing her to Hitler. However, just as he was imagining her with a Chaplin moustache, a limo pulled up beside him. He stopped in mid-step and looked over at the back window as it rolled down, revealing a well-dressed men sitting in the back peering his sunglasses at him.
“Get in,” Benjamin spoke with authority, but the man just stood there with an eyebrow cocked.
“What?”
“You heard me,” Benjamin rolled his window up. The man figured that the limo would ride off then, that it would be some surreal joke just to throw him off, but it just sat there. He was hesitant, which is reasonable considering the whole could-be-a-serial-kill deal; I mean, yeah, we know he isn’t one, but he doesn’t, it would be ridiculous, but that’s what Benjamin is looking for, he wants to see if the man’s curiosity will overrule his caution. This was the first test, he wasn’t going to explain anything until the man got into the limo, it was completely up to the man on the sidewalk to make the choice. Why is Benjamin doing this? Cool it, we’ll get there.
The man made a step to walk away, but something in his mind pulled him back, his glance moved back over to the limo which didn’t budge a single inch. He looked both ways, as if worried what people would say if they saw him jump into a random car, no matter that it was a limo, but after another moment of hesitance, he walked over to the door and opened it. Benjamin scooted to the side to let the man in.
“Welcome,” Benjamin spoke with a sly grin forming on his face.
“To what?”
“To the rest of your life, my good friend.”
“Excuse me?”
“I can understand your confusion, but all will be explained soon. Think of this like the first act in The Matrix, I’m going to open your eyes and introduce you to a new world.”
“Why?”
“All in due time, my friend,” Benjamin slipped his sunglasses off.
“Do I know you?”
“You might know of me, I’m sort of a television personality so to speak, but that isn’t important at the moment. We have a lot to talk about, and I’m sure that neither one of us want to waste our whole day.”
“I swear I’ve seen you before.”
“See, that’s something you’re going to have to stop doing that. Life, as we know it, is filled with tangents. These tangents are a test, a distraction if you will, and if you sink into these tangents, you will get lost of them like most of the world. We live in a binary world, there are those who are struggling to make ends meet, because they lacked vision, and then there are those who keep their eyes on the road and make their dreams come true.”
“Okay?”
“See, life as we know it is chaos, but that is not the case. Chaos has theory, and theory is based off patterns; at one point everything is done and the only thing left are the paths left by those who have done it all before us.”
“Sounds fairly negative.”
“It’s not, I assure you, in fact, it’s one of the most positive things you’ll ever hear.”
“How so? You’re basically saying that there is no original thought, no original action.”
“Yes, but the difference between me and the others saying the same thing, is that I’m not using it as an excuse to give up. In fact, I’m using it as a reason to keep trying. See, in all those different paths, there are paths that will lead you to success.”
“Are you saying there is an ultimate formula to success.”
“Fuck no. There is a way to become successful, but that doesn’t mean you can just follow someone else directly and expect the same results, that’s not how it works. It’ll take work, but what I’m saying is that you can use it to your advantage.”
“So, why are you telling me this?”
“Another thing, no jumping ahead, just keep your head in the present and you will benefit from it. You can project, but never skin ahead when vital information is right in front of you. Now, I’m going to give you a very interesting offer, but it’s important that you understand that this isn’t a free lunch, I’m giving you an opportunity, but you need to do something for me.”
“What?”
“That, somewhere down the road, if you become successful, you offer someone the same offer to someone else. Also, you never coast, I want you to always push yourself to reach another level, you are to never take it for granted, because it’s important that you work for what you have every day.”
“Why?”
“Good question. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but there is a war going on around us. Of course you wouldn’t know, you’ve lived on the bottom rung without complaint, but there is a world of idiots looking to tear down the achievers. Not only that, but for every worker who has scrapped for every chance they get, there are five who accept what they have and use that as accuse enough to sit back and produce nothing for the world, another mouth and empty head to consume our goods and shit out nothing but waste. This slowly downgrades the terms by which we live by; people ask for less, people strive for less, our economy plummets, they do what they are told and our society as a whole slowly deconstructs itself until we are all mindless goods walking around waiting for the next commercial to be blasted in their eyes so they know what to buy.”
“Sounds fairly anti-consumerist for someone who is currently sitting in a limo and a suit.”
“Being a capitalist doesn’t mean I am an anti-intellectualist. If the world is a wasteland of mongoloids, then we all lose. Life becomes pointless, empty, meaningless as we all fuck like rabbits, spew out more empty headed babies to feed off of the land and give nothing back to it. See, what I love about capitalism is that civilization spawns from it. Dangle a carrot in front of a bunch of people, they all follow it until they fall off the cliff, but if you give the carrot to the best one, then suddenly everyone starts working for the carrot.
---“See, capitalism can exist in a world with smart people, because everyone likes reward, but this current capitalism isn’t reward for effort, it is reward for the guy who can make the worst idea sell the best, but it doesn’t matter how many times it brings this country to its knees, people will always fighting for the quick buck. That’s problem with the ‘good guys’ these days; they make everyone feel good because it gets them that instant attention and cheer, but its all a waste. The world gets nothing from compliments, no one has ever felt the need to better themselves when they are told they are doing just fine. It is through critique, it is through deconstruction that we rebuild ourselves into something stronger, and with how all these philistines live their lives, they need to rebuild themselves into something better, because really anything could be better.
---“See, I’m an athlete, and this week I’ve been put in a tournament to determine who is currently the top star in my company. I’ve always thrived in tournaments, because its forced me to look myself over and improve myself, but its hit me lately that my problem is that despite working hard to show people where they sit on the ladder, they won’t listen, and I’ve started realizing that’s because there have been no real witnesses to my climb to greatness. They don’t buy what I am selling, because they are skeptical. So, I decided that if I had someone who experienced it, maybe then people would believe it. So, that is why you are here, to be my experiment if you will.”
“So, I ask again, why?”
“Because, no offence, you are clearly dead on the inside. You are past your prime, you are on the losing end of this game, and you have clearly given up in all areas accept with how people think of you. That makes you the perfect candidate. I’ll take you and turn you around; no longer will you be a failure, no longer will you think of your best years as behind you, no longer will you care about trends or how people look at you, because these people don’t know shit.”
“I’m not supposed to take offence.”
“Not if you want to be successful. There is no room to make it personal, you have to treat all the world like a business, it doesn’t matter how they insult you if you are more successful.”
“…”
“So, are you in? Now or never, you don’t get any time to think about it except for here and now.”
“…”
“Time is ticking…”
“…Okay.”
“Okay?”
“I’ll do it, tell me what I need to do to be successful.”
-.-.-
(Ten years in the future)
Down the road walks a man who clearly is trying too hard; trendy shirt to compliment his gray hair, a goatee just like his son’s, and a pair of the latest head phones as if he were some sort of music producer. He is pissed about something, but he tries to look like he is just serious, completely in control, but his anger seeps out. A limo pulls up to his side and the man stops and looks over at it. The window rolls down and a bald man with a three piece suit looks out over at the man in the trendy shirt.
“Get in.”
“What?” The man is hesitant.
“You heard me.” The man rolls up the window, he is ready to fulfill his promise.
