Observations on Despair: Part 1

There was a night when I was at a club, totally sober, though I had consumed two bottles of wine. I thought that tomorrow I would be on holiday and it gave me some solace; but at that moment, there was only sadness. As Herzog said, the jungle is only fornication and disorder, disorder and obscenity. The same is true of humanity. We are creatures in a jungle.

I looked around and I was disgusted by all the vulgarity and carnal obscenity of the humanity filing that room. The ugly people and their drunken displays of libido were literally sickening and I felt something move in my stomach.

Fat girls in short skirts dancing together in little circles with eyes closed and looks of pathetic longing on their faces. Trying their best to be like orchids, hoping to attract ants that would crawl all over them and stick their tongues into their dripping nectar slits.

Opposite them stood the little pig-eyed men, flexing under tight short-sleeve-button-down shirts, scowling, trying to attract equally ugly women by the sheer width of their arms.

Everyone was just staring blankly into a sort of middle distance netherworld of longing and unfulfilment. Just waiting, aimlessly waiting.

No one knows why they want what they do, but they seem content with searching for it. They seem to sense that this all has some purpose or higher order. They don’t feel the void of beauty, the desperate longing for meaning, the ceaseless quest to project some order on to the series of unconnected events and instances that is life.

Drink only heightens sadness. It makes the depression deeper and opens ones eyes to the misery around oneself.

I wondered what everyone was doing staring glassy eyed around them in their little groups of two’s and three’s, not talking to those they had come with, just starring and waiting with their pathetic hope. Waiting like gold fish in a little bowl; waiting to die then be flushed down the toilet and forgotten about.

People go to clubs to stare at one another like horses at an auction. I go to confirm my humanity, my likeness (or dislikeness) to my fellow men and to justify the meaning I create for myself by looking for it in others.

I never find it though. I only find despair.

 The despair arises, particularly acute, when the ugly people are everywhere. They suffocate me. The pulsating mass of fist pumping, loin grinding, facially deprecated humanity that fills clubs is a gross display the human propensity towards being out of control, drunk, fat, and ugly. These people are the common denominator by which we are all divided. At these moments their is only despair...a despair so overpowering I am rendered immobile and it takes the greatest of efforts to drag myself home so that I may stare into a mirror and reaffirm the divinity of my visage.

I am not a narcissist, I am a heathen lover of bacchus, of thanatos, of beauty, and of pan. I love coffee, snow falling in woods, and most of all I love the sound of waves lapping against boats becalmed in an open ocean. I embody silence, soughing pines, and the susurrus of the wind blowing the jasmine flowers hanging from buddhist temples in some forgotten corner of the sub-continent.