When you are young, everything is concise, concrete. The boundaries between one thing and the other are as clear as day. It is only when you grow older that the mind sets to default and the world around you morphs into a haze of confusion.
When I woke up today I felt good, I had a song in my head. However now, ten hours later, I feel cheated and threatened by what tomorrow will bring. It isn’t a nice feeling. This morning I was singing, now I’m writing. If you love you sing. If you write you hate, or so I’m led to believe.
At about dinner time I stopped singing and browsed the internet. I spent most of it on a website a friend had told me about called Conflict.com. The content was brutal, a barbaric stream of hate filled dialogue and negativity pouring out of the monitor, forming a glow on my face and hands, like a bright splurge of technicolor ejaculation.
Conflict.com is a networking site built on unjustified bile. I was horrified to discover that, without me even signing up to it, somebody had established a profile for me. It had my name, hometown, information and various pictures and underneath a series of comments all taking the form of death threats. Apparently the concept of the site was to browse until you stumbled across a person’s profile that you didn’t like the look of. When you found one you left a message describing unequivocally what you would like to do to that person. In most cases a counter comment ensued and eventually a physical meeting. I realised that computers had openly become killers. I logged off.
After my shocking encounter with the internet I visited a department store to buy some aftershave. The woman at the counter approached me. She acted like I was special, she acted like the make-up was for me and the fixed smile made me believe that I was hers and hers only, but I wasn’t. It was just to get my money. The girl was attractive I guess but she wasn’t far removed from being a hired whore. She kept with the prefab smile and I looked down and noticed her béchamel thighs and calves and her red rough knees where it was clear she had been doing anything but praying. Her smile evaporated the moment I handed her my money.
After I left the department store and had to think about what I preferred, the unjustified hatred or the artificial love.
So now I feel cheated that I’ve fallen for it all. The only comfort being that I possess a sense of perspective in the way that if you hate and curse you evidently love and empathise in equal measure. Earlier on I masturbated over the girl in the department store and later I’m going on the internet to arrange to meet that cunt who threatened me on Conflict.com.
(c) Philip Clark 2008