(painful) words

27^th June 2011

My jaw has not had its daily fill of vocalizing-articulizing mastication - put simply: I haven't spoken much today.

I realise that most of these wild folks that live around these shores - distant and near - go about their daily hepcat worldly existence going to their jobs and then back to their home as they finish.  But I'm confronted daily with a question that is currently befuddling my little old head.  I can see the logic to work: it sustains the mind and body with necessary toil to keep the old cogs moving in the right direction; it also provides economical sustenance - that is: money to feed the body and the body's desires (be they cultural, spiritual, music travel or drugs, fags or booze, etc).  I think I've worked that out fairly well.

However, what confuses the heck out of little old me (old - the word - getting a little tired out now itself...) is that the above logic is reliant on one absolute: that life is for living.  SEEMS to me that all these folk going about their daily business are toiling away unnecessarily.  There is one absolute: everyone dies.  And I firmly believe that the phrase "he died too young" - used to muse upon the passing of a relatively young man - as simply a phrase which has no intrinsic value.

For Instance – take the following:

The notion of ‘dying before ones time’ – i.e. the death of someone who has not fulfilled (according to their society’s statistical figuring) their life’s expectancy – is plainly a stupid one. Why? Because it implies that they have been – somehow – mystically robbed of x amount of years as a living body.  But who robs that person? Where do those ‘unused’ years go? Of course, they go nowhere; they do not exist – the statement is pure folly.  When a person dies, they die.  To die before their time implies something intrinsically wrong.

                Consider the life of a man as an hour on the clock.  The second hand starts to tick round as the man is born – beginning at 12.00.  Dying before their time implies that the hands of the clock will stop before that hour has been completed – for example, at 8.43.  This is wrong, though.  If the life of a man is like that of the passage of an hour on a clock, then whenever that man dies, the clock will always stop ticking as the second hand counts the last second into 1.00.

                Unseen potential of the individual who dies too soon is a cultural fabrication to satiate the bereaved.  He would have been a great man, a fine husband, a superb father, a successful businessman, a loyal friend.  All are phrases heard after the death of a man who has died before his time – yet, ‘his time’ has come because he is dead.

                Perhaps this is all a little too fatalistic of me.

To return to my original question..

People get jobs to pay for their hobbies etc – commodities to satisfy themselves with.

People get jobs to sustain themselves – physically and mentally.

People get jobs to contribute – to their family, to society.

                What happens if: I have no hobbies? No desire to immerse myself in commodity fetishism? No desire to sustain myself? No desire to  contribute to a society which I perceive as flawed, uncouth, ugly, foul tasting?

Is it simply that I wish to die? Or am I simply like most people, but not yet fallen into the monotonous pit of work, of daily toil.

Why subsist if one believes he has nothing to continue living for? No lovers, no goals, no desires.

If I earn fifty-five thousand pounds per annum, what would I do with it? What would be the point?