Juggling Dust

Day 2,840.

Plaiting fog, knitting gravy, juggling dust – just some titles of tricky little human irritants (caused by other actual human irritants) that make the roadmap of life far from easy.

They drop their spectral fingers on the anti-gravity button, causing everything we hold dear to rise up, fade and disappear. One minute everything is there within huggable distance: money, joy, employment, love, friendship, ripped abs (insert your cherished-whatever, here). The next: 3,2,1 up, up, and away they all go! Everything has gone. Everything but us, the emptiness, frustration and anger. Invisible ankle weights bear down keeping us fixed to the earth as we gaze up through glazed eyes, watching everything we had, shrink to a dot. Just when we least expect, it strikes like a prehistoric predator acting as prophet – Veloci-Rapture. All gone. Poof!

Of course, it doesn’t all happen at once. We don’t get it all over with in one agonising lump, then start afresh. No; like our breath in Winter, it evaporates in increments. Days, weeks, months, and years meld and blur behind us. A thief in the night\day\dawn – take your pick.

I don’t actually know where I’m going with this post. Really, I don’t! I may have written myself an over-wordy sinkhole. Well, you’re this far in with me. You may as well get the popcorn.

From screaming our tiny lungs dry on our first day of birth, to screaming back at the empathy-hoover of an automated voice on the end of a phone. We get though life by juggling dust. Unfortunately, it’s obligatory and non-negotiable whether we like it (we don’t) or not. We are not told about such things at our very beginning as we wet our pants, dribble and throw our food at parents. But it soon creeps up as we grow, as life kicks us in our financial, mental, and spiritual backsides. Them’s the unwritten rules. We are the jugglers of dust. Poof!

All life on earth could paved with such an endless abundance of love, joy and sustenance for all – if only it weren’t for one clutch of nasty little elements – humans. Or more accurately, the excremental (not a typo), labyrinthine undercurrents of human nature.

Add a heap of wealth to a nice human. Now sprinkle in some success. Stir in some hype, and add dollops of ego. Let it all cook slowly in government buildings, tv and film studios, organised religious churches and the like. Decorate with the lies and deception of the high-earning, low living accumulation of digitised, online Influencer detritus who throw their pixilated barbs into us for, follows, likes and cash.  

Let it all simmer until you end up with charming a looking dish – totally inedible due to the rotten ingredients that steam and writhe within. I’d advise being in running distance of a toilet after gorging on all that.

Sounds bad? That’s us!

You still here? My apologies, and thanks.

It breaks my heart to see once-perfectly naturally beautiful girls and women, whose faces and bodies have been influenced, co-opted, branded and self-altered, become clones of one another. Lips are swollen into permanent pouts. Botox infused foreheads refuse natural expression, and (perfect?) eyebrows: waxed, tweezed, threaded, pencilled, tattooed and micro bladed within an inch of their once wild little lives.

Then we have the hollowed-out cheeks and the skull-like gauntness that haunt tabloids thanks to Ozempic or other dodgy alternatives. It was good at the start, they thought. Then . . .

The influencers make sure that natural beauty is never enough. A little fix here and there to begin with is never enough. Nothing is ever enough. We can all look never enough together until we all look exactly the same. Then comes thrill of the chase. More, more, more!

Addiction is its own savage and repulsive animal. But if it is fed daily by the greed and antipathy of the scum at the top of the mortality chain – it breeds and runs feral to the vulnerable who have already been emptied of the promises life once gave them. Its victims once the highest of intelligence and the most radiant of beauties, the strongest and most impenetrable of bodies and wills. But each will be stripped and ripped by the teeth of addiction into the most vulnerable and broken of souls. The animal is kept fed by the hand of the obsidian darkness, the bleakest of human nature. Fed by money, greed, desire; domination over every thing and every one. Nobody gets out with their dignity, beauty, finances, or souls intact. Nobody gets out alive.

As a child I used to believe in God. I was a cherubic little catholic; a choirboy and altar boy at my local church. I attended mass every Sunday. Now I don’t believe. Life saw to that. Nothing in particular happened. Life happened. But what sane god would allow the state of this once beautiful planet and its occupants to self-implode and burn like this? All tv and online news media are like scenes from Hellraiser and American Psycho. I’ve seen firsthand what organised religion can do to vulnerable, trusting people who become lost. All in the name of a loving god. They unwittingly lose their soul via their bank accounts and dignity. There are many, many genuinely good people of faith out there. There are. But devils walk among them dressed as angels and acolytes.

But god is not for me. I’ve never met a god that practices what he/she preaches. I’ve never met a god. Have you?

I’m not a vegetarian or a vegan. I’m an out-and-out carnivore. It’s in my (our) nature. I’m more than well aware, as we all are (or should be) of the sickening and horrific practices inflicted on innocent animals to get their meat to our oversized plates and mouths. I do feel that constant, distant rumble of guilt in my conscience as I chew on other-species flesh. But unfortunately, the meat still goes down. We carnivores shouldn’t be able to easily sleep at night. Our minds should be riddled constantly with deafening nightmares of the torture and depravity, perpetrated on our fellow, other-species earth dwellers. But sleep, we do. One day I will cut out meat altogether. I think it’s the right thing to do. They say ‘meat is murder.’ If you care about such things, I suppose technically, it is. I think about these things. I have a conscience. We all have a conscience!

But the slaying doesn’t stop at other-species.

And boy do we murder ourselves on a barbaric and disgustingly grand scale that would make Satan and his sick little minions wince a little as he hammers up the sign on Hell’s basement which says ‘No More Vacancies.’

Femicide, infanticide, genocide, suicide – pick a cide – but whatever cide you pick – it’s always the same cide of a bad cide of a bad lot. The inhuman side of human nature.

As children, we have the get-out clause written as the bliss of ignorance and innocence. As sane adults, we can’t use that same article. We’re willingly and gratefully ill-informed. We should know better, do better, be better. But we don’t.

If the human race were an actual greyhound race, we’d all starve to death in our wide-open traps, as the hare runs in endless circles.  

You sill here? Wow! Help!

But all that stuff, the jet-black stuff, that’s all human nature gone wrong, stuff. The dark underbelly of a superb bit of still-evolving biological super-engineering, given as a gift from the universe to a spinning rock called earth. We schlepped out of the sea one day, many years ago and Bingo! You and me.

Humans. The average Joe. Joe Bloggs – just getting though life the best we can.

Always double-checking we are wearing pants before we walk out our front door, bleary-eyed in the morning. We fill our cars with trusting humans on the school run or work, and try not to hit and maim other biological familiars in similar, speedy tin-can transport. We start work and finish the day in the hopes of not trepanning our co-workers with a long, thick shard of coffee mug when they infuriate us. We bank on them giving us the same courtesy.

Most humans are fantastic ambassadors for upright, intelligent, and chatty biology. We do try our best on a daily basis. We really do. Although we only use a tiny fraction of our brain capacity, the miniscule part that we do benefit from is mostly put to good use. Mostly. We invented the wheel, some time ago, all by ourselves! We can pretty much take the credit for miracles of medical science. All the arts? Yep, all that was us. We also invented Love Island and TikTok, but we all make mistakes. We’re only human.

This post was supposed to be quite short. A rant and ramble about how life could be so wonderful if it were not for the hearts of darkness inside the small percentage of humans belching out smoke in front of distorted mirrors. The inflicting of so much pain on the rest of humankind, animal-kind, and ecological-kind. How recovery from addiction is made so much harder by the greed and soul-filth of others trying to drag us off our wagons and under the wheels. Why we are constantly influenced to be absolutely anything and everything, but ourselves. I could have just said that. But I didn’t.

If you made it this far, you’re a trooper and a star. Unfortunately, I can’t give you your time back. But I can give you thanks.

Thanks.

Take care everyone xx