Life is a process of loss, which is part of gain, which is part of change, which is part of life.

If there should be a number for life, just as we so predictably award numbers and codes to everything we come across in our inept attempt at organisation (which truly only makes things so hard to locate we eventually hire ‘managers’ of all sorts, to find them for us; we suffer at the hands of our own imagined genius), the number, in my humble (who cares anyways) opinion, shall be 87485… don’t ask why, I don’t know, I have forgotten, or maybe I never remembered. Does it matter?

Speaking of numbers, I have recently subscribed to the theory of a book, a book which has successfully located that which all of us have lost in our lives – A conqueror’s resolve, a musician’s whim, a lover’s touch, a racer’s strength, a gymnast’s agility, a coded manuscript, a secret recipe, a courtly dress, a royal brew, a burnt out star, a golden era… We may all find at Station ‘404’.

404 – Not Found

Key some random, imaginary, irrationalised line into your url search bar on the nearest internet browser, and lo and behold, “404 – Not Found”. It is in that which we cannot find, there we bury, or rather buried by time and consequence (more often than not that of our unparallel foolishness; I have, or rather I will, henceforth cease from labelling my own species as ‘stupid’, they are now a foolish lot).

404 – Not Found – where we will never again find, and one day totally lose, as we lose control over our physical vessel, the memory of those which we have once held and carelessly let slip.

If one were to make a list of that which we have lost, forget it, the list can’t possibly be made (It will probably take as long as it would take a toy car to run into a dead end on a mobius strip). It can’t be made (physically, or in our world today, in softcopy neither), simply because it will, like the spawn of our universe, start at a point and stretch uncontrollably towards the finites of infinites.

Nevertheless, much due to insomnia (I am insistent on not taking those pills again, less I start astral-walking, [have I misspelled?] again; the last time I ‘walked’ into my boss’s office!), I shall try to name a few:

1) Good Music

What is music? Music, personally, is the one universal language we all understand but fail to articulate. It is the emotional expression that will never go wrong; the emotional expression that adequately defines our innermost, wherever we are, in which ever era we exist.

Good Music, however, only exists in wherever we are not and in whichever era earlier. And to our fathers, an era earlier, and so on… It is always cast behind us… in a time and place beyond the feeble reaches of our pathetic lifespan. The Pop and Rock eras will look back at the Renaissance, where there were no lyrics, only the altruist expression of sound; while the present era will look back at the time when every culture had a music to call its own, before the wave of ‘fusion’ (and mergers and commonality and democracy and the-one-ring-to-rule-them-all) hit us all so fast everything we hear starts to sound the same.

We will never hear good music in our realities (though one might try to invite imagination in dreams to connect to the lost frequencies). So face it, that’s reality, that’s who or what we’ve become; soulless engines toiling away to live, living with reasons we do not know, and in so doing wearing ourselves out to welcome our deathbed. Music, which evolves with its composers, shall see the same fate.

2) Progress

If Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs are really correct in sequence, they are wrong in progression, and it is not in arrogance, but in the light of simple observation, that I call the bluff; his bluff (maybe it was a genuine mistake, but in this age, in this present, no mistake is genuine, or rather, whether or not is it does not matter, and we get punished for it all the same).

The HON (Hierarchy of Needs, I choose to simplify it for easy typing, though in explaining this act I have wasted an additional 224 characters – just goes to show how we end up complicating things as we try to simplify them, which I will illustrate further when I talk of SIMPLICITY), if I remember correctly, says that we build our needs based on the following:

- Survival
- Stability
- Social
- Self Esteem
- Self Actualisation

It seems, however, that we have been progressing in the absolute 180 degree opposite of the intended / correct / theoretical sequence! I shall explain why:

{Break}

I ventured downstairs to grab a drink from the vending machine, and guess what? I dropped a dollar coin into the slot, pressed for my drink (which is supposed to cost 90 cents), and started staring at the change-dispensing slot.

WHY AM I MORE BOTHERED WITH THE 10 CENTS CHANGE AS OPPOSED TO THE DRINK THAT COST 90 CENTS???

Just goes to show, as with all others things, there goes my sense and sanity…

{Continue}

Self Actualisation: We discard the need for that, or rather, we believe we have surpassed that stage as soon as we surpass our childhood. We drop our innocent dreams, and take the advice of wisdom from those with exceeding age and receding hairlines, to come down, DOWN, from our dreamlands into reality.

Self Esteem: We lose that too, as we enter the world of employment (a better word for slavery, all nothing more than a make-belief better world, in the name of the almighty democracy). We start bowing to people we cannot stand for scraps of paper we call money – our insolent customers, our unsympathetic bosses, our cocky colleagues who bow lower than us…

Social: We form the social nucleus we call ‘family’ as that is what the norm states. We indirectly also form around us a brood of bloodsuckers who constantly feed and live off the already meagre rewards of your massive energy output. We forego the need for social interaction to feed these bloodsuckers, in the name of morality.

Stability: We take loans, credit advances, hire purchases to ‘better’ our lives, directly adding to the piling financial deficit, and lull ourselves into believing that we have risen to a more affluent state of life. We place the only thing remaining of our livelihood, at the hands and mercy of our employers / business partners / clientele. In this ever changing economy, do you still honestly think there is anything called collaborative loyalty? And when the loyalty goes, stability goes with it.

Survival: And so we end up, merely surviving… breathing harder each day, just to keep the vessels going. We forego sleep, our mealtimes, our health, so that we can survive? How ironical.

So, can we truthfully ay we have progressed?

3) Freedom

We all believe, we all preach and sing praises to democracy, a system founded to give the people more freedom. It seems, however, we are merely enjoying under the deluded demise of whatever is left of our freedom.

We despise the old governing structures of monarchy, or mass repression at the hands of one man. To counter that, we create a system, a political revolution of the past era, to take the power of one man and divide it equally amongst the hands of all men! Do we not realise that now instead of one fool to rule over us, we have (let’s just take a small country like ours) 4 million fools to decide our future, judge our actions, and penalise our fancies?

The free-person, who has to consider in every single breath he or she takes; political correctness, mass appeal, social and moral good, a library of legal statutes (which most of us do not know shit about), the possibility of criminal or civil offence, is not so much a free person.

The free-country, in which the ruling party is elected based in the number of material concessions it places as open bribery to the people, where rich men can buy their way into politics and where every civil serving component in the country’s infrastructure inevitably falls under the reigns of the ruling parties, is not so much a free country either.

We really have the knack to destroy that which we desire! So much for freedom; swallowed, digested and passed out as dung in the pursuit for democracy.


And so it seems, that we lose and lose and lose, and the harder we try, the more we try to gain, the more we lose. Demoralising? Suffocating? Feel like slitting your throat this very moment? I’d like to do the same, but only if I cannot find the answer in my next post.

Till then, we can all brood in the miserable reminiscence of those which we have lost.