Paranoid

Monsters exist. And I’m here to tell you to take a care because there’s more monsters than anyone would like to admit. Lots of them. Far worse than you’d imagine. The worst of it is they wear human skin and pass themselves off as one of us. Oh! They’re so good at being human. Too good. There’s something seductive about the way they mimic us. That and the danger of course. Danger has an attraction all of its own.

No one tells us that. Well… they do and they don’t. It’s push and pull all the way to the very bottom. On the one hand there are the tales of werewolves and vampires. Warnings of the sensual powers of the monster. I mean, have you seen all the novels on sexy monsters? There’s mucho frisson when it comes to the really bad dudes and dudettes, and let’s face it we all love a bad boy or an even badder girl. We know it’s going to hurt, but pain and pleasure are two sides to the same coin and we do like to flip that coin and gamble with our lives from time to time. It makes us feel all the more alive when we’re on the ragged edge.

Except, we convince ourselves that it’s not a gamble. That we’re in control and it’s not as bad as all that. We reduce our assessment of the risk and that doubles down on the monster’s power over us.

Maybe we’re addicts. Hooked on pain and wishing for death. Ask anyone a straight question about that and they’ll deny it. The same as we deny death himself. Yeah, death is a man. A privileged guy standing on a glass floor and peering sanctimoniously down upon us all, safe in the knowledge that he always wins. Forget the patriarchy or the matriarchy, it’s the anarchy of death that defines us all.

Sex and death are also two sides of the coin we carry in our pocket as a cursed lucky charm. Sometimes I think we want to fuck death in a final act of rebellion against life itself. Experience the ecstasy of a fight we can never win. Walk into the eternal fires with a stupid grin of idiocy on our faces. One final grand adventure until the curtain falls into the abyss and drags us along with it.

That, or we’re just monumentally stupid. 

I’ve spent a lot of time worrying away at my own stupidity. Asked myself if I’m paranoid. In a way I am. Only it’s not paranoia if you’re really being followed is it? You’re not crazy if the monster really is in your bedroom. There isn’t a word for that is there? Or maybe there is. And the word is living.

No one else sees the monstrous madness and that there is the kicker. You raise your hand and point at the monster and everyone else sees a smile and they all fall for the charm it holds. Atishoo! Atishoo! We all fall down. Forget the angels. We are the fallen and chief amongst us is The Beast. The devil himself pulls that charm trick and we identify with him in a heartbeat. He’s the ultimate bad boy and we all want to be like him. That one percenter that all the chicks swipe right on whilst discarding all the decent guys who might just have retained some semblance of decency and their humanity along with it. 

Choose bad! That’s the world we live in nowadays. Take a midnight stroll amongst the dating apps and despair. On the one side you have women who are swamped with saccharine adoration. A warehouse of dicks to ride should they so choose. On the other side there are men swiping and swiping until their hands fall off. And when they do get thrown a bone, that bone hits them square between the eyes and leaves them sick, dizzy and wondering what point there is in carrying on. Men are suspended in Limbo Central, whilst Women have all their Christmases come at once. Beware monsters bearing gifts and look the Trojan gift horse in the mouth. Because lies are too good to be true. Sugar sweet and rotting us from the inside out.

Look at the numbers of men and women in the dating pool. I’d say those two sides are about evenly split. But the majority of the guys out there are single with no prospect of dating, let alone anything beyond that. Whereas single women are choosing to be single because they’ve woken up to some of the madness out there. Only some of it mind. There’s plenty of insanity to go around and only a few of us have had the full deluxe madness experience. Dined on every single course of the insanity that has its roots in the very depths of hell.

How do you get a ticket to the main event? That ain’t the right question. You need to ask about the price of said ticket. And if you have to ask? You can’t afford it. No one can afford it. But then, neither can we afford to go sleepwalking into the embrace of the devil. No siree. 

I’m sure there are different payment methods to get your eyes unglued and your head set half straight. The price I paid was betrayal. I was beset by myriad treachery and received wounds that will not heal. My carcass is raw and I feel everything. The sigh of a lie and the cry of anguish as it lands. I bleed for the world and I witness a constant procession of people pass me by and deny the truth of my suffering.

I have to remind myself over and over again that this ain’t hell. There is redemption here. I am paying for sins that have sat in my forebears’ account earning interest. I added to that debt and I add to it still. Even as I pay it down.

This ain’t hell. This ain’t purgatory. This is the aftermath of betrayal. The defilement of my temple and the utter desolation that is left at the scene of the crime. I am a site of loss. I will rebuild, but there will always be a sense that something was taken from me. Something precious. Something that I will never get back. My innocence. 

They took my innocence and Father, I must forgive them for their heinous crimes against me. But I will never forget. I can never forget, for I have been gifted with the sight of truth and I see hell approaching. Heralded by a vanguard of those who have sacrificed far more than I have lost. Sold their souls in order to live what has been advertised as an easy life. Chosen blame and hate over connection and love. Made the conscious decision to visit hell upon the unsuspecting.

Hell and its jolly, frolicking monsters. The gates of hell are hanging wide open and we’re dancing with the very devil himself. And God is watching on the side lines of this game we’re playing as we kick around His ball and exclude Him from our lives. He’s rueing the day He gifted us with free will. Even He didn’t expect us to squander life so spectacularly. It’s gotten so bad that I reckon the devil stumbled in front of the open goal we presented him too.

Let’s take a serious moment with this one. Our wilful choice to make like lemmings. We all know right from wrong. That’s one thing we never needed to learn. It’s there as part of the deal of life. Always has been and always will be. A fact of our existence with no weighting to either option. I find that remarkable. But then God has his ways, mysterious and obvious.

Light or dark? 

Which do we choose?

Turns out we’ll make the wrong choice more often than not and call it the easy option. That’s temptation for you. And I don’t think the devil’s even trying most of the time. Doesn’t have to. We’re intimidated by the right choice. We don’t want to stuff up and disappoint the Big Guy. We don’t even try. So you see, the devil doesn’t need to try either. He sits there and watches us as we entertain him with our nonsensical zig zag course towards our oblivion. If I were the devil, I’d give God a hand or at least blow the whistle and restart the game with a few rules to make it all a bit interesting. There’s no sport in this. We’re fish in a barrel and the shark is getting too fat to swim anymore.

At this rate, the devil won’t win. The match will be abandoned and the spectators will storm the ticket booths demanding their money back.

That’s free will for you. And the crazy thing is that we want exactly what God wants. We want to be loved. Loved freely for who we are. We know we can’t make anyone love us. That wouldn’t be right and it wouldn’t count. It has to come from the heart and it has to mean something.

Right?

Wrong!

We’ve made it all wrong and ruined that game as well!

Because we all lure people in under false pretences. We learn from an early age that we’re not good enough, so we have to put on a front that looks good. No one wants to know the real us. Why would they? So we’re all spinning yarns and contorting ourselves in order to achieve the approval we never got when we were knee high to a grass hopper.

In a place where everyone’s pretending to be something they’re not, monsters thrive. We’ve made our world into a monster’s playground. And the monsters pick off the idiots that just want to be genuine. They see the people who are more real than the rest and they feed on their authenticity. Destroy the best in humanity. Cull the decency from the herd. Those who at least try at being human are the tastiest morsels.

And we all stand by and let it happen.

Nowhere is safe. Nowhere is sacred. We all know that. Power corrupts. Even in the many houses of God or whatever you want to call Him. Look no further than our politicians. The world is spiralling rudderless into a whirling cesspool of corruption. 

The end is nigh!

But then, it always has been. That’s death for you. We choose not to see it. Hide in the sanctuary of our ignorance. Share time with fellow worshipers of the lie and hope that we don’t get found out. 

There’s comparative safety in the Ignorance Collective. Staying in character and buddying up with bullies. Isolation is the killer. Victims are singled out and eaten alive. I have the scars from tooth and claw to show for it. I am forever marked by the beasts that walk among us.

Problem is, I can’t pick out the monsters from their fan clubs anymore. Everything has blurred in the shadows. The light dims and the last sanctuaries have fallen to dust and rubble, as the knights who protected them lost their virtue and fell prey to greed and insanity. No one fights the good fight because there’s nothing left to fight for.

I walk the land and I know I am followed. I wish I was paranoid. I yearn for a cure to this madness. As I have become more real everything around me has become unreal. I no longer see my kind. I swim in the midst of an ocean of monsters. Floating towards unremarked extinction.

Am I the only one left?

The sad and lonely man dangling on the end of a dating app. A dark umbilicus attached to my peering face. Feeding me pain and unbearable sadness until I choke to death on my splendid isolation.

The screens were the last straw. And we made them. Screens are the wide open gate that the devil didn’t know he needed in order to invade each and every one of us. We fall for the graven images and we fall into the trap of our own making. Staring through our own reflected image and ignoring how monstrous we have become. 

We’ve tuned in and thrown our humanity out.

I am not paranoid.

The madness is real, it stalks me night and day.

I am not paranoid.

The vengeful eyes of monsters are forever upon me.

I am not paranoid.

Three times I will deny it.

I’m so alone.