I remember all the bad times with the Crack Monster. I remember all the weird deadly moments of toxic lust and destruction and terror. What I don’t remember so well are all the years of my own drug addiction. Not without a conscious effort to do so. Maybe that’s why Divine Providence sent Narcisa to stand right in the middle of my happy, sober life path. To remind me on a daily basis that there, but for the grace of God, go I.
Now it’s Carnaval, day 3 and the whole city seems to be possessed by spirits of random futility and senseless debauchery. I feel disconnected and lost. Not with it, not of it. Not in it. Narcisa’s on her own solitary path of spiritual awakening now. Six months out of the hole and desperately seeking Redemption, and for that much I am grateful. Good to remember that we’re only here today by Divine Grace.
But this Carnaval is turning out to be a lonely and depressing business. I’m neither here nor there, neither fish nor fowl today… Night is falling and I’m going out into the streets on another observation mission. Now I sit at my old post by the waves at the end of Copacabana and watch the grim, listless procession of wandering sheeplike revelers. They’re all out tonight, dull humanity in all their sordid downtrodden glory. How much more before the fall? It seems senseless and grey. Not like the old dreamlike Carnavals of glittering illusion and gay carefree abandon of my youthful earthly memory. Not even the anything-goes wild times of more recent days before the specter of 2012…
More like a devious parade of lost souls stumbling through the darkness now, looking for a chink in the fortress walls of their own mental prisons, clamoring for some sign of light. The sand is littered with them, while many more clutter the sidewalk. Aimless, bored, lost. Drunk. Dangerous. Tonight there will be more of the same silly partying and drunken stumbling, more ugliness, more canned joy and stifled emotion, more searching. More disappointment, disillusion, poverty, hypocrisy and slow death. The best I can do is sit and be here with it all, neither fish nor foul. At the end of the day I’m here to give the whole big screaming seven billion headed beast of humanity one more long, hard searching and fearless look in the eye tonight before they all throw up on my tired old head again.
Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009.
assino embaixo de cada palavra
i actually feel better after reading this…
MIGHT I INQUIRE WHY?
cuz thats exactly what i think about the whole carnival thing
what actually made me feel good was the idea of more people out there sharing the same thoughts and feelings about it
ps. not that im taking any pleasure out of it
hahaha! got it. you are not alone…
I’ll be reading this one again and again.