The Darkness

The darkness seeps through the cracks of life.

I think I've been having a mid life crisis since I was 16, which isn't such a bad thing provided that it doesn't end too soon. Well maybe then it would be for the better, but one can never really be too sure about these things. Up till just a couple of days ago, I was in denial, until I felt the fury flowing through my veins again. I suppose one should rejoice at such a gloomy epiphany for to shrug it off would be to plunge back into the cesspool of deceit from which I had barely crawled out of. The crisis point apparently appears to be the lack of unadultered happiness in my life. The bummer with having a midlife crisis so early is that you simply can't afford the instant cure of a sordid affair or a bright red ferrari. Instead you are forced to take the primitive unevolved route of distilling away all the excess trash till you arrive at the root of the problem. Being placed under house arrest by an over protective mother and having a sore shoulder is the textbook context for such distillation exercises, and so I donned my heavily under utilised thinking cap. I soon realised that the lack of happiness, resulting in the fury, is due to.... nothing. Absolutely nothing. A massive void in my life that like a blackhole, threatens to consume everything within its reach. Yes, even light. This void is probably compounded by my masochistic streak that manifests in a series of activities ranging from seeking out happiness in a doomed relationship to reading Herodotus when I should be in Iran. Now thats the easy part done. The tricky bit of this whole distillation mambojumbo is to find the cure. How does one plug a gaping hole in his life? Of course a ferrari or a mistress would do the trick but as those are squarely out of my reach, I need other alternatives. I suppose this whole mid life crisis phenomenon that is sweeping the globe (believe me, it is, just look at the number of fat balding men driving ferraries these days) is largely attributed to the rapid modernisation of society. When the age of pulse is giving way to the age of tone. When the epoch of analog is giving way to the digital era; the final victory of the numerate over the literate. Maybe that is the cure you say? To detach oneself from this modernised society. To be retrogressive and to spurn the trappings of modern living, of technology, of capitalism. To go back to the age where Advertising was a confidence trick, a cheat, the nototrious enemy of promise. But what will be left of me after all these layers have been removed? The sorry catch-22 predicament of being consumed by a gaping void or being reduced to nothing. Thank god for free will.