Among Mad People

Humans are a mad species. Mad in the sense that they are crazy, like mad scientists, Mad Max and MAD magazine. Every one of those mads describes one aspect of being human. Insane, post-apocalyptically distraught and nuts. But in terms of "being angry" we are even madder than mad. We always did have the capacity to get really really furious at stuff. Broken TV - damn you!! - slow driving people holding up the lane - you idiot! Our "mad" is a blow out, a detonation, like a thunderstorm, quick and painless.

These days, everyone is able to witness everyone else's madity (don't be mad it's not a word) on social networks, and our angriness has become an everyday condition. The madder - the better. The madder - the more we care. Like mad magicians we're in the business of abstractly spreading unfocused anger bolts at the world. And if you're not sharing those sentiments and hop the anger train, you're accused of either being a placidly naive lamb, on their side or you just don't give a damn. So, it's easiest to follow the invitation to be outraged. There's something going on every day. Nestlé, Homophobia, Amnesty, Hunting, Religion, Health, TV shows, Summer. And that was just in one week.

The good thing: we're not bearing grudges it seems. Maybe we have evolved to be a more forgiving species. No more feuds? Giggles, no. More likely that with this large a variety of annoyances to pick from, we forget what we were mad about yesterday.

Why I care? The abundance of red flags everywhere made me lose the will to rant. And that makes me really really mad. But seriously, in all this time being spent angrily, the ability to be critical, to go look for information beyond the bias we seem to lack. We think we're more enlightened than we actually are. There is so much information. We just don't take the time to get it. All of it. Too busy being mad.

I Crush Ants For A Living

My hands just wouldn't stop shaking. I felt oddly calm on the inside, but my body appeared to be in disagreement with that other part of me. The thing that just happened, it happens every day. However I couldn't imagine how the exact same thing could have happened at all, to me or anyone else. And why I've never been warned on how awful it would be like!

I wish I could have kept my knees from shaking so much. They banged into one another like two clumsy sticks. I also remember cursing a lot. Cursing and shaking knees don't go together all that well. Still, this is what being all-powerful means. It means running over animals with your car when you least expect it. It means overstretching the gap between life and death within seconds. Couldn't it have been at least something else, I pleaded, something smaller, and not the beautiful red-and-white creature that came out of nowhere, wanting to cross the street in a hurry? Then again, what an odd impulse, trying to figure out ways to lighten up a horrible scenario. It's never cheerful.

After the initial shock had worn off, I parked the car and went back to look for the remains of the cat. I went looking along the roadside, under bushes and I even waded through a remote stretch of tall grass. Cats have a habit of going into hiding when injured. A big part of me didn't want to see that. The other part wanted to randomly ring every doorbell in the area and apologize to whoever opened first.

For someone who in life doesn't feel all that powerful, I realized in this one split second that I do have a lot of impact on my surroundings. Impact being the operative word..

I never found the dead body, or, what would have been worse, a half-dead body. The cat could have run further, even with two broken hind legs, which would have been a best-case scenario.

On another note, I crush ants for a living and I am not even aware when it happens. Being alive causes so much death and suffering, it makes remorse a strange reaction to the effects of existence. I can't help being a freighter in a world of canoes. I'm a freighter hoping to merely have broken the paddle of a certain red-and-white canoe...