Then it hit me. They were insane. They had gone insane a long time ago. They had to in order to want to continue repeating the same pointless bullshit every day—sitting in traffic, working at a shitty job with low pay, wrestling with bureaucracy, being brainwashed by advertising, having a dysfunctional relationship, a stupid child, a decaying body, and so on.
They were all insane and I simply didn’t have the good luck of having gone insane like they had.
I always did have such rotten luck.
4
After I stepped off the bus in the city center, I headed towards a nearby Irish pub called Dublin. It was one of my usual places.
It was about three in the afternoon when I entered the pub. I sat in a corner furnished with a worn mahogany table and chairs as well as a dark green leather bench. On the wall were portraits of random Irish celebrities, movie stars, and musicians, such as Enya, Gabriel Byrne, and the autistic girl from Harry Potter. I was certain they had never visited the pub, so I wasn’t sure of the reason for having their portraits on the wall, but I assumed it had something to do with celebrity worship.
As was often the case, football was playing on TV. It was the biggest downside of the place as I despised football. I felt that the game was too simplistic, the football players were overpaid, and the fans worshipping them were underbrained.
A waitress came to ask whether I was ready to order. I ordered a Grimbergen Ambrée draught beer. Not because it was fancy but because it was the strongest beer they had on tap. She shortly came back with the beer.
I took a sip and looked around. A bunch of young women sat at a table nearby, talking enthusiastically about something. They looked like students to me. I couldn’t hear them all that well, but I assumed that they were talking about some event, maybe connected to the college they were no doubt attending.
I myself had never been to college. I had wanted to, but life had other things in mind. Perhaps things would have been better had I attended one. Or perhaps not. It was impossible to know. Besides, I didn’t really believe in free will, so what did it matter? As far as I was concerned, everything was inevitable. Every misery. Every disappointment. Every humiliation. Every bad experience. The world was a nightmare to those who weren’t lucky enough to arrive at a better random—yet inevitable—outcome. To those like me.
But then, for so many people it was infinitely worse. After all, I wasn’t starving. I wasn’t being tortured. I didn’t have a debilitating disease—aside from existence that is. And yet I suffered. Perhaps it was because I didn’t have anything particular to suffer from that I suffered so acutely from the general misfortune of being alive.
After I had finished my beer and ordered another one, I took a book I had brought with me out of my jacket pocket. The book was Will O’ the Wisp by Pierre Drieu la Rochelle. It was the first English print from 1963. It had cost me nearly a hundred euros.
The book told the story of Alain, a depressed heroin addict who was tired of living. I had read through it once before and, despite not being a heroin addict myself, could easily identify with Alain’s blight. Indeed, I seemed to share his lethargy now more than ever.
I opened the first page and began reading:
At that moment, Alain was watching Lydia relentlessly. But he had been gazing at her like that ever since she arrived in Paris three days earlier. What was he waiting for? Sudden enlightenment about her or himself.
I drank one more beer and stopped reading. I could rarely read very much at once. Sooner or later, my mind tended to wander off. With badly written books, this usually happened on the very first page. But then, most books weren’t worth reading anyway. They were written only to make money.
I looked around. The girls nearby were gone. Other people had replaced them. I wanted someone to talk to. But this wasn’t a good place to socialize with strangers.
I took out my phone and looked through my contacts. There weren’t many. Of the few people whom I’d had some deeper connection with, one was now living in the UK, one was an ex-girlfriend who hated me, and one was the ex who had recently left me, reducing me thereby to a state not unlike a glass balloon. I decided to go with the last option.
I rang but she didn’t pick up. I then sent her a text message, though I doubted she’d be answering it any time soon. I didn’t feel like contacting anyone else. I had alienated most of the people I had ever met in my life, even the few that I had actually liked. I didn’t know why I had alienated the ones that I had liked, but regarding the others the answer was simple—I didn’t like them. Why? Because they tended to be deceitful, stupid, and full of shit.
What made everyday life so terrible was that on each day you usually had to come into contact with at least some of these so-called human beings. And every time you did, you were reminded all over again how ugly the world was. How it was populated with such ugly fucking beings. Ugly, wretched, delusional beings. Beings who thought that they were kings and queens, yet, as a famous singer once put it, they were all fucking peasants as far as I could see.
Ah, fuck it, I thought. I’ll call an old friend of mine. He was almost always up for a beer or two.
I didn’t like him much… but beggars can’t be choosers.
5
I was on my third beer when Martin stepped into the bar. He acknowledged me with a curt nod and went to order a beer at the counter.
I had known Martin for years. We had first met while working at the same data entry position at a company which by now had gone bankrupt. He was good for drinking with, but profound conversations weren’t exactly his forte. Considering that he studied law, that may not have been altogether surprising.
He placed his beer down on my table. “So what’s the occasion?” he asked.
“The occasion, my dear Martin, is that there is no occasion. For you see, all occasions are equally meaningless and made-up. Therefore, having no occasion to drink is not only as good an occasion for drinking as an actual ‘occasion’ but even better since we choose it ourselves instead of being led like sheep.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, seemingly not understanding what I was talking about.
I sighed. “Let’s just say I wanted some company. And since I don’t have any friends, I invited you.”
He looked at me awkwardly and chuckled. “Oh, come on. I’m your friend.”
“Right.”
We took some sips from our beers in silence.
“So how’s life?” Martin suddenly asked.
“It’s shit, Martin, as always. In fact, I’m thinking of hanging myself.”
He laughed. I had told so many suicide jokes to him over the years that he had probably stopped taking me seriously on them. I was like the boy who cried wolf. But at the same time, I was the wolf.
“And how’s yours?” I asked.
“Oh, the usual.”
“In other words, shit?”
“I wouldn’t quite say that.”
A pity. I wished he had.
We ordered another beer. We talked about life, work, our mutual acquaintances, and so on. Typical shit. As usual, Martin didn’t seem to have anything very interesting to say. Eventually, unable to tolerate the dull conversation any longer, I suddenly asked him whether he believed in God.
“Well, uh, I’m not religious if that’s what you mean. Not sure about God though.”
“Did I ever tell you where God and religion came from?”
“Not that I recall, no.”