Alone In The Machine

The Falling Sickness

What confused John Demos was the people that seemed to navigate their way so easily through life. They were comfortable with their lives, they had jobs that they did not seem to despise. They didn't resent the eight hour day, instead they went to their jobs almost with a smile on their face. They were not troubled by it, rather they thought it gave their life some kind of purpose. Work to them was a distraction from their own thoughts, socializing was a distraction from their own thoughts, everything they did seemed to be an avoidance of their own thoughts, of themselves, and of any real depth. It may be unkind to say it, but to him it seemed it was so. He had known thousands of them and had the suspicion often that they wanted jobs simply because without them they would be sat around bored. Some part of them knew they would be left to their own thoughts and that they would find themselves hollow or that they would drive themselves crazy, and so they were happy with the arrangement.

They were happy worker bee's, they were happy consumers. Demos was not. He would constantly find himself in the company of people that didn't even want to be in their own company, that couldn't tolerate even a few hours in their own minds, yet were so eager to share. What other conclusion could he draw from this than that society was largely composed of philanthropic sadists?

Not only did they insist that he tolerate their company, they also expected that he enjoyed it. They expected him to smile and nod and play along. He often wondered how it was possible to avoid these people, but in all his years he had not perfected a method. People. They seemed to be everywhere he went. Some of them even insisted they were his friends.

They settled in so comfortably in life. They had always known what they wanted to do. They had career plans, they had planned on having children. Their whole lives seem to be planned out for them and it would unfold as it should. There were countless millions of them breeding and following the old pattern. They smiled as they lived worked and died, then secured the process for the next generation. 'The children are the future', they would say, but when the children came they would quickly convert them to being adults; and so the children were never here, and Demos was left with an insane world run by insane adults.

Ambitious no minds surrounded him, cold eyes, faces with no hearts that grasped and crushed. Opium was the opium of the people, chemically addicted to beliefs, thoughts, people, entertainments. Time was the river, the air pushing it, the atom, the current of itself, the pull of the sea, the earth, gravity, and beyond. Was there no stopping it?

He felt the falling sickness coming. He was awakening and becoming more enraged, or perhaps he had gone back to sleep and had fallen back down to earth? A deep feeling of injustice hit him, of helplessness. Soon he'd be flicking through the TV channels and swearing at the adverts again. He'd be raging at the world and at himself. He'd fuel that rage by watching the news for hours on end, by reading the daily papers. He'd cocoon himself in his room for days or weeks at a time and would be unfit for human interaction. It had happened before and he knew it was simply a matter of riding out the storm for however long it lasted, but why did it feel like he was holding onto a lightning rod?