Oblivion

Posted on July 29, 2005 in Disappointment

Some people want to see you dead. Guns, bullets, and poison are seldom the most effective methods. You meet them in a class or other group, they give you their number. When you call them or see them in public, they wield the most effective knife ever devised by the human mind: obliviousness.

The tragedy of our present American society is that it is so easy to deny bonds of common experience. It’s know people for awhile and then get out of there. When it comes to mental illness, too many just want to disappear back into “normal society”, deny what they are and shun those who suffer as they suffer. In smaller, less mobile settings, people must remember what is common to them and use it as a way to ensure that none are alone, none feel left out.

In this world, people can just get into a car and drive off, hiding in the great city. Only a stalker can find them and stalkers cannot be killed except by real methods.

If you happen to be one of those who shared the pain as they suffered it, you become one of their dead.

I have been murdered hundreds of times.

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What is this obsession about forgetting? Forget what was done to you. Forget the past. Forgive and forget. It’s insanity, if you ask me. Forgetting requires nothing less than damaging the brain or zapping it clean through electro-shock therapy. It’s an impossible demand that we place — usually on others. If we demand it of ourselves, then we pursue courses of destruction such as alcohol, drug abuse, mad flight, or isolation.

We cannot forget and we have no business telling others to forget. What we can do is use our memory to help us live better now. Experience can be a teacher only if we remember.