The Thrill of Life

Sure, there will be a day in our life, a life way too long and yet so short, that we will conclude: ‘yes, this is it!’ Life, the great happiness, we listen some to a few tunes, we jog a little bit, we fuck some here and there, we go to and fro a dull-colored office where we sit most of day at a desk that is our kingdom and stare at the fantastic views of the screensaver’s picture show, which rotates images of an exciting life, of hot chicks on hot islands, of expensive Porsches and Ferraris, which we will never be able to affort but nevertheless dream of possessing, and of course there are the dozen of pictures of two weeks of our last holliday spent in Mexico, which is both cheap and convenient.

Well, what can you say to the matter? Life is beautiful and it is short, but lasts way too long for what we get in return. Every day in the early morning, as the winter sun blinds my sight, I walk down the same inclining street to the very same subway stop at 125th. There I turn the aluminum wheel of the entrance gate like thousands of others, walk down the second staircase to avoid the crowd (ha!), look at the large clock at the tracks, and wait for either the D or the A express train. Sporadically I stand in the cart next to that one homeless guy, whose luggage smells like piss and dirt, being pressed against it by the crowd, or I stand in a largely black crows before 9.15 am or a largely white crowd after 9.15, reading a book, until I either switch first at West 4, or exit at Broadway La Fayette.

On the corner of Broadway and Houston, I usually make the same dull witty comment in reply to the hypocrite smile of the Bengali coffee vendor who not only smiles back at my dull wit, but also probably hates me for being white, associating my whiteness with privilege and complacency, before I cross the pedestrial crossing on green or a little up in case of a red light. I deal with the personal administrative red tape, the statements from financial institutions on which outrageous fees for unexplained services charged, the battles on the phone with customer service representatives in India or Ireland, of which I never seem to reach its Nirvana, or I fight the fraud of small dental practices. But in the evening, after dinner, either with rice, potatoes or soup, I will fuck a little, and also read a book or short story, just a small exercise to stretch my brain muscles from a rusty day of numbness. At the bottom line, the most existential question that bothers me at the moment is why someone pays me 90k to generate lines on a paper statement, 90k is the value someone assigned to the purpose of my life, which itself have not found on any statement yet.

Life is good and short, but by all means overrated. Today, I have an image of walls at the site of Troy as the background image on my pc and a view from San Marco square in the morning onto the island of San Giorgia Maggiore as screensaver.

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