Anthology Complex, M.B. Julien [best e reader for academics TXT] 📗

it needs to be somewhere. It just does because it is.

 

Applying this method of thought to the idea of why something that's living wants to stay alive is interesting. I'm holding a shotgun to this bank employees head, and I'm wondering if she wants to stay alive simply because she is alive. What if she were dead? Would she want to stay dead simply because she is dead?

 

If she were happy, I'm sure she would want to stay happy. She probably actually would stay happy until a force comes along, maybe a "force" such as disease, and the doctors tell her she has cancer. That happiness would be gone. She would stay depressed until another "force" came along.

 

They finish filling the garbage bag with money and I take it. Something so valuable placed in a garbage bag, there is something poetic about that, something symbolic. I run out of the bank and get into my partner's car. His hands are sweating, his face probably is too, and I'm the one who did all of the talking. We drive away with a garbage bag full of money, but we have no real intentions of spending the money on ourselves. He drives into a parking garage and we get out and look at the money. He takes off his sad theater mask and his suit jacket and tells me he doesn't know if he can keep doing this.

 

I ask him what he means. I knew exactly what he meant. He couldn't keep risking his life and freedom for other people, people he didn't even know. I tell him that there are way too many people suffering out there from poverty, from starvation, from whatever, simply because of this imbalance in the world. I wanted to tell him that he wasn't angry enough. That he didn't have enough hate in his heart. And then I wake up.

 

Some people die because of a lack of food, and others die because they have too much food. Starvation, obesity. If that's not imbalance, I'm not sure what is. Simple mathematics will tell you that if you have one apple on each end of a table, totaling up to two apples, and you take one apple from one end and put it alongside the other apple on the other end, you have subtracted one apple from one end and added an apple to the other end. I visualize what was once balance, but is now inequality. Imbalance.

 

There is probably enough food in the world to feed every mouth, but some mouths take more than they are welcome to. How can someone right this wrong? Do you steal that apple back, and bring it to the mouths that starve? Do you steal that money and give it to those who need it? Robin Hood would say yes. He would say you have to do the wrong thing for the right reason.

 

Earlier today I'm checking my mail, and I hear someone coming down the stairs. It's Mary, who lives in the apartment above me. She walks by and nods, and I nod back. She is walking so quickly that it's apparent that she's late for something, maybe work, maybe an appointment. I'm standing there with my mail in my hand, thinking to myself, realizing that almost every time I see Mary she is in some sort of hurry. A look in her eye that she may not accomplish what needs to be accomplished, and that scares her to death.

 

I start to wonder if she is always in a hurry because she wants to be in a hurry, like a piece of rock moving through outer space on some pointless voyage to nowhere. I start to think, are people the way they are simply because they are that way, and they want to stay that way. They want to keep being that way. If this is truth then that would mean, according to the aforementioned science, that people can never change. Not unless a force comes along and changes them. Maybe a force such as love, or hate.

 

Chapter 3:

SIXES AND SEVENS

 

There are those who will tell you that numbers, mathematics, have the potential to answer every question there is out there. That if we can understand them, they will reveal the truth. Uncover something we have been looking for the answers to for so long. The problem is that mathematics alone is just numbers, formulas, equations. It's only when these numbers are applied to something that they have meaning, possible comprehension. It's when they are applied we have a science. Science, the language we can understand.

 

The apples on the table is simply one minus one gives you zero, or one plus one gives you two. However, when we apply the idea that this apple is being taken away from someone, that this person may starve and die, we understand what these two equations really mean.

 

A few nights ago I woke up at six a.m. because I had to go use the bathroom. I'm in there, relieving myself, when I hear someone yelling at someone else. At first I say to myself, "This early in the morning?" But then I start to listen, I even lift up my window a little bit so I can hear the words more clearly.

 

A man is yelling at a woman. He yells about how he is always late for work because she can't complete a simple task. On her end, all I can really hear is sobbing, but I can feel her regret. I close the window, flush the toilet and turn off the light as I exit, and I go back to sleep.

 

Last night, I had a dream where I woke up at seven a.m. because I needed something to eat. I go to the kitchen and make a less than desirable sandwich, and not a second after my first bite I hear someone talking to someone else. I put the sandwich down and out of curiosity I lift up the window a little bit so I can listen to what's being said. A man is talking to a woman. The man asks the woman if she got the car from the repair shop and brought it home last night. She says she forgot. The man comments on how she is always forgetful, and out of nowhere she rips into a furious rage.

 

She starts to yell as if she were bottling up so many years of regret inside herself. From what I could hear, the man didn't yell back, he just leaves for work. I close the window and leave the kitchen, forgetting about my sandwich. Forgetting about turning off the light. When I get back to my bed, there is a woman lying in it. I lay down next to her but I can't see who she is, and then I wake up.

 

I'm laying in bed this morning, and all I can think about is why I would have a dream about my discontented neighbors. I keep thinking about why they are so different in my dream than in real life. Probably the same people, but different actions and reactions to an event. I start to wonder if there is a mathematical formula out there that determines what kind of person someone will be. What kind of person someone is. How they will react to a certain event. Can I write down these two peoples' equations and finally understand, finally know who they truly are.

 

There is a man named Joe in my apartment building. He lives right across the hall from me. Sure, I can know Joe, but I can never really know Joe. I can know what he likes to watch on television, what he likes to eat for lunch, what type of women he prefers, but I can never truly know Joe. I can never truly know Joe the same way one person can never truly know another person.

 

But still, I wonder if there are a group of numbers I can apply to Joe's behavior, to Joe's habits, to find out who he is so I can truly know him. Just to understand Joe. And when I wonder that, I wonder if I can find out who I truly am in the same sense. Just to understand myself.

 

I'm still laying in bed, and I start to think about the times that I woke up. Six, seven. Two different times, two different outcomes. Two different numbers, two different results. If I had waken up at five or eight how different would the outcome be? How different would the result be? I would probably be up too early to hear them or wake up too late and just miss them. I start to wonder if fate has anything to do with it. The objectivity of fate. Was I suppose to wake up at six in this life, and suppose to wake up at seven in the dream life?

 

I get up out of bed and go to the window to find it is raining extremely hard. I look down my street, down a row of parked cars, and even further down I look, and I see an intersection. I look down even further, and I see the next set of parked cars. I ask myself how much longer this can go on. How much longer it can go on.

 

Chapter 4:

THE BEFORELIFE

 

I take a composition notebook down from the shelf and I flip to a random page. I find a dream that I had in January of last year. In the dream I'm at a funeral for someone, I couldn't really tell who. There are many people around, some that I know, some that I don't know. Most that I don't know.

 

We are all just standing there, no one is crying. There is so much mystery surrounding death; almost anyone will wonder where we go after we die, if anywhere. Despite the fact that in most religions the forthcoming idea is incorrect, I'll say that many groups of people believe that if you are a good person, you will go to a good place when you die, and if you are a bad person, you will go to a bad place.

 

This creates a sort of judgmental role to be taken place in the afterlife, and gives birth to the concept that we as human beings are split up in death. Depending on the judgment, some of us are sent to a good place and some of us to the bad place. Furthermore, if there is an afterlife, and there is a nowlife, it is perfectly logical to assume that there is a beforelife, our existence before we are sent here, to this life. The question that must be asked is if we are judged when we are in the process of moving from the nowlife to the afterlife, why aren't we judged or split up when we are moving from the beforelife to the nowlife.

 

If we assume that there are good people and bad people in this world, then judgment and separation is absent and from our basis this would be incorrect. If we assume that there are only good people or only bad people in this world, then perhaps we were actually separated when departing from the beforelife. The only problem is that it may be impossible for we as human beings to ever know what is truly good and what is truly bad.

 

I try to be a good person. I try to be a decent person. I follow the instructions in life. Stop at red. Don't hit your sister. Go to college. I do all of these things, I follow the instructions word for word, but in the end I get nothing for my obedience. Well I guess I do get something, I get to lose my mind. I get to conform and lose my mind just like most of the other people who follow the instructions.

 

After I went to college, after I got what I needed to be successful, there was still