All This Quiet

Königssee, August 2018

The Summer of 2015 was when Europe started to die. At the beginning I blamed our leaders. I thought, they were corrupt or just too weak and they couldn’t wrestle themselves free from the grip of economy. We blamed the lobbyists. The money. The inevitable force of an economy rolling downhill, crushing every man woman and institution in its wake. That wasn’t it. We fell, yes, but the fall started with a jump.

I was tired most of the time. Although I got up early, I stayed in bed till early noon. I read stuff on the internet. If you’d have asked me five minutes later, I couldn’t have told you what I had read. It didn’t matter. It promised that there will be something good coming up. It was always coming up, it was never here. I didn’t have what I needed. I was missing something. I couldn’t figure out what. I kept on looking. I remember googling if an actress I had loved 10 years ago had had plastic surgery. I had recently seen her on TV again and she looked amazing. I found some speculations, that she had had a nose job done. Or Botox. I examined the footage closely: She barely moved her mouth and all her other features remained still, as if paralysed. I got obsessed with thinking that she had Botox messing up her face. She looked beautiful. She was older now, with her features being sharper, more defined. But she did not look wrinkled. I wouldn’t get into her pants now, not any more than I could 10 years ago. Maybe she looks more ugly when the lights were different and she had rubbed off all her make up. That would at least give me a fighting chance. But not really.

Then I saw her in the trailer of another TV-series. She was running around in her underwear, packing things together, briefly pausing when she pulled a gun out of her socks drawer. I examined my own socks drawer. It contained some socks that did not belong together. But I didn’t have a gun. I have no need for a gun. I wonder, if outside the US or even outside of TV I would ever think I need a gun. Maybe things will change, when Europe collapses. We have to arm ourselves. All our dreams of zombies invading the earth will come true. All the wars that ravage around the world will finally come home. We are no longer the eye of the storm. We are the storm.

So this guy, you know, he is just watching TV and surfs the internet. He isn’t doing much else. He does no longer see the point of doing something else. It gets very cold very quick once the sun has gone down.

There is not even a point in commenting. All that chatter out there, in here it is quiet. It is beautiful. All this quiet.

But the noise will come to you eventually. He spends entire days trying to ignore what’s on TV. He doesn’t look any news. It is not like there is some sort of conspiracy going on. It’s just that the news have gone broke. We all are. We all have conceded to the fact, that knowing about reality is really no help at all. So we deliberately chose to ignore it. This is some sort of progress. Of course, we can’t take everybody with us. Some will struggle to shake free from this ageing concept of truth. We are going liquid. We no longer struggle. Things come easier now. The light vanishes quickly out of the sky.

There is a backroom where we used to play cards. We no longer do that. I lost a lot of money there, I am not very good at poker. My face gives away the luck of my cards. If I got a good hand it shows immediately. I can’t help but smile. When I examine closely: I do not really know what I am smiling about. I do not care too much about winning. I do care about the money. Money is a good thing. Having money is better than not having money. It calms you. It takes away the need of thinking about it. When rich people tell you, that money alone does not make you happy: They are only telling that, to make sure that you don’t come for them and take their money away. They sure look happier than the guy who sleeps in a cardboard down at the station: He rarely moves any more, because what’s the point. In the late morning, he looks out of his sleeping bag at the people walking for work. Rich people don’t do that.

 

January 5th 2017, 9:48am

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