The Unbearable Lightness of Being (An Ipis)

Posted by Gino Bjorn on Jul 28, '08 3:20 PM for everyone I’ve declared an all-out-war against uninvited guests in my flat today. And my room has stunk of petrol for hours. I knew I should have gotten the blue canister, but the worse of me succumbed to thriftiness. And the trade off: my room smelling like a fallout zone. And there I was, spraying like there was no tomorrow. Death to all creepy crawling creatures! Fuck you for invading my closet, and my makeshift pantry. Fuck you for infecting my office clothes with your scum! I am a god, and you miniscule creatures are my subordinates! Bow to the powers of my finger-driven liquid film of wrath! Die… Die…Die!!! I also found myself moving furniture for only the second time since I my moved in to my current apartment.  This newfound favor of being a mercenary of the damned has taken its toll. Apparently, roaches dwell where you can’t reach them. And for two months, the rear carcass of my closet acted as a shelter for those who hide in fear… Fear from the 9 inches of sole that would crush their bodies flat to the floor finish, and then swept tidily to the corner along with room accumulated dust. I pushed and pushed with my idle arms heavy laminated-wood cabinets and my hollow-steel bed all over the place, leaving no section of my marble tiled floor unchecked for possible refugee camps for poisoned bastards. I know all of you could feel my genocidal approach to the matter, but if you were in my situation you’d probably feel the same way. Millions of years of evolution, and still roaches do their thing. That is to pester the rest of the animal kingdom. Dinosaurs have probably died because of the frustration of not having to rid of these critters for the sake of eons to come. Imagine, the simplest and most insignificant (and I’m ready for a taxonomist’s or a biologist’s argument) living thing to ever crawl the Earth is the one chosen to rule it. Yup, you heard me right. Rule IT! They probably outnumber the Homo Sapiens Sapiens race by a million times, and one birth of every organism constitutes to a thousand for them. Roaches, they live for less than a year but they bother you for a lifetime. They bring sickness, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they drive Life as we know it to extinction. And there they would go on with their ways, for maybe another million years, driving a life form after another insane as to how to rid of them completely. If God is in beauty, Lucifer is in roaches… nope, not in black cats, bats, and spiders or in scary rottweillers. He is in roaches! His evil was conceived with the primordial soup, and his evil lives until now… bringing death through disease, and obviously futileness. Think of one purpose of roaches to our lives. You’d probably get a better chance of winning a lottery thinking how to win it, than to come up with an excuse for such a being. I love animals (12 dogs), almost all of them including rats… but never cockroaches. There is nothing to admire except for the fact that they have sucked the lifeblood of every era that is in futile attempt to outlive a curse that is life with them. Roaches are everything cruel in this world… They steal, they kill and they wake you from your holiest of slumbers. Individually though, a cockroach cannot represent their reputation of being the “plague with six legs”. They would have to strike in numbers: Dozens, hundreds, thousands even to command a legitimate threat. Otherwise, a roach is just another victim of the broomstick to the easily annoyed human race. No chemical warfare needed, plain old fashioned bludgeoning would do. It’s amazing how insignificant one creature can be. It will be reduced to a flat body that traces the floor with slime when it attempts to come close to an armed person. When alone, a roach can never harass, upset or inspire tension. It suddenly becomes a victim of a world larger that it, the bottom of the chain. It could die any second without anyone caring, even its family (of a thousand). They are unimportant beings, even among themselves. You probably won’t see them cry when a comrade dies, or avenge deaths of family members unlike rats. They are selfish… blithe beings. They live in thousands, but die on their own. You would think that it is sad, and even pity them. But it is the cost of having an eternity to roam the earth and wreak and reek havoc… to be significantly insignificant… to die bashfully face-up in full surrender to the supremacy of a higher life form. They are cursed… cursed to be, for a million years, potent in numbers but very fragile in solitude. It will never retaliate as it is dead before it even attempts to…. Dead in a heartbeat, in a disgusting cracking and sticky sound and fashion. In that very context of killing the thing for its penchant of upsetting you, makes you realize the unbelievable lightness of their being. You realize that they live to pester you and are ready to die doing the same thing… Leave you appalled with the trail of trash it left from it was alive. That is their being, the essence of their existence. It’s quaintly disturbing that such a sort of existence was ever allowed to nurture itself for half the world’s age. It is so simple that it doesn’t make any sense at all, with the complexity of the world, creation, being and function in mind. It doesn’t correspond to the dogma that everything in this world has a purpose higher than what is perceived. I’m not being blasphemous; I do not question God for creating such a creature. Although I really fear that He may strike me with a lightning anytime for either being too jaded or being humorless. Because it is what it is, a big practical joke He plays on humanity… Those created with reason and intelligence is made to spend a fraction of time to enjoy His creations. And those nitwits who crawl on their bellies and die on their backs get to enjoy Earth for all eternity. It is the Divine Irony… and we have to accept. Because when you think a bit more about it, you would expose another irony equally hilarious… Those created with reason and intelligence would be weighed for their right to enter heaven only for a time, a century at max. While those nitwits who crawl on their bellies and die on their backs never get to heaven at all; because they are damned to roam the Earth forever! That actually is the reason why heaven is so special, there are no roaches, just daisies and butterflies, even in the latrines. They epitomize the idea that everything on this earth is of no real value… just a vain display of lightness, of world-surrender, of purposelessness. The life of a cockroach is equivalent to money and power, as they inflict havoc in excess but useless in the search for individual happiness… A cockroach’s life, if it is in fact life, is never happy. A prose can only condemn but never defy what is nature. Cockroaches are destined to be the symbols of the world for futility, of lightness beyond your purpose… and they will be for another million years.  There is nothing we can do… Instead think of their hidden purpose: They are a constant reminder on how we are capable of doing greater things, and how much more profound our purposes are on this Earth, no matter how short-lived it is… Seize each day to be great and important… Because we are not roaches…