There is a sign at the entrance in the Stadium 2 warehouse that says: ”No personal possessions allowed beyond this point”. They should have used Alighieri's words instead: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here”. That place is a purgatory for hope and a slaughterhouse for joie de vivre - not that I have much left in me.
I despised every moment spent in that place, there wasn’t a day on the way to work, that road to perdition, where my little grey cells wouldn’t scream with every atom in their being “-Drive straight into a truck, eternal nothingness has to be better than the calvary that awaits you for the NEXT 12 hours”. Oh! with what blazing passion I hated that cage of steel and concrete filled with the tears and promethean agony of the Asian people, neatly packed in recycled cardboard boxes.
That place weighted more on my will to live than the entire sky weighted on Atlas shoulders. Blessed are those that never knew the taste of freedom because only they can bear the darkness of that place (and the cheese makers, of course…). Those forever chained to a cave wall for whom the shadows are the only reality.
Most people like to believe that h.omo sapiens (sapien – ironic isn’t it?) abolished slavery because of some sort of superior morality or ethic code. Think again! It was just simple mathematics and greed; it’s cheaper in the long term to pay minimum wage to somebody that looks out for himself than to feed him, offer shelter, pay his medical bills and so on. The chains metamorphosed into bills and the whip into peer judgment. If the motto for another primitive but omnipresent form of mental enslavement is: “Don’t think, believe!”, the motto for the Western world - capitalism, should be “Don’t think , buy stuff you don’t need” and run on your leased hamster wheel without asking to many questions, chasing the light that flickers at the end of the tunnel. That light, mes amis, comes from within a pit where the bodies of those that finished the race are burned – “the winners”. How much freedom can a man or lady with a dream have? Where is this “freedom” if you have to follow a certain path to achieve a certain dream?
Humans never changed, humans will never change - h.omo h.omini lupus. Look into a mirror long enough and a grotesque monster with pitch-black eyes and a rotten hearth will stare back at you; let that creature loose and atrocities will follow. Open any history book and see what nice, successful family men can do to each other if they are not the masters of that creature, if they let others control it in the name of a flag or doctrine of any kind. Know yourself, know the universe that created you from quarks to quasars, rebel against everything and alone on top of a mountain you will be free at last... free as an aborted fetus in a dumpster.
I digress, that temple of consumerism wasn’t even the worst part of it all. Sartre said that “Inferno is the Others” and he was right. As long as your alone that place can be bearable for a couple of months, at most. The true horror lies in the barbarity of the sound waves produced by the people inside. A constant torture for an idealist’s eardrums; deafness would be a huge advantage there. I have only met one person in that place that was interesting and had a well-developed personality. A lady, a mysterious black lotus elegantly floating on a placid lake of mediocrity. What a mesmerising image she was… and heartbreaking at the same time, knowing that she will forever be rooted in the muddy bottom of that stale lake.
The racism, discrimination and hate speech are rampart. British managers like T with 17 years of experience under her belt and her possy of umpa lumpas used derogatory names for their foreign workers, behind their backs of course, as all brave creatures do. What a despicable attitude, cowardly and dumb in the era of mobile phones, spy pens and Youtube. Maybe, that’s why she has the same position after so many years or maybe because a polish lady half her age with one tenth of her experience does the same job ten times better (and no, I’m not polish, I consider myself a citizen of Terra). Anyway, basic maths is some kind of string theory for this people and the database management software - a gordian knot. In this kind of circumstances I like to think that it’s not their fault, that they were brainwashed by the mass media, the children of a sick society. To ask more of them would be an act of madness or at least of mental masochism. There’s enough chaos dancing inside me as it is.
I believe most promotions in this company are given on nepotism and “big smiles”; that only show an inclination for backstabbing (memento Brutus!) and the metastasis of incompetence. Nothing new under the Sun!
My words will change... nothing, but like Diogenes before I will keep searching for something so rare and precious in this abomination we call society. How Sisyphus can be happy knowing what he knows, I will never understand.
I will end this review with a quote from Schopenhauer that I think is most fitting for this tumultuous times: “The cheapest sort of pride is national pride; for if a man is proud of his own nation, it argues that he has no qualities of his own of which he can be proud; otherwise he would not have recourse to those which he shares with so many millions of his fellow men.”
Good luck!
F
