John's melancholy

            John Doe is stuck. Stuck in this pathetic routine that everybody else tend to call life. It’s basically one day after another, one lost hope after another, drifting away into nothing, drowning in misery. The perpetual struggle got lost along the way and the only thing left is to take each moment at a time, praying for survival, because redemption is long lost and forever forgotten.

            But that’s not the point is it? It says right there in the title that we should talk about melancholy or something like that. Well, truth be told, it’s a bit much to say that John Doe is a melancholic. He doesn’t really have much too crave for right now, so he tries to hide in the past where no one can bother him. But you can’t travel back in time unfortunately. The human race hasn’t been so kind as to offer him this option. So what’s left? One thing and one thing only. Memories. And John has plenty of those.

            Lots of things from the past go trough John’s mind, he gets haunted by various ghosts, some of the happy, some of the sad times. He likes each and every one of them tough, he doesn’t discriminate. It’s long past the time when John Doe learned to take the good with the bad, and now he knows that life’s full of misery and sorrow, but that shouldn’t make one sad. At the very most it should make him a cynic. But he’s not a cynic, he cares too little about the world around him for that. So he lets himself be haunted, missing his past as much as he despises his present.

            He thinks about Jane Doe, her presence sometimes lingers in the depths of his twisted mind. He doesn’t miss her tough. He knows too well that she is dead, and there’s no way he could bring her back. Too much has changed. People don’t change, that’s for shure, yet everything is now different from what it was when John was in love with her. He wishes nothing more than to go back to those times, when everything was simpler and everyone was less. But he can’t and he knows that.

            Basically John doesn’t miss Jane Doe, he doesn’t even miss loving her. He just misses the way he loved her. That unconditional, never-to-be-shared love that kept him alive and never let him down. So if John Doe is melancholic, then he’s got the melancholy of delusion. He misses his own self, he misses his old ideas, his old concepts, no matter how terribly wrong they have proven to be. Reality has failed him, the present has failed him, and the only thing left is to find shelter in his illusions of the past. He might even be wrong, those times could have seemed even darker at the time.

            Most likely, the times were bitter back then. John vaguely remembers the frustrations caused by his secret passion, and he resents himself for not saying anything when the time came to talk truth. But he doesn’t regret anything. He never does. He accepts what he’s done and what he hasn’t done, because altogether if it weren’t for those decisions, he probably wouldn’t be standing here today, revealing his darkest corners, exposing even the biggest depths of his soul. So yes, John is melancholic, but life goes on and his melancholy is just water under the bridge. Seize the moment, as they say.

John the vain

            Never make decisions when angry. It’s just an advice, listen to it, don’t listen to it, it doesn’t make much difference to anyone, but to John Doe it almost did. It almost made a huge difference. There aren’t any good decisions or bad decisions, John doesn’t believe in that. There are, however good times and bat times for making decisions and choosing new paths. Anger is one of the bad times. People could get hurt, and it’s not worth it when you can avoid casualties simply by postponing a decision. John Doe knows this so very well, because he almost died by the cause of an anger fueled decision.

            It was a close one too. For a brief moment, killing John Doe seemed like the right thing to do, the normal thing to do. Well, it turns out it isn’t. John Doe must live, however hard and painful it might be, his existence must never end for good, he can only die if he’s prepared to resurrect from its own ashes, ant this wasn’t the case. If John had died now, he would have died for good. Thank whoever you might want that it didn’t happen. John Doe shall continue to exist, the world doesn’t have the chance to get rid of him just yet.

            We should take a look at the reasons for John’s death wish tough. Well, you might say it was all a big misunderstanding of his actions and emotions, or better yet the lack of them. John Doe has had his share of sorrow and misery, and he is now slowly drifting away in his sea of resent and self loathing, and sometimes, that’s just not good enough. From time to time, he should struggle a little, just to prove that he’s still out there, to show that he didn’t drown yet. Instead, he chooses to live redundantly and soak in a painful monotony, and this near death experience should wake him up and make him realize he has to change something.

            None the less, it’s John Doe’s ego that’s hurting him. It’s stopping him from making any decisions at all, it just numbs him, makes him unresponsive to everything that’s going on around him. And it’s stronger now than it ever was before. John has been hurt before, he has let down his ego, threw himself into the unknown, hoping for the best and expecting the worst. It’s easy to assume that he got what he expected. And his ego, much like a mythical beast, grew stronger after every hit. The saying “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” may not apply to people, but it very well does describe what happened to John’s ego. It has now reached unimaginable proportions, and it threatens to take him down.

            Basically it all returns to decision making. Everything about John Doe is based on actions and reactions, on decisions and consequences. And that’s exactly what scares him the most. That’s the reason his ego grew so big, the fear of consequences is what’s feeding it and it’s hurting John’s existence. But he keeps learning from his mistakes, and hopefully, it won’t be long until John Doe will start all over, regaining his ability to consider choices and decide in his own name. And then, he will embrace the consequences, lifting himself above all egos and trying to reach his ideals once again, losing his fear of the unknown.

            Long live John Doe.

John's chances and opportunities

            John Doe is many things, but he is definitely not an outgoing person. He hates having to initiate a conversation, and you can never count on him to be an ice-breaker. He’s just not that into people. He hates useless interactions, and pities others, who constantly feel the need do force conversations in order to avoid awkwardness. He likes awkward situations, they somehow make him feel more comfortable, in contrast with how the others feel. He doesn’t care about much, especially not about other people’s opinion on him, so awkward times give him the opportunity to asses different types of attitudes and actions.

            In some way, when things feel peculiar, that’s when John feels normal, knowing that he’s not the only weird kid from the block. This attitude does not always work out for him tough. It has cost him a lot during his existence and it most likely keep costing him just as much. He could have done many things differently and it probably would have meant a better life for him, he wouldn’t be so fucked up right now. But he didn’t, and to be honest, if it were to live his life once again, he would most likely make the same decisions and screw himself just as well, mainly because he doesn’t give a fuck if he’s a screw up, he likes it that way. Normal is boring, right?

            And there’s another thing. He is who he is because of these mistakes, the decisions that he made in his existence added up and created him. We already established that John Doe’s only conscience is the past. He lives in the present, but thinks only in memories. And what is the past, if not a never ending series of lost chances and missed opportunities? Let me tell you, it’s nothing. You need to lose something in order to gain another. And John does this quite often. He loses himself to regain another form, constantly changing and never returning to a past form.

            There is something about these missed opportunities tough. It’s something that affects every single one of us, even John. It’s a feeling you sometimes get in your gut, some sort of misunderstood rage, it’s resent. Yes, even John sometimes feels resentful. It’s quite normal actually. He feels angry or sad because of a chance at happiness that he might have lost. And it’s not even real. It’s just a shit at a pursuit that most often ends in grief and sorrow anyway, so there shouldn’t be any regret there. But there is. People like to feed their illusions, for them even that small shot, that insignificant opportunity is something to crave for, and therefore something to resent.

            He wouldn’t change a thing tough. This resent isn’t strong enough to make him try and do something about it. It’s just one of the many small pains and inconveniences that have learned to coexist and live in peace, safely sheltered inside John’s precious little heart and wicked little brain. Maybe that’s why John misses his Jane Doe. He misses the love he had for her, the love she never knew about. With Jane, there are no missed opportunities, because there are no opportunities whatsoever. He knew he never stood a chance with her, so he never did anything to try and get her. It was all just about pure, unrequited love. Nothing more. And John Doe sometimes misses that. It was a simpler time back then.    

The society of John

If there’s something you ought to have understood until now about our beloved and hated John Doe, it’s the fact that he pretty much doesn’t give a fuck about the perks and advantages of having a busy and exciting social life. Yup, the truth is, John is what you might call a lonely rider. He doesn’t like to go with the flow, and the flow mainly consists of people, so he doesn’t like to go with the people, or better yet he doesn’t like to go where the people are.

Truth be told, who could blame him? Honestly, you can’t say he doesn’t have a point. People suck, everybody knows that, and everybody feels that more often than they would like to deceive themselves into thinking they do. John is just one of the rare cases of beings that are willing to accept and embrace the lack of perspective that social interaction has to offer. He is much happier with his choices in life, and he chose to go with his own flow and listen to his own advice, good or bad, rather than taking other people’s words into consideration. It’s a much healthier lifestyle, but the sad part is, when everything goes terribly wrong, and trust me when I say it will, John Doe has only himself to blame. He can’t lift the weight of bad decisions from his shoulders and throw it on somebody else’s, so he just throws it into the world with a simple “Life’s a bitch”, or a plain “shit happens”, and he means it with all his heart.

The thing is, when you first meet John, or his projection into the real world, you might think he’s shy. And in some way, he is, not shy, more like a bit socially awkward. He doesn’t really know how to act out around people he doesn’t know, so he prefers to not act out at all. But beyond John’s awkwardness, there lies the real source of his apparent shyness. He is, in the full meaning of it, antisocial. He hates people, not as individuals, but as generalized beings. He hates the concept of “people”, because with John Doe, almost everything is about concepts and abstract matters. He is happy in his own little world, he loves its imperfections, its many broken pieces, way more than he will ever be able to love the real world. It’s somehow logical, if you think about it. John Doe is a selfish prick, amongst others, so it’s natural for him to love his own little world, the reality that he created, and hate the one that’s forced down his throat with every day that passes. He shouldn’t be blamed for that. John is like a piece of the puzzle that doesn’t fit, but as far as he sees it, the puzzle is the one that’s wrong, so he cuts out his own models and creates a perfect fit into an imperfect mold.

But there’s one thing that’s missing from his beautiful distorted world. A think he finds very hard to admit to, a think that’s been kept out of sight for a long time now. He even thought he forgot about it. But he was oh so very wrong. There is a hidden place inside his heart, a small, dark corner that’s been locked a long time ago, and was thought to be forgotten. It didn’t perish tough. It’s still there, it’s a craving, greater than any other. He never thought he would miss anything, but the impossible happened. The craving is starting to surface, and there’s not much anyone can do about it. John misses, he misses the one that got away, the one and only, Jane Doe.

John and the conscience

So, this should be the part in which I talk about John Doe’s present or future or something like that. It’s not going to happen. Why? Well, mainly because you can’t really write about something that doesn’t exist, even if you call it fiction. John has a past, we established that, but we also established that John isn’t a regular person. He can die at any given time, just the same as he can revive, he can arise from his own ashes, creating a new present and feeding from his meaningless past. That’s why it would be useless to write about his present or his future. These things don’t exist, and most likely it’s better that way.

Imagine what would happen if John would have a conscience of his existence, an idea of the probability and duration of his lifespan. Think about what it would do to him. He would be dead, the thought of having to make plans and take precautions would kill him for good, and hide his body away from any world he could materialize into. We don’t want that to happen, because then everything we’ve established so far would be pointless.  Or do we? Does John really matter? He doesn’t care so the question is pointless. We’re just stuck with him the same as he’s stuck with us.

About John Doe’s conscience, right. It’s hard to say he has one. That’s one of the perks of not having any clue about the concepts like the present or the future. The only conscience he’s got is the conscience of his past. No regrets tough. What would be the point? It’s almost impossible to regret a decision as long as it doesn’t affect your future. And because John doesn’t have a future, he finds it easy to live with the shit that he’s done, and he’s done a lot. It’s quite simple actually. He decides based solely on his fixations and ideals, so that whatever his decisions lead to, it doesn’t change the equation of life. It doesn’t really matter for him if his decisions are good or bad, it only matters that he makes some decisions from time to time.

If it weren’t for John’s twisted conscience tough, there wouldn’t be any decisions to make. His actions are based mainly on his nostalgia. He remembers the times he felt something, anything. He remembers his happiness at the sight of innocence, he remembers the sensation of belonging he felt while being hopelessly in love with Jane Doe, as well as the others, the ones that don’t need to be mentioned. And it’s these memories that make him try over and over again, make him fight for his idealism.

It’s true, indifference suits him, and it treats him well. It’s great, not feeling the need for any feelings at all. But from time to time, John Doe gets infected wit his own nostalgia, like bacteria that lingers in his brain, never really going away. He sometimes craves for feelings. He needs despair to feed his disregard for the world, and he needs love to feed his ego and idealism. He is in constant need of something to look up to, and that might even be the reason why John Doe is so fucked up in the first place. But he wouldn’t have it any other way.

The John past part two

John Doe had died. But it wasn’t the end of his story. No, his story is yet to be written, and the ending is far from the past and even more distant from the present. John’s fist death was just one of the many events that colored his intermittent existence with tragedy and suspense. Death is, after all, the only thing that makes our life worth living.

Anyways back to our business. So John was dead, killed by the breaking of the innocence of youth, and everything was going great in the world, the earth was spinning, revolving around the sun, the rivers were flowing, the children were growing, and the former child, with his broken image of the reality he was living in, evolved and became a teenager. The braded girls with flowers in their hair grew along with him, changing their innocence for beauty and mystery, learning how to steal hearts and burry them where the rightful owner could never find them again.

In this pathetic context, our traumatized friend, John Doe, made his second appearance into the world. It took a great deception to kill John, and it took an even greater one to bring him back, to disturb him from his peaceful nothingness and make him arise from his own ashes. And he came back to find only misery and pain, or at least that’s what he thought at first. We all know John is an idealist, and he was never anything less than this. He always dreamt of a superior love, an absolute love, even from before he even knew what that is. And on his second chance at life, he found it once again. He fell in love, and he loved from a distance, afraid to get to close, afraid to ruin the mystery, hoping he won’t wake up on a random morning realizing his love was fake or below absolute. But he had no idea who he was falling in love with.

She, well she was not your everyday type of girl. She had her share of happiness in this life, she had her share of sorrow, and in this sorrow John Doe made his appearance. At first he was just trying to get close, become a good friend. He saw her misery and thought he ought to do something to change it, because it’s well known that no beautiful girl is supposed to suffer. And day by day, he managed to break the sadness, overwhelm the depression, or at least that’s what he thought. He was oh so very wrong. She wasn’t the type of girl that could be healed, she wasn’t waiting for a savior, for a prince charming on his white horse to love her to the moon and never come back. On the contrary, she was as John had never expected her to be. She was like him.

That’s right, she was the same as John, she had the idealism, the misery, the broken reality, everything he was made of was a part of her. She was, if I may say, his Jane Doe. Yes, that’s what we’ll call her, Jane Doe. John was getting closer to her, finding more and more about her suffering, about her ideas and concepts of life, and he was unwillingly falling for her, throwing himself into a vicious circle with no escape. Hopelessly living their joined misery, him in love with her, her in love with another, both knowing they will never reach their ideal, both willing to give themselves up to the undercurrents, they grew close, understood each other, felt sorry for each other and happy for themselves, knowing they aren’t the only broken individuals in the world.

Jane never knew who John’s big crush was, she never had a clue he loved her, he craved for her and her twisted little soul. She didn’t realize he was feeding on her disillusions, and she started to let them go, thus making John’s life harder and harder. He never had a chance with her, he knew that very well, but he tried to linger by her side, just so he could love in silence, not being bothered by anything or anyone. In the end though, time said its word and took its tribute. John and Jane grew apart, both going their separate ways, and John kept fading, loosing his purpose in the world, until disaster stroke again. John died the second time, leaving the teenager in his sick and perverted reality, without any pillar to lean on. And the teenager gave up on his dreams, he put away his illusions, burying the idealism deep inside his shattered soul.

The John past

It’s about time we do a little digging and check out John Doe’s past and existence. It’s not necessarily essential to know John from the past, but it can’t hurt either and there are a few things that some of us should know about him. Not that he’s interesting or anything. On the contrary, he’s everything the title of his book doesn’t say. He’s a dull bloke with a dull life and nothing to say to the world that would knock it off its feet and soften its legs.

First things first, let us start with the beginning, when was John born? Well, you see, that’s a tricky one, mainly because he was never born, he never knew the life of a newborn or the one of a toddler. No, he’s unfamiliar with that type of happiness and lack of concern. John Doe simply spurred into existence at a young, fragile age, when the copper soldiers were yet to be forgotten. He was born from love, created by his maker to merely witness and advise him throughout his struggling. Soon enough, the maker’s struggle for love became his own.

The John past was the most innocent form of existence he ever experienced. He fell in love without even knowing what love is, at a time when the shame of being labeled as “in love” was greater than the love itself. Back then, when John was nothing than a stupid little child, love meant rhyme less,  meaningless  poems, love was the flower he picked up in some random yard just to put in a little girl’s braded brown hair in the morning, knowing it’ll be gone by noon. That love was real, it was pure, John Doe had loved before he could even understand even the smallest bit of what love really is. He loved with all his heart, he loved his twisted little poems, his beautiful stolen flowers, and the beautiful wavy hair of even some random girls he never actually knew. He just thought that flowers would look great in those curls.

And like every love there is, that innocent need for affection came to bite John Doe in the ass. It scarred his soul with every opportunity, and thought him how to live with deception. He started coping with his love, smothering it until it slowly curled inside his soul and hid there, away from the vicious eyes of the world around him. You might think that this made John bitter, that it ruined him in some way, and you couldn’t be much more wrong. It didn’t make him stronger either. It just made him. He was what he was because of his scars from that time. And he learnt to fall in love with the idea of love, thus eliminating the need for reciprocity. He never knew if the beautiful little girls loved him back, and he didn’t care. From a small age, John became aware of the beauty of loving in secret, being able to model his love after his own ideas, not having to restrain himself in the boundaries of reality or relationships.

But after a while, the love finally overcame his rationality and imagination. Or maybe not. It is hard to say what happened. The truth is, love actually disappeared, instead of becoming overwhelming. John simply stopped seeing the beautiful girls they just weren’t there for him anymore. The reason for his existence was lost, and the inevitable happened for the first time in a long series of events. John Doe died. 

John the sentimentalist

Love sucks. Ask John Doe, he can tell you that much, and trust me, he’s been trough enough so do not try to argue with him. He’s not thinking about his concept of love when he says that tough. No, his idea of love is great. His love is supreme and sublime, it’s that feeling that makes you forget what life is and not care that you did so. John is in love with this idea of love, being full aware of the fact that he will never be able to reach it, not even come near it, not even touch it with his fingertips at least. But this doesn’t concern him, he still craves the impossible, feeding his idealism with illusions and utopia.

And that’s why, for John Doe, love sucks. We’re talking about the true love, the love that floods the world we live in with romance and cliché. John hates the love we all so much enjoy to promote, that fuzzy gooey feeling that is supposed to invade the hearth and somehow give it wings or something. That obsessive necessity of saying “I love you” every five or so minutes just so you can hear it back, making you grow e few inches of self esteem every time you do hear it. That’s bullshit, nothing but lies, nothing but illusions followed by deception and sorrow. Been there, done that.

For John, there is no gooey feeling, there are no wings to fly. The butterflies don’t rumble around in his belly, they’re killed by the gastric acid. Yeah, love’s a bitch. True love is never the one that makes you happy. If loves means happiness to you, than to John, you are just another fool, a brick in the wall. For John, love means pain and suffering, from the beginning until the end. Loves bites, every time it gets a chance, and John gave it all the chances in the world until now. Love scared him, and it never made him stronger, it just made him numb. That doesn’t bother him. If love is made to hurt, than so be it. At least it makes you feel something. Something real, not a delusion that blows away like a bubble of soap at the smallest pale of wind.

Yes, it’s true, John Doe is condemned to a life full of misery by his own beliefs and concepts. His mind created a world full of ideas and emptied of realities. The only thing that’s left is to continue to survive in the real world, and wait until the time is right to crawl back into his little soul, facing away from everything that’s real. At least his reality is honest, not full of crap like everyone else’s. It’s filled with grief and sorrow, but at least it’s not resentful, and that’s the only thing that matters. John Doe might be a cynic, but at least he’s not a hypocrite. Thank God for that.  

Johns hypocrisy revealed

John Doe is a hypocrite. Don’t let him fool you into believing that he doesn’t give a shit about anyone in this world. It’s a lie. It is all a lie. The truth is, John cares more about people than you could imagine. It’s their opinion about him that he doesn’t give a fuck about. His indifference manifests mostly in this direction. John doesn’t make a goal out of making other people like him. It’s their right to hate him as much as it is his right to ignore them. If you don’t like John, it’s fine by him, it doesn’t affect him, and if he doesn’t like you, he simply pretends you are not there, he acts as if you don’t really exist, and no one should be offended by that. It’s just his way of disconnecting from the nuisances in the world.

 Don’t get me wrong, John doesn’t want to hurt anyone. He actually does his best not to give anyone a very hard time by annoying them or making them feel hated. If he doesn’t have something important to say, he prefers to shut up, instead of saying something stupid. He knows there are a lot of people that find that offending, there are people that love hypocrisy. He just chooses to ignore those people. John may seem condescending, but for him those types of people simply aren’t worth his attention. He knows that dealing with them would be a fight against the windmills anyway, so why should he bother? That’s right, he shouldn’t. And he doesn’t.

John Doe hates hypocrisy. But he’s a hypocrite. He realizes it, but he doesn’t want to change it. He couldn’t anyway. His hypocrisy, like many other things that concern John Doe, isn’t a simple one. It’s much more complex. I’m not even sure you can call it hypocrisy. The term paradox could be much more appropriate. Let’s go with this term. The paradox of John Doe is quite a peculiar one. He’s an antisocial being. He rarely feels good amongst other people, and he is almost never capable of initiating conversation with strangers. That’s probably one of the reasons John is so messed up, but that’s a whole other topic.

The truth is, even tough John is antisocial person he has developed a weird addiction. The addiction to socialization. Yes, John is hungry for knowledge, and what could be more interesting than trying to know people. That’s why he’s always in search for new acquaintances, always eager to meet new people. John wants to be known without being known tough. He doesn’t like exposing himself to others, he’s not letting anyone go too far into his defenses, carefully keeping them at a safe distance from his walls, the walls that he carefully elevated with his mind. The advantage it creates for others is that John is always a good ear to pour your troubles into. He’ll listen to you and pretend he cares, just so you get the warm and fuzzy feeling that he personally despites, the feeling of being understood.

By now you might think that John Doe is a creep. By all means, you are undisputedly wrong. John is a fucked-up, zoned-out weird son of a gun, I’ll give him that. He’s not the person to like, nor the person to hate, he’s the person that you should always look after and look out for.  But if there’s something that John Doe is not, a creep that is. 

Johns peace of mind

Most recently, John Doe has experienced one of the best things in life, by his standards anyway. The strangest feeling curled up in his dirty little soul, the feeling of relief. He finds it most reassuring, sublime you might say. John thinks it’s great to just wake up one day and realize that the terrible pain you felt over and over, the unbearable weight that was pressing on your heart is simply gone. With no reason at all, the pain disappeared, leaving John with nothing but a deaf ache in the bottom of the soul, easily overcame by the brain.

For John, that’s the ideal right now. The pain is gone, the feelings are dead, the loathing becomes futile and all that remains is pure indifference, of the most natural kind. It’s good to feel this way. You don’t have to worry anymore, you don’t have to care about anything or anyone. Not even himself. He’s living his life at its lowest, doing absolutely nothing constructive, killing time instead of demons. Truth be told, he might be right. Everyone in this world is chasing a dream they’ll never reach, fighting a problem they’ll never solve. John Doe has given up on these things. Instead, he’s letting go of the fight, leaving himself in the hands of whatever destiny he still believes in.

John doesn’t love, he doesn’t hate, he doesn’t waste brain cells or time on such fragile and even painful things. He gives nothing to the world, expecting nothing in return. His main philosophy right now is one so simple, and yet so beautiful:”happiness is overrated”. Yes, it’s true, Preach it to the world, John Doe has figured it out. Happiness is overrated, and the chase to the goal takes the focus off the pursuit itself. John realized that he’ll feel much better living in the moment, enjoying the present, rather than fighting to exhaustion, trying to reach an ideal that’s impossible to accomplish. The love he’s got to the world is now a real one, a beautiful one, and future holds no answers because he’s got no questions left to ask. It’s like he had a fucking epiphany. He didn’t even search for it.

Don’t get me wrong, John doesn’t encourage anyone to just forget his dreams and live without any guidance. On the contrary, he also believes in the concept of “dreaming big”. Anyone needs to have a goal, a target, a finish line. You just have to learn how to enjoy the race more than the photo finish. And John did that. He is now a changed man, but he didn’t evolve. No, John stepped down a leader, going back to a past state of mind, the one that brings him most comfort with minimal effort needed, the real indifference, the true ignorance that brings him so much of the beloved bliss.

Long live the John

            Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is true, let the world know, John Doe’s alive. He dies a little everyday, but in the same way, he lives a little longer, he becomes a little more, he evolves, you might say. With every piece of him that falls apart, a new piece comes to life, mending the broken parts of his soul. John can never die, no matter how hard this world tries to take him down. His mind always finds a way to repair what the heart is breaking, replacing the pain with sheer rational indifference. He becomes someone new with every moment that passes, and every moment that passes transforms into something new.

            There’s only one question that keeps rising above all others tough. How long does it take until there’s nothing left of John to repair? How much longer can he swim in this sea of loathing, until he drowns and looses touch for ever and eternity? We will soon find out. There’s not much left of the John that used to be a while back, and there’s not much to go until a new John makes his way into the world.

This new John, well he’s something else. He evolved, he grew, but not into a better human, rather into a stronger one. He’s more untouchable now than he ever was before, he doesn’t even need to fight off the darkness, because the darkness doesn’t come after him anymore. It comes from him now, and instead of fighting it, he must release it, let it free into the world around him. John doesn’t want that tough. A small part of him keeps on fighting, and fighting, and struggling. That insignificant piece of soul that hasn’t been darkened, and will never be. Because however twisted the life of John Doe may seem, there’s always the hope that’s keeping him alive. His heart is breaking, his mind is rebuilding, but somehow there’s something that never changes. Deep down he’s forever in search for the same thing, the thing that all humans want but so few of them get, and that thing is peace of mind.

Long live the true John Doe.

The John is dead

            Well, technically, John is not dead. John could never die, and there’s a simple explanation for that. John is not real. We talk about him, talk with him, but he’s not exactly real, we jus like him that way. John could just as fine be a corpse, and it wouldn’t make much difference, because he lives trough his ideas. And that’s exactly why John lets himself die, little by little, fading day by day, going deeper and deeper in his ocean of loathing, fighting a little less with every day that passes over his head.

            Yet John could never die. He might lose his way, even lose himself in the meantime, but he will never depart from his existence, we won’t let it happen. His legacy must go on, his ideas must be shared with the world, even tough the world refuses to share its ideas with him. That is why John is forced into making his own thoughts, creating inside his brain. And that scares him a bit. He’s got the power to create, and it is dangerous, because he’s well informed about what he is capable of.

            John’s brain is a dark place, with an imagination that would make most people jealous, but with a lack of direction, wandering pointlessly from thought to thought, creating symbols and ideas, just to burn them down the second after. In his mind, John kills himself everyday, just to return stronger and more confused every time. He probably tries to find his limits, to see how much of him he can take, before he has to throw himself away and come again in a whole new outfit.

            The truth is, John can’t kill himself. He tried, he did his utmost best you might say, but it didn’t work. The dark side of him is so deeply stuck in his soul that it is impossible to make it go away. And he realized that, so he decided to embrace it instead. Why fight away something you can’t resist? It’s not worth it, especially when you know you’re fighting off the windmills. So John did the wise thing, he took the logical way out, by stopping to fight off his ugliness, by making it his own and starting to appreciate it, because it’s part of who he is, and who is he is the only thing that matters. John stopped fighting his inner demons. He joined their side instead.  

Johns idealism demolished

            We already established that John Doe is an idealist, always in search for true love, whatever that is. Now let us try and figure out what is that supposed to mean. It’s quite hard actually, because John’s ideal isn’t exactly a pattern that needs to fit. Most of the time he doesn’t even know what he wants, and when by chance he finds some sort of guidance, he persistently screws everything up with a precision that would make a Swiss watch jealous.

            It’s not like he doesn’t try or something, he is just incapable of holding on to a direction long enough to reach a goal. He doesn’t fool himself. He knows true love is an utopia, and he doesn’t expect to find it in this life. The world, in his conception, is just too self-centered to achieve such a thing. And then, what’s the point in trying to reach out to something you most definitely never find? The earth is full of true believers in a fake cause. The cause of love. As if love could mean everything in life. That’s a load of crap. For John, even happiness is optional. You don’t need to be happy to live, being happy is just a bonus, an extended version of a pathetic existence.

            But sadness isn’t an option either. You don’t have to be sad just because you’re not happy. Being unhappy doesn’t take you down to the other edge, the cold and desperate edge of depression. It just makes you unhappy, it’s something that you don’t have, not something that you miss. John is not a hypocrite, he doesn’t fool himself into believing that he is better off in his lack of happiness. He’s living his life just like everyone else, throwing himself into wild goose chase after wild goose chase, in the pursuit of the thing that everyone wants, but almost no one gets in this world. Bliss. That beautiful yet so frustrating feeling, that some get out of drugs, others out of alcohol, and the fools from what they think is love. John gets his dose of bliss from the easiest dealer out there, the oldest and simplest form of the drug, ignorance. Yes, ignorance is bliss, and John believes in that.

            All of this doesn’t mean that John doesn’t believe in love. That’s not at all the case. He’s a fool like everyone else, the foulest of them all, I may say. He’s so hung up on his ignorance that he searches for the other source of happiness only in the purest form. He wishes for absolute love, he falls with ease, but he falls hard, and he usually goes for the thing he knows from the start that he’ll never have. That doesn’t bother him though. He got used to swimming in a sea of “what if”s, never being able to reach the shore, never finding closure or getting any satisfaction of any sort. He’s been doing this for so long that you might even think he started to like it. And he will most likely never find solid ground. He just swims from raft to raft, trying not to drown, letting himself be carried by the currents.

The innocent imagination of John

            A thing you should know about John Doe. He’s not some creepy dude that you hear about and never want to face, but he’s not a friendly fella’ either. He’s got a weird side, an unconventional imagination, but he’s able to contain it, to never let it escape the border of his solitary meditation. He never shares any of the stuff that’s filling up the dark corners of his mind.

            Another thing you should know, despite the image you’ve seen so far and the picture that you’ve probably made about him, is that John is a hopeless romantic. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, break the news, alert the authorities, ‘cause our beloved sociopath, John Doe, is a true believer in the cause of absolute love. And he’s stupid too, did I mention that? But I guess you can’t blame him. His small yet damaged mind needs to hang on to something, and what better to keep the brain busy than a wild ghost hunt for a miracle that never delivers.

            Love makes John a better person tough. It’s the reason that he doesn’t truly hate people. He says he hates part of the human interaction, but the truth is this is just another way of saying that he doesn’t care about that part. John Doe, stupid as he is, was capable of acknowledging a few things, believe it or not. He found out all by himself that hate and love have a lot in common, the main resemblance being the intensity of the feeling. Hating someone requires the existence of the feeling of hate, same as for loving someone. Hate means feeling, and the idealist in John is not too keen of wasting emotions on something that ain’t worth it.

            Taking into consideration that fact, John has cleverly, or not, created a pattern for experiencing his emotions. For him, the world divides into three main categories. The first category represents the people he accepts, that are part of his everyday life and that tolerate him, more or less. The second category, and this includes a vast majority of the world, is composed of the people he genuinely doesn’t give a shit about. John doesn’t like to consume too much emotion in everyday life, so he replaced the concept of hate, and the feeling in the matter, with something less consuming, that being the lack of feeling. His philosophy is simple, why hate when you can ignore? And it’s a good one too, life would be much easier if we could all do that.

            The third category of human beings that are part of John Does brain and heart, is made up of that special one, the one and only at the time being, the single most important human, that deserves to love and to be loved. It’s unimportant who that is, the thing that maters is that the one, whoever she may be, is the single person in Johns life that gets the love, the whole love and nothing but the love. There’s someone in his life, at almost any given time, which is truly loved. She might not know it, she might not understand it, but that’s the only one that matters to John. 

Back to John

            Ok, so where was John? Right, we left him in his sea of self-loathing and indifference. That’s the place that he finds himself feeling the most comfortable, I suppose. And who could ever blame him? Is there anyone that can find a better place of mind for someone as bad as John? Because John is bad. He may seem like a misfortunate bloke at first sight, nut the truth is, John Doe is in essence one of the worst bastards the earth has ever seen.

            Don’t get me wrong, he is not a bad human being. He’s got a good moral code and an education that makes him perfectly prepared for the life that’s coming after all of us. But John is bad, he’s bad to himself. If he could break in two, he would probably kill his alter ego, make him endure the most horrible kinds of torture, without even blinking. His soul has been lured to the dark side and it’s hard to say if he can ever return, if he can fight his way back into the light, whatever that means.

            Now let me do some explaining on the matter in hand. You must agree with me that there is a need for explanation after a portrait such as the one I presented on John. First thing’s first, John has recently escaped from a very disturbing situation, the kind of shit that would throw a guy into despair. I am, of course, talking about a woman, because there’s obviously nothing that can wreck a guy’s soul worse than the wicked games of a twisted female being.  The story itself is not that much, it was basically a “love at first sight” or something like that type of thing, for him of course, because for her it was anything but. Short story would be: met the girl, made a move, got rejected softly, grew apart, started reconnecting, got double-crossed and screwed over, didn’t learn his lesson, went for it once again, and once again got fooled and fell on the ground.

            So, john is a perseverant type of guy. One might even say he’s stupid, and that particular one might even be closer to the truth than he thinks. Yes, John is stupid, and he knows that oh so well, but it doesn’t bother him, because he genuinely doesn’t give a fuck about what everyone thinks, and he doesn’t give a fuck about how smart or stupid he plays his life. He simply takes it one day at a time, never calculating his next mistake, but embracing each one with the warm and loving arms of indifference. You may say it’s not good for him, or for anyone else, but then he’d say he doesn’t give a single fuck about what you may say, and continue doing the same retarded mistakes over and over again, until he can’t do them anymore.

            That’s what John is all about. Mistake after mistake, he loathes his life, too much to change it, and yet too little to end it. He considered putting a break to his pitiful existence, but he either realized he doesn’t have the courage, or he concluded that it just ain’t worth the trouble. That’s why he keeps breathing the same wrong air every day and doing the same stupid things, until the earth decides that it can’t hold him any longer, and then he will leave, but not by his own hand.

An introduction to John Doe

            Don’t let the title fool you. John is anything but extraordinary. He’s just an average guy, with an average life and something that slightly resembles an average brain. Except it doesn’t. John’s brain is a dark, twisted place, an insidious cave filled with miserable thoughts and dangerous ideas. And don’t even get me started on his hearth. There are things laying in there that are meant to be kept away from society for ever and for always.

            Kind of scary right? Wrong. John is anything but scary. He’s just a stupid bloke who had the misfortune of experimenting things that would twist even the mind and soul of a perfectly normal person. Not that John isn’t normal. He is normal, but society’s understanding of “normal” is the one that’s broken. John is not your everyday antisocial sociopath. He is much more complex than this. The label doesn’t suite him.

            Yes, it’s true that John is not always able to fit in when meeting a brand new group of people, but that’s not because he’s got a problem with human interaction. He merely doesn’t give a fuck. He’s ok, he can take part in a conversation, most of the times without making a complete idiot of himself, but he’s almost never the one to initiate the talking. He doesn’t care if someone thinks he’s weird, he actually feels a bit flattered, because he embraced the concept of “normal is boring” a long time ago, and now it’s a big part of his life philosophy.

            John has a lot of general ideas and concepts that he revolves his life around, such as “shit happens” and “life’s a bitch”. And honestly, you can’t blame him, he learned them all, and he learned them the hard way. Life had the bitter humor of throwing these concepts at him one by one, like a bundle of raindrops hitting the pavement, until they create a puddle of self-loathing and despair. But life underestimated John. It never expected him to resist, to endure. The point was probably to make him fight back, to make him throw a punch into the air, hoping to hit whatever it was that made his existence so hard to bear. The plan failed. John found a way of protecting himself, creating a barrier between him and the misery and assimilating the shitty mottos one at a time. And that method is generally called indifference. Pure indifference, covering him up like a shield, constantly repelling all the dirt that his maker or makers are so kindly throwing at him with incredible consistency.

            We’re missing the point tough. The topic here is John, and we are already talking about him, but it will soon be the time to start talking about his life, and the thing that makes an average guy extraordinary, or not.