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.