Humanity

    I feel I can’t even breathe, I can’t even talk like a normal person and everything I do tends to be joined by some kind of pain. Why is that? Why is it that whenever I want to do things right, they never really come down as easy as they should be or at least as enjoyable as they should be?

 They say, the people I guess, that the world is paved with good intentions. I don’t think that is true but if it were true, I think things would be much better than what they are. If good intentions were the norm, everyone would just be better off or at least would have more of a chance to make whatever they want to make come true.

 No, I’m not missing the point that such saying is precisely meant to be the opposite of what it is. Good intentions are obviously a façade, a way of getting into something and then you realize that being nice and good is simply not enough. You have to be bold and unapologetic. The thing is that when some people behave as such, they are admired and respected. People often love sincerity and that brass characteristic in some men and women. They would even go and call them “heroes”.

 But when others say the same things, even going a little further, then they are not heroes and they are considered just undesirable and annoying people. They are deemed not graceful enough by the rest of the so-called community and are treated worse than if they had a very contagious disease.

 That has happened to me many times. People told me I’m too shy, I never speak, I don’t talk and so on. And when I finally did and said what I had on my mind, many were shocked and seemed to confirm that the reason I didn’t speak up was actually a good one. Because most people mistrust the ones that don’t speak, that shy away from the lights of life.

 People love when a person just talks and talks and always has a story to tell. They don’t care if the story is real or not, they just love to hear and be in the presence of such gods of humanity who embody everything most people would like to be: confident, courageous, adventurous, experienced, interesting and many other character traits that are more realistic in a cartoon than in a real person.

 From the first years of school to the last years on Earth, people always seek those people out. If they can’t be like them, they want to be their friends, to always be close in order to catch those gems they often lay on the world, whether they are experiences that seem incredibly interesting or maybe a joke told in great way or romantic experience or whatever it is that makes them a magnet of attention.

  We are trained by society to be like that, to try to enter that select group. They teach us songs and they make us sing them in the presence of family members and even family friends and others. They make us repeat every word time and again and seek out new things for us to say, to make us interesting while we are children because there’s is an unspoken agreement that no one should be nasty to a child, at least not their face.

 Some kids succeed in the attempt initiated often by their parents (although the kid himself can do it) and then they are inside that group. The bad thing is that they don’t get to stay there forever. They have to keep doing things; they have to be little circus freaks, entertaining the world while they live their lives. Some people realized they are very good at this and others just fail and are forgotten.

 Of course, another way to get in later in life is when having good looks. In young life this doesn’t really count as judging kids by their looks is frowned upon by society, even if every single person has an actual opinions. But that ban is lifted in adolescence because that’s the moment you sort of transform into the person you are going to be for the rest of your life. So after puberty, everyone is magically entitled to judge you and every single person in the planet and, unfortunately, that’s one way to get noticed.

 If you are deemed good looking or beautiful or cute or whatever the word is, you will get into a select group that have certain privileges for a long period of life. Now that period of life is even longer than in other eras of humanity because now we judge more because we think we know more when the truth is that society is the same stupid animal that has thrown humanity of course thousands of times before and will keep doing it in the future.

 So you have to be interesting and beautiful and bold and nice and good and so many things that are not even clearly defined and that are just a mask that people put over their faces, their real faces and their real feelings about every single thing that happens in the world. Is not something revolutionary to say that many of those pretty faces, of those good people, are actually the front of the most despicable beings in the world. It has happened a lot that the mask just falls off and people realized that they cannot keep lying to themselves.

 To be clear, people know when those they admire are not real, are not honest and lie. But they simply look the other way, which is one of the main characteristics of the human being, which is not made of all good and lovable stuff. We are made of really slimy things and those characteristics have shifted the way humanity is many times.

 We are hypocrites. That’s the reality of everything, the truth of our existence and the reason I write and the reason you may read this to the end and the reason to many other things in this life. We love to do things in different ways, not always because we are dared but because we just want to disobey and create chaos. Other times we just nod and smile and nod and smile for life and there are many people in the world that are real professionals in the matter, people that have lied so well to others and for so long, that they have even begun to believe the lies they say.

 I’m not saying that the world is all made up of false and corrupt creatures but the goodness and perfection of it all is simply too annoying to be real, too superficial to be really something that anyone would authentically care about. I do think there is goodness and real feelings in people that can make them much more interesting than the superficial reasons most people use to get close to someone, to make their heroes. But those feelings are so ephemeral that most of the world doesn’t even care.

 The dangerous thing nowadays is all of this fake attention to issues that used to be taboo or forbidden or just dismissed in a second. Although many people really believe in discussing those subjects and be open and real, many more are using them to make them look better, to make them look like saviors and heroes again.

 There are people that simply do not care who they have to pass over as long as they get what they want. And the worst thing is that many others admire that in a person so it creates a very sick thing when someone is just deemed the best because they pretend to be something that they are not and are clearly doing wrong things to get there but they are all forgiven or forgotten.

 Yet, many others decide that they just don’t want to buy into all of that. They don’t want to be in those groups, in those sects that idealize every single aspect of a human’s life. Everything today is a standard, there is a very narrow path to follow is people decide to get off that standard. And even if they choose that path, the options at the end of it are scarce if they exist.

And it’s not about being different because that shouldn’t be a thing in life. At the end of the day, thanks to DNA, we are all different and that is obvious. We are not machines so we are not copies. Being different is imbedded in us so we shouldn’t praise or go after that because it’s who we are.

 I just hope my body let’s me speak and think again, soon.

War there, peace here

   The park slowly fell into disuse. First, because it was all the way up the hill, something that had been a prime feature of the place but later was seen as just a silly way to make people pay more money for just some rides that they could easily find somewhere else. The rollercoaster, the ferris wheel, the bumpers cars and all those stands where you could get food and silly prizes were still there fifty years later but in a very different state.

 The city had wanted to dismantle the park but it would have been really expensive and it wasn’t a very rich area to pay for anything that big so they decided to send a team of experts to define if the park was safe as it was or if it had to be demolished, at least partially.

 It was a team of only three people that checked every single machine and structure for a period of five days. They used special devices to help them and took pictures. They were very noticeable in town because it wasn’t a very big city and people knew each other really well. It wasn’t a secret that most people believe the park should be left alone, as it had memories for many of the inhabitants of town but also because it was a very obvious and unique feature of town to have the park overlooking them from a hill. It was something like out of a movie.

 By the end of their studies, the team agreed the park was safe and that only some parts of the rollercoaster should be either demolished or repaired in order to avoid a future collapse. What surprised everyone was that the city council did nothing with the study and decided to file everything concerning the park. As they saw it, it was a place that was out of bounds, so if something collapsed no one would be hurt. After all, a perimeter fence had been built around the park many years ago and they could still manage to electrify it in order to keep out any intruders.

 The citizens were not very happy about this, as it would mean that a portion of the city’s electricity would go to a place no one cared about anymore. Some people presented their complaints but nothing happened. So the subject was left alone for a long time and people eventually forgot about the danger the study had shown, the electrified fence and so many other details that the council had omitted about the park.

 In the period of time that followed, the park was only seen as a feature of the city, like the rest of the hills and the forest to one side and the lake to the other. It was just something that was there and that no one really cared about a lot. It was ten years later, when young people, who didn’t know anything about the park and all that had happened with it, decided to are each other to cross the fence and get into the park. No one really knows why that came up but it did.

 They weren’t surprised when the first boy started climbing the fence and wasn’t electrocuted. Inadvertently, they had been the first people to realize that the perimeter fence of the park had not been electrified in many years. Actually, it had only been like that for a few months until the city dropped it. However, the townsfolk were never notified so they still thought safety was paramount among the rulers of the town.

 The kids loved to enter the park and eventually someone brought a pair of industrial cutters and made a whole on the fence in order for everyone to come in and just play around. Important to say they were just children and young adults, the oldest been twenty-five years old. The young ones liked to go around and destroy what could be destroyed, as well as use the former walkways as places to play baseball, pee and practice their shooting with toy guns. In the summer, they changed that to water guns.

 Meanwhile, the older new visitors went all the way up there to have beer and smoke cigarettes or marihuana. There was no place in town to do any of that without someone’s parents been aware of them so it was like a gold mine when they realized no one was looking at them in the park. Many got really drunk and passed out but friends would always help the guy or girl in trouble: they would help the person eat something, vomit as much as they needed to and then help them go home and say they had been food poisoned.

 Surprisingly, parents were very slow to understand what was happening and there’s no way to blame them as the country had entered another war in a far away land and many of the sons of the town had decided to go and defend the honor of their land. The truth behind this was that unemployment was rampant, which combined by the very traditional values of the region, made for a large part of the population supporting that war and being very proud that their children were participating in it.

 When they began to be killed, pride mutated into despair and worry and the fact that kids were smoking and drinking and playing in a dangerous place, was not really an important thing in the parent’s lives. They wanted to win that war but also see their boys, and in some cases girls, come back. The first coffins arrived only five months after the war had started.

 The perpetual state of mourning and overused patriotism was the perfect veil the younger kids needed to go to the park in the hill and just get away from their parents who spent every second of their day putting flags in every corner of the house or watching TV, usually the most fanatic TV station ever.

 They’d rather be shooting their toy guns to the roller coaster’s pillars or from the lower seats in the ferris wheel. It was amazing how the ambiance changed from the town square to the hill park. In the hill everyone laughed and ran and you could always pick up some gossip from the girl that sat in the benches to talk about their schoolmates. Even pets were allowed now as kids brought their dogs and other animals for their classmates and friends to meet.

 The truth is the place had become a kind of haven for children that were ignored at home. If the parents weren’t there for them, their friends would be. Many became friends after meeting in the park and many fell in love there too, initiating many relationships that would last for years and years, although kids had no idea of this.

 Even things as forbidden as two boys kissing was normal in their little world up in the hill, no one said anything to the boys that did it because there was an unspoken agreement that no one would judge anyone for anything they did, unless it was pretty violent or just wrong. For example, a group of kids saved a girl from being raped by some guy in one of the bumper cars and they decided to form some sort of security group, telling others to be aware of their surroundings at all time.

 Life was good for those kids and teenagers. And it was just like that for some years until an accident happened, the one that eventually was set to happen: the rollercoaster collapsed and killed two children and destroyed part of the fence and toppled trees that were located down the hill. As everyone in town was able to see the tragedy, no one was able to ignore reality anymore.

 Parents grieved now for the kids they had at home and realized what the city had done to them. Lawsuits ensued and media frenzy was created, as people loved all the drama and the tragedy behind this story.

Meanwhile, kids mourned their dead too and mourned the loss of the only place they had to be themselves, to enjoy being young in a world were adults were crazy enough to praise children going to war. The ones in the park talked about the subject often and thought all their parents were insane, even if none of them had said that to them ever.

After the tragedy, the town went back to worrying about those who had left willingly to die. But kids wouldn’t take it anymore. It all started with a twelve year old grabbing all the national flags in the house, piling ALL of them and burning them at the backyard. War had come home.

Wedding planner

   The food was ready, the cake was in its place, all chairs and tables had been checked and even the sun was been monitored, as well as the clouds. As a wedding planner, Monica knew everything had to be perfect. She was paid, handsomely by the way, because people knew she was a control freak and in her job, that was a good thing. From the little boy or girl carrying the rings to the small couple on top of the cake, Monica knew everything about a marriage and always had it under control, having alternatives at hand when the time needed. She had left a job in real estate when a friend asked her to organize her wedding simply because she was much more thorough than her. And that party was still being remembered today, with all its beautiful details.

 So Monica had made wedding her life and now attended many of those a week, seeking only perfection. By now she was so recognized in the medium, that she had the privilege to choose her clients, instead of being the other way around. She would only choose those events that had something interesting in them like a great location, many people, cultural aspects and anything she could be interested in to make her business much more successful. She had done everything from Jewish weddings to gay weddings. She had made them on the beach, in the woods and even in a theme park. Monica always had the kind of food you wanted, the colors, the flavors, the music, the entertainment… She had it all for her successful business.

 What she didn’t have was that which all her clients had: someone by her side. Ironically, Monica had never been married or close to being married. She had never had a relationship that had the potential to go that far and the truth was she had never had time for love. Monica was so focused on doing well financially and socially that she had left on the side her needs as a woman with feelings of love and care. But it was, in fact, because those needs were not really that strong. Many people were amazed by this, specially her mother and other women that were close to her, but Monica was not at all romantic, had no interest in being a mother and when presented to men, she was always bored by all of them.

 If you think she may have been a lesbian, the answer is no. It was as simple as she had no feelings for anyone. She had experimented enough in high school and college and she had always enjoyed sex, but she had no need of having a partner or a love interest, at all. Her girl friends were always so amazed by the things she talked when referring to her job. She did the most beautiful things for so many people but when asked how she imagined her own wedding, she had absolutely no words and she often changed the subject. It was very awkward and people would normally go on to another thing.

 All of this was harder on her when men decided to approach. It has to be said that Monica was not a super model but she wasn’t a monster either. She had nice black hair and big brown eyes. Men always stared at her legs, which she often didn’t realize. When a guy decided to approach her, it was really uncomfortable because there were two things that may happen. The first one was that the guy may come and tell her a compliment but she would just be completely oblivious to his intentions. Normally, she wouldn’t even pay attention and would decide very fast to dismiss him, excusing herself by use of her work. Men never insisted because she would talk in such a cold way it was impossible to insist.

 The other case would be for her to be aware of the guy’s intentions but answering by being brutally honest with him. That did not happen as often as the other case, which was great because she was always very cold and harsh when telling someone she wasn’t, at all interest. Men would just think “What a bitch!” and leave the place immediately. And that was it, she was known as the queen of marriages for many women but many men also knew her as a cold bitch. And even women knew this last thing and didn’t mind because that way they thought they would have more control over their wedding that their future husbands, who women always thing have awful taste for things such as weddings.

 Monica was in love once, though. It had happened during her year as a realtor. She would show so many people house and apartments that it became dull and tiring after a short period of time. Then, one day, she met Frank. He was a wealthy young man working in his family’s business and had been commanded by his mother to buy a place in the city, near the office, to be always there if someone needed it. The fact is that Monica and Frank bonded when she showed him several apartments in one day, all enormous for one person and with bills that only a rich man like Frank could pay. But the truth was that, that day; they were both not as interested in the apartments as they were in each other.

 Some days later, they started dating and then Monica’s job took a back seat in her life. She went out with Frank often, to the movies, the theater or simply to have dinner in the most amazing restaurants. He always paid and she loved those details that made him a gentleman. Even the first time they had sex; she realized he was not a driven person, but a controlled one like herself. She liked that so she decided to let herself go a bit and enjoy whatever was happening between them. It was a great time in her life because she had it all: a job, a boyfriend and even money to make small investments, like a new apartment for herself. Frank promised to buy her things to fill it and she knew that it would be their love nest.

 However, that never happened. Blinded by love, Monica had not realized that she had no way of paying for all the bills of the apartment. Even with help from Frank, paying the bills would be very difficult and the truth was she didn’t want Frank to do everything on their future home. Because, although they had never talked about it, she intended to marry him soon. She had not tell any close friends about Frank because every time in the past she had a boyfriend, they had always been extremely judgmental of her because they thought of her control issues and wondered how she would use them in a relationship.

 The case was that she didn’t have to do a thing to end this relationship or to even make it crumble. Frank, as rich as he was, was not interested in her like she had always thought. He was a player and wanted to have many options in life, as he didn’t want any type of responsibility yet. He had been entrusted with a company that someone else was handling on his name. He just had to smile and go to work everyday. But the truth was he would often be high or drunk somewhere with random women, in parties or just having sex in the apartment Monica had gotten for him. When she found it, she felt extremely stupid and told him to fuck himself and never to call her. He was cruel as he told her that she was just using her for sex and that she wasn’t even good at that.

 Monica’s trust in love was destroyed that day and never really grew back. She didn’t blame anyone but herself because she knew she had being naïve and simply stupid every single day of that relationship, if you can even call it that. She was speechless and cried for several days, almost until the day a friend asked her to organize her wedding. Everything changed because of that: she sold the apartment and moved to one she could pay, she burned everything that had ever come from Frank and organized, with the help of a friend who was an expert in creating companies, everything she needed to have a successful business.

 Four years later, Monica had achieved her goal of being the most recognizable face of the wedding planning industry, Because for her it was an industry, as well as for the hundreds of women and men that came to her in order to get married, because they knew they would get whatever their imagination had created. No matter if they wanted silly costumes or the rarest wines in the world she would have it for those who needed it and could pay her fee. When at home, when the weddings were over, she would often think about her own future but she always failed to see love. She wanted sometimes, but there was nothing there. Sadly, that part of her had been torn apart.

Mjölnir

   From the top of the hill, he looked majestic. It was incredible to see him glide over the water and then fly up towards the sun and then fall, breaking the surface of the lake with his huge body. The creature loved to swim, or so it seemed, and it looked really happy to be there. He looked like a child that meets the ocean for the first time. But he was much larger than just a child. He was more the size of two horses and there were far from any ocean although he could reach one in no time. The people who found him had called him Mjölnir, like the hammer that the god Thor held in battle, the hammer that the gods had created to bring order and stability to a world in chaos. He was that for them, a fantastic creature capable of bringing calm to this world.

 The two explorers that had gone to see him were so amazed that they just stared at him for an hour, never mind the fact that he might fly away in any moment. The locals said he lived deep in the mountains because they were the only inaccessible area of the region. The mountains her were sharp and built by nature like razors. Not any human could climb those and to use any means of transport would be a waste of time because of the magnetic instability of the area, which no one had ever explained. Maybe there was something to mine down there; maybe it was because of him. No one knew. What they knew was that he was, for all intents and purposes, unique. The locals never spoke about another one or a herd of them nor nothing like that. He was alone in the world.

 After a week of the discovery, the scientists had begun to look everywhere in the world with the same circumstances but nothing had come up yet. Maybe he wasn’t alone but they had to help him mate or he would be extinct in a number of years. To be honest, they had no idea how long the lifespan of a dragon was but the general thought was that they could live for hundreds of years, so that gave them some time to organize and look for a suitable mate. They studied him for weeks and weeks and more and more people came to meet him, which was astonishing due to the fact that, in the past, any person that had attempted to get close had died.

 Doctor Lemon was a brilliant biologist. She had discovered many new plants and animals in the deep forests of Indonesia. As for Doctor Samuelson, he was a paleontologist, the one that had discovered the first skeleton of a dragon in China. He was the reason the two of them were granted help from an American institution to go and explore the Razor Mountains and see if its inhabitant was real or not. They had to train hard for days in climbing and trekking and in every sport that could help them pass the mountain range. When they got there, they had to try it several times, risking their lives, in order to finally make the crossing that would lead them to Mjölnir.

The lake was not a place they went to look for him. They had seen it from the range and had thought they needed to recharge their water supplies before attempting to do anything else and the lake was probably made of melted ice water from the mountaintops. It was summer, so the lake was not as large as it could be but it happened to be large enough for a gigantic creature to swim in it. It was so strange, for both scientists, to see the creature so at peace and relaxed. If they hadn’t known any better, they would have thought he was a giant dog or something. Not for his looks of course but for the way he behaved in private, playing around and just enjoying himself.

 They had always been portrayed as savages in every single culture. They have been deemed dangerous and quite vengeful but this one did not seem like that. He seemed nice. Maybe that was because in all of the first week, they didn’t see him spout fire. It was possible that he used it only as mechanism of defense but when they saw him eat a deer, they realized he wasn’t able to do it at all. He was a very large lizard who happened to fly short distances but he had no ability to propel fire from his mouth or nostrils. This disappointed many who followed the investigation but he was, nevertheless, a species in the brink of extinction. The two scientist looked all around the area and found the skeleton of another dragon but it wasn’t its partner but its mother.

 The bones indicated it was a larger animal, with a far longer wingspan and a huge body. It was now easy to see now why they had such a clumsy ability to fly: they were too big. They weren’t like the pterosaurs of the past that were light like birds. These dragons were heavy and had to train their whole lives to be able to fly properly. That’s why no one had ever spotted one. Contrary to belief, they didn’t fly that much, they didn’t spout fire and they lived in an area where the magnetic field was just crazy. The area was soon protected by law, so only scientist and authorized people could come in, dare to cross the mountains, and then just watch him to his things.

 Both Lemon and Samuelson stayed there for a whole year and were the ones who set the rules on how to behave while staying in the area. They would explain to any visitors that they had been very careful for him not to se them or be able to smell them. They used a special perfume that made them smell like plant life so he wouldn’t come too close and attack. People always obeyed because it was more important for them to see him and take pictures than risking their lives in a silly way. But like with everything that goes into fashion, most people soon forgot Mjölnir, after only a year. Lemon and Samuelson were happy that this had happened because they needed to investigate more and see how much time he had.

They gathered saliva from the remains of his meals and some scales that had apparently fallen from him. Maybe he was changing skin like most reptiles or maybe he was sick. They had no real idea and that made them insane. For a while, they had to go back to a proper lab and just try to understand more about him. As they did all the tests and experiments they had to do, they realized it was a very difficult job as there was no other creature like it. Lizards and snakes were only similar to him in small things but, in the larger picture, he was a unique creature. And that worked against him hard because it’s much more difficult to protect something you don’t understand than the opposite.

 It was during that time that a couple of explorers in remote parts of the world found more dragon remains and even fossilized eggs. They were brought to a laboratory for investigation and hoping they could lead to a possible cloning project but that was cancelled when they realized there was nothing they could do with the eggs, except noting it features and putting it in a museum. After six months of hard work, they had come to the conclusion that the dragon was about to enter adulthood. His mother had died at least fifty years ago when he was a baby but only know he was beginning to grow up. That explained, at least partially, his behavior in the lake and the way he did things. He was becoming an adult all by himself and it appeared he would die alone too.

 Then the news came. The locals had found his body lying next to the lake. He was dead. Lemon and Samuelson flew to the area but it was too late, another team had come for the body and, with permission and bribes to the locals, they had managed to take the body in a helicopter and now it was far from the reach of those two scientists, the ones that had discovered him. For months, no one heard one more word about anything related to the creature. But both scientists decided to release a book with their impressions and experiences with the dragon. They thought they should at least be the first to say what he was like and how thrilling it was to discover him.

 The rival scientists released an autopsy report saying that he had died from drowning and that they had found the organ that might have produced the flames every single culture in ancient history attributed to the dragons. The discoverers of the creature published an article saying all of that was false and that there was something they weren’t telling and that they should have been able to check the bodies themselves or at least leave someone else do it. But they never did. And the body was never donated to any museum or organization. People, again, largely forgot about the dragon and about them, even as they slammed scientists without scruples every time they had the chance.

 Mjölnir was dead and the truth was he had died because he had wanted to. He was smarter than people thought and his fly over the lake were just an attempt to understand how to kill himself. He was grieving and because he missed his mother. And he was alone and that wouldn’t change. So he took matters into his own hands and did it. People would have never understood that because of the intelligence factor but that no longer matters. We will never understand.