I'm not Rodney

              I'm not Rodney
What is it that makes Rodney tick with the inexactness, the blunder of a broken clock. Like a broken clock, Rodney seldom hits the mark, save for a few times a day when he happens by chance to land on the right number. Often, he misfires like an unprimed machine. This is because nothing of the source reaches him. Few of this life's early preoccupations matter to him anymore. Why forsake all that once mattered? All the blessed and graceful modes of being, all traded in for mental dead ends, and life killers - such as thought, rationality, and a slow, but safe and predictable death.                       Rodney was born human and I made sure to keep him that way as long as possible. He could smile and mean it! He would laugh and he would sing and he would even love- he meant all these things, and he knew instantly, from within his soul, that these things weren't wrong. He knew at once, all which possessed the potential for beauty in living! He didn't mean some of the other things he thought and did though, the wrong things. He knew instantly, from within his soul, that these things weren't right. He didn't have to calculate how those things were wrong, he just knew. Before the age of four Rodney was still in the infinitely superior grace of thought which you all abandon at some point in your early lives. I'm referring to that state which is eventually replaced by something more... mechanical! This mechanical thing is attributed with a name - You call it "I" but what is it really? A black-hole which sucks and drains all the energy of everything and everyone it comes into contact with. Rodney didn't have a name for this black-hole, but he recognized and understood it because sometimes - when he would hurt Brian, he felt that it wasn't him that did the hurting. Most of the time when Rodney would hit Brian it was because Brian had done something trivial, taken a toy perhaps, or irritated Rodney in some way, and he didn't mean to hurt Brian and he always did it in the name of the black-hole, but he still did it! Of course, he didn't really mean to do it, but he always meant it when he felt sorry, that was real and there was no rationality behind it.                                        
              At some point Rodney felt his first pang of horror! Maybe it was the time he accidently killed one of the baby chicks in the chicken coop, squeezed it too hard. Maybe he was curious about the effect squeezing would have on something live, or maybe the episode was Rodney's introduction to that primal desire, that atavistic culprit lent to you from your ancestors in the trees, the desire to destroy something beautiful. Either way, his actions killed the chick! Maybe that was the first time Rodney did something and didn't mean it, but the result was awfully unamendable, and permanent. It was the first time Rodney had a sublime experience with the reality of irreversibility! That might have done it, or - it could also have been all those times when Rodney had to experience the terror of his mother's numerous breaks with reality! Who knows? Rodney even remembers the uncontrollable fear he had the first time he realized that he couldn't stop thinking! His dad said thinking is what makes you alive, but Rodney remembered that he had very recently known life without need for thought. Rodney was 5 and already he couldn't pinpoint when and how he had been before thought. Had the very realization of thought killed the human side of Rodney? Had the very realization of thought started a life of thought? A life devoid of graceful thinking, who knows. What I do know is that Rodney was born human, but life in this world showed him how to move away from all that! He learnt how to dehumanize, and with time he grew to forsake all those things which he had at one point held dear.                                      Maybe there's an ebb and flow to being human. Maybe you move away from that graceful flowy way of thought only so that you may learn the true nature behind the things you hold dear. You must somehow move away from those things before you can be truly aware of their beauty; so to speak, you must see the forest for the trees, and maybe in order to learn you need to mechanize to some extent, and then - only then, you can move back to the graceful flowy manners of thought which preceded thought.                                                                                                                                                Maybe Rodney can stop living life as if in a dream soon. Maybe Rodney can let go of the black-hole within - the ego, for once and for all. Maybe Rodney can learn to be human again. Who knows, maybe he can forgive this world for forcing him to construct his black-hole and maybe he can forgive other people who are utterly consumed by their own black-holes, and maybe - just maybe, he can learn to actually do all this and mean it!! Until that day, which I sincerely hope is soon, I will be forced to live within Rodney and watch Rodney in all his self-destructive ways and at least take comfort in the fact that he can never destroy me. How can he destroy me?  Have I told you who I am? You've wanted me your whole life and never realized it! It's hard for me to tell you who I am directly, but I can tell you that if you tell time with me you have the exactitude of the cosmos, a precision like that of the earth's diurnal cycles, always on the mark, you'd never do anything whilst holding doubt- and there would be no effort to it! In a sense, I am the flowy way of thought which Rodney abandoned so long ago in order to construct - Rodney! I am hard to have though! Hard to - acquire. For now Rodney is in charge, even as I watch him typing up this story, ostensibly on my behalf, I can't help but notice how many times he's inserted the word Rodney in to it.