The Age of Addiction

By Jack R Ernest

This book contains three short stories that share the same overall theme of a society of infertility. The stories range from being 20 or so pages long to about 50 pages. Themes of alienation, existentialism and escapism reverberate throughout the three stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9780244166953

Book preview

The Age of Addiction

The Age of Addiction

Jack R Ernest

Copyright

Copyright © March 2019 by Jack R Ernest

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Printing:  March 2019

IBSN: 978-0-244-16695-3

The Escape Artist of Sinope

1

My greatest achievement was my greatest failure. My genius made me but it also broke me. When they wanted me to smile, I smiled; to cry, I cried and when they said dance, I quietly danced for them. Writing gave me everything and success took it all away. So many of us are haunted by the opinions of others that it moulds our lives and how we go about making any serious inroads in this world. This alas is the mistake I made. In gaining a life of security, I lost the richest quality that man can possess, the only quality a man need possess: freedom. It goes without saying that the greatest freedom one can search for or dare seek to obtain, is freedom itself and now I am no longer that eagle soaring high through the clouds, lifted by a wind of passion that guides us on whatever path. Now I am in chains. I may be rich, but I am an imprisoned poor slave of a dark dungeon. I am no longer on the road anymore. Instead I am suspended in a black hole and there is no escape, no way out and no release. For once you are known in this world you are condemned and you are destined to live the life of others.

My daily life consists of repetition. Life is repetition and a bad memory. The majority of us are not the unique souls we are led to believe by those in authority. No, not at all, we are just cogs in a wheel, a very large wheel that turns and turns with the rising of the yellow sun and the rush of the purple sunset. So, in tandem with this wheel I get up, I shower, I dress myself, put on my cologne, sit to have my breakfast, the same breakfast I have had all my life, I say goodbye to my wife, wish her the best of the day and I head on out into the real world. I have travelled the same route to work every day for the last 27 years and of late I have been wondering if it was the right journey I took. Upon reaching work I park my car in the same spot, my spot, with my name itched into the concrete, a symbol of my status, but even concrete wears away from the wretched rain eventually. I enter the building. How it has changed and become frail in the long years and I climb the stairs and finally I enter my office. I sit down, I think and I dream of a life I never had, the life I should have had and I patiently await my retirement.

Forgive my cynicism, for I have had a better life than most. I have a loving wife, a house and enough money saved up to survive even the harshest of winters and I suppose from the outside looking in, one would be envious of my luxuries and there have been a few jealous people in my time, as there always is. But still I needed more than to be a robot. I wanted to run, to hide, to sing and dance and not give too damns about the world and what was expected of you. The unexamined life is not worth living said a philosopher and that is what I am trapped in.

Being a trained economist, I am aware of how society functions on a day to day level. Men function in this world by blindly not functioning at all. They manage to exist through not existing and they are lulled into a delusion that they live a magnificent life through religion, marriage, adverts, doctors, sports teams and so on.  All those entities give to man his daily life. They provide him with vindication, validation and verification and deprive him of certain things. For instance, his personality is wasted and his very existence in this universe is ignored. This is what I see every day, when I drive to work. I look ahead of me and I see a car in front with its driver. In my rear-view mirror, I see another driver and coming against me I see car after car, wave after wave of wasted souls who do the exact same thing day after day and the horror of it all is that they are convinced that they are the centre of the universe and yet they do not notice the cars in the midst of them. The world runs because it is full of fools who all dream the same dreams and live the same lives as one another. The disciplines of Psychology and Economics could not exist if we were all different and engaged in erratic lives. Our lives are wasted on conformity and that I am certain of, but who am I to lecture, for I am guilty of conforming myself.

When I was starting out as an economist, back in those early college days, a lecturer once told me, well he told us all, that each and every one of us was a statistician. A statistician at heart tries to deduce from what he has observed what he will observe in the future. He attempts to look at others and see what others want. The subtlety of the remark was never fully understood by the class of young bright students as much as myself I must admit. But thirty years down the cold lonely road I see so much truth in it. The truth dawned on me one fine evening as I was driving home and I would see the casual workers filtering out of factories and descending on home to call a halt to another long day. I suppose the obvious answer to such an expression is that we are all stats and yes that is true. At the end of the day you are a stat to your partner as much as the tax office. But what the man actually meant is that we are all engaged in a psychological warfare of observation of the others. So, you look at others, be they a friend, a relative or just an average person walking down the street and you make judgement on them relative to yourself. And everyone you see fits into two categories in life: Either they impress you or they don’t.  The football player on telly is either good enough or he is not. The woman on the street is either attractive or she is not. The boss is either respected or he is not. From this simple thought I deduced a lot of things. One such thing I concluded from this trivial thought experiment is that image is a driving force in the world. The desire to impress others causes us to live in a bigger house or drive around in a faster car. Why? Because in the same vein that we are either impressed or not impressed by others, we demand the very same of ourselves.

2

What am I? Who am I? I am a mathematician, a writer, a husband, a father, an athlete, a friend, a genius, a failure, a beast, a shadow. I am everything and I am nothing. I am who I am and I cannot be otherwise. Truthfully, I wish I was nothing as it would mean I would be free or at least a little less in chains than I am now. The mistake I made was to become known within the world for once you are known you are condemned. Society cannot help but label what they see or who they see. You cannot be known without being labelled and once you are known you cannot be unknown. They say that once something is on the internet it is there for life because it can be found somewhere in some place. The same is true of our minds with regards the people in our lives be they personal friends or the famous people we observe in magazines or films. Once you know a person or they know you, you cannot be negated within the realm of their consciousness. They exist in a portion of your mind be it a neuron or synapse that fires. Then through living and life itself, they meet, they mingle and they make mistakes and it is through mistakes that one becomes labelled and once they are their existence is doomed. A fool invites stress much like the bright light attracts the moth in the dark and the smart man always seeks to minimize any tension in his life, being fully aware that a stress-free successful working environment is not obtainable. You cannot succeed and avoid stress, but you can seek to minimize it and that is what a man should go in search of. The flipside of this approach is that you need trust in your lieutenants to gain any inches and when they give up, you lose. Trust is a decisive quality needed for society to tick. It along with greed are the fuel that heats the water and produces the steam the society thrives on. Without trust and greed, the world would fall the pieces tomorrow. And yet they get us in trouble. Trust is a source of our woes as well. Trust or more to the point, that we trust ourselves in trusting others is why the jails are full and many lives are broken. More caution and less dreaming is what is required for a happy.

I did not choose my wife, she chose me. That’s not to say that I do not like her. I do, she is kind and sweet, but love her I do not. My marriage is built of out pretence I must admit. I go home and smile and ask How was your day? and perhaps on a good day I swoop in for a kiss on the cheek and I keep this routine up. She enquires about my day and I retort and then she mentions some bill that has to be paid. Alas I am wearing a mask daily and a shattered man lies hidden behind this said mask. She does not realize this and why would she? I am so good at lying at this stage for being a behavioural economist I am an authority on the tricks of the trade. She believes I am content, when I am torn. She deems me to be in love, when I am falling apart. She accepts me for who I am, when I am no one at best. My indifference to her is the problem, not my lack of feelings. I do not see her as a woman with a unique personality or with a passionate life. I see her as another woman who gave up any freedom she ever had in exchange for security and stability. Perhaps I would have more respect for her if she had decided to sail against the wind. But I would still have the same problem regardless of who I married. Luckily, we had no children. She wanted them and we tried to conceive, but to no avail. The doctors did not what went wrong. Was it my end or her end or both of us? Either way, no matter what we tried, we could not conceive and I was happy for I did not want the burden of children, along with my marriage.

Truthfully, I did not wish to marry but I was young and erratic and not as knowledgeable as I am now. I would much rather not come home at all and instead wander to an empty apartment overlooking