A world disconnected

I was working on the current edit of Grand Illusion and came across this sequence which I really forgot had existed.

You see, these are the ramblings of a man discontented with his station. I concoct theories to make myself feel better. There must be someone out there worse off than me; there must be some world where it is me who is rich and powerful. But those are just the fairy-tales we tell ourselves to make the next day seem a plausible answer to the blackness. I will wake up. I will go to work and do all of this shit over again.

There is no hope that at the end of tomorrow my life will be altered for the better in any significant manner and yet I still get up. I still do it all over again. I am told it is hope which keeps us moving forward and I have called bullshit more than once.

Hope is what we invented to hide the truth. We don’t get up because we have hope, we get up because we don’t have any other option. We fear. We fear death. We fear the end of our own existence as if somehow this miserable piece of shit getting up every day and pumping your gasoline for a piddly nine bucks an hour matters in the grand scheme of anything let alone everything. My existence is neither grotesque nor incomprehensible to you or anyone else you know, it is simply not relevant and that is the price we pay for having thoughts. Think that a dog wakes up and regrets his choices in life? Hell no, he gets up, stretches, maybe licks his balls and then looks for food. He does so without regret, shame, or fear of death at the end of the day. And somehow we attempt to convince ourselves that we matter more than the dog.

This is from a chapter titled "The Days of Love Not Known" and describes a version of the protagonist who is the polar opposite of his other existences. I forgot the words, but it really reminds me just how different the world can be through different eyes. When I wrote it, I almost had to become like a method actor. I had to put myself in that place. I used my own youthful indiscretions, nights wandering the streets of a small town with no official place to call a home. I crashed on the couch of others. I worked at a bar then, and I drank after work. It was easy to remember this time. 

Though I never had the thoughts of this character, I could put myself into his mind. I became the character for that chapter and wrote as if I was in a life of desperate existence.