Excerpt From A Ghost's Diary Part 3

Part one, go here

Part two, go here

August 12th, 2004

Hello diary.  My only constant it seems in a vague, shifting existence.  It’s summer now, and while I never much cared for the warm weather when I was alive, I do like seeing people enjoying the outdoors.  So alive, out in the light and the warmth of the sun.  Of course, I can’t feel the warmth of the sun anymore.  If I had known how cold the rest of eternity would be, I might have made more of the opportunities I had to get out and enjoy it.  People picture ghosts rattling around in old, deserted places, late at night and forlorn, but for the most part we are right there with you, at the beach, watching you play sports, laughing as you miss that three foot putt.  We surround you as you live out your lives in the light, and we try to live through you, but we can’t fool ourselves.  We will never feel the sun on our skin, we will never feel the touch of another living being.  We just coexist alongside you, and what you think is the breeze is simply our lonely sighs.

October 30th, 2004

Well, tomorrow is Halloween, so I guess everyone assumes it’s a big deal for us ghosts.  It really makes no difference, to be honest.  Most of the other things you associate with the holiday aren’t real.  No vampires, or zombies or werewolves and such.  As far as the ghosts go, I think we’ve already established that they are nothing like we imagine them in movies or books.  I don’t think I ever explained our appearance though.  We are often dressed in the clothes popular to the period we died in.  They change from time to time, did you know that?  I think our outward appearance(even though most of you never see it, we are very rarely visible to the living and much of what you think are ghosts are simply tricks of the light or your imagination) is based on how we saw ourselves when we were alive.  The clothes change slightly as our memory becomes fuzzy, but our appearance reflects how we saw ourselves in life.  That’s why so many ghosts look like hideous monsters.  We are an amalgamation of all of our insecurities and self love or hatred, and the result is rarely pleasing to look at.  Most of us still look the way we did in life, but many times all of our perceived flaws and faults are magnified through our own psyche and we present ourselves to the world as we truly saw ourselves.  Whenever one of us ghosts comes across a particularly attractive and normal looking ghost, we are all jealous and feel sad about the way we thought about ourselves when we were alive.  On Halloween, instead of being frightened by imaginary monsters, be frightened of the way you see yourself.  The you that exists in your mind’s eye is usually the scariest monster of all, and like most monsters, they don’t exist at all.  

March 17th, 2005

Hello diary!  I know it’s been quite awhile since I’ve written.  It’s not easy getting my thoughts together and jotted down.  As it is, I have to write this on foggy mirrors and in centuries old dust that accumulates far from other’s eyes.   I don’t even know if anyone is seeing this, and I don’t remember where I wrote the last part down.  Basically everything I’m doing here is pointless, but wasn’t most of the stuff I did while I was alive just as pointless?  We attach so much importance to so many trivial things while we are alive and we often make decisions while in the grip of fear and uncertainty that we seldom get it right.  The good news is that there are no right and wrong answers most of the time.  Some moves set us back a little, some push us ahead, and most of the time we end up going nowhere.  We just think we are because the scenery changes around us or we get swept along whether we’re ready or not. Being dead only lets you replay it all over in your mind again and again, but the time to make a decision is long past.  Sadly, it seems that the more time you have to think, the more jumbled your thoughts become.  That’s because there is no end game to examining and reexamining a problem or an idea.  If you are afraid of something, the more you think about it the more frightened you become.  If you are confused, the more you think the more confusing angles you will start seeing.  If there is a tiny bit of doubt in your mind about anything, thinking will only ever increase that doubt.  We are blessed with this amazing brain, capable of wondrous things, yet we only seem to use it to torture ourselves with worry and fear.  We all want to imagine immortality, to picture an afterlife that goes on for eternity because we can’t accept that our minds and our consciousness won’t live on.  Well, the good news is, it does. For all eternity, floating around wondering what might have been and realizing that all the time in the world does nothing to erase the fears and indecision you felt all your life.  The only difference is, when you’re dead it doesn’t really matter at all, mostly like it didn’t really matter when you were alive, and that fact only makes it worse.

Beyond My Front Door

       I hate venturing out into the world.  It’s not the world I have a problem with, it’s the people that inhabit it.  It starts before I even leave the house.  I’ll be putting my shoes on and I already start thinking about the slack-jawed idiots and abrasive jerks that will come between me and my destination.  Oddly, my destination is ultimately home again, a fact which more often than not makes me take my shoes back off and decide I can live without whatever it was I had to go get or do for another day.  My laundry can always wait awhile longer.  I have a whole separate store of clothes that I don’t really like to wear, but I will if I can put off conversing with someone at the laundromat for a few more days.  So what if my reserve underwear is a little binding?  I can endure the discomfort.  Who cares if I have to wear my threadbare Frankie Say Relax t-shirt to work? Who am I trying to impress?
     Also, I don’t need to like the food to eat it.  If I only have some crackers, an old pack of French onion mix and a jar of capers, I can whip up something to eat so I can put off going to the supermarket today.
      Alas, sometimes I cannot put it off and I have to go out. 

  One of the things I do, which is probably very common, is to make little stories and scenarios up about the people in the stores or in their cars.  I invent a little backstory for them.  Woman in a troubled marriage or on her way to a first date, man worried about his job or thinking of how he’s going to propose to his fiancé later, old married couple just waiting for each other to die so they can get some peace, that kind of thing.  I really shouldn’t do that though.  It just humanizes them and gets in the way of me realizing my dream of being a serial killer.
      Well, not a dream, really.  More of a destiny.  I don’t really feel like killing people, I just don’t know how else this life can end for me.  The way I see it, I’m either going to kill myself or everyone else, and I might as well try to kill everyone else first.  It's like people who wish they were dead. Why punish yourself? I just wish everyone else was dead.  Hence the killing everyone. Who knows? Maybe I could do it. 
      Probably not, though.  Someone would figure it out.
     With my luck, some real life Columbo will follow me around everywhere, pestering me and annoying me more than the people I murdered in the first place.  The joke will be on him when I confess in the first five minutes, anything to get me away from him and into a nice, empty jail cell.
      Ugh.
      It already sounds like too much trouble and too much interaction with people, and again, there’s the having to leave the house thing in the first place.  So you all are safe, by virtue of the fact that I already know I would just end up home again afterward, so why bother?  Plus, I wouldn’t be able to tolerate even the minute or so of dealing with you before I could kill you.  Talk about a dichotomy.  The very thing that makes me want to kill everyone is the same thing that prevents me from doing it.    
     There is a certain beautiful balance in the universe.  I hate it so much.  

     I have a cat.  I call him Diogenes, and I hope you don’t know who that is and what the significance is and the irony is lost on you and I hope it makes you feel stupid.  I do like the cat though, and it’s not his fault that I gave him a convoluted name that makes you feel like an asshole, so don’t take it out on him.  
     I like most animals, especially in comparison to humans.  Yeah, I know, humans are animals too, aren’t you clever?  If you’re so clever, what the fuck did you name your cat?  Yeah, I thought so.  Now shut up.
     So most days I spend telling my cat why I like him better than people.  It’s a very long list, but he is patient and sits and listens, and loves me unconditionally.  At least as long as I’m the one feeding him.  Sometimes I think he might be happier living with some old woman that has a cheery outlook on life and smiles all the time and talks about flowers or cookies or whatever the fuck old woman talk about to take their minds off dying.  Then I realize that he would rather know the truth, even if it makes him unhappy.  He still purrs, so I guess he’s made his peace with the absurdity and futility of life.  Besides, he’s a cat, it’s his job to look annoyed.
     Some people look at their pets as their children, but not me.  I look at my cat like an equal but misinformed creature.   Sure, he really has no use for most of the information I give him, but I like to think that he at least gets the general idea that people are useless.  At any rate, I would rather have a hundred cats than a child. 

      How people can have children is beyond me.  People full of self hate having little versions of themselves.  That’s going to end well.  Children are just little humans with a lot less self control or sense of decency.  They are selfish, disgusting and have no empathy or concern for anything but what they want now.  Actually, they are not that different from most adults.  
     Parents do their part to try to mold them into better human beings, mostly through guilt and shame, bribery or to deprive them of something they love.  This teaches them nothing but the feeling that they are bad or a freak for having perfectly ordinary urges and feelings, so they grow up to be dishonest, and they better hide who they are or they will suffer and be ridiculed.  
      Or you could hit them, and they will grow up thinking that love is pain and the solution to every problem is violence.  Or you can never hit them, and they will grow up and be shocked that the world is hard and no one cares about their precious feelings and they will spend their lives in an indignant huff and throw tantrums and feel no one is good enough.
     You can’t really blame people, there’s no good way to raise a person correctly, and most parents give up by the time their kids are teenagers.  They just point them out the door at eighteen, whether to college or a job, and wash their hands of the whole mess and finally get back to having disposable income to spend on drugs and pornography and whatever hobby they have talked themselves into to help pass the slow passage of time until sweet death embraces them.

     Anyway, getting back to going out.  For the most part, we have some say about where we will spend our time.  For instance, I still enjoy going to the movies.  Well, sometimes, but most of the time the movie is a horrible disappointment, made for a general population of morons that read at a 4th grade level and still think selfie sticks and rap music are a good idea.  If I go to a movie though, I go at 9am on a weekday, and there is usually about three other people, misanthropes like me, and we space ourselves as far apart as the theater geometry allows.  
     Sometimes I wish I could start a support group for other people haters and me, then I think about the absurdity of that and just go back to wishing everyone dead, even the other’s that wish I was dead.  You have to be careful with that.  Sometimes you find yourself caring about others that might feel exactly like you, but you have to remind yourself that they are most likely just friendless because they are insufferable, not just a clear thinker like myself. 

     At any rate, there are things that you have to do and places you have to go, and the supermarket is one of those.  It is life’s cruelest joke that I have to still go to the grocery store once or twice a week.  Even if you go to the movies, or a museum, or a concert, you are usually there with people that at least have some of the same interests as you.  Everyone has to go to the supermarket.  They are all there, all wandering around in a fog, all IQ levels, all classes and cultures, all stumbling about trying to buy food to get them through another few days.  
     It’s like a constant reminder, played out every four or five days, smacking you in the face with the reality that most of the people in the world are being propped up by the whole of civilization and cheating the quick and lousy end evolution should visit upon them.   
      They continue to live on, blissfully unaware that they are dragging the rest of us down like a sacks full of dead mutant kittens that should have just died at the teat.  
     Please don’t misinterpret what I’m saying to support some racist or class based form of social Darwinism.  I don’t care about race or poverty or social status, I just hate idiots.  The world is full of them.  You see them everyday, standing in line for Kevin James movies, filing in and out church, shopping at Whole Foods, driving around with NRA and Donald Trump stickers on their cars, flailing at a 4-way stop because they forget what order they arrived there in.   
     Morons are everywhere, and they all have some wacky opinion about things they know nothing about.  Gay rights, drug laws, what women should be doing with their bodies, the world economy, global warming, whatever.  Back and forth everyone goes on issue after issue, and never resolving any of it while the powers that be continue to manipulate the population based on what one group of dullards believes.  These issues either shouldn’t be issues at all, or should be addressed rationally based on the evidence at hand.  What do you do then when one side just refuses to believe the evidence?  How do you convince a stupid person that they are stupid when they are too stupid to understand that they are indeed stupid?  And we all think the other person is the stupid one, so it’s nearly impossible.  Worse yet, many times the stupid one knows they are the stupid one and that just makes them fight harder.  

     For example, obviously the climate is changing and obviously it’s because of us, but some people just aren’t going to listen to facts.  The entirety of human civilization is some segment of the population ignoring what’s really happening and then waking up one day to find  themselves slaves or cannon fodder or buried in lava.  When they suddenly find themselves under 10 feet of water, then they will wring their hands and wail about how no one did anything to stop it as they try to swim to higher ground.  Hopefully they will sink from my view before they make it and I will watch them all go under one by one.  
     Or not.  That implies that I am still alive and presumably on some smaller, more crowded patch of earth.  If surviving means coming into contact with even more people I would just rather wash out to sea with the rest of them and eventually be devoured by hagfish on the ocean floor, finally happy and at peace.  

     Back to people that deny the obvious.  There is a huge division between people in this country these days.  Mostly it seems to be between people that accept facts and people that chose to believe that facts are dependant on whether you believe them or not.  What’s worse, everyone seems to care about whether someone that is obviously in the grip of cognitive dissonance agrees with them or not.  So some idiots spend their time badgering some other idiots, explaining to them why they are an idiot and what they should believe.  
      You are never going to get anywhere trying to explain something to someone that doesn’t want to hear it.  You will hit them with some irrefutable fact, something so dire or shocking that it shake them to their core and have them on their knees, struggling with the sudden realization that they have been wrong all the time.  That never happens.  They will shrug it off like it was nothing and go on believing whatever wacky thing they believe.  
     As much as I hate people, they should all just stop trying to convert everyone into thinking like they do and making their lives even more miserable.  All it does is break up friendships and family, start holy wars, and make for terrible “news” roundtable discussions on Sunday morning television.  Let everyone go on in their ignorance and let them find out in the end who was right and who was wrong.  Don’t deprive them of that one moment we all get.  The one where we die realizing that none of that ever really mattered and now the end is here and we wish we had one more minute of life left, regretting all the time we spent arguing over what was better, Apple or Android.  Or as they die by direct result of the thing they did their best to ignore.  That’s really the best one.  Not for them, mind you, but I find great joy in thinking about the comical look on their face as they react with utter shock that their house slide into the sea just like the house that was on the same spot a few years ago did, or when the new dictator they just supported in the coup gases their neighborhood to make room for his palace. Point is, people are going to do what they want to do, no matter what you want.  
     “You cannot wake a man who is pretending to sleep”  
     This is apparently some Indian quote.  Yes, I know they are now referred to as “Native Americans”, but I find it funnier to call them Indians to remind people of the fact that as great an explorer as Columbus might have, he was too stupid to know that he wasn’t in India.  Following some faulty map halfway around the world and not even questioning why he got there in half the time it was supposed to take, not to mention the fact that the people and culture, as well as the whole environment he found there didn’t match any known description of the place he was looking for.  It is only fitting that the guy that discovered America was suffering from his own stubborn delusions.  
     I can’t really say one way or the other whether that is a wise Indian saying or if Dr. Oz said it and markets it on baseball hats.  I know it is way too coherent to be Deepak Chopra, who is the other kind of correctly named Indian.   The internet is full of lies and confusion, and people have a lot of time and money invested in staring at glowing screens and believing what it tells them.  
     So speaking of sleeping people, the supermarket is full of ugly and badly dressed humans, shuffling along, staring blankly at all the mass produced garbage made by the same three companies that supply us with our food.  It’s not quite Soylent Green yet, but it might as well be.  The day is coming soon when we will just grind up people and make food out of them.  We grind them up and make everything else out of them, why not food?  That’s the day I stop eating though and just get in line at the factory to become food.  Not because I wouldn’t want to eat human beings, just because l’m hoping I’ll  make a lot of people sick.   

     So the confused and slack jawed population meanders the aisles, and I try to get around them and get my shopping done and get out.  I firmly believe that the reason zombie films and TV shows are so popular right now is because we are living vicariously through the people that get to blow the heads off of lumbering, brain dead people that are making their lives a living hell.  Just like in real life, but you’re not allowed to shoot real people with a shotgun or hack them up with a machete when they’re taking too long at the deli counter.  
     They take too long everywhere, doing anything.  I am not insane or delusional.  I realize that everyone is different and approaches everything in their own way and handles it with their own tool set, for better or for worse.  That said, there is no discernible rhyme or reason to the way most people do anything.  Most people seem to stumble through life with no forethought or idea why they are doing anything that they happen to be doing at the moment.  They drive with little regard to the minimum or maximum speed limit.  They seem to have no sense of others or the world around them.  You can find them standing outside their cars, looking at the door like they forgot how to get inside them.   They might be looking at a slip of paper they are holding with a perplexed look on their face, like they are an amnesia victim that just came across a photo of someone they don’t recognize in their pocket.  You come across them everywhere, just seemingly stopped dead in their tracks like their battery ran out, or they are rebooting.  
      Mostly you come across them in this state in the supermarket.  Clogging the aisles with their meat and skeletons, their guidance system apparently down for a spell, so they just wait for a signal from high command to start moving again when everything is up and running again. 
      I used to sometimes get lunch at the salad bar.  No more.  If you want to see how far human civilization has regressed, just look at the state they leave a salad bar.  Tongs everywhere, all the choices mixed together, dentures left in the olives.  Well, maybe not that bad, but I’m sure it happened at least once.  I’m not even sure why the grocery store has a salad bar.  It’s like they looked at the operation and asked themselves how could we make the grocery shopping experience even more annoying and baffling?
     When you look at the people using the salad bar it’s very strange.  I assume people eating salads for lunch are at least trying to be healthy, yet I hardly ever see anyone that looks the least bit in shape picking over the greens.  People dressed in hideous clothes that can barely contain them, with their kids screaming and putting their hands all over the food, then in their noses, then back in the food.  The parents don’t seem to notice, they are too busy scanning the bins for the items that are least likely to be in a salad bar, but there they are!  They always seem to load their salad with cheese and eggs and pepperoni slices, bacon bits and croutons, and then drown it in the creamiest, most fattening choice of dressing available.  It’s like they are getting a snack to hold them over for the two minute ride to McDonald’s, where they can really get down to eating.   
     The salad bar is also loaded with things like macaroni salad, or egg salad or potato salad, and these are not really salad, people.  They somehow paid off the salad association for the right to add the name to the end of whatever thing they decided to load down with mayonnaise or some other fatty cream, and because the name contains the word “salad” people think it’s healthy.  I’m not sure what other countries are like, but I’m sure we’re the only one that has come to think of loaded, foot long sandwiches as health food.
    
     Eventually I will make my way through this war zone and get to the end where I can check out and go home.  I used to get mad when the self checkout lanes first appeared years ago.  I got indignant, and asked the manager if I would receive a discount for scanning and bagging my own groceries.  Of course, you don’t.  I refused to use them because I saw it as a way to eliminate jobs, and I didn’t think it was right taking away people’s livelihoods.  I soon  realized though that checking my own groceries meant less interaction with people, and really, what did I care if some idiot I can’t stand loses their minimum wage job as a checkout clerk?  
      Early in life I didn’t care about anyone but myself.  That’s typical.  You haven’t learned about others and developed a strong sense of empathy.  Once I learned of the horrors of the world, I started to care about people’s suffering and I tried very hard to do the right thing.  This included deciding where I spent my money and not giving it to companies and corporations that used slave labor and poisoned the environment, or had political, philosophical or theological positions  that I couldn’t support.  When I met people with problems, people that suffered real trauma in their lives I did everything I could to help them and to show them that love made a difference.
      These days I am back to the state where I don’t really care anymore.  Everything I did, every time I tried to help, everyone I stood up for seemed to let me down.  Nothing seemed to matter.  After a while I started to realize that if the very people I was making a stand for didn’t care, why should I?  Besides, nothing changes.  Nothing I do matters to a billion dollar corporation or an oppressive government halfway around the world.  Nothing I do even matters to those that claimed to love me. 
       Getting involved means getting hurt, and I have had enough of that, thank you.  
       It always strikes me funny though, that as disgusted and put upon as I am, whenever I encounter someone with a baby or small child, that child always looks at me and smiles.  It’s like they can see something I can’t even see in myself.  I stand in line behind them, or try to navigate around them and their stupid parents to get at the fresh produce.  I try to glower harder at them, as if to let them know what they’re in for.  A lifetime of pain and misery, disappointment and heartbreak over and over again until they wind up like me, broken and alone.  
     It kills me that they keep on smiling though, and sometimes they try to say something to me, but usually I can’t understand them and that’s even more frustrating.  The worst part is, that usually I end up smiling back in spite of myself, and that seems to make them happier.  It’s like they get joy out of turning me into a mockery of myself, and try as I might to hate those happy laughing babies for it, I still can’t help the smile that creeps across my face.  
     Sometimes their mother notices, and she smiles too.  Now I have inadvertently brought joy to two people, and it sickens me.  Why do they do this to me?  Why do those babies with their innocent smiles and untainted happiness have to remind me of what the world could be like, and that it’s too late for me? 
    I hurry out of the store and leave the mocking babies behind.  I’ll be damned if their faces don’t stay with me though.  

      Out in the parking lot, I always notice that no one returns their shopping carts to the holding pen.  Fucking people and their inconsiderate ways.  Just leaving their carts in the middle of the lot to get in the way.  Probably some harried mother just trying to get the shopping done and struggling trying to balance a home and job and she probably has her mean spirited baby with her.  Like that’s an excuse.  Or is it?  
      What the hell was my point anyway?  
      I don’t want to do this anymore. 
      I need to get back home.