That weird pleasure: 03 de agosto de 2015
What’s with that weird pleasure one finds in doing something she knows she shouldn’t do? Like smoking cigarettes or eating a fuck-ton of carbs?
Yesterday was Sunday and everyone and her fucking grandmother and dog and 20 kids came to the campsite to make an asado, so the whole place smelled of sizzling meat and all I had to eat was oatmeal and lentils. And I didn’t have any money to buy anything else. I had a debit card and two pesos, so I walked to the kiosko outside of the campground to see if I could pay with a card, and I couldn’t, so I bought a lollipop with my two pesos instead, and sucked on that while wallowing in my own self-pity during the walk back.
But I realized that I at least had something, I wouldn’t go hungry. Even though boredom and listlessness were eating me from the inside out, at least I could think about all the things I did have (and still do) and that time is only an awkward, temporary, almost-pause between knowing and not knowing. Sometimes I think I prefer not knowing; other times I know I only want to know. It’s great that I’m forced to live a balance between the two.
It seems to me that what humans want most is the power to do anything. We want the freedom of choice, and we go so far as to desire things that we are not capable of achieving. Touching fire, for instance. I cannot sit here and sip my wine and rearrange the wood in the fire with my bare hands. But I want to. It angers me that I cannot reach in, unharmed, and have my way with heat and color and dry wood burning. It’d be so much more convenient than struggling with some random piece of metal or a long stick of wood that will disappear eventually into the smoke and flame.
But what I love about being human is that we are ingenious as fuck. We’ll find a way; we’ll invent something efficient to feed the fire of our own intuitive, desire-filled minds. We’ve already invented such things as fireplaces that ignite and die with the turn of a small dial. There’s one in my parents’ home, I know it exists. Firemen wear materials that protect them from flame and heat.
We wish to become masters of things that have no master…
…fire, wind, water…
each other…and ourselves.
An infinite struggle with infinite reward.