He reached Starbucks Coffee at exactly 12:30 p.m expecting to put in at least three hours of productive work. He was happy when he woke up today at 8:00 a.m because he had proceeded to wear his new running shoes and use it for the next hour including a couple of sets of push-ups and pull-ups. Exhausted at the end of it all, he began chatting up with one of the neighborhood ladies who was into fitness. She was thirty five years old and looked twenty five, much to his admiration, both hormone and respect wise. He, Sins would be twenty four in eleven days. Like most of his peers, he held a steady job and blew ninety eight percent of his savings on alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana, food, clothes and shoes. Like most of his peers, on the exterior, he felt great. Inside, he felt shit.
He did not know who or what he was. He felt he was emotionless, incapable of transmitting or receiving love or care. For as long as he could remember, his first reaction to any human interaction, whether received or initiated, would be to cut off the conversation as quickly as possible, restricting and not making any room for small talk whatsoever, because small talk wasn’t productive and invariably led to gossiping about other people and their doings or sayings. Sins did not like small talk or talking about other people. He wanted to talk about how the world functioned, how was wealth being created, the act of liberalism, financial systems, future food production, climate change, the future of the world’s energy resources and human productivity among a host of things.
He wasn’t sure how he would assimilate all this knowledge, other than hope what he was reading and talking about would end up becoming a sum much greater than the sum of its constituent parts. That was all he could hope for everyday, trust in his content and his network of peers so that one fine day, he could make a difference to anything, something, something of value and something important. Hope.
He also thought a lot about having sex, which in retrospect was obviously normal, except the fact that sometimes he felt he was loosing control of his thoughts, so strong would the impulses be. He had an uncanny mind, capable of thinking about the most disgusting thoughts known to humans, some of them too strong to be written or spoken about since there existed many people who possessed reading and writing capabilities, but minds too weak to process thoughts of insurmountable magnitude, their scope not extending much further than the mundane, routine thoughts of everyday life like travelling to work or drinking booze or thinking about other people.
As he stared at his laptop screen at 3:30 p.m, satiated and content after having spent three hours aligning a few things operationally from his company’s perspective, he felt the urge of smoking the cigarettes remaining in his bag from last night’s beer binge. He turned his thoughts away immediately, deciding to take a break for ten minutes. He had nothing to do, and even if he strained his mind for a few minutes in hope of remembering a few forgotten tasks, he didn’t want to, it was the weekend after all. Sins was aware that, he constantly needed cajoling, his impulsive mind already stretched too thin with the massive amount of thoughts he thought about in a single day, many of them running in parallel to each other, each resembling his email inbox, full of different chains filled with umpteen subjects. He remembered, when he had gotten this job last year, how difficult it was for him to motivate himself to work, and finally he had no choice but to tie down his productivity to the inputs he required everyday for his stomach, he had had no choice. Although he loved his job, believed in its ideal, its principles, its potential to change lives for many millions of people, sometimes he found himself slacking off often, as if the universal law of entropy was hell bent on preventing him from loving something for the entire duration of his lifetime.
Marijuana Maharaj 