An Individual In Confrontation With The World, Pt. 3

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Sebastian always paid attention to alcoholics, winos, drunkards, bums, borderline psychotics, and those schizophrenics left loose from asylums because of budget cuts. Sebastian saw on the street a little man shuffling along with crutches: life had passed him by, fate had kicked him in the head.

Bottle collectors with their bicycles would patrol the town streets every Saturday night, picking up empty bottles partygoers had left lying on pavement. Come Monday, some extra coins would be made from the bottles at supermarkets and liquor stores: a nice addition to the dole money and scant pensions.

How did marginalization start? Was there some crucial blow at some decisive stage of life, after which it was all a downhill road, or were some people just born to lose? Was every one of us part of some vicious social-Darwinistic experiment?

Mr. Average, a little bourgeois man was so full of his fears, prejudices and projected fears that he couldn't see beyond them, so he lived his life trapped in them, with no way out. Sebastian understood this clearly, but did not think he would be any better than that.

Being somewhat a fatalist, Sebastian had learned not to be afraid of death. Mystics said there was no death; only a transition from one energy level to another. Sebastian did not know what to make out of it. On the other hand, if all consciousness just evaporated after death as atheists thought, it might not be so bad, either. After all, existing consisted of so much misery and pain, that just vanishing totally and ceasing all thinking, emoting and being sounded only all too merciful.

Sebastian had thought about committing suicide a lot when he was younger. Not a month had passed by without a thought of ending it once and for all. These days, the thought occurred very rarely to him; probably all therapy and medication had done their work. Life wasn't that dramatic any more, merely lukewarm mostly. And there had been already too much pain in the lives of his close ones that he wouldn't like to add to it. Sebastian could well describe himself an ex-suicide candidate. Still, sometimes he wondered.

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