In the Hall of the Mountain King

I was sitting in a bus this morning, watching the cars in front of us crawl slowly up the elevated roads, and I felt guilty for not feeling a sense of heart warming nostalgia upon seeing familiar landscapes and sights. I'd just come back from a short trip where there were no forms of modern civilisation. We stayed at mountain tops, forests and quiet beaches where phone reception was more of a luxury than we could afford or even cared for. It wasn't that long a trip but it was enough to notice how difficult it is not to rely on technology to connect with those around us.

After the second of third day I'd gotten used to the disconnection. After all I've spent most of my life trying to pretend I'm always disconnected with people just so they don't bother me with their stupid issues. I'd sit in my room and grumble on about how much I hated people. But it's finally occurred to me, after meeting ridiculously lovely and helpful people on the road, that I don't hate people. In fact, I love people, they should be the marrows of life, the filling in the donut, the purpose of existence. What I do hate, however, are the people with whom I've acquainted myself. Lots of people I know I despise and wish to have never met. With their petty little issues and deliberate ignorance. It sickens me.

You can go up a hill and find a family who dresses their mornings with smiles even if they live in freezing weather and no heating system, even if they live in conditions of absolute poverty, even if they have been given no reason to smile, they will continue to smile. Perseverance. Survivors. They deserve to live, not the morons with no purpose or further use of their organs but to click away at abbreviations on their smart phones. I hate the people I know.

So it's not "good to be home" or rather, can I even say that this has ever been my home? There's nothing waiting for me here but people I hate and people who hate me back. Sir Francis Bacon once wrote, "But little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth. For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."