Hoarding

I plan to write an article about one characteristic of a fictional person every week till I start to get boring. Here's the post for week 1. It is about hoarding.

Mat kept a diary. He wrote in it religiously every night whilst playing melancholic music on his computer. He was a hoarder. He had trouble throwing things away. He didn’t mind the smell and the clutter. He compulsively HAD to keep everything he had ever used. Surprisingly, he was incredibly organized in his own way. He had a system that only he could work out. He knew where everything was and he got extremely upset when it wasn’t there.

He had a job in the supermarket as a cashier. He loved his job and was good at it. He was also allowed to play whatever music he wanted to be played and the customers often used to tell him that the music was always amazing and he always tried to smile and say thank you. He just couldn’t. He always had trouble with.

Here is his journal entry from the day he was arrested. He knew what the consequences of his actions would be, but did it anyway. This says everything you need to know about him. He truly was abnormal.

Diary Entry: 1/1/2012

7:00 AM

Today is the first day of the New Year. The old diary is obviously over. So, I must introduce myself again.

I am a collector. A things enthusiast. I will take anything that I think is interesting or that I have used and will never throw it away. Why would I throw away something that’s mine? I have everything I need in my room. Clothes, perfume, liquor, a computer, a tooth brush, dead lizards, you name it, I have it.

8:30 PM

A neighbor came to my house at about 6.30 PM to wish me a happy new year. She seemed really friendly to me, but I just did not know what to say or do. She took the laughing Buddha that I had got as a gift from my brother on the 17^th of august the previous year. I didn’t like what was happening, but would saying so make me a bad person? I thought it would, so I tried not to say anything and let it slip. This proved to be a mistake.

She then walked over to my liquor cabinet and saw the wide array of drinks and said, “Want to open one?”

I was trying to stay calm and was failing badly. She was touching my things. MY things. Nobody but me can touch or use anything that I have collected. She seemed intent on ruining my day. She then opened the Remy martin cognac that was on the same spot for nearly five years and poured it on to two glasses. This was the last straw. I could not take it anymore. I took the baseball bat and hit her on the head. She immediately fell to the floor. I took her to her house and placed her on her sofa and covered her with a blanket from the room. She will be fine, but will obviously call the cops on me.

I came back home and saw that the hairclip she was wearing had fallen to the ground. I held it and finally got my fix. I had added to my collection. The Remy Martin was open already, so I drank what she had poured for herself as I waited for the cops to take me to jail.

White Lie

It often perturbs me how people pray for salvation and not rebirth and think that the life-death cycle is more of an infliction. This belief is a bit deviant from what I believe. I always thought that living again would be amazing. Just think about it, all the great things that happened in your life can happen again. You could get another chance at bettering yourself. After all isn’t that what we always aim to do?

People could argue that all the horrible things can happen again too, but, I figure there is always a balance. For a certain amount of good stuff to happen, there must be some bad stuff too. I doubt there are people on this earth who have had only good or only bad things happen to them. Well maybe there are, but the number outweighs the majority of the population. So, if you had been a good boy and got many gifts from Santa, then maybe, there is a small chance your next life maybe just as good. Now that was a chance I would be willing to take. On the other hand, if you didn’t get any gifts from Santa and died a crack addict holed up in an abandoned warehouse, maybe, just maybe, you get a second chance at life. Either way, it seems pretty alluring.

However, what if you wanted no more of this? If you’ve seen it all, done it all, and don’t see any reason to live again? I.e., what if you are Charlie Sheen? Then, you must be given a choice to come back or not. This makes sense because there are very few people who have done everything they wanted to and are absolutely fulfilled, and even if they are, let’s face it, deep down, most humans are selfish, morally impecunious beings. If offered a chance to better themselves, or make more money, or score more crack, they would grab on to it and never let go, unless of course, there is a heaven.

There is only one drawback I can see in this system. If it is for certain that there is another life for us, why behave well in this one? I could choose to be a horrible, morally bankrupt human and still get another chance. Who would stop me? The cops? In a system where there is definitely a second life, why would there be a large set of people with a good sense of right and wrong to police everybody? So, the earth would be a wasteland. Filled with people chasing cheap thrills. So, they would need some incentive to behave. This could be achieved by positive reinforcement right from when we are 2 or 3 years old. Chocolates for whenever we do something good, a disciplining measure otherwise. And if it’s in the grey area, then silent treatment could work well.

So, in my wishful, fictional universe, there are now a large amount of men who have been raised to be morally right above anything else, and of course, as always, a certain amount of people who are just evil, because there’d be no balance otherwise and the good guys could get bored of their monotonous life. So, now we have a world in which good has a chance to truly triumph over evil, all by changing people’s attitudes about death and rebirth. All by preaching one little white lie.