Am i Uncivilized

So, I haven' t been getting a lot of sleep lately. A few things and truckloads of work have been eating away at my brain and it's been keeping me up nights. I'm starting to think I'm a closet insomniac. Your thoughts turn a distinct shade of ugly when you haven't had natural sleep, sleep that isn't alcohol-induced, in several days. I'm starting to rebound a little though, as I fell asleep for two whole minutes at work last night. !@#$

Now, I was on break, so we're talking about a maximum duration of fifteen minutes. At the time, I didn't care, it felt fantastic to just fall asleep.One of my rascal co-workers, however, was intent on spoiling my moment of peace. He saw me, reclined and at peace, and decided it would be fun to throw some water at me. Welcome to the world of wet wake up calls. I was not amused.

That being the first sleep I'd had in awhile, I was torn from dreamland with all the subtlety of a charging rhinoceros. My experiences upon waking were rather frightening, I must say. It was like viewing the world without the lens of civilization and socialization society imbues us with. And it was damn ugly.

Normally I try to view people as generally decent. People do dumb things all the time, sure, but they're trying to do alright, and Lord knows I'm just like them. But that night, having been so rudely awakened and so low on rest, I viewed the world with the eyes of a madman for the space of twenty minutes.

People would come up to me and engage in the usual banter you'd imagine individuals to resort to when striking up conversations with a librarian. All I heard was laziness, crudity, shallow, simple-minded selfishness. A father coddling his child with tons of DVD's, a bitchy back biting colleague, a woman complaining about loud talkers while her sons screams open-mouthed behind her...it disgusted me, almost to the point of nausea. In that instant, I could've burned the world down just for the solitude in knowing that the human race had ended.

I'm grateful that the mood ended rather quickly, and I returned to some semblance of sanity. Any more time in that state and I probably would've done something hideous and drastic. But it just goes to show how fragile things can be, how close to the edge of madness we all are.

Or at least I am... - Vikram 2002