Mind And Play (1)

A Chapter by MassThinker

Artemis went to his room most of days instead of spending his spare time in the living room with everyone else. He didn’t feel very comfortable in that type of environment as it was arranged. His father would always yell and his stepmother did it too, and his siblings they would whine and cry. Now, Artemis had nothing against that, but he simply couldn't stand it for longer periods of time. All the sound coming together in such a mixture of different ways. For him all the noise just turned into a grand spectacle of sound clutter, going nowhere and amounting to nothing of relevance at all. And he never really understood why they talked loud for no reason, even though they sat right beside each other.

He had noticed one more thing about very many people.

How they would engage in a conversation only to speak their own mind and never actually be listening. For some reason he found this to be very strange, so he had tried to understand the nature of this type of behaviour for quite a while. He knew that a person could pose a question to another individual, seeking advice of some sort. They would listen, but in fact not actually listening, they were more like waiting to hear exactly what’s on their own mind. Artemis thought of how useless and time wasting such an approach was altogether, why do it? He could only think of that it served as a gateway of some sort in communication. Where a person already knows something but is still unwilling to accept it. So they need to be constantly reminded until there’s no escape in order for them to move on with their problem.

His stepmother was a tiresome and confused personality by his own criteria. She held that sort of s**t-brained thinking that very many people have. To always be the one talking and spewing out their negativity and thoughts on everyone around them. Like a swirling mind caught in a vicious cycle just going round and round forever without a change to ever settle down. As if she had some sort of addiction intertwined with bad habits, and was now a prisoner to it, her own mind, whom she could not escape.

She would shout and scream almost all the time and went into attack mode two or three times a day. Artemis had named this behaviour, “episodes of outbursts.” She would have those kind of episodes and it was as if her brain erupted or the cogwheel inside her head ceased to function. Without anticipation, she would go berserk and complain and give someone a scolding for no apparent reason. That’s what he felt was tiresome about her, but she also thought of herself as all-knowing in a sense. Thinking that she could provide an answer to every question there is about the world. As if she could go on and write the book on everything there is.

He didn’t quite understand who she tried to fool by acting that way, he wasn’t one of them at least. Nevertheless, he was sure that she didn’t even know it herself, that she was completely unaware of her own way of acting. And as well as that, she was probably completely incapable to seeing herself from someone else’s perspective. Many times he had wondered about how an individual could be so full of insignificant information and never have a good thing to say. It was almost as if she had been uploaded a huge info dump and didn’t have the required capacity to process it all. And that’s what made her confused according to Artemis criteria. She had once said to him that having more than two slices of lemon in his water would result in heart failure. And when he asked, “What’s your reference?” she had just replied, “That’s just how it is.” And just to counter all the things she came up with most of the time Artemis started to ask her, “How do you create the Universe?” which most of the time made her fall silent.

All the noise in the living room would just go bouncing of the walls and never end, there was literally not a single second of silence. And the TV was on as always, he didn’t watch it--ever, he simply disliked TV so much he’d decided to never have one himself. No reason to stain a mind with vicious and manufactured thoughts, fabricated in certain ways to later be used as propaganda. And they convoy them through a screen, he thought it to be absolutely awful. He couldn’t understand how someone willingly could go on and watch a reproduction of life through an electronic screen. But he could imagine that’s what the TV ultimately was designed for, and it’s purpose was to make it’s user sit and indulge image after image, hour by hour. Why don’t go and interact instead, he thought. Be with someone that you like and share the same interests with? Move to a place where you can sit silently and imagine instead of wasting time with something completely insignificant to you? He thought of television simply as a tool and a curse, one of the greatest inventions of evil.

Artemis laid down on his bed, but he had beforehand turned the lights off and opened his room window. He liked how the cold air slowly swept into the room and how things slowly got colder. He also felt that he could breathe much more easily. Artemis would calm down first by resting his eyes before his mind could start to play around.

“Why am I here?” that’s a question he would puzzle about for hours. “Why me and how?” He searched endlessly and everywhere but could only come up with one answer and several other possibilities. “Because it happened,” was his main conclusion to the question. After making that assumption he would go on thinking about the “It,” now what is that? Is “It” what happened, became continuous to never stop and is essentially eternal. He would find himself caught in the trap of seeking as usual. It was better to just stop thinking altogether and leave the mind alone and let it settle. He faced a major problem here because he simply loved thinking. Artemis saw no real reason to go on scaling of every trillion layer to this living. The thought of being all-knowing wasn’t appealing to him at all, where was the fun in knowing everything in advance? If every wish would finally materialize what would there be left in the world? He would then be God, and that must be such a boring job according to him. To ponder was a blessing, to see things and understand their functions and try to explain them was amusing. But he knew that silence too was a big part to his beloved hobby. He understood that in order to truly understand, one side, he must be able to understand it’s opposite side as well. So even if thinking constantly was fun and amusing, he knew that he sometimes had to stop. He knew that in order to think, he needed time to not think as well. That there must exist a moment dedicated to silence, otherwise he wouldn’t have anything to think about except thoughts.

But still, he thought.

Is there a meaning to all of this, then what is meaningful? Or is it absolutely purposeless? He didn’t care much of it anymore, life and death, nothings wrong with them, they’re both equal by nature. None of them are more worse than the other, but thoughts and customized teachings leave one’s mind tricked into believing. Now, first of all. We wouldn’t exist without the opposite, life implies death and vice versa, that was his thinking. Artemis always thought of himself as “It,” as everything there is and always has been. I am what I am--I am It and I always have been, he used to say. Only that it all began in great fireworks and that it never ended, it’s still in constant expansion and we’re all a part of it, here and now.

He felt alienated in a way, because he found himself separated from others, feeling that none understood or shared his type of thinking. He looked at himself as an organism, who had gained consciousness, something we called the mind. It’s there to him, but he cannot pinpoint exactly where it is.

Artemis felt that a regular life wasn’t that he wanted, he knew that life as we know it was illusory but he walked a different road. Who was he? The concept of himself, his name or his title in society? What made him think like he did? Was there an answer out there to who he really is? Artemis hadn't told anyone, he would just be gone, leaving to discover a road he never planned for.