The Main Character

I hate the city. The size, the smell, the brands, the pretentious architecture, and most of all; the people. I’m such a fish out of water here, the one person not in on the joke, the outsider. Perhaps it’s because I grew up as a simple farm boy. My responsibilities were to the horses, the dogs, and the plants; making sure everyone was fed, healthy and sheltered. Maybe it’s just me, but rushing out into a rainstorm to untangle a horse being choked by its own rug seemed like a much more honest existence than aimlessly wandering around trying to look cool and bother people by shouting the ‘issue of the day’ at them. When I mowed 10 acres worth of lawns I had to be paying attention, not power walking along with eyes only for my smartphone as cyclists narrowly avoid people on shared footpaths at high speed. Everything seemed so much more important on the farm, the city is big, intimidating and fake. How I long for fields of green as opposed to quadrants of steel and concrete. It’s at this moment I realise that the fantasy of a simpler time will never return, we will all keep rushing, doing as the screens tell us and allowing the machine to combine us, mix us up, and make us indistinguishable from the person next to us, all with eyes only for their silicone screen. We have all become one, blended together, Human Soup.

Let the feast begin.