I fell to weakness when I began entertaining the gods of envy.
Because a friend’s success makes plain your own failures.
I’ve been in my head lately. Which means I am suffering from thought, the most permeating illness out there. My father, a devout Anglican with admirable foresight, once told my brother, Johnny, and me that if we ever brought a man home, he would personally castrate us. So that’s that. The man’s mouth was pointed at Johnny, but his eyes were drilling my skull.
If you tell people that sometimes you think being unalive isn’t so bad, they look at you like you just killed someone. Which is a terrible analogy, I know. But suicide is a bit corny in 2026, and in my community, if you die before siring a child—“Getting a child is like putting money in the bank,” they’d say—they prick your buttocks with a needle. There is nothing honourable about a haram of elders giving your backside one last hurrah, and you know they’d do it with spite tempered with relish; that’s how seriously ancestral customs are taken where I am from. Like, you moron! You brought shame to your parents. And mockery to a whole village. Thought has always been the enemy. People will say it is drugs. Or drink. Or social media. No. These are all distractions from thought. Or cures, perhaps that’s a better word. A cure, in the end, worse than the disease. Aegrescit medendo.
