Before the curtains close

A head's up - this will be a long post, I may rant, I may ramble, but I will be brutally honest at all times, and hope to write something important here.
So, in past posts I've mentioned that I have five personal nightmares. One of them - the very first - I came to develop sometime around April 1999, when I first learned that I would have a son. That nightmare - one exacerbated in my imagination when he was a small baby - is that one day I receive a call or a message saying that something happened to my son. You can imagine what exactly. Certainly, watching Nanni Moretti's 'La stanza del figlio', very much about the death of his teenage son, didn't help. That's my nightmare right there. The number one nightmare.
Now, when Ian was born I knew that I'd probably never be in a position to gift him with a life filled with plenty. Oh, he'd have plenty of what mattered, but it would be - hopefully - a fairly mundane life. And what I could certainly give him were the lessons I had to learn on my own, and not because they were born out of example. I could teach him that if he were to judge someone, then do it because of what's in them and not how they look. And I could teach him to always - always - be a good man, because there are plenty of bad men in this world. I hope I taught him well.
This leads me to examine whether or not I am a good man. I think I am, ultimately, but as everyone else, I am flawed, I've made mistakes, I've hurt people, I pulled some stupid stunts in my teens. No matter what I've had done to me - none of that influences me in a detrimental manner.
(It does, in fact, but only in the way that it justifies my destruction of my self.)
But in the very worst moments of my life, the moments where I was at my most broken and at my most broke, maybe I had some selfless deeds that somehow balanced that karmic scale, when I chose to do the right thing instead of the easy thing. In the end - though I am loath to own up to it - I consider myself a decent person. I'd certainly not willingly do anything that would hurt anyone else, nor would I ever abuse someone from any position of power I might have.
These are just things that I can't imagine myself doing. Not even in the most abstract of senses.
And maybe that's because I grew up with an abusive father - me and my brother and my mother were often on the receiving end. And maybe that abuse didn't stop with my father, because I remember being twenty years old and still being abused verbally and physically by my mother. There's a memory I have of being, I don't know, maybe sixteen or seventeen, and I had to scream/sob/cry at my mother and grandmother that I was tired of being abused.

In one of my most recent posts, I talked about some TED videos I'd watched. They impacted me deeply, especially the one with the mother of one of Columbine High's shooters. I've watched it a number of times since then, because I ended up reading up on the shooting itself, and not short afterwards, I was maybe 10 wikipedia pages into serial killers. Before I go on any further, let me plug the great Jon Ronson again, especially that wonderful book of his called 'The Psycopath Test', based on the existence of the real life psycopath test, developed by psychologist Robert D. Hare. Now, this test purports to definitely be able to ascertain whether or not you're a psychopath, and obviously, all of the most famous serial killers rank very high on the test. So for the past few days I've immersed myself in serial killers, its lore, its history. I've seen a considerable amount of videos on police interrogations of people who'd commited terrible crimes, and in these videos all of them are ultimately broken by the interrogation and end up confessing their crimes. And I mean - truly terrible crimes. From the stalking, rape and murder of young women, to the murder and sexual abuse of eight years olds, the amount of atrocities I read up on and watched videos of, it made my stomach turn.
One thing I noticed while reading up on serial killers - U.S. and elsewhere in the world - is that these people come from all walks of life, there are white guys and black guys and women and poor people who want to get rich and poor people who get their fix from killing even poorer people. Female serial killers are mostly a) poisoners, b) motivated by greed and/or avarice, and c) very often their victims are their own family, be it their husbands or their children. Also, there are a lot of nurses killing old people. Now, male serial killers very often are people who a) are at odds with their sexuality, b) do their deeds out of a desire to control or dominate someone and c) their inflated ego makes them the heroes of their own narratives.
And very often, these people are part of a circle of abuse that goes back generations. They were raped as kids by theid fathers, who'd in turn been raped as kids by their fathers, and so and so on until they perpetuate this dark legacy by destroying the lives of so many people - both the victims and their families. So I asked myself where these psychopaths come from, how they're mass produced. How can there be so many of these creatures, predators that would have certainly been more at home in the neanderthal age. I can only think that somehow they're products of a society that places more value on things than on people. That places more value in instant gratification than on the long-term goal. One thing that I found about many of the monsters I read up on is that they've had - at some point or the other - during their lives positions that granted them a measure of power, sometimes even over many people, or indeed, in the case of John Wayne Gacy, over a whole community. In some cases, there's a backgound in the military - something that very much dehumanizes people. In most of the cases, you could see that these people - just by looking at them - are clearly not all there at all. You just look at their expressionless faces, you just look at their dead eyes - and you see that they clearly are not capable of empathy, clearly not capable of feeling an emotion that does not revolve around themselves. And one of the most disturbing things is that they just look like so many people you see every day on the streets, you probably even knew someone at some time or the other that just gave you chills, and you instinctively made your best effort to stay out of their way.
All this makes me wonder. Why are there so many of them? Even now, so very many? Ultimately... and without even taking these creatures into consideration... why are there so many bad men? Why are so many of us bad?

Let me tell you something first, though it's been touched upon elsewhere before : I'm not religious and nor do I adhere to any kind of religious beliefs, dogmas, or superstition. I do not believe in God, in Jesus, in saints, in angels, in heaven, in hell, in devils. I don't believe in any of that. Sometime in 2001 though, I was working in London and I had a co-worker from Louisiana, and he was vey religious. We did have some nice conversations about faith and religion, and I remember him telling me that part of his beliefs was believing in hell, though what he believed hell to be was this here planet we live in - hell on earth. I do know that in some cultures what we perceive as life is actually perceived by those who believed in that particular religion to be their afterlife, so what he told me wasn't actually dissonant with what I knew already. But I don't believe in any of those things.
I do believe in evil, though.
These past few days I've watched dozens of hours of interviews with serial killers, psychopaths, sociopaths, monsters who embody evil. All of them unrepentant, all of them incapable of acknowledging the evil of their actions. I've heard the testimony of mothers who've slaughtered their children just because they wanted to punish their father, I've heard confessions of demons disguised as men who kidnapped, raped, murdered and dismembered little children and who confessed to having planned on eating their bodies. I've heard confessions of young men who've killed their mothers, had sex with their lifeless body, and ate her brain. I've heard words come out of people who looked no different than anyone else I might come across any given street stating that they don't see anything truly wrong with what they did. Sometimes they even smile sadistically. I've listened to a waste of human life posing as a man speaking about how he molested his step-son, time and time again, and his reasoning for these atrocities was that he didn't see the poor boy as a living creature, but rather as a toy, a plaything for him - all because he wasn't his biological son. He saw any and all children he'd molested in this manner. He even made the claim that amidst all the pain, all the suffering, all the indignities he visited upon these children, that this happened because they liked it. Because they liked it. This is evil itself.
Some did these foul things for petty reasons, most did it out of abandon and disregard of the value of a human life, and all of them did it because they're fundamentally wrong in their moral makeup.

So what opposes evil? It has to be good, almost on a cosmic scale. And I want to think that there are far more good, selfless people than there are evil, selfish people. It just feels like the actions of the former are always surpassed by those of the latter. It weighs more on us - on our souls - all these moments of pure evil than those moments of good we do. It's an unfortunate, sad truth.
This moral makeup I mentioned earlier, is it something we're taught and then develop with age and experience? Is it something that we're born with or without? Is it a choice? And what defines moral?
We all know that often those who project an image of being morally upright end up being the worst among us. What can we do be better? How can we set an example to those who cross our lives - kith, kin, colleagues, co-workers, etc.? It would be perhaps best if we understood what creates so many of these bad people, themselves often part of a circle of abuse. I think that men - as a whole - are fascinated by the idea of violence, and they're exposed to it everywhere, in the movies and tv shows they watch, in the cartoons, in the video games they play, in the news, in sports, in their playgrounds, and even in their homes. This infatuation with violence - guns, muscles, explosions, fights, people dying, and so much more - is, in most cases, treated as fiction, fantasy, whatever, and we go on to live mostly quiet lives. But it's true that all these things help to dehumanize and desensitize children to the fundamental value of human life from an early age. That may be one of the reasons why we have many cases of children who kill and torture other children. But maybe that's also where we fail them, in not helping them understand that what we see in those movies or games or shows or whatever not only isn't real, they're also things that do not apply to real life itself.
Maybe what happens is a mix between indiference - let the kids figure out these things for themselves - and encouragement, exposing children to ever more escalating violence. When these things shape our minds, who do we become? Do our sons grow up to be good and kind men, or do they grow up believing that having big muscles and that they can fight anyone (do NOT google Jon Koppenhaver, unless you want to be deeply traumatized) and they end up being men who believe they have power over someone, men who believe that they own everything and everyone and can justify the destruction of a human life with that imagined power? It's tough to say. Because I think that honestly there aren't many great living examples you could show your kids, everyone is tainted somehow. Think about it : how often do you see men resorting to some form of violence as their first instinct? Not reason, not discourse - violence. Because that's what so many of us know, that's what's so deeply ingrained in our psyches. Violence is what we're taught, and never as a last resort, never as a means of defence - but rather as a means of asserting dominance. Strength - in its masculine sense, is something I've always envisioned to be an ideal to strive for, but only for the purpose of defending those who cannot defend themselves, to help the helpless, to give a voice to those who cannot speak for themselves.
Ultimately, society would have to change, and society's perception of masculinity would have to change in order for us to have a better chance of turning kids into better, kinder men. But how can we bring about these changes?

I often think of a society without men altogether. A matriarchy, where children are born via parthenogenesis. Perhaps the world of men is done with, and a world of women would be the answer. But alas, I see no hope in that either. Trust me, I've listened to and researched far too much evil coming from women as well. So we'd have to do this together, build this society together, this utopia where evil does not exist. The metaphysical implications of the nature of evil are interesting. Because if evil is something that we're born with, then we'll never be free of it. It's in us, it's in our very souls. But if evil is a choice, then we can educate and raise our children to be better men and women. Will we ever be able to do this if we don't do away with all the trappings of this society we live in now? Can we create a world without greed, vanity, without the notion that image tops integrity? Can we create a world where a men's worth is measured not by the size of his muscles or his sex but rather of his heart and soul? You can see where I'm going with this. I don't honestly think that this world can be saved, but I increasingly tend to think that this world doesn't deserve to be saved. I think we're beyond redemption.
Let me circle back to my number one nightmare I mentioned earlier. The moment I knew we'd be having a child, I was overjoyed. I think I always wanted to have children. I also knew that as long as I didn't be towards my child what my father was towards me, then I'd have a decent shot at being a good dad. And I also looked to my dear friend Sérgio's father as an example : loving, supportive, understanding, and at all times loyal and protective, he became my gold standard. But I also needed - well, we, me and Dora - to make a choice. Did we want to bring a child into this world? Into a world of violence and uncertainty? Where sick individuals could snuff out such precious lives on a whim? We made a decision born out of love and not out of fear, and so Ian was on his way to join us.
It's a funny thing, but for years afterward, my biggest dream was to have a baby girl, I always thought that Ian would love her unconditionally. That never came to pass, though in a couple of times there were some late periods that for the shortest while held the ghost of that chance. It was a dream that I gave up long ago. I know I'll not be having any more children, not in this life at least. And I'm absolutely sure that I wouldn't want now to bring a child into this world. I'd not condemn another soul to live out the rest of humanity's sad history.

I think the world is changing, though. Not much, not how we'd need to have a future as a species, but a bit. The 'Me too movement', and now the 'Speaking out', an offshoot of that, have made great strides into uncovering, denouncing, and publicly chastising the sociopaths that abuse their position of power in order to gain sexual favour with those who are vulnerable.
(Take into consideration that there are also women being denounced, this is not an exclusively male issue.)
Recently I read on how one of my writing heroes - Warren Ellis - has been under fire because of allegations of sexual misconduct, with a number of women rising up and confirm that they too had suffered the same behaviour from him. These things... man, these things always leave me feeling miserable, because I never expect that someone who I admire would be capable of these things. It also makes me look inward and analyze myself, analyze if I am someone like them or not.
Bad things I've done are mainly stupid, adolescent acts of shoplifting. I've also had crappy jobs where I was less than professional, hoping they'd fire me. I've broken up with a girl via e-mail, many years ago, and though me and Marta have been on good terms for a very long time, I still feel shitty about that. That's the thing, I can't ever forget. Anyone who's crossed my life, who shared close moments with me, they never leave me. Some make me smile, others leave a heavy weight on my heart.
The worst things I've ever done were to one person in particular, under complicated, but not mitigating circumstances, where I cheated on her. This was a profoundly stupid and selfish thing to have done, as there weren't any reasons why I should have ever sought someone else, and me telling you that when it happened I wasn't entirely sure of the status of the relationship - there's just no excuse.
I'd hoped these things would never come to her knowledge, but they did, and when I witnessed the pain I put her through, I decided I'd never do such a thing again. I never did, never will again. No one should go through the misery I put her through, and however much my heart was rent to pieces because I had to witness this person who loved me so much tell me that she could never trust again, it was nothing compared to the pain I saw her going through. Since then, I've had a lot of bad stuff happen to me, relationship-wise, and if this is the universe's way of knowing what that hurt I inflicted felt like, then that's fair and I accept it. I deserve it.

There's a part of me that absolutely believes that I'll spend the rest of my days alone, and I've been learning to make peace with that. I am not now, nor do I think I will ever be, someone who'd be what others may consider ideal, someone who'd be chosen by someone else. That's ok. I have my son and my friends, and I love them deeply. These are the people who live in my heart. And that's what I urge you, in this dark and often awful world, if you have someone you love, let them know. Love them deeply. Love them truly. Look after them, treasure them, nurture them. Fill their days with light and love, always.
I hate that we live in a world so full of violence, so full of suffering. I hate that we live in a world where the weakest and most vulnerable are prey to monsters. I hate that we live in a world where a child can be snatched up from the streets and molested and murdered. I hate that we live in a world where a woman can't do something as simple as walking down a street without fear of being raped or killed, and far more often than it should, something like this happens. I hate that we live in a world where sociopaths can whisk away some trusting youth from the streets and then kill them, dismember them, molest their corpses, and there's no hell in creation that could punish them enough.
I hate this so much, because all I want is a world where we're never afraid, and truly free, and live with nothing but hope and love in our hearts. And I don't know that I can survive this world much longer.

Smile when you think of me.