Every time I went to the synagogue, it plagued me to think that all those people there with me could just be driven by the same reasoning I was. 'I can't go to hell'. God wanted men after his own heart, like David but deep down we all had darkness we were unwilling to relinquish. You know that guy the Christians talk about - Judas? That was his story, you know. I mean everyone's there like, 'Why would God make his heart this way since he clearly knew beforehand what was to happen? So like, Judas had to go to hell in order for Jesus to save us? Like, why couldn't God have just made him a nice man? You know, for his sake, because clearly the guy was tormented if he killed himself.' Anyway, I don't know, maybe no one's ever thought this but it plagued me until I realized when I was old enough, that I had darkness I knew about, things I continued to do that probably didn't sit well with the big man. But also that hard as I tried, I still feared hell more than I revered my deity. Everything seemed even more futile when I started to think about how God already knew psychopaths would be psychopaths, how he made their brains without the capability to feel guilt or empathy. How, try as they might, they'd just be imitators. So I became an atheist. Somehow binge watching supernatural brought me closer to forgiving these slights. I started to think about all the roman and greek gods and how imperfect they were but how wholeheartedly their people had worshipped them. I still don't get why some people are born with fucked up brains but he is my deity and my king. I honour him nonetheless.

We're forever in awe of our great strides in evolution. Of being rational, having ideologies and deities, well turns out there's a catch. We're plagued with this hunger for everything life can give. Contentment is not a thing we're capable of attaining. Machiavelli pulls others one way, Mother Theresa the other. We're extremists, never wanting moderation. We fear mediocrity to a point where even those who have everything, crash and have midlife crises. We've unearthed that the earth is round and we can make computers, but the scientists are never sated, they classify to a point where it's inane. I shit you not, I was in class and not only did the lecturer classify plants according to their taxonomy, he went on to speak of the different ways to classify the flowers of plants. Why were there different ways? Because science is born out of the gnawing need by some select humanity to comprehend everything that exists to it's fullest. An employee stole 600 million from a government ministry. It puzzles me to this day. In my country, the very best house costs 7 million. To steal 600 million from a country where the government tries it's very best even building houses for the destitute, a country plunged into further poverty by the closure of one of it's major mines.. 600 million and not a single sleepless night about the humans who will go without because of your actions? We are forever longing for more. We want to be younger, write thousands of books about how to be happy, things a lion nor sloth probably never feel. And yet we pride ourselves in being the most intelligent life forms. Why, so we can be plagued by the questions we cant answer and the contentment we can never attain? 

With me, it was my need to please her that she took advantage of. With him, she took a different approach. She appealed to his inborn arrogance. She made things normal children did sound like trysts for the diotic. I don’t think even she knew what she was. She wasn’t just a manipulative adultress, she was a downright conman. 

I may not revere my deity enough, but I do fear hell enough. It’s tragic but true. I’m goddamned judas, aware of my darkness, aware of what my clinging to it costs but unwilling to relinquish it. But, for every temptation I can actually resist, I will. I do still wish to die a hermit farmer, a woman after your own heart. 

My best friend told me once that she felt it'd have to be pain to have a brain like mine, constantly charged up, from Henry Ford becoming Hittler’s hero to James Franco’s short stories, she said I thought way too much and one day it might break me. Maybe that's how I ended up here, cause my brain won't stop rushing and accumulating.

The fruit of the forbidden tree cannot have been anything but longing.

It's a curse we must bear. We're forever in awe of our great strides in evolution. Of being rational, having ideologies and deities, well turns out there's a catch. We're plagued with this hunger for everything life can give. Contentment is not a thing we're capable of attaining.

No good can ever come of ideology. Run from a lover who seeks to better the world on a grand scale. There are always others waiting to take his place either leaving him dead or defeated and if a man who's life has been devoted to challenge had none, his vices will definitely be magnified. In your own life, restrict contact with the grandiose. Seek not to draw attention to yourself.

This is homage to a woman who had only two virtues, courage and generosity. Somewhere up my family tree, there’s the one human who passed a defect on. Deep irrationality, mood swings, ingrained apathy, scars from beatings, neglect to a point of malnutrition and unwarranted betrayals; that has been our family’s legacy. My grandmother was a part of a generation who recognized no psychiatric defects but schizophrenia and she wasn’t much saner than the rest of them, but she did foster 17 children born to her kin because she saw their pain. She broke down often but kept at it.  

Being a human fascinated by the grotesque these days is nothing you’d be ostracized for. Heck, a woman can marry a serial killer on a witness stand. We are all deviants these days, privately or not so. We are all depraved to some extent but it’s easier to find love now even if you are. Apt Pupil is about a boy who was depraved in a time when family life was stable, there were no wars, no slavery, just apple pie lives. I think it’s a great feat that Stephen King was able to make his deterioration into psychosis so slow and so elegant. I probably would have made him too similar to that boy from A Catcher in the Rye. It’s a wakeup call to parents of sociopaths or psychopaths to acknowledge fully that even if you want to believe the opposite (because no matter what the evidence says, your child has never been this person he’s accused of being), if the facts are staring at you point blank, don't shield your child or yourself from reality, find help for them. I think we ought to as a society push for psychiatrists to be more accessible in schools so that children with such thoughts know where to seek proper help because let’s face it, a guidance teacher would not be helpful in this case. I think best of all, Apt Pupil makes us aware that psychosis is an impending trap for people who are afflicted with these thoughts. Without an author’s name, I would have sworn it was Sidney Sheldon’s. It’s incredible how King mastered Sheldon’s genre while never waning in his own.