Tuesday, February 06, 2007

One way or another

I’m living in a city of one-way streets and farmacies. Do the myriad of one-way streets drive people to drug-use, looking for remedies against the resulting claustrofobia and singlemindedness? The signs are seemingly randomly scattered, breaking up single streets into several parts of opposed one-way segments. I keep having to get on and off my bike, alternating riding with walking like a contestant in an involuntary duathlon.
I’m living in a home that is my home, only the people are missing. I miss the people. Inquenchable thirst, even playing solitaire doesn’t help. To make matters worse, I live in a multiple one-way street, above a farmacy. Many things that seem random are actually ordered, but even more things that seem ordered are actually random. What did I do to deserve beginning all over, suffering all the insecurities again? Overhearing conversations about me I’m not supposed to overhear, I walked back down and up the stairs hoping they didn’t hear me coming the first time. What the hell am I doing here? The question is never answered, after a while it just gets drowned in routine or sleeping pills.
I’m listening to the radio: it just reported how some British beauty queen has been forced to relinquish her crown because she was going to pose nude for a men’s magazine. Apparently she was not supposed to put the concept on which beauty pageants are based to further use. I wonder how she feels now: probably much like an unsuspecting biker who went into a one-way street, only to discover the direction of the one-way suddenly changed. We’re losing faith in the system. Maybe she started taking pills to stop looking for the sense to it all.

1 comment:

Hannah_Savannah said...

We once counted 32 pharmacies in Geneva centre, a village, the perimeter of which takes 20 minutes max. to run around.

Other villages seem no different and one can only conclude: the francophone world digs pharmacies.

The faith in medecine is high, the barrier to obtaining médicaments is low. Anything, including simple colds, is liable to extensive drugging. All one has to do is mention one's doctor suggested a certain drug and you forgot the prescription. Pharmacies formed the only exception I have found to the Swiss obsession with living by the rules to the letter.

I never got it, but I like your analysis. A people that accepts living in some state of chaos needs to find a remedy somewhere.