soul

Soulless.

After a short drive through the city in the hills on an abreviated vacation, I finally reallized what the concrete valley I currently live in is missing:  Soul.

The buildings are nothing but rubble. Ruins. I look out of my balcony and am confronted with broken brick boxes festering in a sea of concrete. There is beauty, but even it is reconstructed without the heart of imagination. It is simply a mechanized motion of something that should be done. The music is horrible, and that’s being polite of me. Electronic hypnotics weave through speakers on their own power, without the control or interjection of human ingenuity. And when it’s not the hypnotic poundings of a bass driven beat, its the remade version of an earlier soulless song overlying a thick computeronic beat. The people themselves are afraid to express their soul; that or a totalitarian regime has so deprived them of a soul that it has all but been removed from their psyche. Silence everywhere. Grey, concrete silence.

It seems as if the Destruction and the 60 years of stagnation did more than just aesthetically cripple the city.

The city in the hills blows me away. The colors. The sounds. The brief moments of insanity wrapped up in a lazy afternoon.

Soul is not something that can’t be read in a textbook or taught in a TV special. It’s just something you have to feel. The only way is to set the bar high and hope something rubs off on the others. Around every corner of every minute of every day, soul must explode from me. It’s exhausting. And I get worn down easily. The stern looks. The people constantly trying to bring you down. But I will no longer let it affect me.