Posted by Josh Konnely
on 7/30/2008, 3:21 pm
69.121.177.16
It is early fall in the year 1995. A boy of ten sits in front the television, playing a game on his NES. Into the room walks his younger sister, and the nine year old girl smacks him in the back of the head. She walks right back out of the room, leaving the boy to wonder what he had done to deserve that. This is his life. His sister is ADHD, and she will regularly walk into a room and smack him for no good reason, as she did there. Frowning, the boy returns to his video game. In a lot of ways he prefers the virtual world of Nintendo to his real life.
At least his father will be home soon. The boy's father is his best and closest friend, his deepest love. His father needs to work two jobs just to provide his family of four with the basic necessities, and even then most of the children's clothes are bought second hand. This is a matter of great ridicule in their small town school, that they wear clothes from the cheap second hand store instead of name brands. Everyone knows the little shop that sells used clothes, and that this boy gets most of his clothing there. And so he goes to school and gets bullied. Then he comes home and gets bullied there, too. His sister, whom society would label a "problem child," seems to resent his mere existence and presence.
His dad, however, is a good man and a great father. He works hard to provide for his wife and kids, and still makes the time to play with the children. As the sports editor for the town's weekly newspaper, the boy's father covers the high school's sporting events, and brings his son to most of them. The boy loves going to the baseball games and the football games, the volleyball and soccer matches, and even the wrestling tournaments. It is not so much the sports themselves that the boy enjoys, but the time with his dad. Sports are his father's greatest passion, and this child shares that passion.
As if summoned by the child's thoughts, the front door opens and his father enters the apartment. The apartment is not much, just a little three bed room, roach infested place upstairs from a Chinese restaurant. But it is their home, and they don't complain. The boy certainly could care less about the quality of the place. He is happy just to have his family- and his NES. However, at this moment he puts the controller down and runs to embrace his dad, the man that means everything to this little boy.
Once his father has changed, and the boy has turned off his video game, father and son walk together to the local park. They bring with them baseball gloves and a ball. As they walk, they talk about school and about the boy's life in general. The exact details of their conversation are a forgotten memory, and do not really matter. For the boy, and perhaps his father as well, it is all about the time spent and the togetherness. The important thing being exchanged is love, not words.
The two of them arrive at the park, where they play catch for a couple of hours until the sun begins to set. It is a Friday night, the father's payday. What that means in this family is that it is the night for eating out, and the giving of allowances. On this particular night they go to IHOP, then to the mall, where son and daughter get to spend their one dollar allowance. As soon as the boy gets his dollar, he quickly leaves for the arcade, and he is as happy as can be. Simple pleasures like this give the boy all he needs. All he asks of the world. Isn't it funny how for less the price of a gallon of gas- even in 1995- you can make a small child the happiest person on the planet?
But just like that dollar, happiness does not always last as long as we would like it to. The dollar is fleeting, and so is the happiness. Tonight the young boy will go to bed happy, but in the morning the joy is forgotten. That is how life works, is it not? Neither money or happiness go as far or last as long as we would like.
As the father tucks his young son into bed, the scene fades out.
"Sorrow, however, can last forever."
A voice cuts through the silence, and the scene fades back in. It is now July 31, 2008. The present day. With his head in his hands, a man sits in the confessional booth of a Catholic Church, although no priest or clergy sits on the other side. Alone in the confessional, the man looks up and speaks to anyone who may feel he is worth listening to.
"That boy you saw was me. Josh Konnely. I was plenty happy with things as they were back then, as simple and even undesirable as they may have been. But one cannot be happy forever, can they? Some of us just do not deserve to be happy, it would seem. Some of us are destined for misery. I guess there is only so much happiness in this world, and some of us are just not worthy of having any. Because since those happier times, the world has offered me nothing but pain and sadness."
"And sadness often lasts forever. They say that those who die in moments of great sorrow continue to walk this Earth in despair even in the afterlife. Many a story has been told of a jilted lover, or of a tragic loss, where the heartbroken person passes away only to spend the rest of time haunting their home or the place where they had their heart broken. This Church itself probably has a ghost or two of a woman who got left at the altar, or of a groom whose bride was killed on their wedding night."
"Sadness is pervasive. It permeates through all aspects of one's life. It consumes their entire being, and robs them of their very soul. Life becomes meaningless when that pitch black depression grips you to your very core. That is the kind of pain I came to experience at a very young age. It has torn me apart, and broken me down. I have never cracked, though. I am not an alcoholic or a drug addict. I almost never drink alcohol. I have never and will never touch narcotics and that sort. I am clean, and I am mostly sane."
"But 'mostly' just might be the operative word there. I find myself feeling somehow obsessed with pain. My life has been filled with pain, and somehow I feel this is the fault of mankind. And womankind, too, for those ultra-feminists who insist upon a division of the two. I have grown to hate humanity. Or at least humans. There is truly no humanity in this world. Humanity is a lie. It is a dream of the liberal and the weak. Mankind loves to abuse each other, to cause each other pain, to torture and kill each other. It is a sick, animalistic need that dwells in the heart of man."
"We all say that we do not want to hurt one another. We all say that we do not want to kill each other. We all say that we do not want to have wars. We all say that we wish there could be peace. But the reality of it is... we all LIE."
"For inside us all there is really a deep-seated hatred, and a killer instinct. A passion and a desire to cause bodily harm to others. We try to regulate such desires by forming institutions such as politics and religion. Only in times of anger or other extreme passion do we actually act on our nature instinct to hurt and kill. Some even turn to the opposite extreme and use their very political and religious views as motivation and justification for killing. It is a game mankind has been playing for hundreds, even thousands, of years. Trying to belie the fact that we are all brutal, violent ANIMALS deep within our souls."
"Other people's pain is our pleasure. That is the truth of humans, which many of us do not want to accept. I, on the other hand, have come to terms with that fact. People enjoy the pain of others. I enjoy the pain of others. And that is why have come to SFT. I will share my pain with you. My pain will be the pain of my opponents. I will release my pain on your roster, and I will enjoy it. In my life, people have caused me nothing but pain and suffering. I will turn that pain and suffering back on the people of SFT. The world has mocked me and laughed at me my entire life. I will have the last laugh. And you know what they say about the man who laughs last."
The man called Josh Konnely grins a sadistic sort of grin, his blue eyes cold and bitter.
"Do not say I didn't warn you."
The man laughs coldly and maniacally as the scene fades to black. Even in the blackness, Konnely's laughter can be heard growing louder and harsher before it too fades out.
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