I am the most ill-fated man on the planet. I am a sick wretch who is unable to learn from his mistakes. I am a beast. All the same, the Gods watch over me. For what purpose? Pleasure? Adoration? It is not for me to know; the human who thinks himself able to understand the Gods is the human who thinks himself equal to the Gods and he is not going but a blasphemer. The Gods live above man and man exists to serve God as the animals do mankind. All the same, whatever their interest is in me, it appears to be special.

I wander through this dream like a leaf through a river; the river is time and inside its currents swim sorrow, euphoria, and quickening. It flows to a stop; a life ends and begins, the many mouths of darkness spewing her emesis unto holy wisdom. I find myself drowning; I am caught by the fisherman's wife who births me and then makes love to me. In the end, I am reduced once more to my essence: flesh and nothing more.

I do not find myself much of a believer in the idea of an 'immortal soul'. If it were truly immortal, it would be unchanging. We would be ourselves from the day we are ejaculated from our mothers, wholly thinking and moving as we would as adults. Yet the human is constantly evolving; to learn is to change and to change is to die while continuing to live. It is knowledge that makes us mortal and this is why YHWH, that pathetic tyrant, cast us out from our place in the Garden of Eden.

Yet, this does not mean that our lives serve no purpose; a hammer exists to hammer, a nailed to be nail, and all men under heaven live to do one thing or another, so sayeth sacred Dharma.

No, there is something in store for each of us, though whether that is merely to be mutilated, raped, or to mutilate and rape is as much in the Aether's web as it is in our own.

So, this being the case, I have fully come to accept my fate. Amor Fati, love of fate, is something Nietzsche coined, but I have simply decided that it is far easier to bend with the wind than to go against it. Lo and behold! Strange circumstance after strange circumstance comes to seek for me like a lion chasing a gazelle. I cannot run fast enough. I jump. I trip. I fall. And I perish.

As has happened yet again, I am reborn, only this with a new memory and tale to tell.

Last week involved a strange man taking me on his bike to eat with him; we did not speak the same language, yet we became friends all the same.

This week? I may have helped save a man's life, though what ailed him and what I had exactly done escaped me.

The courier took the dying man in arm and tried to lift him; out of the darkness, a monster emerged. Stunned, the monster lost grip on his prey and knelt equally to embrace moribund he. The man's jacket, the man's shirt; both found themselves cut open, not by blade, but by design. Whether the monster massaged the man's chest for a sexual thrill or for want to do good was unknown to the monster itself, but what good could a monster do? For it is a monster.

The dying man left in a taxi. The monster was left alone with no words said to him. All the same, why should he have deserved them? He did nothing. So, he continued on his way, never to enter heaven.

- - -

Carthage, a grand city with no rivals, was the Madonna of her age, an empire who all in the world knew and who all fumed with jealousy at. Her granaries overflowed, wine spraying from fountains like they would have in the fields of Elysia. Her streets were paved gold and all of her citizens adorned themselves with silk and Tyrian purple, her wealth being unmatched by any in the world. The men were strong, courageous sailors, her women chaste and honorable; her children were considered to be heirs to the entire world, destined to rule from Ctesiphon to Olisippo. There was not a more perfect country.

For this, her enemies hated her. At last, they made a pact; the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Numidians, the Italians, even the barbaric Gallics each convened a meeting with each other to destroy their hated enemies. The Greeks brought their sciences, the Egyptians their Gods, the Numidians their envy, the Italians their wrath, and the Gauls their twisted dark magics. In the span of a week, like lightning bursting forth from a cloud, the Carthaginian empire was reduced to ash and it found its very walls beset on all sides by an army of 10 million men on each side. Her soldiers were made into pin cushions; her walls were battered to the point of perpetual convulsions; all her citizens despaired, to see their beloved nation made into little more than a thing that was broken.

In the old days of Carthage, weeping men and lamenting women walked hand in hand to the highest hilltop of their city. Crowds were gathered there on those days of great import, the desert sun bleaching bones under her a sickening shade of white more pale than snow. It was here that they would meet to beseech the god of their city for help. At the top sat a large goat; it was not only a goat, but a man, woman, and a hermaphrodite. It times, the goat would give tidings of good fortune and of great prosperity. It had promised riches, fame, and esteem and it had granted these by two, three, and even ten fold! Surely the goat would save Carthage again.

Yet the goat breathed great flames of hatred and spoke truthful pain, its arms outstretched, beckoning onlookers to come forward and listen to its sermon.

Its sermon was death. It told those who worshipped it that their was nothing it would do; they asked too much of the goat and not even the goat himself could strike down 40 million angry men at once. To this end, he promised them destruction.

The believers protested and protested, desiring salvation, hope, even the slightest chance at breathing another day. Tears rolled down their faces. Their keens drowned out even the Gods beneath the waves. Nothing could be done, said the goat. All hope was lost.

Desperate, ever desperate, the Carthaginians offered up what little food they had, foolishly conjecturing that what the goat needed was nourishment. This did not sate its hunger; it again portended doom and death.

The now starving Carthaginians offered them their pride; they were a land of traders, merchants, descendants of the Phoenicians who sailed to all corners of the world. They gifted the goat jade of the east, the very blood of dragons; they gifted ivory of the south, the very flesh of giants; they even gifted the golden-haired maidens of the north, the very daughters of the Gods themselves. The goat ate merrily, yet it still would not raise a finger to save its beloathed cultists.

The destitute and famished Carthaginians had nothing; their stomachs were empty and their wallets equally so. They began to give into despair and some of them slaughtered some of the others, in their madness believing that the goat needed blood. At this the goat smiled and as the first hag lay stoned to death, her eyes caved in by two heavy boulders the size of fists, he at last begat something other than obliteration:

Give to me your children that they may lay in my womb, that their screams will drown out the rains and that their chastities be defiled by my raging loins and that they may curse their forebears for betraying what love, affection, and loyalty that may have been offered to you in the years to come. Give to me your future and at last, I shall rid your city of its enemies.

Fearing for their lives and in no position to bargain further, they first threw in their virgin daughters into the goat's mouth, to be raped by the goat's scalding phalluses. They then threw in their springling sons, to be emasculated and rendered impotent by the glowing knives of the inferno. At last, they threw in their babes, wailing as they soared, never to wail again as hellfire silenced them forever.

The goat, his hunger sated, laughed, as all the Carthaginians under the age of 14 were purged into one big smouldering pile of shit. At last, he snapped his fingers; the five-nation army vanished and, in their relief, the survivors of the city praised their savior for granting them what little chance at life they had left.

And so it is that the goat had had his way; it had never cared for the Carthaginians at all. They were playthings to the goat and now these once fat, decorated, and fecund animals were boney, dirty, and impoverished monstrosities. It did not matter if they lived or died; what mattered was that they served it until such a time that the goat wished to move on.

And so it happened that Carthage robbed herself of what kismet had been gracious enough to grant. For surely this was as equally their fault as it was the goat's.

---

To serve the Gods is not a choice, but it equally is a choice. Whether they are cruel or kind does not matter; you are nothing and will remain so.

And for this, we are all condemned to burn in Hell anyway.