The story of the Monkeys of the Shitty Island

On certain nights, I find it especially hard to pin down my feelings into something concrete. Tonight must be such a night. Today, a whirlpool of emotions swept me by my feet. The feelings felt like a mix of everything that I could have ever experienced. Everything just failed to make sense even after an attempt to sort everything out in a logical and chronological order. It wasn't easy nor was I any successful. The more I searched to understand my feelings, the more complicated it got. Such an attempt proved insufficient and it just left me hanging and feeling overly unsatisfied. I needed a concrete answer for myself.

As I began to unveil the riddles within myself, I seek to explore a distant and foreign territory within myself that I myself have never discovered. In doing so, I realized that I was feeling more confused than before. I recalled events from years back, some with such fine details and that it seemed totally absurd and ridiculous until such a point that it occurred to me of the possibilities, that such memories was incredibly fabricated by myself. Similarly, certain memories I held, seemed so distorted and warped in its details that it paradoxically appeared mesmerizingly surreal.

This is why I am unable to answer any of my questions with any absolute certainty. It is also why a large part of my answers is strictly based on hypothesis, which was fashioned for myself without a solid logical basis. What I can hope, or hope to understand, is to uncover parts of myself that for years I have left neglected. I do however realize now with utmost regret, that I have dire consequences to pay for neglecting certain intrinsic areas within myself.

It is likened to how a monetary debt occurred in the bank has a cumulatively exponential growth rate and how at the end of the year, I realize that the debt in the bank has grown to such a huge figure that I am unable to pay it off. So what do I do next? I shut it out from sight until it grows too big and uncontrollable and it comes back to haunt me every now and than. At the same time, I are so detached from my problems to such an extent, that I forget what it is that thing that is coming back to haunt me. This is the price of detachment.

When I think of this, I am reminded of the story of the Monkeys of the Shitty Island in “The Wind-up Bird Chronicle” and Marukami describes the story as follows:

“Somewhere, far, far away, there’s a shitty island. An island without a name. An island not worth giving a name. A shitty island with a shitty shape. On this shitty island grow palm trees that also have shitty shapes. And the palm trees produce coconuts that give off a shitty smell. Shitty monkeys live in the trees, and they love to eat these shitty-smelling coconuts, after which they shit the world’s foulest shit. The shit falls on the ground and builds up shitty moulds, making the shitty palm trees that grow on them even shittier. It’s an endless cycle.”

Marakami than explains:

“What I’m trying to say is this. A certain kind of shittiness, a certain kind of stagnation, a certain kind of darkness, goes on propagating itself by its own power in its own self-contained cycle. And once it passes a certain point, no one can stop it – even if the person himself wants to stop it.”

This exactly the kind of shittiness I’m facing right now. Fuck.