I would like to say my name is John-Baptiste but I would be lying, I don’t even know the man. I also know nothing about man’s biblical fall, for I have never read the bible. I read a couple pages from it in a hotel in Texas one time, and it is a dull juvenile read. Like most religious books, the imagination is scarce, childish and too convenient. I am above such nonsense, I am afraid to admit.

I do, however, know what flight is. It is a fall where I am in control. But how am I ever supposed to be in control of a fall when my bones are too heavy and my body isn’t aerodynamic enough?

In trying to choose what life to live as an absurdist human, I have found the farther I stray from the theater of morality, the closer I am to the truth. However, the farther I stray, the more I need the company of my fellow maqaars.

Maqaar is an urdu word that is often badly translated to mean deceitful, cunning etc. What it actually means is key to understanding the type of company I seek in the ninth circle of hell. You see, at the heart of us, the thinking modern humans that have accepted the death of god, is a moral void that wants to suck all and any facade of honor we might hope to cultivate to provide ourselves with a right to exist without cynicism. This moral void is counterbalanced by the feeblest of weak forces, the web that society creates to ensure we are all being polite to each other while we spit on the helpless. If we, the thinking modern humans, just partake in this theater with sincerity, improvising in the reality we’ve created and “yes-and” the make believe rules, there is nothing to fear. A good improv is practically indistinguishable from any interactions between moral strangers, i.e. people who don’t yet know the moral bankruptcy of who they are talking to. But it is hard to keep the theater going.

This is where it’s important to know what a maqaar is. It is you, and it is me, it is the thinking godless modern human. It is the human that has cherry picked moral values from the big buffet to espouse in circles with similarly crafted plates, opining on the choices of others, while explaining their own. Of course, we don’t eat all we pick up, it is more fun to grab the values from the table than to actually eat them all, and sometimes we eat a little bit of everything. It is generally considered bad form to not pretend like you’re serious about finishing your plate and the intention to eat all of it was sincere, but that is usually something only moral strangers hold you to account for in the theater.

What I want in my little circle of hell is the company of maqaars who know I don’t intend on finishing my plate, and who know that I know they don’t intend on finishing theirs. We all will revel in the antitheater, finding a bit of relief from the utter loneliness that the theater often makes you feel. In those little circles, we will have cheated, and despite our heavy bones, we will fly. We will fly because there is nowhere to fall, and when we realize that, we are in control.