Congratulations !
You have been awarded points.
Thank you for !
- Story Listed as: Fiction For Adults
- Theme: Inspirational
- Subject: Personal Growth / Achievement
- Published: 11/01/2014
FAME DOES NOT MAKE YOU MORE VALUABLE A PERSON
Born 1969, M, from Herten, NRW, Germany.jpg)
FAME DOES NOT MAKE YOU MORE VALUABLE A PERSON
A Short Story by Charles E.J. Moulton
(The artwork on this page was painted by Charles E.J. Moulton.)
Somewhere between Paris and Barcelona Kieran caught himself biting on his nails again. The action was ever so subtle, like a small gust of wind blowing through the trees on a hot summer day. Suddenly, Kieran was not a forty-something salesman commuting across Europe on the 10:07 A.M. TGV train to Spain anymore. He was a freshman in high school, his mind messed up by a manipulative school pal who first gave him obsessive compulsive disorder and then blamed him for it.
Kieran caught himself chewing and ripped that finger out of his mouth, wiping the saliva off on his expensive Armani-suit.
The trees and houses flashed by his vision at breakneck speed. French villages, cozy farms, local vinyards, French fields turning more Spanish by the minute. All of that flashing seeming like modern life itself: a speedracing profile page that ruthlessly forgot reality regardless of the spiritual price. Virtual reality had become so present in people's lives that people had lost touch with what was actually real in their lives.
Kieran's gaze fluttered. He did not dare to look back at that wide eyed grimace of a face on his Smartphone Facebook Display. The face he had spent twenty years trying to forget. "Bloody hell," Kieran muttered, "how the heck did you become so successful?"
A faint moan reached his left ear from the other side of the passenger car. Kieran's head twitched as if his ear had been bitten by a cobra. But there was no Roman soldier there, no brutal Hunn, no cool CEO. Just a girl with her laptop firmly placed over her million dollar snatch. A girl that obviously had overheard Kieran muttering about an old friend and pretended not to notice.
Kieran snapped his head back toward the window, sighing and finally, ever so slowly, looked down on the display.
The words on the screen rang out like a nightmare in his mind. Envy? Yes. Envy. In the most painful spiritual corners of his soul, Kieran had hoped that a person that had caused him so much pain would actually end up seeing what he had done or at least see the light in some way. But the supposedly shy teenager, of whom everyone spoke of as a modest outsider, had played unspeakable psychological games of manipulation on him and given him OCD, the inability to let go of certain psychological borders. It was actually a miracle that Kieran had turned into the relatively successful professional he was in spite of all that pain.
But not only had Pierre Hallyne not seen what he had done to Kieran, he had also gotten away with giving him that unspeakable fear of the dark, of authority and of critique.
"Pierre Hallyne has changed his profile picture," the text under the grimace read. 236 likes.
Kieran compared that to his own successful entireprise with his many customers and his constant travelling and then looked at what kind of results he got in that weird website they called Facebook. Kieran would post an info on Facebook about some project that had raised € 17 000 and then receive 0 likes for it. It just baffled him to see that the world could praise something to smithereens and receive no attention whatsoever on Facebook for it. Reality seemed to have nothing to do with that kind of social media. Actually, Kieran had tested what was behind all of that. He had been posting stuff about an international symposium that presented a total of 80 000 book titles that were available through his and other publication's companies. 1 like on his Facebook page was the result. The next day, just to be a devil, he had posted a picture of himself with sunglasses and a leather jacket, grinning his nuts off. Within minutes he received 34 likes. Now there was proof. Facebook was all icing and absolutely no cake.
Kieran, tired of feeding his aching heart with this pain, pressed the house symbol on his cellular and threw the telephone into his briefcase, swearing to himself not to be dependant on anyone again. Well, okay. He needed his wife and son. And God. But that was it.
Funny thing, though. Kieran stopped biting his nails after he threw in his Samsung Galaxy in his bag. Those eccentric and picturesque landscapes of southern France turned into a more Hispanic version of Europe while Kieran slept. He dreamt of authors, literary agents, book fairs and business meetings. And all the while Pierre Hallyne was there picking his nose on some shampoo billboard commercial.
That statue of Columbus welcomed him in the Barcelona harbor at four-thirty that afternoon and the large pillar Columbus stood on seemed taller than last time Kieran had been here. It actually surprised him that he had been able to sleep at all after thinking he was back in the claws of an abusive friend infiltrating him with terror of the unknown. Pierre Hallyne had vanished into his nightmares and Kieran now felt like a dozy clumsy baby with an Armani-suit and a Boss briefcase.
The weather was just as sunny as when he had left a few weeks ago, but his heart was now missing a stone of pain. No, that wasn't true. He knew now that psychological pain had been caused by Pierre and not by a bad memory from his early childhood.
"Daddy?"
The voice was sweeter than honey, entailed memories of Sunday morning strolls to the bakery, Saturday evening Scrabble games, Good Night-stories about the bear and the firefly and mystery games of hide and seek in the domestic garden at summer.
"Connor!"
The black hairdo smelled of dandelion conditioner and his Star Wars T-Shirt reeked of energy. Kieran laughed, his belly wobbling with inspiration, once his son started using him as a simulated motorcycle, grabbing his arms and making Honda noises.
The beauty of the smile behind Connor gave that funny crazy kid in his arms a wondrous touch of tranquil truth and bliss.
The woman joined the boys with a restful striding stalk, her high heels giving the pavement a run for its money. That sexy Andalusian half-smile had been what had drawn Kieran to her in the first place.
Two full minutes must've passed before one of them moved, the warm breath of his two loved ones making him feel important in their arms. It made him ask himself why he had yet been unable to let go of that hideous memory haunting his past.
Connor snored all the way through Barcelona, cuddling his Luke Skywalker-toy. Kieran's pretty wife Felicitas did him the favor of driving the Mercedes through the crazy Spanish traffic. The air condition was cool, the seats were comfortable, Connor's soft snore reminded him of long evenings by a white crib Kieran had bought and carried home to the house himself. The conversation with Felicitas was now mellow, sexy and sweet as jungle rain.
"How was Paris?"
"The dinner at Lido's was first rate, the conference at the Versailles actually created a bridge of understanding between Salman Rushdie and that Saudi publisher. I spent about sixteen hours in front of my computer screen."
He carefully rested his hand on his wife's lap.
"And I missed you."
Felicitas lay her right hand on his for a second.
"I missed you, too," she responded. "Did you have any ... issues?"
Kieran looked down, for one moment remembering Pierre's grimace on his Facebook page and that girl that heard him mutter.
"I came across Pierre Hallyne's Facebook page. He is quite popular."
The family car was just exiting Barcelona and heading for the small town of Figueres when a sneer appeared on his wife's lips. She looked like she smelled something really bad, like an odor of deadly silent flatulence.
"Pierre Hallyne is Cassius in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar all over again," she snapped. "He is someone who would sell his own mother to an oil shiek if he saw that it brought him enough cash. But Kieran, dear, why are you still not able to let go of that? I mean, you are a successful guy with a great family."
"Kieran got away with scaring me to bits, giving me neurosis and never letting me defend myself. We ended the friendship and I was left to handle the bullshit alone. I mean, he was responsible for psychological manipulation of the worst sort, including 18-page letters full of amateur psychological analysis of a condition he gave me and then blamed me for."
Felicitas rolled down the window and gave another driver behind a Porsche the finger. He had obviously passed her on the wrong side. Kieran still couldn't get used to that Spanish way of uncontolled traffic.
As if nothing had happened, Felicitas again turned into the gentile woman and continued regardlessly:
"You do realize you have spent most of your adult life being angry at this guy. Are you angry that he is successful?"
"Yes."
"So was Adolf Hitler, but you didn't go into therapy because of him."
"I can't let him go."
"You have to let him go. Finding the reason or the logic behind something is not always the answer. That's why psychotherapy doesn't always help. Sometimes there is no answer but the answer we give ourselves. It's like quitting smoking. You sometimes just have to do it. Part of the reason why we have psychological problems is because we can't forgive people for doing something to us and we keep on blaming our friends, our moms and dads or our teachers for something they did. You mourn him. You are not angry. But the people honestly don't give a shit. They're not looking down at you or anything. They just don't care. So why should you? And telling yourself that you let Pierre get away with what he did to you is actually giving yourself the oppurtunity to go on and maybe letting him deal with it for a change. Sometimes there are unsolved mysteries in a life. That's okay. Living a life means choosing. The culprit is not you. Be true to those who are true to you. Leave the bullshit behind you."
The sunset over the Spanish siesta made life look fantastic and once Connor was in bed the arms of his wife would seem like a sunrise. Here in the car Kieran loved hearing his wife give him her pep-talk. The great thing was that this time it was working.
"And another thing," she continued, "fame does not make you more valuable a person. Pierre being successful does not make better. You being successful does not make you better. You're just two guys that had a very long fight. There is an increasing virus in the world. I would call it THE FACEBOOK SYNDROME. Facebook is supposed to be this fantastic contact portal. But it uses something very basic and ritualistic in man: competition. Andy Warhol's words of everyone wanting their fifteen minutes of fame is now more true than ever. In fact, today's web gives everyone the possibility to look like a superstar. That means that there are amazing creative possibilities. But it also means that something else is being nurtured: the lie that you only count if you are famous. So the young people try to become singers and actors, instead of doing what they should be doing: learning the crafts of singing and acting and really being singers and actors. The people who have given up on fame start drinking alcohol and philandering because they think their lives only matter if they're famous. But creativity doesn't care about fame. Creativity, true art in general, is a spiritual Godlike force. All emotions count. Every event counts. But what is happening in today's society is that the web is becoming this competition of who has the bigger ego. It is even sillier than guys comparing their willies. As if a person is only valuable if he is popular or has so and so many likes on Facebook. The worst is the attitude that someone is less worth as a spirit if they're not famous. We need famous people, we need people to look up to, we need people with skills. But we mustn't forget that famous people eat, sleep, cry, laugh, belch, fart, pee, think, feel, hiccup, giggle, hop, move, snore, whisper and scratch themselves just like everyone does. That does not make them more or less unique. It just means that the famous dude has more people who will help him pretend that he is more unique than others. But basically a soul doesn't really care about fame. Do you really think Robin Williams cared about his fame when he closed his bedroom door and killed himself that morning? That doesn't mean that we shouldn't strive to be more, shoot high, be the best we can be. But we should keep it in perspective. And we should become more by learning our crafts, not just becoming famous for being famous. Like that funny ironic statement: nobody knows this, but I'm really famous. That's Facebook in a nutshell. If fame were all it took, why, heck, we could strip naked and run across the White House lawn. But that would only take us to jail. Work on your skills, work on becoming better at what you do just to make this a cooler planet to live on. Don't jump on the Facebook wagon if it means being pissed off at whoever gets more likes. Life is not a Miss Universe Competition. Life is a road of discovery. That, being thankful for your past and yet letting it go, always remaining eager to learn more and looking into the future: those are the key elements to a long and happy life. Realizing that fame is just the icing of the cake will bring you closer to it than actually chasing it. Let go of your past and it will not haunt you anymore."
Kieran, Connor and Felicitas sat on their terrace that Saturday evening. Kieran drank his favorite Rioja: Sangre de Torro, whilst eating 8-year old Connor's favorite dish, Gnocchi Formaggio con Carne, and Felicitas' favorite salad, The Waldorf. Beyond the beautiful meadow lay the museum where Felicitas worked: The Salvador Dali Museum.
Kieran knew that he would be leaving for New York in a month. Until then he would try to spend more time with his family than ever before, doing what he did best, except trying to let go of his past: spreading lots of love, again and again.
FAME DOES NOT MAKE YOU MORE VALUABLE A PERSON(Charles E.J. Moulton)
FAME DOES NOT MAKE YOU MORE VALUABLE A PERSON
A Short Story by Charles E.J. Moulton
(The artwork on this page was painted by Charles E.J. Moulton.)
Somewhere between Paris and Barcelona Kieran caught himself biting on his nails again. The action was ever so subtle, like a small gust of wind blowing through the trees on a hot summer day. Suddenly, Kieran was not a forty-something salesman commuting across Europe on the 10:07 A.M. TGV train to Spain anymore. He was a freshman in high school, his mind messed up by a manipulative school pal who first gave him obsessive compulsive disorder and then blamed him for it.
Kieran caught himself chewing and ripped that finger out of his mouth, wiping the saliva off on his expensive Armani-suit.
The trees and houses flashed by his vision at breakneck speed. French villages, cozy farms, local vinyards, French fields turning more Spanish by the minute. All of that flashing seeming like modern life itself: a speedracing profile page that ruthlessly forgot reality regardless of the spiritual price. Virtual reality had become so present in people's lives that people had lost touch with what was actually real in their lives.
Kieran's gaze fluttered. He did not dare to look back at that wide eyed grimace of a face on his Smartphone Facebook Display. The face he had spent twenty years trying to forget. "Bloody hell," Kieran muttered, "how the heck did you become so successful?"
A faint moan reached his left ear from the other side of the passenger car. Kieran's head twitched as if his ear had been bitten by a cobra. But there was no Roman soldier there, no brutal Hunn, no cool CEO. Just a girl with her laptop firmly placed over her million dollar snatch. A girl that obviously had overheard Kieran muttering about an old friend and pretended not to notice.
Kieran snapped his head back toward the window, sighing and finally, ever so slowly, looked down on the display.
The words on the screen rang out like a nightmare in his mind. Envy? Yes. Envy. In the most painful spiritual corners of his soul, Kieran had hoped that a person that had caused him so much pain would actually end up seeing what he had done or at least see the light in some way. But the supposedly shy teenager, of whom everyone spoke of as a modest outsider, had played unspeakable psychological games of manipulation on him and given him OCD, the inability to let go of certain psychological borders. It was actually a miracle that Kieran had turned into the relatively successful professional he was in spite of all that pain.
But not only had Pierre Hallyne not seen what he had done to Kieran, he had also gotten away with giving him that unspeakable fear of the dark, of authority and of critique.
"Pierre Hallyne has changed his profile picture," the text under the grimace read. 236 likes.
Kieran compared that to his own successful entireprise with his many customers and his constant travelling and then looked at what kind of results he got in that weird website they called Facebook. Kieran would post an info on Facebook about some project that had raised € 17 000 and then receive 0 likes for it. It just baffled him to see that the world could praise something to smithereens and receive no attention whatsoever on Facebook for it. Reality seemed to have nothing to do with that kind of social media. Actually, Kieran had tested what was behind all of that. He had been posting stuff about an international symposium that presented a total of 80 000 book titles that were available through his and other publication's companies. 1 like on his Facebook page was the result. The next day, just to be a devil, he had posted a picture of himself with sunglasses and a leather jacket, grinning his nuts off. Within minutes he received 34 likes. Now there was proof. Facebook was all icing and absolutely no cake.
Kieran, tired of feeding his aching heart with this pain, pressed the house symbol on his cellular and threw the telephone into his briefcase, swearing to himself not to be dependant on anyone again. Well, okay. He needed his wife and son. And God. But that was it.
Funny thing, though. Kieran stopped biting his nails after he threw in his Samsung Galaxy in his bag. Those eccentric and picturesque landscapes of southern France turned into a more Hispanic version of Europe while Kieran slept. He dreamt of authors, literary agents, book fairs and business meetings. And all the while Pierre Hallyne was there picking his nose on some shampoo billboard commercial.
That statue of Columbus welcomed him in the Barcelona harbor at four-thirty that afternoon and the large pillar Columbus stood on seemed taller than last time Kieran had been here. It actually surprised him that he had been able to sleep at all after thinking he was back in the claws of an abusive friend infiltrating him with terror of the unknown. Pierre Hallyne had vanished into his nightmares and Kieran now felt like a dozy clumsy baby with an Armani-suit and a Boss briefcase.
The weather was just as sunny as when he had left a few weeks ago, but his heart was now missing a stone of pain. No, that wasn't true. He knew now that psychological pain had been caused by Pierre and not by a bad memory from his early childhood.
"Daddy?"
The voice was sweeter than honey, entailed memories of Sunday morning strolls to the bakery, Saturday evening Scrabble games, Good Night-stories about the bear and the firefly and mystery games of hide and seek in the domestic garden at summer.
"Connor!"
The black hairdo smelled of dandelion conditioner and his Star Wars T-Shirt reeked of energy. Kieran laughed, his belly wobbling with inspiration, once his son started using him as a simulated motorcycle, grabbing his arms and making Honda noises.
The beauty of the smile behind Connor gave that funny crazy kid in his arms a wondrous touch of tranquil truth and bliss.
The woman joined the boys with a restful striding stalk, her high heels giving the pavement a run for its money. That sexy Andalusian half-smile had been what had drawn Kieran to her in the first place.
Two full minutes must've passed before one of them moved, the warm breath of his two loved ones making him feel important in their arms. It made him ask himself why he had yet been unable to let go of that hideous memory haunting his past.
Connor snored all the way through Barcelona, cuddling his Luke Skywalker-toy. Kieran's pretty wife Felicitas did him the favor of driving the Mercedes through the crazy Spanish traffic. The air condition was cool, the seats were comfortable, Connor's soft snore reminded him of long evenings by a white crib Kieran had bought and carried home to the house himself. The conversation with Felicitas was now mellow, sexy and sweet as jungle rain.
"How was Paris?"
"The dinner at Lido's was first rate, the conference at the Versailles actually created a bridge of understanding between Salman Rushdie and that Saudi publisher. I spent about sixteen hours in front of my computer screen."
He carefully rested his hand on his wife's lap.
"And I missed you."
Felicitas lay her right hand on his for a second.
"I missed you, too," she responded. "Did you have any ... issues?"
Kieran looked down, for one moment remembering Pierre's grimace on his Facebook page and that girl that heard him mutter.
"I came across Pierre Hallyne's Facebook page. He is quite popular."
The family car was just exiting Barcelona and heading for the small town of Figueres when a sneer appeared on his wife's lips. She looked like she smelled something really bad, like an odor of deadly silent flatulence.
"Pierre Hallyne is Cassius in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar all over again," she snapped. "He is someone who would sell his own mother to an oil shiek if he saw that it brought him enough cash. But Kieran, dear, why are you still not able to let go of that? I mean, you are a successful guy with a great family."
"Kieran got away with scaring me to bits, giving me neurosis and never letting me defend myself. We ended the friendship and I was left to handle the bullshit alone. I mean, he was responsible for psychological manipulation of the worst sort, including 18-page letters full of amateur psychological analysis of a condition he gave me and then blamed me for."
Felicitas rolled down the window and gave another driver behind a Porsche the finger. He had obviously passed her on the wrong side. Kieran still couldn't get used to that Spanish way of uncontolled traffic.
As if nothing had happened, Felicitas again turned into the gentile woman and continued regardlessly:
"You do realize you have spent most of your adult life being angry at this guy. Are you angry that he is successful?"
"Yes."
"So was Adolf Hitler, but you didn't go into therapy because of him."
"I can't let him go."
"You have to let him go. Finding the reason or the logic behind something is not always the answer. That's why psychotherapy doesn't always help. Sometimes there is no answer but the answer we give ourselves. It's like quitting smoking. You sometimes just have to do it. Part of the reason why we have psychological problems is because we can't forgive people for doing something to us and we keep on blaming our friends, our moms and dads or our teachers for something they did. You mourn him. You are not angry. But the people honestly don't give a shit. They're not looking down at you or anything. They just don't care. So why should you? And telling yourself that you let Pierre get away with what he did to you is actually giving yourself the oppurtunity to go on and maybe letting him deal with it for a change. Sometimes there are unsolved mysteries in a life. That's okay. Living a life means choosing. The culprit is not you. Be true to those who are true to you. Leave the bullshit behind you."
The sunset over the Spanish siesta made life look fantastic and once Connor was in bed the arms of his wife would seem like a sunrise. Here in the car Kieran loved hearing his wife give him her pep-talk. The great thing was that this time it was working.
"And another thing," she continued, "fame does not make you more valuable a person. Pierre being successful does not make better. You being successful does not make you better. You're just two guys that had a very long fight. There is an increasing virus in the world. I would call it THE FACEBOOK SYNDROME. Facebook is supposed to be this fantastic contact portal. But it uses something very basic and ritualistic in man: competition. Andy Warhol's words of everyone wanting their fifteen minutes of fame is now more true than ever. In fact, today's web gives everyone the possibility to look like a superstar. That means that there are amazing creative possibilities. But it also means that something else is being nurtured: the lie that you only count if you are famous. So the young people try to become singers and actors, instead of doing what they should be doing: learning the crafts of singing and acting and really being singers and actors. The people who have given up on fame start drinking alcohol and philandering because they think their lives only matter if they're famous. But creativity doesn't care about fame. Creativity, true art in general, is a spiritual Godlike force. All emotions count. Every event counts. But what is happening in today's society is that the web is becoming this competition of who has the bigger ego. It is even sillier than guys comparing their willies. As if a person is only valuable if he is popular or has so and so many likes on Facebook. The worst is the attitude that someone is less worth as a spirit if they're not famous. We need famous people, we need people to look up to, we need people with skills. But we mustn't forget that famous people eat, sleep, cry, laugh, belch, fart, pee, think, feel, hiccup, giggle, hop, move, snore, whisper and scratch themselves just like everyone does. That does not make them more or less unique. It just means that the famous dude has more people who will help him pretend that he is more unique than others. But basically a soul doesn't really care about fame. Do you really think Robin Williams cared about his fame when he closed his bedroom door and killed himself that morning? That doesn't mean that we shouldn't strive to be more, shoot high, be the best we can be. But we should keep it in perspective. And we should become more by learning our crafts, not just becoming famous for being famous. Like that funny ironic statement: nobody knows this, but I'm really famous. That's Facebook in a nutshell. If fame were all it took, why, heck, we could strip naked and run across the White House lawn. But that would only take us to jail. Work on your skills, work on becoming better at what you do just to make this a cooler planet to live on. Don't jump on the Facebook wagon if it means being pissed off at whoever gets more likes. Life is not a Miss Universe Competition. Life is a road of discovery. That, being thankful for your past and yet letting it go, always remaining eager to learn more and looking into the future: those are the key elements to a long and happy life. Realizing that fame is just the icing of the cake will bring you closer to it than actually chasing it. Let go of your past and it will not haunt you anymore."
Kieran, Connor and Felicitas sat on their terrace that Saturday evening. Kieran drank his favorite Rioja: Sangre de Torro, whilst eating 8-year old Connor's favorite dish, Gnocchi Formaggio con Carne, and Felicitas' favorite salad, The Waldorf. Beyond the beautiful meadow lay the museum where Felicitas worked: The Salvador Dali Museum.
Kieran knew that he would be leaving for New York in a month. Until then he would try to spend more time with his family than ever before, doing what he did best, except trying to let go of his past: spreading lots of love, again and again.
- Share this story on
- 6
COMMENTS (0)