If you like wikipedia, you might get a kick out of this.

The Afghan film industry has led the way in the eastern Middle East, especially in areas of humor. The comedy group, “The Three Ali’s,” put on many shows and several feature length films throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

After a relatively stagnant 1970s, the 1980s saw the return of a thriving industry of violent movies and TV shows. “Jihad Joe,” and “Transformers: Islamabots” were examples of popular Saturday morning children shows that spawned a dramatic surge in the toy industry.

Buzkashi is by far the most popular sport in Afghanistan. People from across the country assemble together and watch people riding horses carry bovine carcasses and throw them into nets to score goals.

The origin of this sport is unclear, however many believe it to be simply a way to piss off people in neighboring India, who worship cows. While different variations have been created through the years (communist cadaver toss, and extreme infidel Buzkashi being two prominent versions), original Buzkashi has kept its dominance.

The second most popular sport in Afghanistan is bloodbath. The Kabul Warlords are one of the perennial underdogs of Major League Bloodbath. However, the Warlords have been able to win many upsets through bloody tribal support and persistent resistance.

I didn’t make these, BTW. And I don’t remember where I found them, I’m just passing them off as blog content.

In the early days I found myself fascinated with the world. I had access all areas to the secret life of people. I’d stalk people for a while to try and catch them doing something interesting. Doesn’t happen as often as you might think. There’s a lot of downtime in waiting for a moment. In the evenings we’d all gather again with stories and updates.

Often it was easier to just go watch a film. You could really get lost in one of them for two hours. Sometimes I’d go to nightclubs. I’d get the odd feeling I got the few times I’d gone to nightclubs sober. I was almost as invisible then as I am now. The girls all glamed up, the boys in front of them auditioning for sex. They’re the loneliest places in the world.

You see colours around people. It’s just thoughts and emotions moving out into the
world, people aren’t as separate from it as they think. They tend to draw towards them what they give out. For instance, a depressed person will have a lot of black and grey, and if they are sitting with a group of people their colours will dull a little as time passes. The opposite also holds true. Most people have a whole mess of colours because they are feeling and thinking a load of different things at once. They’re pissed off at their boss, can’t wait to see their kids, got to pay the gas, where did they leave that card, you know how it is.

The temptation is to play with it. We’re all spirit so we’re hooked right in. Run your
finger through a colour and you see a little flash from their lives. Try red for a little
sexual fantasy. Easy for first timers to get this wrong, myself included. Ran my fingers through this girl’s red and saw something I didn’t want to see. Do it to a man and you get to see a model naked. The tricky part is doing this brings that thought right to the surface of the person’s mind too. The morality of messing with people’s minds is uncertain and a lot of blues are paranoid that it could be adding years to our sentence or even get you sent down. Trouble is it’s about the only kick available to us here, seems like the best fruit is always forbidden.

I suppose I should be talking more about how I got here, because I’ve got to sort this out and this is the only the only way I can think of. I know it had a lot to do with fear. I believe that around three years ago a poison entered the well of the collective
unconscious. I describe it like that because it’s the only way I can think to describe it. All of a sudden the zeitgeist seemed to become a black wave and people were holing themselves up in their rooms and not coming out for months. I talked to people who never seemed to think twice about anything before and they were telling me about going for long walks to try and clear their heads. A lot of people cracked and a lot of people died. As for myself it felt like I was sitting deep inside my skull looking out at the world through a long dark tunnel. The colour went out of the world and all I could see was endless grey.

It was somewhere about this time I grew demons. I counted three, but it’s hard to tell.
The Papa of these, the source of all my trouble, was fear. Now fear is just another
emotion, a deficit of hope, maybe. But it’s like when you’ve got a loan from the bank, as long as you pay your interest you’re fine, but if you have to pay interest on your interest you’re a goner, because fear is a monster that feeds on itself. Fear starts you off afraid of a particular thing, then starts warping your thoughts, gets you to test yourself then presents your earlier paranoia as proof of the pudding. Loading on the interest you get more disorientated, more uncertain of yourself, more fearful. Spun round and round by it’s son and daughter, obsession and paranoia, fear likes you to think that it’s greater than you are, that it has the power to change you, that it can make you into what you fear. It can’t though, for all it did to me I’m still me and I don’t know why I let the squirming little worm hold me in thrall for so long, because when you stop running and look it straight in the eye it melts away. All evil is by its nature cowardly and will only attack what it considers weaker than it. I lost so much time fighting shadows, fighting nothing and I’m still paying for it, still trying to make up for it. My weakness, my cowardice, my lack of faith.

Sitting on this hill overlooking the town, I’m trying to sort my memories. My
chronology is fucked due to the relentlessness of time here. There is only before and after that day I woke up for the last time. Sometimes the memories of before seem like dreams to me (did they really happen?) and sometimes it’s the other way around, that this the dream. I’m picking out the memories with the brightest colours and seeing where it leads me.
Out on the town with a riot in our souls we’d lace our drinks with powdered happiness and laugh at every laughing passing shape. The laughter of famished hyenas that hadn’t tasted real joy in years. Later we’d be climbing the walls of cars we were trying to steer down roads that had turned into rivers at thirty miles an hours. Colours would float past, cars on a different current. The next day we would laugh at what we could still remember. On our days off we would sit and shout and the television to remind ourselves we were smarter than everybody on it. Reality became lies and we were the truth, the only ones with the balls to really live, when all our emotions came out of a capsule or a glass.

The wind’s picking me up now and pushing me down the hill a little. It’s a nice feeling as long as it’s gentle. I used to go to the top of tall buildings before (earlier?) and jump off. You swoop, you soar, a minute of peace. Reminds me of heaven. Ever since I was a child I have this memory of heaven. It could have been a dream because I was always confusing memories and dreams then. I was in heaven and it was white, absolutely formless. I was aware of my existence, conscious of ‘I’, and other ‘I’s all around me, but we were all part of a greater consciousness and I was swimming through perfect joy. Someone a girl, who I couldn’t see but was aware of asked –

‘Do you want to go back?’

And I said ‘Yes.’

This has always been my problem. If I could choose five words to describe myself they would be ‘I. Can. Never. Say. No.’

Plato said it would all work out once we work ourselves out. The opposite of depression is enlightenment and if we could remove all the debris built up from memories and regrets we would see naturally again and know joy once more. My biggest regret now is Michelle, that I could do nothing for her. But to get to Michelle I have cover Cathy first.