Ever have those times when you wake up screaming, and then you realise you haven't gone to sleep yet? I do, more and more these days.

A little while ago, I was a devoutly social animal - Last year I went to such efforts to hang out with my friends that my course work suffered. It wasn't the only reason that I failed, but perhaps if I hadn't spent quite so much time in the student bar I could have better combated the other factors.

Now, however, I lock all the doors to my flat, and double check that the windows are closed. On Saturdays I would either go to parties or out to a club, but I've barely been to a party in months, and I often find myself unable to head to this club. My brother invited me around for dinner the other week. I told him I'd call him about it in a few days. I sat at home for two weeks without touching the phone.

I've been thinking about the reasons for my isolationism recently (not leaving the house for days on end and having no hobbies is a prime recipe for getting a bit of thinking done). I've realised the "why" behind my newfound hermitage.

My defenses are crumbling.

Let me explain - I've known for years that the world was full of idiots. A greedy, bureaucratic ruling class, governing mindless, lowest-common-denominator stooges. Hypocites, liars, greedmongers, gullable idiots, haters, you name it, the world is populated by the worst examples of it.

Once upon a time, back when I was slightly more idealistic, I got mad at this. Hell, after being mad at it for long enough, I even tried to change it. Of course, anyone else who's tried to change the world recently can guess how that worked out.

A couple of years of attempting this destroyed my idealism - my rage at the stupidity of humanity flared brighter than ever before during this period, and was overwhelmed and snuffed out.

After that, my attitude was "Can't win, don't try" I couldn't change the world - I mean, there are 6 billion-odd morons out there, and only one of me.

So I settled into a healthy few years of contentment - I gave up protest actions, and I discovered that with my burning desire to affect change from within gone, I didn't really have any reason to go to church anymore. Sure, people were still all nothing more than shaved monkeys, they were still destroying the world, each other and themselves at an unbelievable rate, yeah. But hey, that's life. I didn't let it get me down.

Well, I think that's gone.

Recent events in my life have been giving me in-your-face reminders of just how staggeringly unfair life actually is. I mean, of course I've known this for a quite some time, but it's been a while since I had my own example.

I think the stress of the last few months have shaken off the blinders I had been wearing re: the world. I now see the world as it truly is - No differently than the rest of you see it, but you've got to realise - I've spent the last few years in a cocoon of apathy. I'm not equipped to deal with this sort of thing anymore.

The best example of this - I was reading the paper last week - an article about how criminals were trying to beat dna testing. It recounted the tale of one Anthony Turner, convicted of rape in the States in '99. He claimed that the physical evidence recovered ie the sperm found on the victims, was not his, rather it was that of a man who had his exact genetic code. Of course he was imprisoned. Weeks later, sperm was recovered in a rape case - sperm that was genetically identical to Turners, giving credence to the "It was my genetic double" defense.

A little digging later, it was discovered that Turner had smuggled his sperm out of prison in a tomato sauce sachet passed to family members, who then paid a woman $100 to claim she had been raped, and allow the "evidence" to be found on her.

If had read this even earlier this year, I would have laughed. Now, however, I threw the paper to the floor, ran and locked all the doors, and switched on the internet - not to use it, just so that no calls could get through on the single phone line. Having taken said precautions, I proceeded to rock backwards and forwards on the sofa for a while.

Me and the world recently, huh?

I saw a 60 Minutes interview of Michael Moore - something of a hero of mine - about his first documentary "Roger and Me" dealing with the closure of the General Motors plant in his home town of Flint. A scene that graphically illustrated the poverty that had hit the town was that of a woman bludgeoning a pet rabbit to death, so she could sell the meat and fur. Commenting on this scene, Moore said that hundreds of people over the years had come up to him and said "Isn't it horrible about that rabbit?"

Then he points out that 90 seconds later in the film, a black man is shot down in the middle of the street by the Flint police. In over a decade, how many people do you think Moore has counted coming up to him and saying "Isn't it horrible about that black man?" Yep, you guessed it.

In the past few years, I've seen a mob of people throwing books onto a fire screaming out "Freedom of speech!" I've been to a Bible study on the danger of cults, where the study leaders blankly read out a list of "dangerous habits and traits of cults" which was simply the list of things they encouraged us to do, except it was right when we did it. I've seen people betray their friends and their lovers when they really didn't have to. I've had people tell me they hate themselves when they drink, and will stop to become better people, then run off because the bar's about to open. I've seen a never ending tide of reality television sweep over the airwaves - I've seen three different countries versions of idiots trapped on a desert island.

And do you want to know what's worse? I've seen a million people walking the streets of my city every day, taking this as the norm. "Cults are bad - Yes I'm a Christian" "He shouldn't mistreat her like that - Yes I did just cheat on my girlfriend" The amount of times I've heard this shit.

People pick a set of values, then they rail against anyone who doesn't fit their version of normalcy. My Christian friends think my Goth friends are aliens, and vice versa. I had a person who is in an open relationship with half a dozen women tell me that transsexuality is a form of insanity. The entire world thinks THEY are normal, and they're so busy judging the guy in the skirt, or the girl with two boyfriends, that they don't seem to care that were raping the planet, that we're raping each other, body AND soul, that the most monstrously fucked up things are happening every single day. People are so busy looking at the freak in the make up that they don't see how freakish the world has become, how fucked up people's psyches have become, how apathy and cruelty have overcome. And it's time that stopped.

How to stop it? Well, I have a few ideas, but frankly, they probably won't work.

For now, I want you to do something. It might be hard, you might not know how to do it, and you probably won't want to do it, but I want you to try. The thing is this; Try not to fuck people over.

--Apathy Jack