When a mad man is coming down the road

Adaobi Osakwe
2 min readMar 3, 2021

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When a mad man is coming down the road, you avert your eyes or put your head down.

You remember all the terrible stories you have heard of mad people over the years. The one that the church teacher once used to illustrate why you should never wear low cut tops. She promised you that she saw it with her two “koro koro” eyes. The mad man had dragged that girl’s breast from her low hanging top and fondled it and then suckled on it and that if she had been “well dressed”, that wouldn’t have been the case.

I have been thinking a lot about how different people approach issues and how listening to someone with a contrary opinion can save you.

I have always thought and still think that everything will get worse. That everything will fall apart. The ice will melt, the water will swallow us all.

Morality will keep degrading before our eyes until we all have no shame.

I have always believed and still believe that this is inevitable.

I hated and sometimes still hate the lot I got in the world. I don’t see the point of creation knowing that the world would come to an end and things will get worse and being born is nothing to be celebrated, I had resigned myself to wait it out.

Until I listened to crazy Elon Musk who believes as I do, that everything will get worse and that we are nearing the end. Instead of folding in half and laying on the floor defeated, he decides that if the earth is going to get worse and become uninhabitable, that we had seven other planets and that somehow my inevitable verdict didn’t have to be.

It’s very much like my Dad telling me that “Ife amaro ka eme bu onwu” — The only thing without a solution is death and even now with the new way I look at life, all I hear in that statement is a challenge and all I can say is “yet” — “Death has no solution — yet”.

If the world ends and Elon Musk does not get to go to Mars or I die and I never get to see the “solution to death” or I finally come to terms with the fact that as far as there is life, there should be death because First law of Thermodynamics — Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. I get to look a mad man in the eye every time I look in the mirror.

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