“The Pope leaned forwards...”

The Pope leaned forwards, a sort of viscous purple foam dribbling from the corners of his mouth.

“Fools they were, fools they are, and fools they shall ever be. Men, who look to us to enable their fantasies as being in any sense special, as being in any sense more worthy than a blind mole rat, a cockroach, a cancer cell. He is lashed to fate no less than any of them, and not a whit better. Nay, far less good, on account of his sickening vanity.

He, they, all, are just the froth, the spittle of an unthinking Nature, steam boiling off the ass of the brainless demiurge, whose laws cause this, cause that, no one thing worth any more than any other. When a man harms himself, or harms others, there is much fuss made, but Nature bats not an eye, creation and destruction are as one to her.

Continue to babble on about these absurd mysteries, they are useful - they enrich us, they keep us much in the rabble’s mind, fill their puny minds with awe, respect, the notion that they are part of something noble, even eternal, in any event far bigger than themselves. It is indeed true that they are a part of something far bigger than themselves - Nature, which cares not whether they strut about congratulating themselves on their spirituality and wisdom or are hung from a meathook in a factory farm. In point of fact, it very much seems that she prefers the latter, and that the most barbarous, abominable monsters in human history are, to her, its greatest heroes. And, let’s be honest, the ignorant people very much sense this as well. They are still very happy to talk and think about Neros, Genghis Khans, Hitlers. Those whom they describe as virtuous cause them only to fall into apathetic stupors.

There is a part of them that knows full well that we deal only in lies and machinations - that the ashes and soil from whence they arose and to which they shall return are every bit as important to Nature as all the pompous nonsense that comes out of their mouths and pens. Every bit of rubbish we tell them serves only to prop them up in their own eyes, to make them seem, to themselves, better than those around them. And this is nature’s most basic law. That, at the end of the day, we care only about ourselves and about no others. When we claim, or some of us claim, that we care about others, we reveal only that we care about the way those others cause us to feel - that is the long and the short of it.

Every priest has known this since the dawn of history - we deal in lies, lies which enrich us and enable us to molest and abuse the ignorant rabble, at the same time that they are soothed by them. Every guru, monk, rabbi - they all know this perfectly well. It is their stock and trade - they are highway robbers, and nonsense is their arsenal, the weapon with which they rob, pillage, and wreak havoc.

You ask if I, and people in my employ, who do my bidding, and who are privy to what it is we do feel remorse. Such a silly question. Once the scales have fallen from your eyes, to deceive, to manipulate, to rob - these things become virtues in a cold, barren universe which operates only in accordance with its cold, barren laws. One revels in it. One feels part of a larger, transcendent reality. The reality of evil. We are evil, and are proud to be so, for in so being, we reflect what the world is, at bottom, and encourage that reality to flourish. Look to and in that pond. The most lovely of surfaces, a holocaust beneath. Look to the dust mites on your face, on your pillowcase, look to the brutal wars apace every moment in your bloodstream, look to your marriage, look to your friends, look to the cashier at the drugstore who would be a Nero had he or she the opportunity, look to yourself, who would be he as well, in a heartbeat. In a heart beaten and dragged out of its owner, stomped upon, dragged through the dirt, and fed to whatever rodent was sufficiently famished to gorge itself upon it.

Look most to the women - the mothers, daughters, siblings - their tongues wagging, their daggers constantly poised - redolent of fetid swamps harboring blind anacondas devouring helpless crocodiles, who themselves, but a moment ago, had dragged a child or man from the shores, and shook him violently as it began to devour him, much to the delight of that pampered aristocratic lady who had borne him, and who now sat by the waters that babbled on all about the execution taking place within them, fanning herself, pouting, and contemplating ways in which to further deceive and eventually disembowel her husband, the count. Look to their wombs, which dry into a putrid cesspool of useless filth midway through their journey through life, although they are, as a rule, more than happy to soldier on into their future bodies of wrinkled leather, their voices having become those of eviscerated ravens, their souls intent on only the basest of pleasures and the most venomous of treacheries. Recall how they suckled the groveling, grasping turds which shot out from between their thighs all those years ago. In disgust, in anticipation of formula, or of their wet nurse, in deepest resentment for the hell they were in, and for the many hells to come. Adopting the pose of pre-Raphaelite angels, they looked smugly down upon their charges, delighting in the infamies they were soon to inflict upon them. For what is heaven other than the joy of looking down. Barring that pleasure, of happiness there can be none.

They are the fractious, fractal offshoots of the heartless Mother herself - the one who spews her creation everywhere, she who pisses and shits it upon globe after globe, here, and throughout the miserable universe of which she is landlord. Delighting in the pissing, in the shitting, though remaining certain that the persecution and devastation of those creations will afford her, and them, infinitely more delight. To procreate, to nurture, those are the properties and behaviors of those who would call themselves virtuous. They are not remotely virtuous. They are nauseating abominations, spewing themselves, their spunk, their excrement, their children into a world which is already overrun with far more than enough of their filth, and of their kind. A noble mother! Ah, it is so rarely that we find one. But when we do, rest assured they are juggling infants on pitchforks, and bathing in the blood of innocents. Such creatures, such marvels. Would that the demiurge were not a blind beast, subject to laws - would that we could implore him to set loose a race of billions of harpies such as these on the face of this globe, and of every other - delicious, deeply bloodthirsty Amazons, never satisfied with the murder of a few, with drinking the blood and eating the hearts of only her own children - rather, bent on the destruction of all creatures, of all things, of the universe itself. In this she shall never succeed, but her attempt is Nature’s most luscious and voluptuous flower, its culmination and consummation, the glorious, corpse-heaped crown of creation.

And this “love” fools profess to have for such creatures - this despicable evisceration, this castration of what a man is, of what a man might otherwise be. How we men grovel and live for breadcrumbs scattered by such scorpions, on deserts of scraggly pubic hair, inhabited by dust mites and crabs. Parceled out like so many Machiavellis on picnics, to rivals whom they fully intend to poison, smiling to themselves all the while, as they are flattered like queens - queens, who, the moment our fortunes recede, or hairs begin to whiten, or when they spy another whom they imagine possesses a bigger cock, perhaps spouting gold, or made of chocolate, will grab the sharpest implement they can find and stab us lethally and deeply in our bowels, sever our testicles and feed them to squirrels, laughing shrieking like hyenas all the while - at our naïveté, our gullibility, and, above all, what was our raw, naked need. Needs which cause fools, such as we are, to ascribe to these harpies charms which a Petrarch could not have imagined. Everything that is vile about her now becomes a virtue, every disgusting imperfection a proof of her supernatural beauty, every absurd piece of nonsense that pours out of her poisonous lips a sign of her wisdom.

Yet wisdom she does possess, and of a sort so murderous that any thinking man will not allow himself to entertain even the faintest notion of this “love” of which the fools babble on endlessly about in their idiotic songs and poems and entertainments, designed only to hoodwink morons into the perfidious, putrid Ponzi scheme of procreation. Closer inspection inevitably eats away at this foul illusion, erodes it, until what had been, up till then, adoration is now the purest horror, contempt, and hatred. One finally begins to realize that this is a creature who reliably and without fail turns what might have been one’s good humor into the foulest disrepair, a creature who possesses no curiosity, no humor, no sense of awe or wonder, who has only the wish to enslave some poor man, in order that he shoot spunk into that pustule-filled tunnel of spunk between her thighs, and, hence, provide her with a crotch turd which she can then hatch, with and by whom she can soothe herself, tell herself that there is some reason for her existence on this shithole planet, that is to say, that this earthworm now sucking at her mangled, deformed tit is a sign that she need not loathe herself, that she is a something, a legend, an angel spinning threads of eternity through time and space, a hole through which divinity has poured itself, like an arsenic-laced discount liqueur guzzled by a drunken demiurge on a fourth-rate comet, careening through some butthole of a solar system in the not even armpit of a perfectly undistinguished galaxy, spinning its way towards a collision with another which will swallow it without a burp or a thought, in a pointless, finite, death-driven universe. The fool’s dick snaps to attention, sings a love song of Schubert, or, more likely, of some talentless nitwit of his contemporary acquaintance, is tugged along by this ethereal crotch turd yearning, begging, shrieking to be born, and shoved into a malodorous, skanky hole of the Komodo dragon whom he now embraces, and who is hellbent on ripping those genitals off in a single vicious bite, once their contents have warmed the venomous eggs festering in her polluted womb. Had these foolish men the meagerest of imaginations, they would have known, seen, recoiled in horror from what they would soon realize was that fetid cesspool sitting between those thighs, that rancid canyon, poised to cast out dozens more worms, if it’s given the opportunity. And that casting, do picture it - picture this treasure, this angel, this gelatinous, screaming blob of squirming, puss and mucous-filled flesh pushed out of that hole which you a moment ago worshipped as if it were the altar upon which lay your deepest desires and joys. This putrid, stinking gulf, where those two, mismatched, wrinkled, saggy, stubby thighs meet in a tangle of perfectly disgusting, matted hairs which shoot this way and that - a forest of foul lichens, of pestiferous moss so unseemly, that were you to see it on a forest floor, you would kick it away contemptuously, after having pissed on it. And what of those flaccid bags of meat - those misshapen, wrinkled globes of swaying flesh, with their never-matching, bizarrely misshapen nipples which, when closely inspected, are things of the purest horror, meant only to deceive and entice you now, in order that they might squirt scum into the greedy mouths of stench-filled turds months later? But no, perhaps it is that other side of her where her most delightful charms are to be found - in those two mountainous bowls of stinking, discolored viands, hovering over and sheltering that foul, rancid hole, from which pours shit of a sort with which you are more than a little familiar, for you yourself have become this shit, a shit which she herself can mold and ply into a slave of her own invention, to debase and discard as she wishes. Ah no, ‘tis not the body you worship. But of course, it is her delicate, noble, angelic soul! Or so it seems to you, up until that moment when your spunk spills, and your idiotic swooning has ceased, and you are faced with the lies, the shrewish, scolding tongue, that godforsaken voice of a shrieking cat, the pettiness, spitefulness, nagging, the infinite stupidity, the whorish machinations cloaked in paper-thin protestations of prudery, the cawing of ravens, the stinging of scorpions, the eviscerations and soul-murders of which she is such a master. Ah, ‘tis these things you cherish.

And if and when you have been thus caught, dragged into the web of her machinations, of assisting her in the spawning of some future piece of filth which shall walk the earth, thanks to your imprudence and naïveté, when you now see what it is she had been all along, how she had planned this from the start, whether she was aware of it consciously or not, how her character and essence was and is nothing other than a Venus Flytrap designed to entice and then destroy you, when this it is that you have come to see clearly, you will either sink into the most hopeless despondency, or, after a period of the blindest rage, sometimes culminating in the awful revenge, enter that clear-sighted state of wisdom in which women appear to you as what they are - abominations, scourges, the very worst of the earth’s most foul pestilences.

And so, my friends, to what do we now turn our thoughts to, pray tell? Perhaps you’ve dodged that bullet. Or perhaps, having been shot, you are soldiering on. As what? As whom? What is left for you, after you’ve eaten of this delicious food and are now satiated? After you’ve had your way with what previously seemed the delightful body of some whore, and are now left disgusted and horrified? After the superficial wonders and beauties of the natural world have fallen away and revealed the chains of holocaust upon holocaust beneath? Perhaps ‘tis time, once again, to inspect that delightful cavity of your beloved, its mucosal walls, its irregular ridges which provide such an agreeable home to an assortment of bacteria and fungi. Those stringy, fibrous muscles, which help to expel the various fluids from said hole. The rubbery, elastic tissue which allows your beloved’s gaping crater to stretch sufficiently to allow crotch turd after crotch turd to emerge, to be shat into the world, there to weep, grow old, and die. All those asymmetrical folds of skin, in all their blubbery riot, at times seemingly sufficiently ambitious to cover the beloved gash itself. That hole up top, through which your angel pisses - oh, the ecstasy! Is it not enough to make one drunk with joy? This pinkish raw meat, with its endless ridges and folds, so often full of the rankest cottage cheese and fishy-smelling discharges - is this not heaven on earth? Behold it in all its glory, worship at its altar, drink deep of its endless flora, smelling so distinctly like the bottom of a stinking, fetid landfill - let its odor intoxicate you with memories, dreams, hopes, a veritable Madeleine of Proust in need of a thousand douches and antibiotic regimens! Yet, nevertheless, divine, because it is hers. Whether it be yellow, green, grayish, white, odorless, or smelling like an overflowing Beijing sewer pipe, ‘tis the body and blood of Christ - drink and eat of it, for, in doing so, thou shalt be saved! And ever more so, when, if fortune smiles upon you, you find, to your delight, various irritations, sores, blisters, pustules, abscesses, cankers, and swellings, which she has received, as a gift given, unbeknownst to you, by some rival whom she prefers. And which you soon find belong to you, as well. My treasure, my angel! How can I ever repay you this gift, which you bestow upon me, so freely, and with such energy, nay, such blameless, guiltless, artless energy!

Well, there you have it, my friend. The sour, stinking cunt out of which you, and all those you have ever and will ever meet have been shat, quite without your consent. Perhaps you imagine that you had been a tad happier prior to said shitting, bathed, as you were, in the foulness of the womb of the she-devil who bore you, but you would be wrong. Locked in that bestial prison of sour gas and poisonous fluid, you were, at that time, in a state of unimaginable torture, a mindless misery for which you yet had no words with which to soothe yourself or attempt to explain it all away, and from which, now that you are embodied, you shall never escape. Look at yourself, you filthy insect, with that revolting spittle dribbling down towards your chin, unbeknownst to you, but clear enough to those unfortunate to catch sight of you, with your stomach grinding away on dozens of corpses, the hairs in your nose, in your armpits, sprouting everywhere like stalks of toxic fungi, harboring countless microscopic monsters busily chewing on you and laughing, all the while picturing and busily engineering your death, at which time said chewing will only continue, unabated, and with, as likely as not, all the more vigor and delight. It is only they who are not utterly disgusted by your pasty white skin, drooping furiously like toilet paper dangling from a discarded mannequin, hanging on in its fruitless struggle against nothingness and death - skin bearing mouths and eyes unable to speak, to give voice to the horror, eyes without lids, staring in perpetual horror upon itself, that waxen strait jacket in which you cannot move, in which you do not belong, which wrenches violently back, at times in despair, at others in the agony of its colon sloughing off its lining. All the while the nails, growing like daggers, on hands busy rotting, legs limping, stumbling helplessly along, in search of help, camaraderie, some minimal assurance, all of which will never come. You are a carnival of horrors, trapped in a body you had hoped was meant to and would eventually embrace others, but that you now see is just this thing, this thing with armpits, ears full of wax, this thing that creates shit and then compels you to expel or retain it when and as it wishes, without consulting you. You would claim you are not this body, that the body is an abstraction, that you are something other than this trash bag of shit, piss, blood, sinew, and bone, that you are something other than your corporeal form, something miraculous, and not this cruelest of jokes, that sex is a stained-glass window opening upon the divine, the transcendent - and not simply a concatenation of sweat, spittle, stink, and lies, that you something other than a meat puppet, a marionette, a figurine into whose asshole Yaldabaoth, the Gnostic demiurge, shoves his bony hand, to make it twitch this way or that, to think this or that thought, to desire, to endlessly covet and crave with neither purpose nor any hope of ever being satisfied. You stagger around under the absurd illusion that your body is something which obeys your will, that it is not merely a playground of random pains, yoked, as it is, like the sorriest of donkeys, to the most pitiless and brutal of masters, on the most arduous and ill-advised of journeys. To its cravings, to its wishes and desires, which you realize are absurd, meaningless, disgusting. To its, and hence your terrors - to your intuition that it might be only a moment until your chest bursts open for no apparent reason, revealing a monstrous, gaping eyeless face, with a drooling, famished mouth housing seemingly hundreds of bony teeth. To your obsession with this body, but not that body, no, no, no, not that one! I must have this one! And it must profess to love me, and of its own accords! That is what shall most certainly put things right!

But this we have discussed, above. More than sufficiently. You are a tube, with holes at either end, nothing more - needing, wanting - your entire existence is nothing other than this constant needing, wanting. And the world about you? It is nothing. It exists only as the instrument which either pleases or displeases you. Do with it as you wish, for it is not real. It has never been real. Those who told you it was real were lying. They, and it, were, and are, eminently dismissible, and exist in your mind only, in order that they might satisfy or exasperate you. A dream. From which you can now awaken, if you so choose, to viciously embrace and violate the world, in what is, it must be admitted, only another dream. But this latter dream is one in which you are now God himself, both chess master and board, all its players subservient only to you, existing only as puppets with which you can do as you please, which you are free to make of what you will - that you can embrace, cast away, ignore, treat with toleration or contempt as the spirit moves you - who exist only as much as that curious being in some half-forgotten dream, who emerged from shadows and fog and began to strut about as if he mattered, was known to you, deserved this or that, but who, in reality, was no more than a puff of smoke, with less reality than an earthworm, a chimera whom you might just as well impale on a harpoon as have a satisfying conversation - a ghost, as are they all - those at the shop, in the park, who claim to care, though they surely don’t, and for whom, in moments of weakness, you attempt to convince yourself that you care, that most absurd of fantasies, which still lingers pointlessly in your mind because nonsense of this sort had been poured into your ears and down your throat all those years ago by other phantoms, who mattered then and now exactly as much as that self-important hobgoblin who swaggered last night through your dream, and whose throat you now regret not having slit with a disinterested smile, to be forgotten a moment later.

We are alone, caged within ourselves, at the same time that this solitude, this transcendental solipsism is the ultimate freedom. The play within our minds is vast, is infinite - these creatures that appear to us as if they are “out there”, in a world, are no such thing. They are a bit of undigested beef, as Scrooge told Marley. And when this Marley, and his peers, convinced Scrooge of this or that, ‘twas only a play within the miser’s mind, which he was too ignorant to recognize as such. This world one sees, in which one appears to move about, is but a panopticon of one’s own invention, in which the entertainments, punishments, and pleasures one ascribes to things, to persons, to nature, are nothing other than the echoes in one’s own mind of a previous vibration, itself an echo, and on and on into the primordial mists of a nothingness from which it all arose, and to which it is presently speeding. Borne on a raging sea of desires, compelled to live in a prison of one’s own invention, for the world is nothing other other than that - penned in this prison, yoked to these desires, we wish to change what seems to us some undesirable thing or situation, which we have, in fact, created, and are now, without knowing it, involuntarily discovering ways to circumvent. Our fears and hopes melt into one another, into joys and disappointments and a thousand other things, sensations, and feelings in the space of an hour, nay, in the space of a minute, like crickets thrown over a waterfall, morphing into butterflies and scorpions, and back again, in an eye-blink. One’s memory of an earlier time, nay, of an earlier moment belonging to that selfsame day, is a history of some other person, who thought himself momentarily stable, as you do now, although you ought know better, for you have been drowned in this vortex, sucked into this abyss and spat out again, unrecognizable, an infinite number of times. You are filled with this hunger, this passion, this disgust, this longing, this boredom, this rage, this despair, and poof! You are another. With suddenly another set of no less absurd preoccupations and assumptions, which have about as much connection to those of that fellow of but a moment ago as the musings of a ferret have to those of a Komodo dragon. To be a brain in a vat, such as we are, is no ignoble thing. It is contemptible only to wish it to be otherwise, to pine for the love of another, who exists only in one’s own mind. This is not some despicable Stoic nonsense, for the wise man does nothing other than to give free rein to his passions, to mount and ride them like a stallion in a whirlwind! Yes, they are phantoms which you are chasing. And what of it? Do you not enjoy your dreams? Are you not God himself in those dreams? Be they wonderful or nightmarish? Do you not feel ecstasies, shudder in horror, writhe in anticipation over characters in novels? To whom you feel infinitely closer than to those phantoms that walk around that world which is also of your own invention? But it is all the same, my friend. Exactly the same. Absurd, wonderful, revolting, fantastic, contemptible. This life - it is not “rounded by a little sleep”. It is this sleep, nothing other. You are dreaming yourself, you are dreaming your body, the world, all of it. And so: do with it as you like, as your character demands, as it whispers and at times bellows into your ears - fuck, kill, poison, eviscerate - and if you find yourself doing something as execrable and absurd as to “love” another, do recall that this absurdity is taking place in only one location - in your bowels, which themselves are a thing of your own invention. She is not “out there” - she is you, and only you.

I’ve gone far afield from any semblance of my Papal role, for that role, as I have said, is one in which I say all this only to myself, in a dream, in which you appear. You, who are nothing other than an illusion with whom I presently dally to entertain myself, for there is nothing else to do in this vacuum, in this black hole, in this one-horse universe which is, and has ever been, only myself. It is of no concern whether this self is the self of the purest and most naked solipsism, or that which is portrayed in the fairy tales of the Upanishads, or those of George Berkeley. We haven’t the faintest clue whether this world is our dream alone, or if, rather, we are only a bit of that world, dreaming itself. You will say that Tom, Dick, and Harry observe the very same tree as I, and hence claim a material reality for that world. And yet - do they not do every bit as much in my dream? And so they appear to now, as well - whether, when I feel as if I am awake, I dream still, or I am simply a dream persona in some cosmic mind. I do not give a fig which is the case - nor should you. Your loves, enemies, passions, griefs concern nothing other than yourself, are merely your inner eye landing upon a part of yourself which had been to you previously opaque - they have naught to do with what a foolish man considers “others”, or this or that “out there” in a world, which, were he wiser, he would recognize as existing only in himself. Those others with whom you converse, or whom you read, are, for the most part, the most virulent of distractions from the love of one’s self in quiet solitude, in whose environs bubble up what is best and most joyful in us. They are parts of you best ignored, bits of snot on tissue paper which you regret examining for too long a time, when you should have simply immediately discarded them. And yet there can be that occasional unicorn, that exceptional encounter with what is ultimately oneself, though it appears to be in the words and minds of others - a bolt of lightning, which illumines the sky, a sky which was there within you, all along, but which the dreaming earth had heretofore hidden from you. And it is at such times that you are entranced by a piece of music, a work of visual art, of literature, a natural scene, a word or words from a beloved friend, all of which was within you prior to any awareness of it, or of them, on your part, prior to your birth, which was nothing other than the birth of the world which you see around you and is yourself, that unknown country from which your own thoughts and words emerge - that, too, is, and was, you and only you, all along.

And so, with these mirages, phantasms, these fancies which you, in your naïveté, deem persons, things, events - you may do as you please. For the only law the wise man follows is that of his own pleasure. He regards the sufferings of others as not only of no consequence, but as things to enjoy, as entertainments, and knows that any pangs of ridiculous conscience or empathy which stir in him are but echoes of this or that bit of nonsense drummed into his unwilling ears as a child, a child who was far more content to pull the hair of little girls, to throw rocks at them, to pull the wings off butterflies and terrorize small reptiles - a pure child, a thing of Nature. But let us not stop there - for it is our own suffering which is most delicious to us, when we feel said suffering as only our own, neither belonging to nor experienced by another, when we do not ascribe said suffering to some dream persona we have invented, some fantasy extrinsic to ourselves which is nothing other than ourselves. This is the purest of delights and exhilarations it is possible for a man to know. The delicious tastes and aromas of betrayal, rejection, physical pain, loneliness, boredom, dysphoria, horror, terror, existential torments and tribulations, deepest grief - it is only at these times that one feels most alive, and, indeed, that one feels and is most alive. Happy, carefree moments are those we readily and happily offload to morons and cretins, to the fools that live for what is soporific and anodyne, who run giddily into the arms of a culture which happily lobotomizes them, and by which they are more than pleased, intensely relieved, in fact, to be so lobotomized. For a sensitive soul, there are only disappointments, punctuated by momentary pleasures which go off like Roman candles in the blackest of night skies, never to be retrieved. There are no people, no beings in this world of ours, only ideas, all of which are our own - it is in them we live. And is there a single idea which weakens, exhausts, and enervates a man more than the notion of being a “good man”? A “virtuous man”? And is there one which enlivens him more than being a bad one? Of inflicting and delighting in his own, and in others’ suffering? There is not - only a fool, a blind mole rat of a man, a sniveling woman, nay, a weepy little girl, in the body of a man, would deny it.

And, needless to say, those enlivenings, those vivifications, those greatest pleasures to which a man can attain, consist primarily in his inducing suffering in others. To provoke them in some poor animal is of no consequence - there’s nothing in that, neither pleasure nor nobility, for the beasts are utterly unknowing and innocent. No, it is man in whom one must thrust the knife, up the asshole and into his very bowels, while taking great care to look him full in the face and eyes with the chilliest and most self-satisfied of smiles. For these things, these seeming creatures, that pass you by, these things to whom, in your more weak-minded moments, you attribute personhood, in whom you are sometimes tempted to imagine an inner world as vast and rich as your own - these things, I say, are nothing, nothing other than you yourself, no more worthy of consideration or kindness than is the shit you just flushed down the upstairs toilet, though, granted, not without having first taken a good, long look at it, full of the most delicious interest and inquisitiveness, an interest akin to that which you feign in the words that gurgle from the throats of these phantoms who are none other than you - these dream figures, concocted by you to provide merriment and annoyance, that particularly delicious merriment which results only from annoyance - constructed by you to distract you not from the shit you just flushed down the upstairs toilet a moment ago, but from the shit that you yourself are, that randomly fluctuating, momentarily amassing bit of flotsam which, but a moment later, becomes something quite other, a new, other, less familiar self - “other”, yes, but no less wearisome and awful, consisting only of more endless, idiotic running about, of projects with which you attempt to momentarily convince yourself you’re not a hair’s breadth from a ghastly death, of countless plans and exploits in which none of the dream phantoms you happened to have pulled out of your ass that morning ever have the slightest interest. Perhaps you should sleep then? That might help, no? Or, rather, perhaps masturbate? But then there’s always that gaping abyss which so inevitably and immediately opens up once you’ve managed to squirt, that black hole of misery which opens in your bowels a moment after having finished, of disgust with the vile, slimy gunk on your fingers and clothes, mixed, as it is, with no small fraction of curiosity and pride. But revulsion, over and above all, with yourself, with this world into which you have been thrown, or, more accurately, into which you have thrown yourself. Upon whom might you unload your misery? Perhaps were you to find someone to embrace, perhaps fuck, some dream phantom whom you could pretend is “out there”, once again, someone who is somehow capable of “knowing” you, who gives a damn whether you live or die, who professes to love you? But your dream phantoms are as vile, as self-involved, and as profoundly incomprehensible as what you know, understand, and experience as your self. What you are busy doing is not much other than refining the grimace with which you will greet yourself in the mirror that next unfortunate time you encounter it, making the image that much more hideous, more distorted, and more filled with a rage that would not be content had it the power to blot out the Milky Way and all the life contained within it, that which we know, and that which must surely exist elsewhere within it, all of it bound to be as vile as the life and existence with which we are familiar. For it too, the planet on which it arises, the doubtless gelatinous mucus and scum of which it is composed, is none other than one’s self, none other than you. Soldier down, that you might achieve what it is life wants and requires of you - to attain to that profoundest sorrow, that towards which you have been moving your entire life - to feel it, quite entirely as your self, at the moment of your expiring. For all your philosophizing, your mad scribblings, your engaging with these phantoms for the odd moment, only to experience the inevitable boredom laced with disgust after not more than an hour, the desperate necessity of getting away you then feel - these things are born of nothing other than your cowardice, your pretense, of your pretentious cowardice. You create, in these phantoms, so many cunts and cocks and snouts and pricks and assholes and sweat and spittle and stink - why is it, pray tell, that you have failed, over and over again, to create a heart? Oh yes, didn’t you do just that, at twenty, for a period of a few months, or so you told yourself at the time? A story whose potency lasted only for those months and no longer, to be followed by the cultivation of a swinishness so insistent and appalling that any poetry which had burned within you, for a moment, like a tiny, store-bought birthday candle on the cake of the brat you once were, was squashed, stomped endlessly upon, murdered many times over - not into some artifact of poetry or prose, mind you, no, no, no - rather into the snot drying within and dripping from that appalling nose of yours, into the stink emanating from your unwashed armpits, into the shit to which you, but a moment ago, were busy waving goodbye, into the spunk greasing your grubby fingers, wiped off on an unwashed leg or pair of too-often-worn jeans upon which you assume it will not be seen or remarked upon by the next incorporeal goblin whom you have dreamed up and then upon whom you have happened to chance. You live now only for your hatred, your greatest pleasure, nay, not your greatest, for that term makes no sense - you live now only for hatred, your ONLY pleasure, all that is left to you. You speak, and the words disgust you - you notice only the vile, slobbery origins of that speech, the worm that is your tongue darting this way and that over a regimen of decaying, brownish teeth, the poisonous spittle moistening your lips, or occasionally sucked back down your gullet, the words bubbling up from a black hole of nothing, some dismal, incomprehensible abyss, which are always a surprise to you, a source of amusement on rare occasions, but more often of horror. You speak, and are diverted from that next inevitably inconsequential thought by the smell of yourself, which you somehow neglected to notice heretofore. This body, this disguise, this meat suit, donned by temporarily aligning viscera, molecules - this body both revolts, and is revolting, to others and to our selves - it revolts, first and foremost, against our demand for it to not come immediately apart, to not meet the fate of the shit we just flushed down the upstairs toilet. Our body is neither more nor less than that shit, and it is striving, constantly striving, to slit the throat of that abominable farce of having been sewn together and forced to behave as if it were a self, of having to endure, of not suddenly detonating in the Hiroshima of its dreams, of its constant itching and inclination to be undone, to spew itself across the universe in an ecstasy of sputtering, nonsensical, divine, ecstatic madness, mayhem, and pandemonium. That time will not come in some mysterious, abstract future - it is happening right now, constantly gaining force and increasing its speed. Lie back and enjoy it. Embrace the shit. The upstairs toilet waits patiently, rather, more than a little impatiently, for quite a bit more than tomorrow’s morning shit. Ask not for whom it waits. It waits for you.

Crawl into yourself, drink your misery like a fine liqueur - it is, at least, a genuine feeling. Darkness, the dead, the living - there’s nothing to distinguish the one from the other. They are nothing but you, in any case - you being a more random than not assortment of dipshit neurotransmitters jumping about and across this or that synapse. Cling to your filthy, rotten past because it’s yours, and you have no way of unburdening yourself of it. It must mean something, yes? Why of course! It is you, after all. And because this is the case, it is incumbent upon you to smear this shit upon your present, upon your future, upon any of the dream phantoms you happen upon during the course of a day, and to assume those dream phantoms hear and understand that shit exactly as you would, were you listening to all the detestable nonsense bubbling out of your rancid mouth. You are a bag of entrails bathed in sauces cooked in the fires of your self-interest and sadism. Your choices are more than a little constricted - death, hypocrisy, intoxication, rage, and desire - followed, inevitably, by satiation and disgust. You would ennoble your solitude with fine words, with lie upon lie, with thinking and naming it wisdom, which is, were you to look at yourself momentarily with something other than hypocrisy, nothing other than your infantile grandiosity and solipsism, although there’s something to be said for solipsism, let’s not kid ourselves. It’s the truth of the world, and the only reliable source of our pleasure. And yet, the sound of your voice, even when speaking alone, sickens you - you see quite clearly that the only way to go forwards in an even minimally honest way is to sleep, to skip merrily down the path towards oblivion as rapidly and effectively as you can. In the presence of others, whom you readily recognize as figures of your imagination, you experience only regret, ennui, the brute, barbarous, mind-numbing repetition, the knowledge that you’ve seen and heard all of this before on an infinite number of occasions - these very same tunes, counterpoints, and counterfeit improvisations masquerading as inspiration. You are tired, bone tired. Sleep it must be then. It is all that is available, the only reliable narcotic. For now, at least.

Right and wrong, making a point, even to yourself - these things mean nothing to you. All that matters is keeping the din of all these nattering insects who flit about you to a minimum, to stop them from speaking to you, and from feigning their interest, when both you and they know full well that their interest is only in themselves, those selves which, as if in some “Alice in Wonderland” hall of mirrors, exist only in you. You know full well that when you find yourself in the presence of these beasts, the only way to achieve some sort of temporary ceasefire with them is to shut the fuck up and endure their perpetual pontifications, their beastly verbal monuments to themselves, the shit which flies out of their mouths so reliably and inevitably. For their vanity’s sake, you must make yourself the ground beneath them, a mat upon which they can wipe their stinking feet. And while you are forced to endure it? Well, you can philosophize, drink deep of the contempt which is boiling in your bowels, or watch yourself from ten thousand miles behind your eyes while attempting to remain reasonable, so that you are able somehow to not gleefully slit their throats. Those are your options. In addition, you can look at them as they truly are - bodies, nothing but bodies. And what are bodies? They are, every last one of them horrid, creaturely, existentially terrifying, disgusting, poisonous, comical, graceless, and poised on a hatpin above the charnel house. A source of much potential amusement! And the longer you stare, the more creaturely and unreal the being upon whom you gaze becomes, and, necessarily, the more creaturely and unreal you yourself become. In that particular moment, which is pressed against an eternity of equally stupid moments, each of which looks upon the other with utter incomprehension, just as you look upon that creature - time as confused a jumble as space now. Moments pressed against moments, like cheese against bread against meat in that disgusting stomach of yours, like words against words spoken to that beast upon whom your gaze has now alighted, like breath upon air, hatred upon mystification and confusion, and, all the while, the inevitable wish to impale the universe on a dagger forged of spite. Misanthropy is the least of it. The world is a mistake.

A mistake into and out of which we enter and leave in the most absurd and grotesque of fashions. Violently contracting wombs and bellies, thrashing wildly in fits and starts of fierce, savage, unbearable stretching, burning, ripping, accompanied by fiendish, scorching pain, in an overarching symphony of the most excruciating body-wide wretchedness, of ruptured membranes spurting thick gobs of blood everywhere, drenching the vile little head of the abominable crotch turd which now begins to poke its gelatinous, slime-encased head out of one stink-pit and into that far larger and infinitely more dangerous stink-pit, the one in which it will wring out its wearisome, pointless allotment of days. All the while a pale, piss-colored goop is blasting out from deep within the womb, as out of the cunt flow streams of bubbly, yellow piss, with everywhere the faint smell of hay, swallowed in the stench of the mountainous pile of shit which inevitably spews out of the mother’s ass, as that other, flesh-encased pile of shit continues to make its way out the other end. Push, bitch! Push out the monumental piles of manure you’ve been carrying in your bowels and womb these many days! Flood the world with your filth, your abominations, the one a source of only momentary disgust, the other doomed to host and inhabit a lifetime of horror, terror, misery, and torment - to both experience it and to inflict it. Perhaps the little blob will arrive with a veil over its hideous face, appropriately and ironically enough, for it is now to be the bride of death, wedded to it for all eternity. Perhaps the monstrous little barbarian has arrived swathed in gobs of cheese, smelling of tit-milk, which is to be wiped off in paroxysms of feigned ecstasy. Not long after, the thing becomes visible, that little slab of brownish beef, smelling like raw liver and lemon, and to which a hellish, whitish tapeworm is lustily attached - that most horrid of things - musty, metallic, blood-red and spongy, all of it resembling nothing more than a pot full of congealed, bloody excrement, a missive straight from the Hell from whence it has emerged. Eat, drink, and be merry, Husband! For this atrocity, this diabolical feast is your doing - your moronic, evil contribution to this ever burgeoning satanic swamp of misery, this world of ours - smile as if you’ve achieved something, for indeed you have! Exactly what rodents and cancer cells achieve - no less, and no more. Look tenderly, with a father’s love, upon that bloody lump of meat, which has just sloughed out of the very same hole into which you shoved, not all that long ago, that pathetic, little, much-cherished dick of yours, while you and she gurgled protestations of a love which didn’t then and has never existed - observe most diligently that hole from which has now emerged this monstrous baboon, this hunk of rotting flesh and worms. Listen to its sobs! Why, pray tell, dolt, do you think it sobs? Watch it pulsate, as you pretend this horror on which your eyes now feast does not make your bowels quake in terror, as it does the mother, who has become unrecognizable - busy, as she is, clutching her mucus-filled larva to her chest, while simultaneously realizing both that her life is finished, for it is now to be devoted only to the care of this evil, insatiable gremlin, and, moreover, that you are now quite beside the point. You’ve given her what her deepest self, of which she heretofore had been profoundly unaware, and of which she was only the unwitting servant and vessel, what that self has been wishing for since time immemorial, since the first, vile, famished, self-replicating molecule tragically appeared in some hot vent on shithole Earth, eons ago. You are now to be discarded. You have now become - implicitly, explicitly, and officially - a nothing, a thing to be, depending on the mother’s pleasure at this or that moment, a thing only to be plundered, swindled, pillaged, and sloughed off with a wave of contempt.

But no matter! In a period of only a few decades, this will play out in quite predictable ways, ways that will make this momentarily monstrous scene a very minor nightmare in the grand scheme of things - the silliest and most meaningless of dreams from which you shall never awaken. You’ll be lying in a ditch of one kind or another, your eyes gradually clouding, your skin pale, your temperature falling, falling, falling, your blood rushing to your lower extremities, as you stiffen and begin to putrefy. The stench will be beyond comprehension, but you’ll not notice it. Putrefaction, maggots, skeleton, fossil, dust, cloud - rain, rinse, repeat. The shitshow must go on, and so it shall. You’ve played not even a bit part. No one has, or ever could have. Dreams, Amelia. The false alarms of lives which never should have been.

And in between? For you? For that beastly, sweating, weeping, now hideous wife of yours? For that monstrous piece of once fetal, now fecal shit she’s just pushed out from that gaping maw which sits between her veiny, wrinkled thighs? Which have now become for you a thing of horror? There is time. Moments of time bouncing against one another like miserable subatomic particles forced into a momentary existence by some grandiose madman operating a gargantuan, labyrinthine supercollider far beneath the earth. Those moments would scurry back into a timeless void just as readily and eagerly as electrons and quarks, were they allowed to do so. Moments, like lonely soap bubbles, condemned to live alongside one another for but an instant, in an unalterable, cosmic loneliness - helpless, begging only to snap, crackle, and finally pop, to be done with it. And so they do and shall, having lived for the briefest sliver of eternity in a horrid hell, as we do and shall. It is no different for us. Infinite moments, infinite universes, all weeping, helpless, screaming, unheard by their neighbors, eviscerated by their loneliness and solitude, who appear and disappear exactly as they - abominations coughed up by a sadistic and quite mad demiurge, whose laughter is the only the thing to which those hopelessly solitary moments and beings are privy. Hateful, cruel laughter, ear-splitting, soul-crushing laughter. Listen - surely you hear it too? Of course you do. You feel the sadness - it is immense within you - all the irreconcilable moments of your life, impossible of any connection, sense, meaning - each a hell which might make of itself a thing of worth, had it the opportunity to connect with, to be known by another. But that has never been and will never be the case. There is only that damnable laughter from without, and the sobs, the endless sobs, the oceans of tears, from within. There is no world, no time, there is only what you feel - projected into the bubbles of the past, present, and future. And all those whom we pretend to know, who appear to give themselves to us freely, we invariably hate. It is only when they spurn us, or are unavailable, that we crave them. But of course, it is not they whom we crave. We covet only the way the dream of them has made us feel, the way it has distracted us from the torturous boredom and pain of our everyday existence, which assaults on all fronts, and against which we must make sure to erect barriers, in the forms of distractions. We wish to murder them all, in either case - more immediately when they make themselves readily available, but no less so when they disappear, betray, or reject us. Longing and disgust are the most intimate of bedfellows, and, more often than not, a threesome ensues, in which murderous thoughts sign on to the erotic play of our inner worlds. And they are delicious, these thoughts, so very delicious. In the doing, yes, but even and ever more so in the imagination. For it is in the imagination of vengeance or, better yet, of cold, unmotivated cruelty, that the soul blossoms into a gigantic, blood-red flower, upon which one rides through pink clouds in the most delicious of ecstasies - bludgeoning, terrorizing, oppressing, molesting, mutilating... Ah, it is divine! It is the only thing that is the least bit divine in this rancid, sweltering, blistering furnace into which we have been dumped, against our will, for a series of instants, not a one of which communicates with the other. To snuff out the lives of these beasts, of all beasts, of all life, of the inanimate world, of the sun, the galaxy, the universe. No brutality, no crime could ever suffice, could ever compensate one for the crime of having been dragged into this nightmare world, this catastrophe, this Hiroshima will envelops us, one and all. But we, that is to say, “you” and “I”, care not a whit for that “all”, only for ourselves. We are concerned only to avenge ourselves of this crime, to silence the laughter, the one who laughs, and his accursed creation, all of it. Including, in the very last scene of the final act, and with a pleasure much outstripping the destruction and death wrought by us up until that moment, ourselves.

Needless to say, one murderous moment, rapturous as it might be, cannot ever be meaningful, for meaning, if it existed, which it surely does not, would necessarily rely on a series of moments, one of which would possess some means of knowing, infecting, befriending, becoming another moment, but is, rather, a series of unattached and freely floating spores, never to have the slightest intercourse with what is floating directly adjacent to them - quite unknown, and quite incapable of being known, in the ether. So indeed then - live for the murderous moment, even moments, though they know not of one another’s existence. Drink deeply of them, you who don’t exist either, for the whole thing is a jumble of absurdity - pebbles strewn randomly on a nonexistent beach by a giggling, idiot god, and signifying nothing.

Assaulted by memories, all of which are unreal, torturous, and less than meaningless, our heads become a sort of stale cheese, numb caskets perched upon our necks, as if they were bits of moronic styrofoam discarded from cheap Ikea furniture packaging, all of which pulls us into an appalling state of stupor and paresthesia, intermittently interrupted by painful hunger and mystification, in which we float through what appears to be the physical world before us, which we, at the same time, know full well is a mirage, nothing more than an unlicked postage stamp buried deep in a drawer full of scraps of letters - to ourselves, to everyone we’ve ever known, loved, despised, felt nothing for - letters which we never had the patience, motivation, or talent to bring to fruition, much less send. In which we find, as well, perhaps a filthy spoon, which we haven’t the slightest wish to clean, or a cricket, whom we momentarily consider attempting to catch, and whose life we might then attempt to preserve by ferrying the creature gently outdoors, but soon think better of it, as we fall involuntarily into the deepest and most familiar of apathies and oblivions - given also that said cricket is nothing other than a momentary hallucination of some doppelgänger with whom we are unfamiliar - he who had not the slightest notion of cleaning either spoons or himself, for that matter - this doppelgänger who has momentarily co-opted our senses, this dead thing, this zombie, for whom spoons and crickets are nothing other than the chatter of worlds we neither care for nor inhabit - infinite, incomprehensible, internal and external worlds - merging, spinning, lacerating and eviscerating us, blowing through our bowels like galaxies, up from and out of which we once crawled, only to find ourselves beneath some unfamiliar bed, attempting to hide ourselves from creatures whose only pleasure consisted in attempting to convince themselves they were alive through nocturnal rituals of sadism passed down to them from ancestors spun out through bubbles of time hearkening back to the first rogue DNA molecule, which was, indeed, initially confused, yes - stunned and astonished - but which soon found its bearing, felt its passions arising within it, and came to understand its destiny - to rip, shred, torture, murder, and consume. A passion we all share, once we’ve either been sufficiently honest with ourselves or have been forced by some vigorous or excruciating circumstance to cast off the shackles of civilization’s nonsensical prohibitions, shoved down our throats both by weaklings, convinced they’ll be left alone, once they’ve finished shoving those rules of gold, which they long ago invented, down our throats, and by tyrants, whose wish is nothing other than to keep us imbecilic, harmless, and obedient. But of that most of us remain unaware. What we are aware of is, above all else, this intolerable, sharp, racking otherness and profound loneliness - this beast within us, which is us - screaming into the void to be touched, known, loved. We screech, we bellow, we howl into the void of a world which is not real, where we find only the echoes of our putrefying bowels, written into everything we see, everything we encounter - be it week-old roadkill or fireworks of celestial northern lights shooting through the night sky.

With art we sometimes delude ourselves that we have pierced through a sort of veil, a veil which keeps us from what so often eludes us in our mindless daily lives, that we have somehow been made privy to the interior world of this or that genius, and that we are no longer entirely condemned to the execrable isolation we so often feel in our daily lives, shut off from any and all beings amongst whom we make our way through this venal and endlessly petty world. But this is, needless to say, the purest nonsense. The artwork serves only as a well-crafted vehicle enabling us to bore down to some depth of ourselves, to shine a floodlight on terrains we previously had not the remotest clue existed within us, that were already very much there, only heretofore unobserved by us because unavailable. Were we to be honest, we would see, with a great deal of certainty, that our response to a work of genius is only further, irrefutable proof of our hopeless solitude - that there has only ever been, and only ever shall be: us, ourselves, this thing, this rancid bag of meat in which we find ourselves imprisoned, this nightmare, this stinking, overly familiar set of terrors and confusions, this body which betrays us so constantly and consistently, settling down momentarily only to rise again, full to bursting with some new set of pains, and with omens of imminent deteriorations of one sort or another - of the putrefaction which we observe in the unrecognizable images of ourselves in mirrors, which terrify us, annihilate us and betray us, at every turn and at every moment. We are attracted not least because, not having to acquaint ourselves with said genius, in the flesh, in his or her stark and reliably disappointing, more likely disgusting, reality, we may project on to them and their works parts of ourselves which now feel elevated, and which may, at times, be so, but they are far more likely to be just prosaic parts of ourselves for which we are suddenly much gladdened to find that we now have permission from seemingly on high to believe these objectively commonplace character traits and sensibilities of ours somehow noble. And from this we then deduce both our own superiority, and the inferiority of others, who are now worthy only of our impatience and scorn. How delicious! Snobs are only those who are foolish enough to broadcast this self-deception. And yet the faux-humble lover of late Beethoven quartets, with and through which he might very well have the most delightful, though necessarily and exclusively self-referential experiences, is not one whit less a snob. His deceptions are just a bit cagier. Of himself, first and foremost, but no less of those around him.

Having been awakened by vapors wafting up from hell, which clear both sinuses and mind, one sees what all this has been all along, these so-called “people”, but not only them - all these rooms, beds, blankets, dogs, trees, squirrels, mountains, lakes, ponds - ponds no more full of scum than the so-called “people”, rooms, beds, and blankets. It’s all of a piece, a monstrous piece, a practical joke of a universe, a universal practical joke, all the joke of some sadistic, Gnostic demiurge, some Yaldabaoth, whose hidden laughter pours out from black clouds, from beneath anthills one encounters on walks through scandalously unhinged forests, from everywhere, from and in everything - every inch of our bodies, within, without, right, left, above, below, before, now, to come. A seething, microbial world, buried within and beneath black algae, which demands we mourn this or that piece of conspiratorial filth whom the present tyrant happens to favor at some particular moment, and wink while the heads are blown off tens of thousands of starving children. Black algae, black march to the scaffold, from which our heads too are to roll. Stare at anything, some momentarily gorgeous natural phenomenon, some woman whom you desire desperately, your beloved dog, child - stare long enough, and they will all become every bit as absurd and meaningless as a word you’ve mindlessly repeated scores of times, and, in so doing, have revealed the emptiness at its core, at its speaker’s core, and at the very core of existence. And that is the optimistic outcome - one of apathy and absurdity, both of which carry the potential for adopting a pleasant, even comical distance. It is, however, far more that likely these visions, beings, and body parts will reveal themselves as, and remain horrific, nightmarish abominations.

It’s all within you, whether it be a harmless, localized rash, or an alarming spot on some internal organ just now revealed in a malevolent scan ordered by your satanic physician - these things were already within you, in your spirit, your soul, there to be randomly and momentarily illumined by some remark, scent, melody, counterpoint, fugue, buzzsaw, enticing woman, or horrid crone - they are all already there. You take them for a sort of global truth, when they really are just hobby horses upon which your ass happened to find itself at that particular moment, through no virtue or wisdom of its own. Predictably and invariably, this horse then finds bushels of hay upon which to feed itself in the bowels of your memory, whether you are aware of said memories or not, to reinforce and nourish itself, to provide it with the girth and confidence to assert that you, after all this time, are surely NOW seeing clearly - that the madness and folly of your youth is surely a thing of the past, now that this unassailable truth or worldview upon which you’ve just happened to install your bunghole has been grasped. And yet, after a few days, weeks, months, or years, this bold steed becomes the most ephemeral of beings - a lunatic dream, something which you couldn’t possibly have thought, believed, or felt - a demented pony, shuffling aimlessly in a hall of mirrors in some sub-Saharan desert, struggling to survive, while, at the very same time, half wishing for death. The Stoics, those laughable fools (but no more so than the other hordes of cults through which your psyche has passed, mesmerized momentarily by this or that bit of nonsense, and compelling you to then obnoxiously proselytize your friends and acquaintances) succeeded only in implanting within you the burning desire to slit this or that new acolyte’s throat. And you did it, you couldn’t help but do it, you were more than happy to do it. Now, and only in this moment, do we find what we pretend to ourselves is wisdom. What we’ve actually found is just another bubble of soap, which, when pricked, smells, at first, of a fart seeming to have been dabbed with the fragrance of a buttered croissant, but which, after a few moments, reveals its bouquet to be only that of one’s vanity and blindness, a cheap cologne which unfailingly offends the sensibilities of those unfortunate enough to inhale its fetid perfume. It is the dollar-store toilet water of which you, of which we all are made. Air the room, flush the toilet, fumigate vigorously - then rinse and repeat. During a flush in which it feels appropriate to do so, have an accomplice violently thrust your head into said toilet with a plunger, perhaps while he or she whistles the forest bird’s little ditty from Act 2 of Wagner’s Siegfried. Last week you were a Stoic, this week you’re busy reading Marx, next week you’ll more than likely be lying ice-cold in some discount morgue. And it shan’t be a set of glorious symphonic variations being performed, rest assured. You are a neurotic. You are at least intermittently aware that these momentarily, seeming-to-be-true bits of yourself, which you had at first inhaled with delight, become, not very long after, utterly incomprehensible, that is to say, what it was about these things that had previously entranced you is now something which you can no longer even locate, and which utterly mystifies you. You cannot remember those pieces of that apparently now-dead self which found any interest or took the least pleasure in such things. And at such moments you feel your soul, the existence of which you never did and never will believe in, slipping through the cracks into the air all around you that you’d barely noticed, out through every pore of the body which betrays you constantly, each day in some terrifyingly novel way, and with considerably increased and renewed vigor. You grasp this air - but there’s nothing there - it, and you are nowhere to be found - within, without - there is only the abyss, which (who?) has conveyed to you quite plainly on innumerable occasions that it despises you. Not to mention the ceiling, which is about to fall upon you as well, after which the sky, and, finally, the heavens in which the Gnostic God is busy buggering a host of angelic assholes, as depicted so charmingly in those miscellaneous apocryphal gospels of which you’d once been so fond. And suddenly you are overwhelmed with loneliness, with the wish to see, to embrace, to kiss Mademoiselle X, knowing full well that what you desire is only to remain in that desire, not to risk fulfilling it - for to see her, to embrace her, to, heaven help us, possess her, would lead only to disappoint, disgust, jealousy, dysphoria, and a host of demons chuckling and cackling the moment the spunk shot out of your body, the moment the interview was over, or simply the very moment you set eyes upon her. Such is the way in which the demiurge has set the rules for this dime-store board game in which we all find ourselves - dragged, as we are, this way and that by the metaphysical magnets which lurk just beneath us - we know not why or how, only that it is so - we are all not very different from those plastic, pint-sized hockey players strutting and fretting upon the plastic fields of arcade games played by children in the bowels and hovels of corrupt capitalist cloisters and community centers, with those despicable smirks pasted on their vile faces, and with the grease of cheap, breaded, fried fowl fomenting in their obese, entitled, boyish bowels.

Belief in this sort of what is most likely entirely metaphysical nonsense has been a constant in mankind’s puny, wretched head since he first roamed the savannas and, doubtless, well before. We’ve all experienced things and events which seem to have preceded from some sort of moral necessity, at the same time that it is clear to most of us that they are nothing of the sort, that they are random, chaotic, and accidental, that even if they are “determined”, moral necessity has clearly played no part in them. And yet it is more than usual for an elderly person to look back on their lives, whether they have been more pleasant than not or have contained an appalling preponderance of suffering - to look back and see it all as possessing some sort of instructive, didactic meaning - as if it were all of a piece, a sort of epic, which had to be thus, that in no way could have been otherwise - as if it had all been mapped out, as in a play of the greatest quality, as if, for the individual at least, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” It’s clear to us that a great deal of this arises from the fact that we’ve been cast into the world with this or that character, which snaps us back upon some predictable road or other, like migrating salmons, tides, or pendulums. We all pursue what is appropriate to the character with which we’ve been thrown into this shitshow - this or that spider spins this or that web, this or that bear hibernates in such and such a den. This is a simple enough assertion, a truism, if we merely consider the character we’ve been given, been blessed with or cursed. And yet the world seems to give us both what we are and what we crave, what we always were, are now, must be, and will die as, what is most correct for a being such as us, not as in what is most soothing or beneficial, rather what is most correct, in the sense in which the fates of protagonists in epic tragedies are correct. We say things were “bound to happen”. What does this mean? Is it as simple as that they were “bound to happen” to such a one as us? We hardly control the motion of the moon and stars. And yet we are allied with them, puzzle pieces in the universal jigsaw puzzle, which would appear as no puzzle at all to a being standing outside what appears to be chaos to us monkeys, stranded as we are on a flying rock. It, and we, might seem the work of a very fine, nay, transcendental artist, one full of wisdom, who sculpts, writes, or composes works with the most astonishing and self-assured technique, one whose foresight is seemingly infinite, and who provides those works with the deepest and most satisfying coherence. But that coherence and foresight cannot possibly exist within us. We are insects, borne aloft on a wind which is wild and powerful and chaotic, yet somehow intelligible to us, at least in retrospect. This is all palpably absurd and deeply obscure, and yet we all feel it - the atheist no less than the most simple-minded religious person. This can all be readily dismissed as teleology, new-age nonsense, as the purest gibberish - these obviously infantile notions of justice and karma, of a universe which somehow dispenses justice as if it were nothing other than a vast cosmological preparatory school or monastery - there is no end to the refinements of palpable nonsense to which man has gone seeking to justify this persistent, inescapable intuition, just as surely as every thoughtful man rejects it. And yet every man is nonetheless convinced of it, by virtue of his experience, more and more so as he ages, and never more so than at the end of life. Omens are not exclusively the domains of fools and grifters - we’ve all felt them, and we’ve all believed and continue to believe in them. And if this life is but a dream (though very few of us are rowing merrily through it), then it’s taking place in some sort of mind, and does not every blockhead become a sort of genius in his dreams? And if there is anything to all this nonsense, if we are all indeed mucking about in some sort of cosmological, symphonic composition, ought we not complain to the music director that it is the most abominable of pieces? With the most execrable of endings? Which almost never ends as we would have imagined, as we, or others, felt or feel that it should have ended? There is the occasional death which reflects the life that preceded it, e.g., “He died as he lived”. But that is the exception - brutal chaos is the rule. All of which is to say that the instincts which cause us to consider our lives as the greatest of Sophoclean tragedies are as likely as not to be only the feeblest of self-justifications and fairy tales. With this in mind, we trudge onwards, to meet our doom, with (at least we console ourselves) some minimal honesty. Even if the design is indeed there, it clearly does not love us. When one falls down the stairs, and arrives on the landing a heap of broken bones, rest assured that it was precisely the right set of stairs and injuries for that particular individual in that particular moment - as if the universe had been waiting patiently yet assuredly for centuries for that one, single, graceless misstep. Laugh not at the absurd design of the thing, but at your previous willingness to pretend it was meaningful - laugh at the two-bit, cosmic vaudeville act into which we’ve all been thrown. It’s all you have left, all any of us have left, the only genuine thing that remains to us - other than grievous pains, soul-crushing longings, and suffocating boredom.

Well, that, and sleep - delicious and milk-laced, primordial, bestial sleep - where one’s most abominable nightmare is the source of a thousandfold more pleasures than one’s greatest daytime delight, for in sleep one is God, the demiurge, the abyss, the heavens, the inner, the outer. One’s shriveled insect of a self, that squashed and bogus pretense one walks through the day pretending to be, might very well be horrified, shaken, shocked, and unnerved. But that self is to who one really is as an infinitesimal, unnoticed rash on one’s buttocks is to one’s heart - it is to be scoffed at and discarded. And in doing so, one then stands at the empyrean gates, privy to boundless, drunken eternities of luxurious, winged ecstasies to which one can then abandon oneself - ecstasies of love, of unimaginable cruelties, cruelties to oneself and to one’s enemies, many arising simply from the love of cruelty itself, that is to say, lacking the slightest reason from without. When the ceiling of a crumbling, ramshackle forest cottage becomes the vault of heaven, the cricket in the bathroom sings as if he were the Archangel Gabriel - singing, as he rubs his little wings one upon the other, melodies, nay, symphonies, of unimaginable beauty - lost, sacred cantatas of Bach, newly discovered and unheard until this very moment; the overture to the opera about the Buddha Wagner toyed with writing, having completed Parsifal; or the most heartrending and gorgeous melody of one’s own invention, in a style in which one hadn’t the faintest idea one could compose. And, needless to say, above all else, it is the charm of this risk-free embrace of death one cherishes, after which one so often feels renewed, yet just as often fails to recognize what has been lost. What precisely is it that has been lost? The self you were but a moment ago, the self of the night before. It is a very different being that now arises from sleep, which now awakens from that little death, a being that does not entirely recognize the one that embraced sleep so sensuously just a few hours ago. Where has he gone, that being? We don’t give it a second thought. Were it an actual resurrection, we should be astonished. But because it is a different being who has now emerged from the corridors of sleep, there is not the slightest amazement - everything seems just as it has always been, from this being’s point of view, who has quite forgotten the self so willingly cast off just hours ago. Perhaps that previous self now wanders in some Asphodel Meadow, or more likely Hades - a staggering, miserable, perpetual insomniac, seeking a no longer extant world, finding only dark shades, grievous and famished looking, with torturous looks of longing engraved on their long faces, playing inscrutable variants of something resembling chess in grim pastures. But now this new being arises, perhaps with the solution to some problem which had irked and confused his previous, cast-off self, quite pleased with himself, and scurries off excitedly to put this fresh solution to the test. And then, more than likely, having once achieved his goal, sinking into the deepest despondency, for the solution, the achievement, having now been accomplished, is now, immediately and necessarily, a dead thing. Not a sleeping thing, which might emerge, like some butterfly or Phoenix, to take wing, to blaze and soar through azure skies, but a cold, lifeless, inert thing - a hateful thing, which has betrayed its maker utterly in its having been brought to completion, a lump of coal dumped on to what one had hoped would have been the most sumptuous and delectable meal. And then, invariably, the urge to sleep returns, to die, to beat this all down, this Ponzi scheme of existence, to lock it in some leaden strongbox and dump it in a deep, blood-red sea. You feel it arising within you, that not unpleasant pressure in the forehead and around the eyes - the eyes themselves slightly burning, closing, giving way, begging for the workday to come to a close and be sent home, where the familiar opium den of stupefied sleep beckons, like some narcotic, Oriental harlot heaving her perfect breasts towards you, gently and silently mouthing words which don’t matter - only the motion of her mouth matters, of her lips, of the little shrugs and tugs of her eyes as she beckons, this sleep goddess, this angelic hustler, who gently caresses the lids of your eyes, closes them, her musky smell carrying you off into the deepest and most fragrant stupor - this sleep, where every phantom of your past will float through space, exchanging bodies, expressing things to you they never did or could in daylight, in waking life - things which they most certainly feel and have always felt - the lover her loathing of you, the always collegial colleague his wish to slit your throat, the loving mother her wish that you’d never been born. These opaque, black boxes with whom you’ve spent a lifetime interacting, these angels now become fiends, but being truly neither - these phantoms who know you as little as you them, but who are only, ultimately, you, the lover and enemy of one’s self, the hero and villain of one’s life, the one running desperately from pain and boredom, and the one in whom it is created. We do not muddy the waters to make them appear deep. We find ourselves in mud - more precisely, in shit, which we find, to our surprise, and, if we are in the mood for self-pity, to our horror, is not the slightest bit deep - is only a surface, a mirror, in which we perceive the vapidity of ourselves. If one is lucky enough to project some negligible yet somehow still noble portion of oneself on to another, forgetting not for a moment that that other is merely one’s self as well, in a disguise of one’s own invention, one is pleased - one might very well then have a sensation of longing, of love, of aesthetic contemplation or even ecstasy - for a moment, perhaps a few moments, never more - never longer than one’s longest physical climax, which is never a matter of any longer than several seconds. And then comes the stunned return to the idiot body, that gaseous, fetid stink-pit, from which one is destined to escape for never more than an instant. Hell is most certainly other people, as well as all the things of this world, including the creations of those people who live in you. One wearies of them. Why? Because one wearies of nothing more than oneself, and their existence is nothing other than your, and only your hallucination, the phantasmagorias of a poltergeist who’s been thrown into an alien world, who grasps at mirages with arms that are stumps, doomed, rooted to the spot - a withered, dying, nutrient-starved stump of a tree in the world of one’s imagination, which never does other than disappoint, for it creates, desires, and, without fail, falls back upon itself - the slimy, viscous meat puppet which is the source of that imagination. A grizzled, elderly Sade in the Bastille, conversing with a spider of his own invention. One’s bread and circuses can be the scum-filled landfill of contemporary culture; or they can be Keats or Webern - no matter - either way, one is no less doomed to the hell that is one’s self.

Condemned all the more, truth to tell. For the clever man is constantly confabulating, and those confabulations are hardly restrained to matters of the intelligence - they very much extend to matters of the heart - it is, in fact, there where they operate most intensively and ruthlessly. When speaking to an object of which you are fond, or for which you feel contempt, when embracing them, or even when thrashing them mercilessly, you’re not speaking to, embracing, or thrashing whatever it is they might, in fact, be, but rather a sort of scarecrow which your imagination has fastened to them, and which conceals them, if it is true that they were ever actually anything in the first place, at least from your point of view. It is with this scarecrow that you converse, it is she whom you embrace, whom you kick to the ground on a whim and without a second thought - a dime-store puppet whom you have created to serve your momentary needs, projections, and wants. You could not see this creature whom you’ve thus hidden, costumed, and manicured if you tried - in point of fact, there is no way in which you could try, for to do so would imply that you had realized and acknowledged to yourself that it was only you who had constructed this theater and her in the first place - this play, this actor - and that she was created, made of, and conjured out of nothing other than you. And yet, ironically, the image you have of her is every bit as shadowy and obscure as the one you have of yourself - the one you see when you look, puzzled, amazed, distrustful, shocked, and disgusted at your reflection in a mirror. It is only when you chance upon this creature in an utterly novel situation, especially one in which she is unaware of your presence, that you might suddenly see, to what will likely be your horror, this thing, this creature, this fictional woman of your own invention, composed, as she is, as they, and you, and we all are, of endless weird angles and imperfect flesh, stumbling along in what you might never previously have observed a comically absurd, unseemly, imperfect manner - at any rate, in a manner diametrically opposed to the way in which you had previously imagined her. She is suddenly now a creature, and a creature only - no longer a being with a name, much less a being with a name whom you loved or despised, but a creature comparable to those you’d far more likely encounter in a park or forest or zoo - phantasmagorical, incomprehensible, and profoundly disconnected from the reality in which you fancy it is that you exist - hopelessly other, with no use for, interest in, or possible means of engaging in any meaningful contact with you. And it is at such moments that you will suddenly look at your own outstretched hand, the extremities of your body, or your face in the mirror, and discover precisely the same thing - some nameless creature, in a body as foreign to you as a rock, a boulder, a mountain, a planet, a galaxy, a thing spinning through space with some apparent agenda which you cannot grasp, on which you are borne along like some weeping tail of a comet struggling to eject itself from one unhappy solar system into another, whose grass you’ve been told is somewhat greener, and to be preferred - like some bleeding hemorrhoid hanging off the ass of a testosterone-crazed, male elephant hellbent on lacerating his rival, unable to see anything other than intermittent clumps of his own cells, drenched in rust-colored blood, falling to the jungle floor, all the while clutching madly at his skin, limbs, and extremities, for fear he too will meet the very same fate - shaking himself violently, rattling his brain about in its idiot case of bone, blinking furiously and repeatedly enough to realize that no, he is you - and you are still just in that room, observing the woman whom you thought you loved, and who now sits there, staring into space, ignorant that you are watching, a thing from whom that dream-stuffed scarecrow of your own invention has fled - a thoroughly naked thing, clothed in this or that garment, it is true, but naked nonetheless, as naked as the chipmunk which just scurried beneath her and the jay about to fly over her head - denuded, defenseless, tottering on a tightrope poised above unspeakable tragedy and suffering, staring hopelessly ahead, oblivious of you and of everything other than her own little fables, the scarecrows whom she too fastens upon others, whom she recognizes and with whom she honestly and genuinely interacts as little and as infrequently as you do. Between you and her is a gulf wider than any in this most unlikely unreal physical world - the gulf between two impoverished imaginations, long-ago stuffed in iron-bound lockboxes and tossed into a bottomless sea. To approach her frankly and straightforwardly would be a surreal agony, in which the harpoon on which you are already impaled would only be thrust deeper, and then another would be stuck up your ass, through your entrails, and out your bloodied, jabbering mouth. You’d be doomed, if you were sufficiently foolish to approach her, to spout inanities from which you would both recoil in disbelief and horror. And then it would occur to you - the ailment has the most obvious and simple of cures! You need only imagine, intensely imagine, that you are the man of a yesterday in which you did not know this creature, one who had not yet met her, or that you are the man of a tomorrow in which you have both tired of and grown to loathe her. And all the illusions will then vanish, of their own accord - this Sarah Bernhard of your own invention, acting in this play authored by no one other than yourself, the lines of which you have compelled her to learn, or that you at least imagine you hear coming out of her mouth, as well as this alien, anonymous creature whom you presently observe at a distance - this mysterious whatever she is, this thing - as foreign to you and your experience as a ferret, as an insect, as a reptile, as a piece of dried dung upon which you take care not to tread.

So you’re free - it’s freedom, of a sort - freedom from her, and from your absurd and imaginary refashioning of her, at least. And yet, to yourself, be it that self with a name, a past, and a memory, or that terrifying creature that stares back at you from the mirror, whose outstretched hands you see but do not recognize, or, more correctly, recognize clearly do not belong to you, of whom you are not, have never been, and will never be free, for the bastard chases, brutalizes, and eviscerates you even in your dreams - the fear is that this self in which you are incarcerated will do the very same in death - at the moment of death, and through an eternity as drenched with stupidity, boredom, terror, and pain as the one to which you are presently condemned. Every night you’re down and out, in some hellish pit with this fellow, mutilated by the dread of some dream, of tomorrow, of the fear that whatever bad tunes you seemed still able to occasionally hear or cough up are about to disappear into an inaudible ether, of all momentary beguilements vanishing, now that you’re confronted with this awful gnostic demiurge, the one who is not willing to lie to you, or to at least tell you soothing fables while he stabs you. You look about wildly for any distraction, for any bit of nonsense with which to divert yourself, a victim on whom to lay hands, a fist to turn upon another or yourself, but it is not to be. Madness, in the face of truth, in the face of its ruthless sadism, is helpless. The reality is that each moment is now nothing other than an eternal death agony, and that, faced with having no more scarecrows to fasten on this or that mannequin, no lies that continue to be effective, for all the old one have removed their masks and fled, no bodies left which might have once deflected, detained, deluded, or entertained you, but which now reveal themselves as nothing other than shoddily assembled bits of random internal and sense organs thrown together in some two-bit factory, staffed by blind mole rats with nothing on their minds other than the shoddily assembled bits of random internal and sense organs of other blind mole rats - that, faced with this black hole of dysphoria from which you will never again emerge, you acquiesce to go under, to drown, to not care whether yours shall be a dignified and noble exit or a humiliating and absurd one, concerned only that it be quick. There is to be no more sadness or grief - no more scraps of the misguided hope in which you had previously indulged yourself.

Between the three or four moments of inspiration and the countless swallows, rumblings, excretions, greedy desires, and inanities burbling out of his mouth that constitute a man’s life, we find the proper measure of his existence. And the truth is that the culmination of any life “well lived”, or “honestly lived” is a scowl of misery that he genuinely embraces only on his deathbed - the final acceptance of the dumb, blind intuition which has been growing in his guts and gnawing at him for decades - the admission that the world is, and that his life has been, nothing other than a nightmare. If then, on that deathbed, the horribly misshapen frown on his distorted and withered face reflects this reality, there will be, at least, some small shred, some hint on that face which displays for all to see: “This man has seen what’s what. This man knows and understands, and is unwilling to push the truth down his gullet any longer - to coddle and embrace his filthy family members, to make amends, to give them the pleasure of a ‘good death’, which would allow them all to then return to their filthy hovels in which they live their coarse, vulgar lives, to slap themselves good-naturedly on the back, to primp and preen about like peacocks, and to flatter themselves what wonderful children or siblings they were.” No, we’ll have none of that at a good death. If that man who’s leaving for no shore at all, rather for that idiot blackness which preceded him and to which he now returns, if he is to be at one with himself, to be honest about what he was, what they were, what all this was, well then - he will, if he has the strength, start violently up and piss in their mouths, shit on them, if he is able, strangle them, stuff them in the hospice wastebasket - let’s make no mistake about this. It’s only the dying fool who smiles and bleats generic platitudes to soothe his despicable relatives, while at the same time attempting cowardly to soothe himself. The legacy of his life has been nothing other than a series of stomachs, which have themselves been naught but crematoria for tens of thousands of creatures - snouts, cocks, cunts, lies, betrayals, assholes pretending to be gardenias, not a heart to be found amongst them, unless it has been stomped upon sufficiently to no longer care whether it is to be once again involuntarily displayed as some sort of cruel, perverse trophy. And then? It will either be discarded, or simply fold in upon itself and die - its only remaining wish. Anyone who continues to live past a certain age cannot have done so without bathing himself in arsenic, stuffing himself with rot until he himself becomes rot - for rot, already decayed, can manage to keep itself in a state adjacent to life for many years, having already decomposed to such a large extent. There’s nowhere much left to which he or it can aspire or at which he or it can arrive - if there had been any momentary poetry within, it died long ago. He is now a wraith whose only hope of overcoming his self-loathing, of achieving some sort of dime-store chivalry or high-mindedness, consists in comprehending, accepting, and incorporating the rot of which both he and the world is quite entirely composed.

And that includes grasping hold of his hatred and clutching it to his breast, for it is above all else what he most cherishes, and what motivates him to keep inhaling the rancid air he must unwillingly share with all the beings whose throats he would so willingly and merrily slit. Oh, to live forever, to be that insomniac barber who’d put Sweeney Todd to shame - upon whose stylist’s chair would sit kings, noblemen, vagrants, crones, girls in their first blush of sensuous exultation, children, fetuses ripped from the wombs of pregnant women who had sat upon that chair but moments ago, enemies, lovers, former enemies, former lovers - a splendid time would be guaranteed for him and him alone. Of course, were I he, I would be compelled to speak with them first, taking care to entice them to their doom in the most merry and cheerful of manners, as in, “How’s the weather, the Mrs., the children?” The hypocrisies and inanities would cascade out of my mouth, barely betraying their mucous origins, streaming out like a fetid, polluted creek in some squalid, industrial backwater - nothing, really, other than a bit of involuntary shitting, somewhat more convoluted and a tad more pretentious, perhaps, but not a whit less mechanical, mindless, and moronic. I’d suck in my breath, and observe the words arising from some internal cesspool of which I haven’t the slightest knowledge - and yet there they are! - the occasional witticisms, ‘tis true, but nearly always suffocated beneath the more usual barrage of inanities, which pour like a fountainhead of caustic stomach acid through my gullet, past my ill-kempt, rotting teeth, out of my unwashed lips into the ears of a victim who hears nothing of what it was I’d imagined I’d intended, only what was judged sufficiently inoffensive and perhaps soothing enough to make its way past the barb-wired fields of indifference and vanity with which every man surrounds himself. We can never simply “leave it there”. It is never enough. We must coddle, reform, resend our words - we can never simply leave them as they are and deserve to be, rotting in the air like some massive, unflushed shit in a foul-smelling public restroom, which, at the very least, has the dignity and decorum to not shuffle about overmuch, all the while spouting nonsense in an effort to draw attention to itself. We worship all these bits of shit we fling into the air - so fond of them are we that we can be distracted by them to the point of forgetting what their purpose was in the first place: to divert and distract the blockhead presently sitting upon our barber’s chair from what is to momentarily descend upon him. Sometimes we are overcome by a wave of apathy, or even pity, if the lump, the imbecile sitting there and babbling away is ill in some obvious way, crippled, or perhaps just a jump or two from death without any intervention required on our part, and so it is we let them go their torturous way, as we would some pathetic rodent, who’d been wounded in some way or other, and had stumbled into our pantry. We would simply usher them out into the black night to die, with no further assistance from us. Were they to invade our living quarters, healthy, famished, with an agenda to nibble on this or that, to warm themselves in our bedclothes, or perhaps hide themselves away in some closet in which their purring, singing, or squealing gave them away, we’d smash their little brains into a pulpy, viscous puddle, which we would then scoop up, carry downstairs, and throw into that same black night in which their sick, wounded cousin would most likely still be dragging himself from bush to bush, deciding beneath which it would be most propitious and perhaps even pleasant to expire.

To nurse your hatred is the only really reliable source of joy, of sustenance, of indulging the passions. Keep a scroll within your mind of all the viciousness and depravity you have encountered in your life-a scroll which, were you to unfurl it, would stretch from here to the Kuiper Belt and beyond. You need not be witty or literary when recording these things, just piss them cheerfully on to the parchment, in all their blatant, naked dissipation and viciousness. Unfurl this scroll sufficiently in your mind so that you see its letters before your eyes throughout the day - think of it as your little fuckfest with Jesus, the two of you on your own little road towards Damascus, your own little, ever-present fiery cross, which demands of you, no less than it did of Constantine, that by its sign, you are to conquer, that is to say, you are to choke up, expel, and inflict your rage, disgust, and cruelty upon all those who cross your path. This is a theophany that will never desert you, a revelation that will enliven the remainder of your days, give you purpose, meaning, a will to drag your sorry ass out of bed each morning. Yes, purpose, meaning - in a world quite without either of those things. Your little revolt against the absurd shithole in which you find yourself. Camus would approve. Perhaps not of the garroting of throat after throat in your little shop of horrors, although one never knows. It’s not like we can dig up and ask the blowhard. This hatred is not all, it is not meat nor drink, to recast Ms. Millay - neither slumber nor a roof against the rain. Hate cannot fill the thickened lung with breath, neither clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone. But enough of her, that drug-addled, narcissistic cunt. There is no need of flowery words here. Were you to lose your grip, your embrace of hatred, or when you lose them, for, rest assured, it can happen - suddenly, what do you know? There’s the old bastard, Death, standing there, stinking, in a barrel of shit right beside your bed, filling you with the petty regrets you thought you’d discarded ages ago - you’re suddenly this sniveling, apologetic, beat up piece of garbage in a hospice bed, desperately trying to make amends with a world which you knew full well, when you were strong and your mind was razor sharp, wasn’t worth spitting on. You’re suddenly this thing to be pitied, a sort of puppy dog with the face of a corpse, babbling out excuses and explanations, justifications and pretexts - all the shabby little griefs and expressions of remorse with which you wish to touch the hearts of the harpies attending you - and all the time knowing, were some miracle to occur, were you to suddenly regain your vigor, your clarity, your SELF, you’d have it off with all these whores, these she-devils. When your body betrays you, your hatred, your lifelong and dearest friend, your daemon, is more than likely to flee - you may very well find that you’ve been cleaved from it, that you are alone, that you are nothing other than the filthy meat puppet of which you were first aware, at four years old, in the basement of a home populated by demons, fiends, and vampires. Hatred alone keeps such creatures at bay, and there is nothing, NOTHING that matters more than that, nothing to be valued more highly. And when others feel the force of this hatred? If you haven’t first slit their throats? You know full well what the advantages of that are. They curse you and flee your presence, the little darlings. And what is more delightful than that, pray tell? One need never again be “nice” - one need never again castrate oneself when out and about, engaging in disingenuous chatter in an attempt to be “liked”. What folly! Is there a greater folly? Rid yourself of it, and you will be free.

And the measure of that hate is nothing other than the measure of your experience - its hopes, expectations, betrayals, and abuse - all that has ground you down to a weary, emasculated pulp of violent misanthropy and boiling rage. For what’s the use? Of those who matter to us for whatever wrongheaded, godforsaken reason, we inevitably understand nothing. Of those who don’t matter in the least, we understand all, though the knowledge is of little interest to us. At best, it offers us opportunities to manipulate, to take advantage of them, as if they were brute objects, which, truth to tell, they are. With the former, it is a very different story. We have the damndest of times untangling ourselves from them - we impute our own intellect and passions to them, and see little in them apart from our own reflections, of which we ourselves understand next to nothing. It is if they are mirrors within mirrors, and, hence, become the source of all sorts of bothersome anxieties, for when we worry about how they might react to us, how they feel, or behave towards us, we are troubling ourselves, above all, with apprehensions concerning the state of our OWN souls, OUR nature, its worrisome flux and undependability. Who will I be tomorrow? Damn if it isn’t dependent on her, who, is, after all, only me in a skirt or pants suit, she onto whom I have fastened a thousand and one attributes of myself - one a bit of free-floating love, another some poisonous globule of hate - either, or both of which, laser-like, can be turned upon her - she whom I have constructed at what feels like a moment’s notice. It’s all never much to do with her, or very little. It is, rather, only these dead weights, which I carry within myself - that sometimes thrill, and sometimes ennoble me, but far more usually devastate me. People are props, and props only. We assimilate them easily into our selves - unsurprisingly, for we are their origin. We shit-stain them with our viscera, our longings, our disappointments, and our needs. It can feel to us as if they are more important to us than our very selves, when, in fact, they are merely mirrored mannequins, on to whom we have projected previously unknown, nether regions of ourselves - and, having done so, then allowed and encouraged them to burrow deep into these Elysian fields, these damnable hells we all carry within ourselves, just out of view, and throughout our lives - most of our waking lives, at any rate. Such “persons”, with their knack for unlocking these cryptic, clandestine caverns within ourselves, seem to reach deep within us, as we are only able to do when left to ourselves in passionate, longing-filled, and terrifying dreams, dreams from which we awaken astonished that these underground chambers and catacombs exist within us at all, and, that, in addition, they are teeming with the most fantastical and hallucinatory creatures, who do all sorts of things at every moment - while we are fully awake, and even when we are engaged in the most insipid of activities. There they are, scurrying about in the bowels of our psyches - seducing us, enraging us, poking us with their little pitchforks, turning the reins this way and that all the while, even when we are having the most insipid of conversations with the most hopeless of ignoramuses. Cup your ear over the edge of the cliff which is your self, and listen carefully - you will likely hear them - scheming, contriving, pulling levers, operating steam engines, strutting about, busily writing notes on pads which will direct you to say this or that bit of nonsense, to have this or that dream, this or that nightmare, to stumble over your words, burp up the occasional witticism, to be gripped in a momentary death terror. These hobgoblins, all of whom are you - they’re the cleverest of eavesdroppers, double agents, betrayers - they’re the ones scampering about in the throes of passions of which you hadn’t previously the faintest of clues were yours - that is, until some prop on your horizon, who has obviously caught their attention as well, throws them into a whirlwind of enthusiasm, of ardor, or of rage, which bubbles up from your bowels, and in which you then drown - the origin of which you attribute to some woman with whom you’ve become infatuated, though, truth to tell, you know not a thing about her, or to that man in the street who has so enraged you with his stupidity, arrogance, or bigotry, with whom you are unacquainted, and about whose past and motivations you are quite ignorant. They are nothing other than the starter, who, through waving his flag and shouting “Go!” unleashes untold hordes of stallions within you, of whom you were up until that moment entirely unaware. But now the race is on. There are no stewards about to oversee it, to insure that it proceeds fairly - with kindness, or sanity. No patrol judges reporting infractions or violations. There is just this shitshow of the most colossal dimensions taking place within you, which you attribute to that lovely gal with the heaving bosom, or to that perfectly idiotic, entitled twit with the political opinions of which you do not approve. It’s showtime! The adventure begins, once again! And yet you are, have ever been, and shall always be, the loser. These lovers, these object of your rage - they are no more real than the characters in a novel by which you have been moved or enlivened, whom you feel you know, and with whom you feel as if you have lived. As true as it was of those ethereal beings, so it is with these creatures of seeming flesh and blood, who toss you this way or that in both mild weather and in storms, storms whose winds and rains live only in you. It can be helpful in such states of discomfort, which can even progress to actual madness, to attempt to vividly imagine who you were prior to ever encountering this being, and who it is you will be when they no longer have the slightest effect upon you - as if you are shaking yourself loose from some intense dream which has displeased or unnerved you. You are not a collection of lines in some accountant’s book, that accountant being yourself. You are the literal accountant, the accountant himself - at this moment, and this moment only. A few seconds later? A minute later? You are now a very different accountant, taking note of assets and liabilities entirely different from what they were an instant ago.

What is the above other than a bit of “philosophizing”? And what is “philosophizing” other than a pretentious outlet for one’s existential terror? And is all of this not terribly fatiguing? Engaging in this eternal lie to which one has so devoted one’s self? Can we not simply say, simply admit that we are profoundly disgusting, appalling, and outrageously absurd? Can we not at least claw back some minimal dignity in admitting as much? Of course all men will then avoid us, for we are rubbing their noses in what they know full well but will never dare to speak aloud. We are simply pointing to the rot which they are, which lives in them, which correlates quite precisely with the corruption and filth of their diseased bodies, bodies which they are busy hiding from both us and from themselves - busy, as they are, dressing up in absurd clothes, dabbing themselves with soaps and perfumes which hide the atrocious odors and excreta which dribble and sometimes pour out from them at every moment. How dare we, naked ourselves and unwilling or unable to clothe ourselves, force THEM to unclothe? To observe their scandalous, putrefying meat suits in the harsh glare of an apathetic and exhausted sun, from which they run into darkness? Into frocks, into games, into philosophy, at the very first opportunity? There is only madness and hypocrisy - and we, each of us a wannabe Diogenes, we, who spew this vain nonsense from our rancid barrels, are no less absurd than the pompous, spectacled penguins upon whom we heave our venom. Here we sit, preaching gibberish, pontificating this or that bit of drivel - our self-abasements and loathing of them cut from the very same cloth, and stitched through with every bit as much navel-gazing grandiosity as is the twaddle of all those who parade into our little cottage-industries of grandiosity, our spiders’ webs of pontifications and denunciations. When we rant, jabber, and behave in this manner, are we not every bit as absurd, every bit as deluded as the objects upon whom we shower our contempt? And mustn’t we, to be even minimally honest with ourselves, factor into our calculations the perfectly odious being everyone else thinks we are? They, every bit as wrong in their judgments and opinions as we, must needs rule the day by the simple fact that they are the majority - they are every one and everywhere. Of course, we see, perfectly clearly, that they are all the worst sorts of miscreants. But then they, to the very last man, think the very same of us! When a hundred monkeys shower their shit upon some unfortunate visitor at the zoo, who has come to simply observe them and who perhaps finds them quaint, it is he, and not they, who is the deserving object of ridicule - a hopeless, pompous fool.

Speaking of shit, why is it that we are made so terribly uncomfortable by constipation? Clearly, it’s no picnic - there is palpable discomfort. But constipation causes a distress, and contains a disquiet and uneasiness far beyond that of some other simple, straightforward discomfort, which, had we reliable neurological measures of just how many pain neurons were firing during each, would be its objective equivalent. The anxiousness and consternation arise simply from the fact that, when constipated, we cannot rid ourselves of the notion that we are not a great deal more than a tube full of shit - that this, above all else, above all our prattling, our philosophies, our compositions of novels and symphonies - that this is who and what we, at bottom, are. Hence it would follow, and does follow, that when a severe bout of constipation is relieved by the good fortune of suddenly being able push some massive dragon out of our bowels - he who had previously been hiding in his cave, sleeping peacefully like Fafner, oblivious to everything, above all to our sufferings - that when we explode in this manner, it is as if we are experiencing a sort of Christian rapture, a much longed-for and seemingly effortless ascent into heaven - a blissful Arcadia in which our bodies are, for the moment, and only for the moment, not the source of abominable physical and existential torment. We’ve all experienced this - this is no revelation. What remains in all this that is perhaps worth our further pondering is the burden with which all of us so constantly walk the earth, which we carry at every moment of our waking life - nay, not just our waking life, for shit infects, inhabits, and steers the course of our dreams as well. And so, at the moment we are able to rid ourselves of some significant fraction of this shit, we feel, for a fleeting moment, a sense of freedom, of existing in some unbounded, ethereal space, in which we are somewhat less the usual bag of putrefying viscera housing piss, shit, blood, spit, bile, sweat, mucus, semen, menses, lymph, and tears - untold, countless tears, infinite tears, very few of which we are able to let pass through us, most of which grip us in a lifelong chokehold of suppressed grief. We are strangled, haunted beings - death-haunted worms desperate to forget all of which we are made, to forget all that we are. One can proffer all sorts of romantic nonsense about how the angelic spirit we truly are has been chained to a thing quite other - to the filthy, execrable body - that we are made of the purest ether, that our authentic selves exist in some empyrean realm. The reality is quite other than this. We are not some temporary, seraphic passenger, fastened to the back of a mad beast, who tosses us this way and that. We are a pustule on that creature’s ass - an abscess which has been unfortunate enough to grow pairs of ears and eyes, which are usually more than sufficient to observe and experience the horror of the situation in which we find ourselves.

And so here we sit, temporarily relieved of some fraction of the mushy blobs and cracked sausages which a moment ago had plugged full our lower bowels, smiling as if this moment of relief could possibly be anything other than a moment - coddling our psyches with fairy tales concerning the illusory nature of time, how in each moment there lies an eternity, all that hocus-pocus, airy-fairy nonsense with which persons facing what they full well know will be abominable torments in the very near future repeat to themselves in their inner ears, with a voice that they’re not quite sure is their own, but which is, at the same time, somehow familiar. Ah yes, that daemon which so often drops in to catastrophize about this or that horror about to take place on this or that date! Which whispers the most appalling judgments on persons absent, some fraction of whom might deserve these libels, but most of whom do not, which is known full well to the inner voice which continues to whisper the indictments! Which, in fact, the more it is aware of their innocence, the more it redoubles the force of its vitriol. It is, somehow, this very same daemon which now, incomprehensibly (for it is so terribly out of character for it) begins to confabulate the purest nonsense about all the infinities and eternities which lie within us, and of which we are tasting at this particular moment - this moment when we happen to be somewhat literally less full of shit than we are ordinarily - that somehow we might remain in this moment, to linger in its blissful light, to step out of time, into a shit-free firmament in which the body is discarded - where we are free to hover, unbounded, in celestial spheres in which shit and guts and bloated bellies and the multitudinous varieties of excretory muck dripping from these wretched bodies to which we are fastened, and which we ourselves, in fact, are - where all of that is gone, and surely for good. There cannot possibly be a demiurge cruel enough to yank us back into the cesspool of filth from which we’ve somehow managed to disentangle ourselves - the fetid, grief-choked swamp through which our stinking bodies wander moment to moment, no, it is not possible! “When I say to the Moment flying: ‘Linger a while! - thou art so fair!’” Our ruin is far less profound and literary than is Faust’s. For us it is rather more mundane - the inevitable gorging ourselves later that very same day, sending platoons of the dead down our gullets to their watery graves, to fester and metamorphose and advise us of their doings with the most insidious squealing and cramps - all of them omens of the constipated, bloated hell that once again awaits us - the one into which that idiot inner voice had just been attempting to assure us we would never again be thrown, having forever surmounted the vexation of being hung upon the meathook of the body’s incessant needs, pains, and betrayals.

But when we are, for that moment, free of the body, or so we tell ourselves, what is it that actually then appears before us? What does the voice tell us now, now that we’ve taken its rubbish about time and the eternity of the moment halfway seriously, now that it need not barrel onwards with its sermon, given that it has beaten us into a sort of temporary, happy for the moment submission? We are left with the notion that we must now DO something. We can’t just sit here, for goodness sake. Yes, it is wonderful to be, to a large extent, not full of shit, for that we are grateful, we’d be the last to deny it, and perhaps we are sufficiently obtuse to take the reassurances of our inner voice to heart, to at least pretend to ourselves that we believe both it and them. But surely, aren’t we now to DO something? Sitting here modestly shit-free seems somehow insufficient, lazy, unsatisfying. And now it confronts us, this oppressive, agonizing question - what are we when we are unaware or less aware of being a bag full of shit? When are we when we are not suffering? Why are we alive? For what purpose? Surely, if it is only the constant suffering which distracts us from all this, then clearly there is no reason to live? Oh, I know, we must PRODUCE something, that’s it, that’s the answer - thank goodness, now we’re saved - now it will all be all right, or at least bearable. We’ll DO things, PRODUCE things, perhaps one or two others might even take a modicum of pleasure in those things, although we shall do them, first and foremost, only for ourselves. There’ll be no stopping us! We will do this, do that, busy ourselves with the most meaningful of enterprises - hop to, let’s not sit about - we must, drum roll... BEGIN! Because, for fuck’s sake, SOMETHING needs to happen, no? I know - well, speaking for myself, at least - I shall write a memoir, that’s it! No, hold on, that won’t work - I’ve had no life. I know, I shall fall in love! I shall garden! Crochet! Oh, much better - I shall do crossword puzzles! Watch all those old classic films! Practice the piano! Walk the dog, perhaps come up with a melody, or, I know, a poem! I must write a poem! That’s it! How hard can it be, after all? And then, having written the poem, I shall, wait a minute - submit that poem! No, no, that’s stupid - no one will care, and, even were they to care, I don’t concern myself in the least with the opinions of strangers - no, that won’t do, there will be no submission - yet, nonetheless, a poem there shall be! And when I’m dead, perhaps it will be read at my funeral, that’s how bloody good it will be! And there’ll be weeping, the most wonderful remembrances, and toasts, and - hang on a moment - I am suddenly reminded that I don’t give a damn about the opinions of strangers. In point of fact, I no longer give a damn about anyone’s opinion, including those of the few I claim or pretend to love, and the fewer still that might, if pressed, admit, claim, or pretend to love me. I don’t give a damn what they think or feel either. I wish them well, yes, surely, I love them, mustn’t I wish them well? Well of course, there’s no question of that - how silly to countenance a doubt on such a matter, of course I wish them well. I love them, do I not? But what they think or feel no longer matters - and I ask myself, in the wee hours of the morning, why it ever mattered, for at one time it did, quite intensely, horribly, and often - I thought about, nay, obsessed about what they thought and felt constantly, there was nothing that mattered more. But that was only a dream, surely. None of that happened, REALLY happened. I only imagined it, perhaps only dreamt it? Well then, perhaps I am dreaming this as well. What do we owe the phantoms with whom we inhabit our dreams? Are they not merely ourselves? Well of course they are! But then I need ask: are these not the thoughts of an absolutely ghastly person? Surely only the most repulsive wretch would have such thoughts - such apathy, such cruelties within his heart. But hold on - surely the more I judge myself, the more right I have to judge others? That must surely be the case. How could it be otherwise? I am only bloody doing unto others as I am bloody doing to myself, so that’s the end of it - right, right, quite right - problem solved. I am nothing - a vile beast in a snake-pit upon whom it is not worth pissing, and so it follows, necessarily, that they must be as well. What a relief! I was confused there for a moment. OK then, what was it? Gardening? Oh, I recall - a poem, I must write a poem. But what is it to be about? There is nothing to write about - the world is a desert - there is only this monstrous emptiness, which begins within me and proceeds outwards, although I may have that quite ass-end - it might well be the other way round. In any case, I know it is a mistake, this world - the universe itself is a trivial gaffe worthy only of scorn - we are not to bother ourselves with any of it. I shall wear purple, as those soon to be old broads say. Yes! I shall wear purple, garden, write poetry, perhaps a villanelle, how hard could that be, there’s that “Do not go gentle...” one - perhaps I might crib something from that. While I garden. I’ll bring a pen and paper - oh, and a pad, yes, a pad. OK then, it’s all settled. Oh dear, I’m so tired all of a sudden. But I do believe I might quite be able to nap now, given my shit-free guts. If only that perpetual voice in my head would stop with its nonsense. Oh wait, that is only I, just another bit of me, a sometimes clever but far more usually terribly irksome and annoying part of me. But it is all of me that is exasperating, when all is said and done. OK, there’s an idea for a poem! I need a slam-bang couplet now, that’s what a villanelle requires - a resounding, dramatic couplet - surely I can dredge one up from somewhere, from deep within my bowels, shit-free as they are at the moment. This must be what they call “poetic exhilaration”! Yes - I am unquestionably in the throes of “poetic exhilaration”! How long will it last? Hopefully at least until I’ve got my couplet. Would digging in the garden be of any help? Enable my bowels? Perhaps distract them from the task? How am I to know? Oh dear, I am tired, so very tired. Perhaps it’s to simply be a poetry-free, <not encumbered by a shit-filled torso> nap then. I’ll lower my expectations, and be satisfied with that. They say that’s the royal road to happiness, they do, this lowering of one’s expectations. A bit hard for a morbid pessimist such as I, but feasible nonetheless. There is always a “lower” to which one can descend. Until, well, you know, there is one no longer - until the bottom has been reached, in which one’s body spasms in horrendous pain and expires. But I shan’t trouble myself with any of that right now.