1.

I want to write with the same voice and the honesty that comes so naturally when you speak to your lover late at night, after the urgency has passed, and you can talk truthfully for a brief enchanted moment, holding each other, enjoying the warmth and the proximity of the body, before blessed dreams finally take you.

Can you imagine? A hundred pages of vulnerability? Those silly moments that you know to be so sacred. Not even in the harshest separations are those words used as weapons.

I think that would be the perfect book. The one that you’d reach for in moments of uncertainty, to hold close and be comforted by. If you’ve already found your pair you could read it together. But if you are still alone you can read it and be comforted with the knowledge that it is out there, and somebody else might be reading it at this very moment. Somebody else might be feeling the same things you are, breathing the same air. Training their mind, bringing it into harmony with your own and the world, so that one day, should you finally meet, you’ll recognize their soul and thoughts immediately.

Love at first sight. Yes it is true. You always know in that first instant. Whether it is to be a close friend or a lover, you always feel it right away. It’s just that sometimes you don’t recognize this feeling for what it was until later. After you’ve made every instinctive and unconscious effort to push that person away, only to find that they are still there. You recognize the feeling when you see that there was nothing you could have done to destroy the harmony. The ones that are meant to be with you forgive anything, without even having to be asked.

And it is not so rare as everybody thinks. We’re all the same soul dressed up in different clothing. We’re all subject to the same weaknesses, and we can all be saved by the same kindness and discipline. You can take any two people in the world and put them together and under the right circumstances they’ll start whispering to each other like tranquil lovers. The circumstances aren’t so hard. The only reason they don’t manifest themselves more often is that people lose sight of the goal. Or maybe it is just that they were never told the way. That would be a real shame. Because the truth is that it is all so easy.

2.

Or something like that.

I’ve fallen into kind of an ugly routine lately, and I don’t hesitate to admit that I am ashamed of it. It is funny how much you let yourself get away with when there is nothing there to make you toe the line.

I get up at around noon and eat or something. Sometimes I go to the bathroom. Sometimes I shower. Most often I don’t. Sometimes I make myself write something. Usually I try not to. I hate opening up my computer. I hate unzipping the case that it sits in. I hate pulling it out of the case and setting it on the table and turning it on. I hate waiting for it to finally be ready.

That all takes so much time. I’m constantly afraid that I’ll have something inspirational to write sitting in the back of my head, waiting with urgency to come pouring out of my fingers. I’m afraid that I’ll do all these set-up tasks with a kind of desperation, only to find when the moment finally comes for me to write that I have nothing. I’ve lost it. It has slipped away, I was too slow.

The urgency is like needing to use the bathroom. But the disappointment is inexplicable. Have you ever had your bladder stretched and screaming at you? Running to the bathroom, a thousand countless delays, only to get there and not be able to go? It doesn’t happen like that.

Better to just not write at all. When I feel the words coming to me I just ignore them now. I let them pile up in my subconscious. If you don’t look at them directly you can’t lose them. That’s the key. The key is to not do the weaving until you are sitting in front of your loom.

The subconscious feelings is the cotton.

The printed word is the thread.

But it is trickier than that. Let me explain.

If, for example, you are sitting on a bus, and you are bored. And the bus stinks and is too hot and you need something to distract you, chances are that it isn’t all that improbable that you might go swimming in your subconscious just to get away from it all.

There are always a thousand things swimming around in there. It is a vast and unconquerable ocean, but that’s exactly what you try to do with it--conquer it. You conquer it like you learn a language. You don’t start at one end and slowly carve away. No, no, no. You jump around. From here, to there, to there, to there. Little dots all along the way, and as you go you leave little lines and you draw little erroneous conclusions that pretty much work but not all the time. You get this basic framework that gets you through existence, but it is in those exceptions that you plant the seeds of your downfall, and you inherently know this even though you are stubborn to fix what ain’t broken. So that even though you are content with the lines of thought that you know usually work, you’re not content in general. You’re always aware that you don’t have the whole picture and that makes you uncomfortable, so you sit back in those moments of quiet, like on the bus, and you go swimming, looking for some more small answers.

Pant, pant.

This is your life’s work. Nothing else is important. Getting control of your brain.

Tricky fucking task too isn’t it? The whole thing is predicated, eventually, on being willing to abandon lines of thought that have kept you afloat for your whole life.

Not abandon them entirely that is, just the percentage of them that isn’t quite accurate. Again, easier said than done. But you’ve got built in cues to help you when you get off course. It is impossible to live by a belief that isn’t true in comfort. You grit your teeth at night. You speak to sharply to your children. You have no patience. Dogs raise their heckles when you come near. If you can live with all of these things then there is no need to put in the work to get your spirit in line, but for me it isn’t worth the hassle. I’m lazy, I want it the easy way. I’ve found it is easier not to fight nature and the universe.

But like I said, this is what happens to me and it drives me crazy. I’ll be sitting on the bus and I’ll accidentally start thinking about the things in my subconscious. I’ll start throwing out lines like a spider in a thousand crisscrossing directions. All of that is fine enough, but then I’ll make the mistake of turning my work into words. I want to record it all.

So there it will start, in my head, a running transcript. And it is always so beautiful. Especially on the days when I actually make perceivable progress in understanding my subconscious. I’ll sit there and convert my findings into poetry. I’ll write pages and pages of beautiful words, all while I stare off into space with a detached and slight smile on my face. A pleasant little waking dream.

Then, disaster.

I wake up and realize that I don’t have my instrument before me. I don’t have time to write all those words down and they are already starting to fade. They’re written in electricity and it throbs more and more faintly each time. How horrible. Once it is gone it will never come back. I sure as shit don’t want to give up my understanding of myself just to go back and be there to catalogue the experience again as it happens. I would probably never make the same breakthrough again even if I were given the opportunity. How horrible!

You never write when you are sitting in front of your computer or desk or wherever you write. You write all the time, as you walk down the street, as you sit on the bus, when you are playing basketball. When you sit down to give your accounting of yourself at the end of the day you’re just making a copy with the hopes that somebody somewhere along the line will be able to pick it up and use it as a map to get to a place in their own mind that you have been to and where they want to go. Because, you see, if you can save them that time then they get to start where you left off. The idea is that after all of humanity has had its time to work, well, maybe we’ll have the whole thing mapped out. Maybe things will start making sense.

That’s a nice thought isn’t it? A nice little dream?

But like I said, I don’t like to write anymore. That’s because there is too much now. I always forget something. I’m flawed. I don’t record so well anymore. So when I sit on the bus and write, or go for a walk and write, or do whatever and write; by the time I get back to record it, I’ve lost more than half. I’m afraid that whatever I put down will only make me look like a raving psychopath. Nobody wants people to think they are a psychopath. It DOES make sense, my world, when you see it from this side.

So in an effort to avoid the loss I try not to dive into my subconscious until I am close to my computer. But the fucking thing still scares me. I can only type so fast and there are times when I know that even though I am putting down everything I can as fast as I can I’m still not getting all of it. Then, too, is the matter of incompetence. Perhaps what I’m saying is not even close to an accurate representation of what I meant to say? I’m grabbing the wrong colors in my desperation, nobody will understand my own peculiar code.

Then there is the very worst. When you write everything you can and retire exhausted only to come back to it several days later only to find it is all absolute crap.

Crap, crap, crap!

Nothing that will serve anybody for anything.

So like I said, I try to avoid it all now. I just get up and drink and wander around and talk to pretty girls. It would seem like a wasted existence I suppose, but I’m running away from the inside. That’s a tricky thing to do. Please hold your judgment against me until you’ve tried it.

That doesn’t seem too much to ask. It is only fair after all. 3.

The moment you run into trouble is when you start thinking that she’s yours. That makes you start watching her like a hawk. Looking for errors, little breaks in fidelity. You start guarding against the bad rather than enjoying the good. That’s playing not to lose, and that tactic makes you lose every time.

That first night when you hold her and she’s so soft. It will never be the same again. You’re comforted, you indulge in that lie that somebody knows you. Even if it is the very first night, you feel better. Even though you are a million miles away from a real relationship. All those hard tasks. Getting to know each other. Reading the signals. Learning the habits, good and bad. You need all that time to know somebody truly, and even knowing them doesn’t guarantee anything. It doesn’t mean that they’re going to stand by you. It doesn’t even mean that they love you. It just means that they’ve gotten used to you and the prospect of trying to save you is easier to digest than the option of living without you.

People fear change above all things.

But it is still good to hold her. For one night. But don’t ever think you own her. That’s not the way it works. You can never own her because she owns you.

4.

Stumble out of bed at whatever time it is. Probably noon. What have I missed so far today? Well, down at the beach the girls in their bikinis are probably packing it up just about now. Damn. That would have been good to see. Not good enough to get me out of bed however.

There is just about nothing that I really want to get out of bed for anymore. I get out of bed to do some exercise and shit so that maybe, after a few hours, I’ll be able to sleep again. There is no better way to pass time than to sleep. It all disappears and all of a sudden you are in the future. Sleep, sleep, sleep.

Sometimes I just lay in bed with my eyes closed and dream without sleeping. I can guide my dreams then, they are so intense. It is like watching a movie only a billion times better. The pictures come and surround me. It is closer than reality because it all takes place in my own mind. They swirl around me and I breathe in deeply and relax. Then, when the dream is over, I fall asleep, and wake up just in time to watch Sunday night football.

There was never really anything that made me want to jump out of bed. It can all wait until I wake up. What’s that bullshit about getting a head start on the day all about anyway? It is the same frickin’ day, you need the same amount of sleep. If you get a head start on the day you just get left behind during the night. How is that a good trade?

If you wake up too early you won’t have time to go out to the bars. That’s where all the drinks are. That’s where all the girls are with their beautiful dresses and bouncing hair.

Just last night I was out at the bar. I was talking to these two girls. One was wearing this second-skin red snake print pair of pants. The other looked pretty good too. They were buying me drinks. Actually they were just using me to finish off the drinks they had when they got warm and stale.

Fine by me, the alcohol still worked.

It would have been a better night except that I wasn’t horny. Funny how that sends the whole evening crashing down in defeat. What is there to talk about when there isn’t any sexual tension? There is no fire to the conversation. They just sat there and I just sat there and we talked to each other but not really because we wanted to.

People filtered by. I drank more of her/my drink.

Her friend told a joke. I hate it when people have to resort to memorized jokes. It is so easy to make little jokes as you go along. A memorized joke is such a fucking speed-bump.

“Everybody stop and listen! I have a joke. Are you with me? Are you with me?”

The conversation is dead. You all have to make eye contact with her and assure you that you are paying attention.

“Ok a rabbi and a priest....no, wait.”

We all wait patiently. The four or five little funny things that I was waiting for an opportunity to fit into the conversation we had been having start to disappear. I am annoyed. I have been robbed by my chance to demonstrate my cleverness once again.

“Yeah, a priest and a nun....ummm, let me think about this.”

Fucking stale old joke that nobody wants to hear. Canned joke. Past its expiration date.

She finally manages to tell the joke and then gets to the end and looks at us smiling.

“Is that the end?” I say.

“Yes.” She says.

I start laughing like a maniac and slapping my knee. Tears come to my eyes. It truly was a great joke. How could I have ever doubted her?

The three of us sit again in silence.

A girl walks in with another girl in tow. The first girl is slender and sexy but in a kind of weird way. There is nothing that you can specifically point to and say is the problem, there is just something off. She’s got a tan dress on, with some kind of high heeled shoes. The shoes are nice, her toes poke through, but there is something weird about them. Maybe her toes are slightly too big or, I don‘t know. I just know they should look nice, from what I’m looking at I can see that they should look nice, but there is just something off. She’s got blonde highlights in her hair. The highlights are perfect, too perfect. There is something off. Then she makes random eye-contact with me and stares at me so intensely that I shiver.

She begins to dance. She’s dancing in her little space outside the dance floor because the dance floor is filled with old men and women. What the hell is she doing at this bar anyway? This is an old person’s bar? Wait a minute! What am I doing here? Oh well, it is too late now. I always lack the energy to change my situation.

Her dance consists of spinning her body in place. It would seem graceful except that there doesn’t seem to be any danger of her falling. There is no vulnerability. In fact, it looks like if somebody came into contact with her as she spun, she’d rip them in half. Her elbows look like sharpened spears. Her calf muscles are strong...a little too strong. She spins expertly on her awkward shoes, like she must have had to sell her soul to obtain this proficiency. Every time she spins her head comes around and stops and she assaults you with that crazy, intense gaze. Head spin, stop, glare. Head...spin...stop...glare. She looks away to the left very quickly and then back. There was nothing over to the left that she wanted to see, the whole motion was just to get her hair tossing in front of her eyes. It is like she is trying to mimic the effect of a movie, where every shot of a face is remarkable because something has just or is about to happen. But this is real life. The effect isn’t what it should be. The effect is somehow off.

“That chick’s a lesbian.” The girl with the joke says. I decide not to argue with her. I don’t even ask her how she knows. The lesbian starts dancing with the girl that she dragged into the place. The girl that she’s dancing with is a little shorter, a little fatter, and seems like she actually belongs in reality.

That’s good, I decide. That weird lesbian needs somebody to keep her from floating off into the dream world or wherever she’d go without an anchor.

I sit there in the not uncomfortable, not unenjoyable, just continuing moment with the two girls. I don’t feel like pushing for sex so I don’t know what to do. They don’t seem to know what to do either. The moment continues.

An older woman walks by. She’s wearing a young girl’s dress. She has a nice enough body. That’s not the problem. The problem is that she just seems too old to be playing that type of game. It just seems like she should have found somebody by now and built some sort of home and understanding. Somebody she could just plop down beside and watch some crappy shitcom. Not parade herself in a bar in the middle of the night.

As she walks by she hands her card to some guy who is standing near us. She hasn’t talked to this guy all night. I know because he’s been near us the whole night and she hasn’t talked to him. He’s well groomed, but it is obvious this is not the type of guy you’d want to hang around with. He’s a little too proud of the way he looks. He’s got some bullshit sweater hanging off his back, tied across his front. It looks like the sweater is hugging him. He looks like a sailor boy.

The woman with the card walks off and the guy looks at the card with a kind of sneer. It is a bullshit sneer that he puts on his face for the benefit of his friend and his bullshit bar image. In his puny little mind he probably thinks it makes him look cooler to be able to reject the advances of strangers. He wants to make people think that he gets that all the time. Strange how the fleeting opinion of the crowd of gathered strangers is more important to him at that moment than the outreached invitation of the woman who has just left.

Or maybe she knows him already, she didn’t even look back. She gave him space to conduct his preening. Shit, maybe they’re made for each other.

The whole thing just makes me sad. The guy looks at his friend and laughs. I glance over to see what he does with the card. Does he throw it away? That would really make him look cool, at least by his stupid, superficial standard. Or does he furtively fold it up and put it in his pocket? That would kind of destroy his whole macho-man image, but he might get a date out of it. He can’t get too many offers like that one. It isn’t like he is some major catch. What an internal struggle he must be having. I turn my head away before I get the chance to see how it ends.

Not a big deal really. Of minor curiosity. Like watching a bacterium try to come to a decision.

The girls are still there.

“That was sad.” I say.

They saw the card transfer too. I don’t think they have much of an opinion on it.

“Just a lonely woman looking for some companionship and they’re laughing at her.”

It made me feel like shit. I didn’t even feel like following up all the millions of possible thoughts that the situation suggested. That was the nice thing about drinking. You just sat there trapped in the emotion. If I had been completely sober I would have felt compelled to toss the problem around until I had some kind of real or artificial solution. That’s what some people call progress. But just sitting in the moment ain’t so bad. There was no way out of it. I just sat there, bouncing off the walls, constantly reflected back to the same middle. Poor woman. I didn’t look back at the man.

Shit, I didn’t mean to get drunk.

“Well, I’m going to go.”

The girls look at me. They don’t look sad or happy or anything, they just are. One starts to make a half-way effort to get me to stay but it doesn’t work. I just stand there and the moment continues.

“Well, I’m going to go.” I say again about five minutes later. I kiss them both on the cheek. The second one kisses me back a little bit. Was she trying to say something? I can’t read her face. I give them an e-mail address.

“Now you’re like that woman.” One of them says.

“Not quite, I spent the evening talking to you at least.”

The other one fingers the piece of paper I gave her and looks like she is just waiting for me to leave so that she can throw it away. She was the one that kind of kissed me. I just don’t know how to read these girls. I need my dick to think for me.

I leave, but I can’t help but wonder how much like that lonely woman I actually was.

Outside I forget about it. That’s just bars. The air is better outside. It kind of enables me to think. Bars are just sad places. They’re all a big lie. You should feel guilty just walking into one. There was a time when that was the case with me. That just standing outside, or walking by I felt guilty. I knew instinctively that those were bad places.

What is it about them? Maybe that you know everybody is going to be trying too hard inside. Like that lonely woman, like me. You’ve got to have the dignity to just follow the path of your life in solitude and wait for the right moment to meet people. Don’t go pushing it by looking for people in bars. Don’t be sending out the bait. You can handle it alone. You don’t need a shoulder to cry on for even one wasted night.

You’re never going to meet anybody worth a shit to your life in a bar. Sure you can take your friends there or your girlfriends there for an evening’s diversion once you’ve already met them, but that’s because you started the relationship someplace else. The pot is too big, the draw is too random. You’ll meet the important people when you’re following your path. They’ll walk beside you for a while and won’t slow you down. Bars are just pit-stops for the soul. Somewhere you go when you need a quick fix, and then off again. A night or two just to remember that you’re alive and desirable.

I wouldn’t even call them dens of sin. They’re much too pathetic for that. It is much too sad. It is just like when you’re drunk, stuck in stasis, only it isn’t true stasis, you’re slowly ageing. One day you’ll wake up in the bar and find that you’re old and pathetic and people laugh at you when you hand them your card.

Better to start out on your path and make your wobbling baby-steps towards progress. It hurts a little bit more than the drunken oblivion, but the pain will be less in the future for it.

Yes, there was a time when I was ashamed to go into those bars. But now I do it. I’m not so scared to stare right into the worst of humanity anymore. There is a kind of beauty to seeing so much pain. There is a kind of honesty there. People stuck in a whirlpool forever that will only take them further and further from the places they want to go. And it is all their own doing.

Then there are people who actually do meet people of significance to their lives in bars. People just like them. People who’ll make them happy an give them direction. But those people are just the lowest common denominators, their lives are really of no consequence one way or the other. I’m sorry but it’s true.

That’s what most of them are like. Them and me. Or maybe I should just say us. Maybe it’s all the same.

5.

Amber liquid. If you’re writing a book about drinking, at some point you have to use the word amber. That’s the color it is. That’s the word that you have to use.

They put the amber liquid in front of me and I don’t even really desire it. I’ve never liked the flavor, not of beer, not of anything. I just switched from Bailey’s because I got tired of the bar tender handing my drink to the girl beside me.

You don’t even notice as it happens. It is like growing. Some people don’t catch it at all, but I always have a moment during the night of self-awareness when I feel the buzz going. Yep, I’ve got a buzz. I try to stop trying to sound intelligent. You just overcompensate and draw embarrassing attention to your drunkenness. I know what I’m doing by now. I don’t resist it. This was the purpose. I didn’t start drinking that night so that I could be a pompous ass. I drank to start acting stupid. I’m not going to let my own sense of pride rob me of that moment. You’ve got to roll with it.

There was a time when I was too dedicated to drink. I was going places, I wanted to make myself the best that I could be. I didn’t think there was a spare moment to waste. I’m past that now. I got as far as I thought it was necessary to go and nothing happened. Nothing will ever happen. Nobody listens. Everybody’s got their own form of self-delusion to distract them from the truth. You don’t know if you’re really worth a shit until you end up in some intense situation. That’s the only place people quit playing their games and look for true competence. But there are no intense situations anymore, just boring, safe, stasis. If you want intensity, you have to find it yourself. Preferably by drinking.

Al the things you’re afraid of when you’re sober go away when you’re drunk. You don’t need food, you don’t need shelter, you don’t need a bathroom. You can endure intense pain but you don’t even know it. In the morning you ache a bit, enough to know that what must have happened to you last night was extremely painful--but you have no memory of it. It makes you feel tough somehow, even though you were obviously running away. You were too drunk to feel the pain. You ran away from it.

There is too much pain in the world, it makes you stronger if you choose to put up with it, but there just isn’t anybody to appreciate your sacrifice or care about your achievement anymore. Why do it?

Amber liquid. Liquid surrender.

6.

My plan is to let time pass. What do you think of that? Laugh if you want but it has been highly effective so far. Nobody’s figured out a way to inhibit me.

My theory is that people become their routines. It doesn’t matter what it is. You let yourself do something again and again and again and eventually you are your routine. It is something you have to guard against. I think our minds and bodies are programmed to rob ourselves of free will. Maybe free will is contrary to high percentage survival tactics.

I saw this beggar on the street the other day. He was deformed. He was walking around on his arms because his legs were all misshapen and deformed. He was wearing dirty red sweatpants. People were handing him coins out the windows of their cars. He was the kind of bum you wouldn’t mind giving coins too. The others, the able bodied people who were just there out of laziness you spit on as you walk by. But this one had a right to be there on the streets. He’d been dealt a harsh hand. You gave him coins because you felt guilty there wasn’t some social program to help him out. It was obvious that he needed one.

When I saw him my first instinct was to look away. I made myself turn back and look though. I thought to myself that it was disrespectful to life to look away. Better to make myself see it. This tortured man and his horrible existence. It didn’t go away when I turned my head. So I looked. Never once did some bullshit thought like, “I’m so thankful for what I have,” cross my mind. That’s not the right reaction.

I looked hard at his face. He’d stopped wandering around on his arms and distorted legs. There is a character in the movie “Cobra Verde” staring Klaus Kinski and directed by Werner Herzog who looks the same. He moved like a gorilla actually. A gorilla in red sweatpants. His hands were all broken from walking on them. They weren’t designed to put up with so much weight, but they had adapted. They had become club-like. They curled around like the fingers of a gorilla. When he went to pick up the coins people threw him, it was with a gorilla’s hands.

His face seemed gentle, but not human. I couldn’t tell if there was something wrong with his face or if it was just madness shining through. He seemed to have too much skin. His eyes were black holes. Not sunken, but distant. He had a sparse mustache. It wasn’t a fearful face. It isn’t something horrible that haunts me. It isn’t something I wish I could purge from my mind. But it didn’t seem human. It seemed more like an animal.

What was his life? The life of an animal? Scrounging around for coins. Hiding from danger in this urban wasteland? Did he have friends? More likely he would have an owner. Freaks always have owners who make a lot of money off them. What kind of people are those? They exploit the freaks. How low is that? It would be difficult to think of something more foul. But then again they take care of them don’t they? It is in their interests after all. They take care of them better than you or I as we drive by on the freeway and force ourselves not to look away. Or maybe we don’t even do that much.

I felt so sad for him, but after a while I realized that his situation was only hell if he had experienced something better at another time in his life. If there had been a time when he could walk well, hadn’t been deformed, then now would be hell. If there had been a time when he had held a respectable job and been a productive member of society, only to later be reduced to this. That would be hell, the memories would torment him.

But there was no bitterness in his eyes. This was the only thing he had ever known, and he had adapted to it. There wasn’t any rage there. A gorilla doesn’t feel rage for having been born a gorilla, nor does a dog, or a rat. They just do what they’re there to do. It was his life and he had learned to live it. He had found his place and he was passing time. Trapped, but no more than anybody else.

There are stories of people who have worked hard all their lives who come into some money and still can’t keep themselves from getting up at four in the morning and occupying themselves with some chore. They can’t be comfortable without doing fourteen hours of work in a day. They’ve done it all their lives, it is in their bones now. They have learned that it is a necessary part of existence. You get in the habit of sticking with the things that work for you. Deep down you know that routine has kept you alive. You can’t abandon it. We’re still animals after all. The things you do instinctively always come faster than the ones you have to think about. It is a fast game we play. This is the way we’re built. We construct our own instincts, and they are hard to displace once they’ve taken root.

Or how about a prisoner who can’t stand the thought of being released from prison? He’s adapted so well to his prison environment, that the outside world is terrifying. Freedom, the most desired of all things attainable on this world. Some prisoners have grown to fear it. That’s how people work. With time, that’s what you become.

There was a time when I wanted to be a writer. That’s why I worked so hard. I used to discipline my mind, try to do the best I could at everything. Every minute was another chance to learn. Not so much for the act of writing, but for the craft of thinking. Not bullshit philosophy, but something else. I don’t even know what. Just following the logical currents to see where they go. A little sense of rightness to the world. A pattern I can hold onto. I need a sense of the rules before I play the game. It has been a lifetime of hesitation for me.

The last thing I want to do is get caught in some life. Some life of difficulty and hard work that I grow used to through sheer repetition. I don’t want some outside obligation to form me. To determine what will happen for the next forty years. I don’t want to wake up shaking someday because I’m too old to go to work and too strongly conditioned to know what to do with my day of freedom.

You become what you do. It becomes an instinct. Eventually you can go through the motions with your brain turned off and the outside world doesn’t even know the difference. You’re a shell. A gorilla begging for coins.

People get lost in their instincts and can’t distinguish what is possible and what isn’t. There is no logical reason for a lot of the things people do other than they are just in the habit of doing it. Wasted motions. I wonder if they aren’t haunted by a whole lifetime of things they could have done with their life. Instead of turning in a circle three times before they jumped into bed out of superstition, perhaps they could have gone to Hawaii. Instead of wasting every Sunday morning at church, perhaps they could have gone fishing with their friends and grandchildren.

Your life is just a line of choices, you should let habit make those choices for you. Jesus Christ, drive the ship you’re in!

Right now my only purpose is to avoid getting into that kind of routine. I get up when I want. There is no reason to get out of bed. I eat when I’m hungry. Sometimes at twelve, sometimes at eight, sometimes at three. I get drunk. I work a little when I need money. I write when the computer is screaming for me. I stumble around and pass time. I figure if I do this for long enough I will have avoided the trap that catches everybody else. I’ll be a product of my choices rather than my habits.

But then again, the trick is to not make your choices out of spite. Make the better choice.

I don’t want to fall into some horrible routine that defines me. But a lack of a routine is a type of routine. I’m making myself into a bum. That’s my routine. But being a bum has never been the focus. The focus has been discipline and determination.

It is a habit now. I go about everything the same way, with the same intensity. I can’t make myself stop thinking about things in a certain way. I can’t make myself stop analyzing them. I want to understand it all. I stay awake thinking until I knock off unconscious. When I wake up it is the first thing in my mind. When I write it is the theme of my words. All the same habit.

Freedom, free thinking, bullshit philosophy. I just want some answers. There are a million little clues. Can’t you see the clues? It is like a puzzle with a billion pieces in four dimensions. I want to sit and try to put them all together and see the picture. People see me sitting there working on my puzzle completely stationary and they go away with the mistaken perception that I am accomplishing nothing, that I am wasting my time. They laugh and say that I will never finish what I am trying to do. They call me a fool or a lunatic. I do sound like a madman at times, I admit that freely.

I’m not accomplishing what they’re accomplishing, and maybe one day I will regret that. Maybe one day I’ll regret not spending forty years in some cubicle shuffling paper. I won’t be able to point to a building and say, “Yes, there are forty years worth of files in there that I organized.”

The goal of my life is to never produce anything like that. I don’t want the focus of my material labors to be spent on something that is itself material. This body is the decaying object. This is the thing that will disappear. I want what I work on to be forever. It doesn’t matter what material you work with, how large you make it, or how strong it is, some day it will be wiped away along with the last traces of you.

I want to work with the infinite. I want to construct from the pure chaos of the absolute. That’s what pleases me to do. That’s what I will continue doing. It doesn’t matter how many simple minded morons mock me for wasting my time.

But that’s my routine, and I want to get out of it. Sometimes I want to escape it. It sounds nice at times, but it is a nightmare too. It is impossible. It is madness. Perhaps the material creation is the most that we can hope for. I’m squandering my opportunity for that. I am wasting my brief life on foolish dreams.

But there is no way out of it. It is the routine now. It is in my mind. I try to escape but I always get pulled back in. Like a celestial object that can’t quite manufacture escape velocity. I get close, far enough away that I think I am free, and then I decelerate, stop, and come crashing back. It is always on my mind. I’ve made the mistake of letting myself think of one thing for too long. It has defined me. Perhaps it was my destiny.

I’m only free when I drink. Perhaps if I drink enough I can break free, and join the other productive members of society.

7.

I can tell my parents are embarrassed of me. They’ve always been embarrassed of me, even if they mostly manage to hide their disdain out of some sense of parental responsibility. They hide it, or at least try to, though I can see it rising up sometimes to just below the skin.

I think the true act of responsibility would have been to eliminate it from inside. Purge it from the source. To simply guard against feeling it. But I see now that would have been a major change. It would have required them to evaluate and discard the very foundations of their adult lives. Lives devoted to comfort. It was more than any child could expect. Expect, maybe not, but deserve. To deserve I would say most definitely.

It is always the little things that make them the most angry. When you go through those typical growing pains such as denting the car or getting a speeding ticket, they swallow their ire. Not to say that they don’t yell at you, most assuredly not, but they keep the rage out of their eyes. It is a volatile situation, and they know they must reign themselves in. It must be some instinctive form of security, some genetic switch designed to eliminate the potential for infanticide. They get this huge rush of fury and then the air just blows out. The encasement cracks. And they just explain your error in a voice that is weary and sad rather than furious.

But that security doesn’t protect you from the mundane errors. Those small things that are frankly completely invisible to you. The unspoken regulations of society that you break a million times before you even become aware of. Your parents watch you commit every single one of those errors. And they say nothing, sit quiet, but their eyes are afire and the muscles of their jaw bulge. That’s the moment of danger, the moment when they’re truly capable of killing you.

The thing is, the worst of it, is that these are the discressions that really don’t amount to anything. That aren’t even really wrong. There is a reason the law remains unspoken, it is that nobody understands it. They all try to obey, and they think that because everybody is acting a certain way their must be some reason for it. They live in a constant fear, wondering why they don’t see the logic and desperate not to fall into the paths of the people who do. When they look at you like this, it is really hatred of themselves that they are projecting towards you. Hatred that you will expose the fact that they lacked the capacity to teach you the social lessons that everybody else understands and lives by without question.

“Haven’t you settled down yet?” my parents ask me perturbed. “Why can’t you find a good job? Why can’t you set down some roots?”

They demand these things of me. They say them out of the corner of their mouths as they look around them in desperation, smiling at everybody else, as if they don’t want them to notice the stir I’m making.

“Relax, nobody minds.” I say, but this doesn’t pacify them. The only thing they have now is their little quiet place in their community. I even feel guilty for disrupting it. They are nervous like cats in a boat. There is nothing you can say or do. They want the situation to change and they won’t sit still until it does.

So you start to get pressure from other angles, “look what you’re doing to your poor parents. Have you no respect?” It doesn’t matter to them that your parents demands are completely unreasonable. The only thing that they can see is the stress your parents are under and that you are the apparent cause. It can even seep in and make you crazy if you allow it too. Or worse, you might break down and give in.

Your parents have their day down to a precise schedule. They get up at the same hour. They get in their car, or take their bus, or walk, or whatever they do to get to work. It takes the same time every day. They see the same people along the way. Everyday. They work, they eat, they go home. They even say the same things to each other. And they go to bed early to prepare for the next day. They want to be ready. They have no time to think of anything else.

They have their own little world. Their own little reality. They are dependable. Everybody they see on their daily routine has grown used to seeing them there. It becomes a comfort to know that they are as regular as clockwork. Like a wild deer that has grown used to the family farm and thus creeps near to steal the apples from the blooming tree in front of the living-room window. They still have their instincts to flee in terror, to jump, to protect themselves. But nothing ever changes and they don’t have to use them that regularly. That moment of newness always brings fear and anxiety. Nobody likes to feel that. Your parents would hate to be responsible for startling their neighbors out of their pacified state. It seems the greatest discourtesy to them.

So that’s why they view you with such contempt. You who have refused to find your routine. You who have failed to find a specific time in the morning to rise, and a brotherhood of strangers to salute on your way to some tedious and insignificant job.

You walk freely between worlds, and though they tolerate your entrance, they don’t really want you there. You’re the stranger. You’re the unpredictable force. They don’t know what you’re going to do. They can’t count on you being there tomorrow.

It does make me feel bad to scare them. But then I remember, there is a reason that people have those instincts. The instincts that make them leap and jump and the sign of trouble. That send the heart fluttering and the adrenaline running through their veins. These chemical reactions that pull you out of your slumber and remind you fully and unquestionably that you are alive and that you need to protect yourself.

Do they really think they have a right to this state of rest? Is comfort really the absolute goal? Doesn’t it just make you soft and weak?

Once they get comfortable they don’t even question their reality anymore. They don’t care what the price of it is. They just don’t want it to change. Life feels like a burden to them. A constant, daily battle. The weight you have to carry just to survive. The worry, the uncertainty. Their routine takes all the conflict away. They don’t want to question it, even to make themselves better. Even to improve their routine, or appease their soul. They just follow, going to bed early at some absolute and incontrovertible hour. They must sleep for tomorrow, the first tomorrow, not the thousands that come after. They must sleep even if they are in the middle of following a thought that can change their, and everyone’s, entire existence. They must sleep, and forget it. The breakthrough isn’t worth disrupting the routine.

But young people aren’t so quick to settle. I’m not. I can’t stand the thought. Young people still have that inherent sense of rightness. I think that every year, there are more and more children that linger as the society continues to deteriorate in its complacency. We go dancing in and out between their slowly worn and tedious paths. We’re the deer full in flight. Terrified, but alive. Soaking in new experiences and new horizons. We have not traded the joy of life for the slow death of security. And we are the safeguard to ensure the survival of the species when the bottom falls out.

There is risk. There is always risk. And the arguments can be confusing. It is easy for them to point to our missteps and say, “you see! See what happens when you rush about so recklessly! Control yourself!” And they go back to their drudgery, content that they were right. Blind to the fact that they are slipping slowly towards their own unique universal disaster.

Why don’t they just lock themselves in their homes? Why don’t they nail up the doors and put fabric in the cracks to keep out the sunlight lest they get burned? Why don’t they sit and shudder in their placated fear alone and locked away? What can they handle; what can they manage; what can they really do after living in their world of security?

I say that if you only take one risk in your whole life, even if it be the risk that kills you, it will still be a fuller existence than a life lived in cowardly security.

I see a man receive a plaque for having taught in the same school for fifty years. One day of recognition. His face beaming. For a split-second, I am envious. That’s only human, we all want that appreciation. But then I think how sad it is. Here this man has sacrificed his whole life to this one endeavor, and this is what he gets in the end of it all. This second of acknowledgement, and then he is forgotten. Thank you for not bothering us, is the general message. You didn’t change anything for better or worse, you couldn’t, you kept to your path.

They present this man like he is the model I should strive for, but I cast it down.

I’m never going to let myself be trapped in that mind-killing routine. I’ll scare the others up and out of their lethargy with my very presence. I do not want to commit so much to one enterprise that I become blind to its faults and intolerant of beliefs contrary to its foundation. I will hop from culture to culture and pick up what I can of truth, before flittering away. My culture is humanity. As soon as I feel the ropes of a nation upon me I will run. As soon as I feel the routine sedating me, I will go.

My parents can hate me if they want to, but their hatred only strengthens my resolve.

Any ideology that puts the fire of murder in the eyes of parents as they look upon their sons and daughters must be wrong. You might even be able to make them understand this, if you could break them far enough out of their insanity to listen to you.

Staying free is the harder path. It is the safeguard. It is the outside perspective. Bad habits develop when people stay in their routines for too long. There has to be somebody to step in and stop them. Even if it is after twenty years of peace. Even if it was good enough for your parents, and your parent’s parents, and all the relatives that came before.

They’ll call you all sorts of names, they might even disown you, but this is the position of fear. Keep moving, and take in all the perspectives. Dare to face the truth, rather than the manufactured fantasy they surround themselves with. You can’t deny the outside forever, sometimes the outside comes barging in unwanted.

They’ll sputter and hate you and denounce your chosen path as a waste of life, but remember that’s all from a perspective that no longer is connected to reality. In their world, you’re a disturbance, but in the real world, you’re a power.

No matter how far gone they are, they’ll never lose sight of that entirely.

There may be hatred in their eyes, pure and unrefined, but you can’t have hatred without fear. Look for that kernel of fear, and if you still need the assurance, know that the fear means they respect you.

You can bend them to their knees, and when they tremble that’s when you’ll know you’ve exceeded them. A parent should rejoice at that day, but it is in human nature not to.

At some point you might have to accept the possibilities that all their council is to prevent this very thing from happening, not because it is wrong, but because they are afraid to let go.

That isn’t their right. Don’t let anybody pressure you or guilt you into believing so. No perversion of the natural order is kindness, even if they spin it to appear so.

Or indignantly demand that you follow. You only get one chance, why compromise?

My parents can be content with their first tomorrow. I’ve got my eye on the never ending supply that comes afterwards. Who are they to say I lack ambition, direction, or security?

8.

You know, nothing gets me going as much as when one of those pseudo-bullshit pretending-to-be-caring assholes laughs at my youthful anger and dismisses it as foolish.

“You’ll understand one day when you’re older,” they say.

Or they just laugh under their breath and shake my head. I get all kinds of reactions to the glaring flaws I point out in society, but the relation I hate worst is that slight shaking of the head.

“Foolish, foolish, child,” they seem to be saying, as if they alone have figured out the one truth of the world that is still eluding me. Fucking pompous asshole. I’d like to grab them by the back of the neck and stick them face first and smother them in their own bullshit.

I even prefer the people who get angry at me. The ones that chase after me and threaten to kill me and even try to go through with it. At least that shows some passion. Some willingness to act. Sure they’re a bunch of misguided crazy motherfuckers but at least they aren’t sedentary wastes of life.

“Foolish, foolish, child.”

The ones that make me angry just sort of laugh like they know they should be offended but they don’t want anything to upset their state of delusional self-harmony. They laugh, “Oh, that’s a good one, I should be really insulted.” But they manage to sidestep any real emotion like you aren’t worth their time to even notice.

I wish more people would stop doing the heavy lifting and start drinking like me. Watch how quick those old bastards come to their knees when their whole world starts crumbling around them. I bet they wouldn’t ignore us then.

It’s one of the laws of human civilization that you put up with the system to a point. You try to bring about change from within, to a point. But when that system starts violating too many laws of humanity you are no longer under the obligation to work with it. At that point it has been corrupted. Your new duty ceases to be to the system and reverts back to humanity. Your first duty is always to humanity actually, but that line can be blurred, even in the service of humanity. It’s a confusing fucking world.

Here’s a new take. Maybe it isn’t naive youthful anger. Maybe it isn’t a pointless waste of emotion and energy. Maybe we’re like this because we can see the glaring holes in the way things are and we have the energy and the motivation to fight to change things. You fight and you fight and every year you inevitably make a little more money and with more money your arguments tone down a little bit more each time. Soon your making a shitload of money and your triumphant rebellious roar has become a meek whisper and the only thing you do in your spare time is mock the misguided and discontented youth that you can’t identify with anymore.

Finally after years of confusion and retarded social pressure I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no one truth as to how you must live your life. It changes depending on your age and your position. You have different duties that you are supposed to perform at different ages. A ten year old boy isn’t evil or somehow neglecting his duty to humanity by not brining home a five or six figure salary. He’s in a developmental period. That’s all he needs to do. Later when he’s older and rebellious his job is to scream out the human rights violations that the older, game players, have become too well placated to contest anymore. When he’s done fighting he settles into that kind of detached maintenance mode of the fully adult, and then he gets older and does something else that I haven’t figured out yet. If you’re doing anything but the duties of the age group your part of you’re violating your duty to humanity.

But all I’ve ever felt in my whole life is pressure and guilt for not adhering to the standards of that one mature and docile group. The achievement that stands above all else is to bring home the bacon and anything else that you have any aspirations of doing is derided and mocked with the most foul and harshest of language. That’s all I’ve ever heard. All my peers and teachers have always filtered their guidance through the lens of what is required of their social position, not mine, and of course I have always come out lacking in the final assessment.

What bullshit!

The young people that complain aren’t noisy, lazy, troublemakers. It isn’t their duty to discover the social dialogue and conform to it. Doing otherwise isn’t rocking the boat. It isn’t disrespectful to not allow your parents and your grandparents to grow complacent in some ridiculous ideology that is self-indulgent and erroneous. You’ve got to stand up and scream out those mistakes, the ones that they once knew but have now forgotten. That’s how things get better.

You shouldn’t feel guilty if there is something inside of you that keeps you from feeling content with doing what you are somehow inherently programmed to think is your duty to do. All societies have their flaws. Some people just can’t do the wrong thing even to fit in with the system. When there are enough people like that, and they are tortured in mind and body by their understanding of wrongness, there will be a revolution. People can live under a shroud of evil, but it tortures them and breaks them and they have an inherent nature to resist it and break free. Some sooner than others. Some can just swallow it and take it forever. Some reject it right away. Its all a matter of tolerance.

But shit, the thing that really pisses me off is that nobody’s ever told me all this. Here I’ve been this whole time wondering why I have all these vague feelings of discontent. Wondering what I should do about them all and secretly fearful that I am evil. Then I stumble across an explanation out of nowhere that explains the whole deal and, armed with my personal discovery, I find references to it in other cultures that have existed in peace and harmony throughout the millennium. The Buddhists and Hindu’s are aware that people have various obligations at various stages in their lives. It’s obvious as hell. Works like a fucking charm. The evidence is right there. Why the fuck did I have to come up with this answer myself? Why the fuck didn’t somebody mention it to me? There was no need for me to bear this bullshit emotional suffering? Why the fuck didn’t somebody say something?

That seems to be the god damned bullshit routine, every god damn thing that I need that is worth any god damned good I have to discover for myself. What have people been doing throughout all of history? Sitting around and jerking off? Why haven’t they organized everything a little better? Yeah, we’ve got tall buildings and cool special effects but there isn’t jack squat for spiritual and emotional confusion. There is just pressure, pressure, pressure. Like were back to forcing left handed students to write with their right hands.

Knock it the fuck off!

I’m only twenty-seven years old. I am young enough that I still shouldn’t be able to discover anything, it should all be explained to me by now. There should be guides and teachers with more experience willing to lend a helping hand and knowledgeable enough to see every malady that I am suffering and quickly diagnose it. Where the hell are they? What the hell have they been doing? Why can I come across something new and useful that I’ve been desperately needing and searching for every fucking month or so?

I went to college to listen, I tried church, I had parents. I’ve gone everywhere that I’m supposed to go and all I get is this heavy helping of guilt as if I’m not doing enough. It is all slight-of-hand and self-indulgent, they’re trying to trick me into doing their work for them. They don’t want to explain the situation because if we all knew what was really going on we’d yell a collective “Fuck That!” and walk out on the whole enterprise. Talk about exploitation, how about some brotherhood? How about that responsibility to humanity.

I’d like to see it all boil away in flames frankly. Fuck the bastards.

v It’s all about surrender. You’ll never win anybody’s respect or attention by working your fingers to the bone. Isn’t that the goal? Isn’t that the ideal? Aren’t we all supposed to be vying for the attention and love of our fathers? Those indifferent pricks. The ones for whom it is never good enough.

Watch them come running when you turn your back on them. Watch them sit and plead when you become a drunk. When there is nobody but themselves to do the work and they are all withered and decrepit. They’ll show you right then that they’ve known exactly what you’ve wanted and needed the whole time. They’ll come bearing it for you on bended knees and offer it to you in supplication if only you’ll get back to work. It’s a bribe. They’re only doing it because they want something out of you. There’s no love in the world anymore.

If you want to keep their attention, you can never do what they ask of you again. Make them keep begging to your back in their stuffy little hell world forever. Show them what it was like to be you. Remind them, so that you don’t feel vindictive enough when you’re older to do the same to your own children.

Maybe there are different social rolls not just through ages of your own lives, but through cycles of generations. Maybe the duty of our generation is to be a cleansing fire. Burn away that old lazy crowd that has grown fat, content, and complacent with this anti-humanitarian stasis. And don’t let them try to get you with the excuse that they were following the ideals of their age. That’s why they call it free will, you’re accountable.

I’ve got good enough reasons to be pissed off. It’s a good thing I’m so busy drinking or maybe I’d be out killing people. Come and drink with me, let’s let it all fall away. There is no other course. You can’t talk to make them change it, they don’t want to listen. You can’t put together an army and go after them, that’s just terrorism. Better to just passively sit back and watch it collapse without you. Passive resistance baby, just like Gandhi. Just drink and let the pain disappear and in your moments of sobriety try to figure out ways that it could be better.

Don’t tell me I’m not doing my duty. I’ve already come up with a hundred little explanations for all those peripheral troubles that I’ve had to deal with and everybody has to deal with. Most people just put up with them and develop that reflexive twitch and tolerance of insanity. Not me, I’ve got some hard answers! Enough to justify a whole lifetime of jerking-off. But unfortunately that’s not the type of thing anybody notices. The majority starts to jerk-off right away before they even deserve it.

9.

Back in the bar, this chick is actually trying to talk to me when all I want to do is screw her. She keeps talking away. I move closer and she moves back from me. What the hell is up with that? How rude? It is obvious as hell that I don’t want to listen to her anymore. That I have absolutely no interest in anything that she has to say. What the hell is wrong with her? Where is that female need for communication? They’re all great for body language when it is their own that they’re talking with. They’re pretty damn adept at ignoring it when it is the language of somebody else. Hypocritical bitches.

I just get up and leave. She sits there all pissed off and shocked.

“Don’t tell me that you didn’t see this coming.” I say and then I lean down to kiss her. She jumps back in fury and terror and throws her drink at me. The glass cuts me over the eye. If a man had done that to a woman it would be assault. As it was she’s a hero and four guys jump on me.

I wake up in the alley. What the fuck was that? That bitch wasted my time listening to her stupid idiotic story and I didn’t even get a piece out of it. I stumble into another bar. It is the type of bar you can sit in when you’re covered in blood and garbage from the alley. There aren’t any women in here that I’d want to get on.

I just sit and muse to myself. It is getting early. It is a good reflective hour of the day. My computer isn’t there so I take it as a matter of course that most of what I think is going to be lost. I have to upgrade my memory. I’ve only got something like 512 K, whatever the fuck that means.

What the hell? Why does it have to always be about relationships. There really isn’t anything more powerful than fucking. Jesus Christ. Why can’t more women be more mature about it. The truth is women separate quite nicely into two distinctive groups; women you want to spend your life with, and women you want to have sex with. Unfortunately there is very little overlap between these two groups.

Yeah, pretty fucking funny God. Laugh it the fuck up.

The girls you want to spend your life with always get mad when you dally with the girls you just want to fuck. Jesus Christ! Can’t they see that you respect them? They’re the ones you want to spend your life with! Don’t they see what an honor that is? Christ!

And the thing is you go off and fuck some girl and she gets all weird and confused. Girls would have you believe that they are incapable of having sex with you without getting their emotions supremely involved. Actually they’ll tell you that they won’t get their emotions involved but this is always with the understanding that they are going to go right ahead and get their emotions involved anyway.

“I thought we had an agreement, this was just for fun.”

Sob, guilty look, sniffle, “I...I...I...know...b-b-but...it...just...happened.”

Just one of a million little unwritten rules that exist so that women can do whatever they want. They somehow make you feel like you are an insensitive asshole if you don’t bend over backwards to accommodate and take care of them...and they demand to be seen as your equal at the same time.

Christ!

You go on to explain, “Look, I have a wife and a kid, I told you that from the start.”

Then she gets all pissed and starts throwing knives at you. A few minutes ago she loved you so much that she was reduced to tears at the very thought of leaving you, now she’s throwing knives at you. Then she tells your wife who divorces you, takes the kid, you never see either of them again, but you find out that your wife and your ex-lover got involved in a lesbian relationship. Now if you’re wife had been willing to bring her to bed in the first place like you had suggested all those years ago all of the unpleasant developments could have been avoided. The situation would have been exactly the same without the suffering of you...the man.

Light bulb goes on.

Why do people need to define their relationships? Why can’t it just be sex for sex’s sake. A quick one in the bathroom bar and you never have any obligation to one another after that. We’re in a modern age. There is effective birth control, we can take adequate precautions against the spread of disease. Why don’t we have a free sex world for a change. There is plenty to go around. Quit hoarding it. Stop being so desperate to guard your emotions.

The truth is that a man can have sex without it meaning anything emotionally. It is jus something that they do. Like getting up to go to the bathroom. It is a chemical need. It is all pretty clear cut and on the surface for men. Women are different.

First of all women claim that they aren’t capable of being involved physically without being involved emotionally. This isn’t true. There are prostitutes after all. This just goes to show that women are capable of detaching their physical and emotional lives. At least when money is involved. But even if you ignore this little sidetrack there is always the weird contradictions in our social perceptions of the situation. It is often used as a weapon that women are more emotionally committed after a sexual act and therefore men have the responsibility to be careful with them. However this implies that female infidelity contains an inherent strong emotional component. Yet, female and male infidelity are almost universally defined as equal betrayals. Seems to me as if there is strong evidence to be gained from the performance of the many active theorems of social interaction that the female infidelity is worse simply because female intercourse is defined as an interaction of body and soul. But nooooooooo! People get all furious with you if you try to present this argument. The pieces just don’t fit together, but I think the reason most people don’t see that is that they get stuck in one kind of life or the other and they don’t get to see all the facets of the diamond.

Here’s the last funny exclusion. With all the talk of gender equality you’d think that the flip side would be discussed as well, gender accountability. Back in the dark ages when men used to think women were inferior they developed a pattern of thought that rarely held women accountable for their actions. Just as a ten year old boy or girl isn’t chastised as harshly as a full-grown adult, a woman wasn’t chastised as harshly as a man. It is a cultural habit that has been sitting in our sub-conscious and has been passed down from generation to generation. The only way we are going to get rid of it is through the conscious effort to resist it. When a woman does something wrong, she must be punished as severely as a man for making the same error. Accountability. The funny thing is, this is how you actually achieve equality. Not just the appearance of it, but the fact. Equal accountability for women. A woman is now just as much at fault for having chosen a dead beat for a spouse rather than that nerdy kid who went on to make a million dollars. A woman must now share some of the blame for her assault because she shouldn’t have been in that neighborhood dressed the way she was. Accountability, it is harsh, but it is true and it helps you gain control of your life.

Nope, nobody will ever be screaming to be punished with the same severity. Fine, fuck em, they can just stay in the proverbial kitchen then.

Women say they want equality. But all the men have been too well trained in their overprotective attitude to use the appropriate, and sometimes harsh, portion of accountability which is necessary to build true equality. The result is this weird pseudo-state where women are just as much the puppets of men as they have always been, but are now getting paid the same so they don’t seem too upset that it’s a sham. When people like me come along and point out the flaws in the situation I am the one that gets accused of being the sexist! They said they wanted equality, that’s what I’m trying to give them. True, undeniable equality in conflict with the pre-programmed beliefs of my culture. I personally think they can hack it, I’d prefer it if they did, but it is a long, hard journey.

But they get mad at me for pushing them along the way. They seem content with this new oppression. They said they wanted equality. Maybe they don’t know just what the hell they really want. It wouldn’t be the first time with them.

Do you want equality or do you not want equality?

Do you want a relationship or do you not want a relationship?

Do you want to have sex or do you not want to have sex?

Do you want me to tell you that you do indeed look fat when you ask or do you want me to lie to you?

I’m doing my best but you keep changing the rules.

Say what you want and stick to it!

You’re an adult, why can’t you make yourself abundantly clear?

Can’t you see how needlessly difficult you are making this?

Can’t you see how frustrating this is?

Can’t you see what you’re doing to me?

I pick up my shot and rub my black-eye. This fucking sucks. It is probably better that everything I’m thinking about will be lost forever. It all sounds too mean. I wonder what put me in this mood?

I drink and ask for another. Soon I stop thinking. Life is good.

10.

The thing that I find to be the most irritating about the world that I, by chance, was born into is that nobody cares about the true story anymore. Nobody cares who is actually good or bad or whatever. It all comes down to what people can get away with.

It is a hard thing to talk about. It is a hard thing to make clear. The world is a tough place to live, it always has been, there is no getting around that. But the difference between times that came before and now is that we currently live under the illusion that we are guaranteed a certain amount of security and even luxury. It is this big stupid lie that has found its way into our collective minds just because we’ve lacked the discipline to guard against it.

There used to be the opportunity for the ancient rags to riches story. Somebody would be born in some far off secluded place without any guidance or support and still somehow manage to make it to the big time. It didn’t matter where their area of talent lay, whether it was in science, sports, art, anything, they could find a way to the top. People were on the lookout for the next genius. They actively searched for them and when their talents manifested themselves, resources were granted to them for the betterment of humankind.

It has always been hard. You never know where the truly influential and important people are going to pop up. There has always been a kind of desperation. That deeply felt desire to find those leaders and put them at the head of the team. The human race has needed it’s heroes because it has never felt secure. Life has been a constant conflict, a precious gift that might be revoked at any second.

It was the duty of the gifted to construct a crude beacon to separate themselves from the masses, to show they had something to offer the whole. Something that would make the world a better place for everybody. They had simply to construct their beacon and somebody would come along and pluck them out of their destitution. We needed them.

Now it is not merely indifference that greets this small and desperately needed percentage, but active suppression. It is as if the main group is resentful of the few with talent, and they not only ignore them, but they take steps to keep them down. Nobody wants to hear the ground shattering theories anymore. Nobody wants to read the books that break the old ideological box to fragments. The masses get haughty and defensive when you stuff their nose in their errors. They don’t change, instead they stubbornly stick to their old routines as if flaunting their indifference to the prospect of a better reality. It is an ugly by-product of too much security. They feel they can waste the resources that come to them. They feel they gain some sort of celestial prestige by doing so. It is a disgrace to the human spirit.

The majority wants to be able to think of themselves as the one true talent, and for the first time in history they have the money and the power to make it true. If not by actual achievement, then by withholding the efforts of the ones who are capable of driving mankind forward. They want greatness to be evenly distributed by race, age, gender and when the reality doesn’t match their figures they assume it is reality and not their calculations that are in error.

The whole thing is absurd. There will be consequences to this. Somebody should shut all those people up. They don’t have a right to enact this kind of detrimental philosophy. They don’t have a right to retard the very development of human evolution because they are too arrogant and too stupid to realize they are totally unqualified and incompetent to mold it.

Reality is always the ultimate rule, not the pretty fantasy of how you might want the world to be.

There, that’s it, that’s all I’ll offer. You can fucking listen to it or continue on with your deluded path. It doesn’t make one shitload of difference to me anymore. I’ve spent too much time standing and waving trying to get your attention. You don’t want to listen to me? Fine, fuck it, I’ll sit here and drink. I want to be nice and numb when you drive this truck right into the brick wall we’re heading for.

I’ve repeatedly asked you to turn in a calm and collected voice, and I know that you’ve heard me. I know because you’ve responded with that same odious and preposterous phrase I’ve heard from so many factions with so little provocation.

“Stop yelling at me!”

I’ve never had a voice to yell with. I’ve only spoken in a whisper, and now I’m drowning even that in alcohol.

The gentle gurgle is an inebriated fuck you.

11.

I wake up in an alley. I’m covered in egg shells and old socks and gross shit that would really bother me if I weren’t so drunk. I have cotton mouth. I hate that. It always goes away when I drink water or Gatorade. I live on that shit.

I stand up and see that I’ve pissed my pants. I think I might have shit my pants too, but I don’t reach back to check. What’s the point? Can’t do anything about it now.

I start to walk. It is kind of a nice night. You can see the stars. They’re worth looking at you know. You learn something every time you do it. That’s one of the fucked up things about the world. We spend all our time watching TV and you never learn a god damned thing from TV. But looking at the stars is the best teacher in the universe, and nobody gives a fuck. It just makes me hate humanity even more. If a thinking animal can’t even make the most of the resources it’s been granted then to hell with them.

One day I want a house with an open room than I can sleep in. Something that is outside where I can look up at the stars. Sleeping under the stars. I’ve probably only done that once or twice in my whole life. I’ve lived for twenty-seven years and I’ve only slept under the stars once or twice! For a brief minute I’m absolutely humiliated. I even stop walking and I stand there in the street with my hand over my head. That is fucking pathetic. Once or twice? What are you going to say to god when you show up and he asks you how you enjoyed sleeping under the stars?

“So, what did you think of that cool universe I created to entertain you and lull you to sleep?”

“Err, I was too busy watching ‘Friends’.”

Jesus Christ!

A nice house with a nice little courtyard that you could throw a bed in really easily. Something where the trees framed the slanted roof and the dark branches snuck into your field of vision to frame the eternal heavens. Do you realize how much good that would do you to look at that every night? You can’t even look at it through a pain of glass. You have to be there. You have to be a part of it! When your laying there looking up at those millions of little white lights you realize that you’re just clutching to the side of one of them. It’s you and everything else. There are no illusions. You know where your place is and your value.

What the hell have I been doing?

I lay down in the street at look up at the stars.

About then a marauding gang of street drug-addicts comes along. They see me laying there in the street and start laughing. I stand up to run. I shuffle off. They chase me and beat the hell out of me. I get a couple of good licks in myself, but there are just too many. I’m still conscious and bleeding as my hands go limp. They strip me roughly. They’re going to sell my clothing. I’m so drunk and beat up I don’t even give a fuck what happens yet. I’m terrified, but I can’t do anything. I’m like a detached observer, watching from a protected, hidden room. I want to vomit and shit at the same time.

They get all my clothes off me and just drop me. There is no use in killing me I guess. I wonder what holds them back? I mean it would be easy to do, and certainly something they’ve done before. Maybe it’s deeply rooted in people. You just shouldn’t kill. It always comes back to bite you in the ass somehow. That’s what I’d guess stopped them. That kind of superstitious crap that nevertheless seems to have some roots in reality. It seems to be something you could prove if you took the time and were clever enough to devise an experiment.

The adrenaline is the only thing that is keeping me awake, and as the group wanders off I pass out. It is a kind of completely helpless release. I just fall back and smash my head on the concrete. I feel the concrete against my skin. I feel wetness in a dozen places from blood, piss, shit, and who knows whatever else is on the sidewalk. I’m dirty and hairy and gross. I’m naked laying there. The stars are still out, shining on me. They tickle a little bit.

12.

Jesus Christ, how is it that I’ve fucked up every relationship that I’ve been in? I don’t know how it’s happened. They’ve just all come apart at the seams eventually. There just comes a day that I just can’t take it anymore and, in a moment of colossal arrogance and frustration, I end the matter, and spend the rest of my life regretting that one harsh act. Even when I find a new girl I regret the ones I’ve lost. All the moments spent together. The things we’ve built that nobody can see. But when I’m with them I just feel restricted, like they and they alone are preventing me from meeting new and different people. Having new and different experiences.

Part of it is the things that I’ve always dreamed of pursuing. I want to write. No, I want to think. I want to understand. I want the truth. And I don’t want to play any games. I don’t mind risk. I don’t mind being alone and naked, beaten up on the sidewalk, waiting for morning. You won’t ever find a girl who wants to share that kind of experience with you.

I need my freedom. Absolute. But it means solitude too, and that never goes away. The promise of what might have been never leaves you, it is always hanging around in the back of your head like a nasty dream. Taunting you. Reminding you of your stupidity and your arrogance. Reminding you that you’ve thrown it all away and made the wrong choice.

But I keep doing it. I keep getting new opportunities to start over and I keep doing the same thing again and again. I have to do this. Like I said, I’m caught in the loop. This has become my habit and my habit has defined my life. I need to be alone. I can’t offer anybody any security. I can’t ask anybody to believe in me. I don’t know where I’m heading. There aren’t any guarantees. If you want guarantees you’ve got to play the percentages, but anybody can see where those lead. You get a nice little house and a nice little job and a nice little dog. You work hard forever doing some remedial task that any idiot can do. After you’ve worked long enough you start making enough money. You pay your dues and fifty years later it pays off and you can buy what you want and take that trip to Venice. Isn’t that what you owe a woman?

How can you justify staring up at the stars rather following the secure career path? How can you allow somebody to follow you with nothing but your gut feeling that there is truth, out there, in the absolute? Maybe it’s all just alleyways and drunken brawls. How can you ask somebody to come with you for that?

You can’t.

But maybe if you make the connection when your young enough, they’ll still be waiting for you when the ship finally comes in. They’ll be there when you’ve proven yourself. You can give them everything then.

It’s sort of the best of both worlds. You’ve given them their freedom, but they can still believe in you if they want. You allow them to believe in you, but not at the expense of their own lives. The things they can create with their own hands.

I suppose that’s them paying their dues in a way. If they’re there at the end when everything has been sorted out, why not bring it all to a close together? That’s the ultimate test. That’s the only thing that means anything? Why try to avoid it by making sure the situation never comes up? Don’t you believe in love?

13.

I wake up at about noon the next day. I’m sunburned everywhere. I was laying on my back and half on my side. There are big, red, sunburned lines all over my whole body. My penis is sunburned. It will hurt to get an erection for the next few days. That of course excites me and makes me have twice as many erections as normal. I should just cut that damn thing off and throw it away. Another rash decision that I would probably regret if I did it.

I walk home. Cars honk at me and people look at me in disgust. What the fuck is their problem? Indignation is not the appropriate response to my situation? Christ, look at me! Does it look like this is something I chose to have happen? How about giving me a ride and a pair of underwear? I’m sick of the bird and noisy fifty-thousand dollar car horns.

I walk. I step in some broken glass. I leave a big red, bloody footprint with every step I take. It pisses me off even more. People keep driving by and yelling obscenities at me. I flip them off. Not one of them stops to help me.

I make it home and jump in the shower. The cold water feels good on my sunburn. That sunburn is fucking evil. I’m as red as a lobster. I’m well god-damned cooked. It ain’t fun. Water pours all over me. The water is cool. I let it trickle into my mouth. I have cotton mouth again. I hate cotton mouth. The water doesn’t really help, but it gives me the illusion of helping. There is the promise that it will help me later on, but fuck that! I want to be helped now!

Nobody gives a shit. Nobody is going to come by and see if I am ok. Nobody cares about me. It makes me sad. I start to sniffle a little bit. Then I start to cry. There are moments like this. I’m not going to lie to you. Moments of absolute depression. I think of all the nice things I’ve done for people and how nobody ever seems to ever have even the slightest inclination to pay any of it back. I let myself dwell in my self-pity for a moment. I just let out and cry. I keep drinking the water when I can and in a moment I have to piss. I just piss right on myself in the bathtub. The urine streams out onto my leg. It is thick and golden. It is hot. It aggravates my sunburn but I don’t do anything about it. My sunburn hurts worse when I move. I’m in a sorry state. Sorry and pathetic, but that’s the fucking point. I’ve let everything go. Fuck everything. Fuck everybody.

Nobody listens to me, nobody remembers the times I’ve helped them. I just let myself feel pure rage for a while. The whole time I lay there. I hate it when people try to suppress feelings like this. You’ve got to go through them every now and then. Everybody has them. It’s perfectly normal. Those people that pretend they don’t are just bullshitting themselves and everybody around them. They’re accruing a debt that they’re going to have to pay someday. Rather than let it out a half-hour a time every couple of months, they let it build up until it becomes so powerful that they break everything they’ve constructed with their whole lives. Pathetic macho bastards. Think they’ve got everything under control. Constantly wishing to present a proud and strong face. You can’t run from your emotions. You can only choose the moments they control you. If you don’t want to break down where people can see, you have to let yourself break down when you steal a moment of privacy. Fucking arrogant bastards don’t do it.

After a while, the self-pity passes. The emotion has run it’s course. I don’t understand emotions. Nobody does. They just come and hit you and take control. It is totally chemical. There is no way around it. Just like taking drugs or getting drunk, you’ve just got to ride it out. Resistance is stupid.

I drop all that talk and just feel good that nobody is there to help me. Nobody has ever been there. That’s not something to be ashamed of or to lament. All it signifies is that everything I’ve accomplished in my life is entirely my achievement. I’ve chosen my own path. I didn’t have some asshole lay it out for me to follow. I built it all up from dirt and shit. It’s my work by my hands.

I feel a sense of pride.

That pride does not, however, redeem all of the figures whose duty it was to help me. They’re still wrong. What I’ve done is super-human. They did their best to hold me down. They did their best to make me less than I could have been. To form me into their weak and pathetic idiotic image. But I escaped. I am blossoming, I’m reborn, red like the phoenix.

A drunk in a lonely bathtub with cold water pouring over his sunburned, naked body. That’s victory. I don’t feel the least bit ashamed about it. I wish they could come and see me right now. I could flaunt my dirtiness at them. I could flaunt my state of disrepair. I could flaunt the blood and the burn and the slurred words.

This is me! How do you like it? This is what I’ve made.

But the truth is on the inside, completely different than the outer shell. That’s the only thing I’ve learned. And I am proud of what I am, what I’ve just described has nothing to do with it.

I’m a being of light. I reside among the stars. I’m magnificent. This body means nothing.

But those bastards can’t see it. They go no farther than the broken form. And that’s why they stay in their superficial bullshit hell. That’s why they know nothing about reality.

14.

I never used to like beer. Not just the sensation of being drunk, which I also didn’t like, but the taste of it. Its frothy bubbliness. Its bitter sweetness. I just had no compulsion for it.

Such a cop out. You drink to much and you miss the flow of reality. You skip out on sections. It is like reading a book and skipping every seventh page. Or two out of seven. Or seven. Depending on how many days per week you go and get drunk.

When you are sober there is a progression that takes place. You watch yourself age. You get better at the things that you are here to do. You grow in competence and responsibility. When you drink you miss out on your growth. You just end up where you are heading without the qualifications you needed to have developed before you got there. That just gives you more reason to drink.

Being unprepared was the thing that used to worry me the most. Now I don’t give a shit. Now, as you know, I’ve given up. Fuck it. Fuck it all. Because the thing was that I was prepared once long ago and it didn’t matter to anybody. Or when you’re prepared you know what happens? Yeah. You end up having to fix things up for all the other drunk and unappreciative assholes in the world.

Let the whole ship go down I say. Let it crash and burn. If you don’t like it, you can work to change its course. I’ve done my share of work.

Then I start screaming that and realize that the people who are intended to hear it and who deserve such criticism are drunk again. The only ones who are spurred into action are the children who are guilty of nothing. And I feel like a guilty ass.

Guilt, what better excuse than to get drunk?

It’s all malty and golden and I’ve started to crave it. I get that thirst that isn’t a thirst but a longing. I want to feel the tingle of the thick malt liquid in my throat. I want to feel sick. I want to shit my pants and get a boner in a public place. I want people to put their hands to their mouth and look away as I walk by.

And I want to laugh at them. I want to laugh with that loud pathetic groan that makes them cringe in disgust. I want to burp a beer burp into their face and sigh and hug them and piss down my leg. I want to feel the warm piss rolling down my leg into my shoe, setting the groundwork for a future and unbearable odor.

I want them to say, “How disgraceful, you could have done so much!”

But I’ll never get so drunk that I can’t answer.

“You’re the disgrace! You keep blocking me, but the truth is I’ve done it all already. It’s all right here, but you don’t even listen.”

And I know that they won’t understand that, and that they’ll probably just walk away with a snort. Fine by me. I picked their pocket when I hugged them. Drinks for the rest of the night are on them.

15.

I see a girl from across the bar. She’s so pretty and innocent sitting there. Long high heels. Her house is only two blocks away but she had to get a cab because she can’t walk on them.

She doesn’t even really look at me but I can tell she wants me to come over. It’s one of those nights when I’m not looking too bad. She’s curious about something. I sit beside her and her giggling friend. Her friend tells jokes. I listen to them and ask her when they’re over, then I laugh to be polite.

We drink. This girl is buying me beer. She’s filling up the glass she is holding and then handing me the refuse in the bottle. It is about half and half.

I quit talking entirely. I just stand there holding the bottle. We kiss a little bit. Right in front of her friend. Her friend giggles and carries on. She’s kind of cute. The girl I’m kissing starts to suck on my tongue. That’s a pretty clear hint. I wait. Eventually I leave that night without going home with her. But I have her number. I have a plan to see her the next day. That usually doesn’t work, but it was just the way things transpired. Usually they don’t go for it the next day. Usually by then they have changed their mind. But this girl is rare. She knows what she wants.

I go over to her house. She’s waiting for me. She takes me to her room and we have sex. There is nothing poetic or mystical about it. It is just a bit of exercise. We lay there naked and spent. I just want to go. I don’t want to be there for one second more. She was good and everything. She was beautiful and enthusiastic and flexible, but I just want to leave. I don’t know why.

I make myself stay for a half hour just to be polite. Then I put on my clothes and go. She opens the door for me. She walks me to the gate in her bathrobe. She’s old enough to not be visually distraught, but I know what the situation is. I feel guilty. I lean forward to give her a final kiss through the bars of her gate and she seems taken by surprise by the action. I kiss her, say goodbye and walk off.

I still have the condom in my pocket. I wrapped it in toilet paper after I took it off. I look for a garbage to throw it away in. I always take the condom. I don’t want any little babies running around. Could she take the semen out of the condom and impregnate herself? Is that even possible? I don’t know. I don’t care. I have the condom, my mind is absolutely free and clear.

Even at that moment, walking satisfied in the cool freedom of the night I fully intend to call her. I wake up the next few days with thoughts of her lingering on my mind. But I never go through with it. I just don’t know what calling her would accomplish. I don’t really want to talk to her. I’m melancholy and guilty with the unfairness of it. What does she want from me? My life? My time? For what, because we did the equivalent of a thousand sit-ups together? How can she have this hold?

I hope she’s ok. I resent that I have to think that. She’s an adult. She’s my equal. I just wanted to feel a person near me for a while. Isn’t that what she wanted? Wasn’t that pretty clear by the way things transpired? Or were all those false signals. Was she just using me? She claimed she just wanted my body, but maybe she wanted it all.

My money, my time, my life. She wants to be the focus. She wants her work to be over. She wants to find that guy who will carry the burden for her and make it all easy from that point on. The beautiful white gown. The antique car with the cans behind. The next morning you wake up married and find out that absolutely nothing is different. You haven’t “made it,” the same tasks are still ahead, waiting for you to tackle them. Only now you have a partner, maybe. Or maybe you just have the work of two to do.

I thought it was just sex. She was using me for a relationship. They always use you for a relationship.

Will she give me the one thing that I need as a man? The one thing that all men need. Not anything physical or sexual or anything like that. Just to be looked at with admiration. That’s it. A little awe. It burns like rocket fuel inside of us. We run forever on it. It doesn’t matter if it is childish or obvious or even artificial, it makes us tick. We’re sensitive that way, more sensitive than any woman is for anything. We just want to be admired. Not even for anything preposterous, just for the things we deserve.

But those days are all over now. They’ve wiped it all away. Our women demand to be taken on the same level. It doesn’t matter that no woman has ever achieved the intellectual heights of somebody like Einstein or Dostoevsky, we are to treat them as if they had. This new feminism has robbed men of the right to be awed. The new argument is that Einstein and Dostoevsky are sexist because they made their breakthroughs and thus robbed women of the chance to make them. The current belief is that it isn’t right to admire men for anything. Ever.

I’m not asking for anything that seems, at least to me, to be all that unreasonable. I just want people to notice when there is something that I can do better than they can. But everybody’s in the habit of making up excuses as to why that is now. The reality isn’t important. The important thing is what might have been if the world had been perfect and everybody had been given their fair opportunity.

As if it was perfect for me. As if it was planned so that I won. That’s what they imply, and it pisses me off to hear it.

I wake up so indifferent for a few days, but she is always on my mind. I don’t call her. I hope she’s ok. I just am not inclined to talk to her again. The night we spent together, the hour, it all starts to fade into a dream. It is like it didn’t happen. But I know it did happen. That’s the thing about sex. It staples you to reality. Those moments are the real ones. They have an effect on people. They never forget. And sometimes, those moments come back to haunt you.

I get sick and start to itch. It’s a little present from her that she neglected to mention. People will tell me it serves me right, but there is no way they’d say the same if I pulled the same trick on somebody else. Woman to man is a sign of strength. Man to woman is a sign of filth. I for one, am a believer in one truth, thought I still don’t know what it is.

16.

There are many truths in this world that are self-evident. I think the problem is that people have gotten into the habit of dismissing the possibility of them. Take for example the idea of rights.

The truth is that we have very few rights, cosmically speaking that is. The universe couldn’t give to shits about what we do or feel that we deserve to have happen to us. It isn’t a matter of rights, it is a matter of cause and consequence. Everything we do has an effect, and thus, most of our behavior is designed to bring back what we perceive to be a positive effect. We call that morality, but it is really just whatever works out best for us in the long run.

The funny thing about morality, is that you can’t make any rules that are contrary to self-preservation. Once you start doing that, you lose your audience. They tell you to fuck off and stop listening to you. There is nothing else you can do. The fundamental rule is that everybody has a right to do whatever they can to keep themselves alive.

There is no functional view of the world that can be in contradiction to this basic truth. Any conclusions you can draw based on the premises that people aren’t going to do what they can to keep themselves alive are totally worthless.

So there we have it, rule one, people have the right to try and keep themselves alive. If you try to establish yourself as contrary to that rule, they’re going to kill you. They have to. You’re contrary position makes you a threat to them and they’d be stupid as hell not to eliminate that threat. That’s too fundamentally programmed. You have to stay alive.

Everybody’s always all mind boggled about the current state of the world. They don’t know where all the anger and resentment is coming from. Especially the anger and resentment against the united states. The people of the US think they are greatly moralistic and are doing the best they can to make the world a better place. But here’s a little statistic that I think you might find interesting. The main health problem in the US is that people eat too much. The main health problem in the rest of the world is that people don’t have enough to eat.

On the one hand there is a surplus so great that it is actually physically damaging.

On the other hand there is a shortage so great that it is also physically damaging.

People have a right to self-preservation, we’ve already established that.

There is no moral argument that you can come up with that would be in contraction to robbing American’s of their surplus of food. You couldn’t tell some poor bastard in the middle of the desert that he must watch his children starve because the American has the right to eat so much that he becomes grotesquely obese. No.

All the other arguments melt away. The fundamental truth is this: people have the right to a healthy meal every day. It doesn’t matter if you think your country deserves all it’s opulence because you worked hard or your forefathers worked hard or the people of the other countries of the Earth are lazy or whatever. The fundamental rule of morality is the right to self-preservation. If some people are starving, and you have enough and aren’t sharing, they have a right to kill you and take it. End of story.

There once was a time when the world was really big, and all the places were separated into their own distinctive compartments. Things were different then, and chances are many of the things we believe today were actually true. The people who had the wealth were the people who had earned it and who deserved it.

But things are different now. The whole world is connected. Products are made in one place and shipped off to other regions thousands of miles away. The economy and consumable production of the world is highly inventoried and catalogued. We know where everything is. For the first time we’re in a position to actually do something about the problems that have been unavoidable before, but nobody’s doing anything.

It’s all too big and connected. The things that happen in one nation effect the lives of people a half world away. Decisions must be made with that in consideration. It is time for a new and more responsible morality. The old texts must be revised. This is a new and different period of human history. We’re entering into a bold new world. We must have some respect for our new environment.

But people do what they can get away with. And they get all snooty if you tell them of their error. So fuck it. I’m not even going to try anymore.

I drink until I throw up. The thoughts of being the guide for the new millennium leave me.

Everybody wants guide. They want it all lined out in an easy to follow pattern. If they don’t have a good guide they’ll start looking for answers anywhere they think they can find them. They’ll start thinking bullshit TV sitcoms have it right.

Another drink. Drink, drink, drink. Let them watch sitcoms. I want to watch myself take a piss. At this point, nothing in the world will make me happier than taking a piss. I go to the bathroom. The pressure is intense. The stream is sharp and clear. I finish.

That was satisfying.

That was pure joy.

The End

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