Today's Food is Tomorrow's Shit

But so what?

Of Warm Hands and Sympathetic Clefts

It always begins in a souring. Overanxious types show up, hands slip down and go up unsympathetic clefts, overripe melons burst in the corners, and I . . . I am always there with my big, rough tongue to lick it, souring and all.

An old man asks for the time and gets brushed aside. His fists half-heartedly clench as he shuffles off to sink into one of the couches furthest from the lights. Bitter, he silently farts into the brown patch-work couch and drenches it completely. Couches at parties are, by far, nature’s most farted-on objects. A couch can be pushed only so far and sometimes a couch will fart back. This couch is no different. It pushes back. Its essence will spread and attempt to fill the world. Soon harsh-words need will exchanging, jaws will need breaking, heads will need squishing, and—at the very least—entire floors will need fumigating. The old man knows this. He sits still as his pupils slowly turn into couch-fabric.

It is nearly eleven o’clock and Paula is still beautiful. Thin, pale worms dig themselves deeper into the food. She looks on as their bushy tails disappear into a dark red casserole. They mean to be eaten. But everyone has seen the posters and they are too excited to be hungry too and so tonight the worms will go unfulfilled. Paula’s fingers curl into a fist and the fingers crackle. Her bones are older than she is. She steals a glance at one of the many full-length mirrors and I look back at her.

Her hair is coming undone. She looks around to check if anyone is looking. No one of import is; only two younglings who look away as soon as she finds them. She licks her index finger and tucks the three enterprising locks behind her ears. Mrs. H’s back bumps into her. Paula shudders. It has been eighty-three days since anyone touched her. But then she doesn’t know that. She shudders anyway. Mrs. H’s big brown eyes grow even bigger and browner and her little mouth reaches maximal puckering and they both apologize for the green daiquiri that now dribbles down the yellow sundress. The dress is ruined and everyone in the room knows it. A thousand dogs licking it for a thousand years couldn’t lick it clean. To compensate, Mrs. H takes her by the hand and drags her rag-doll-like to the restroom. As if Paula didn’t already hate everyone and everything enough.

Mrs. H is ten years younger than Paula and far lovelier by most standards. Most men are exactly that: standards. Paula snorted. Standin’ ‘tards. No. That spoilt it.

Mrs. H turns on the faucet. The tap gasps. The small, clean room fills with the sound of water filling in Mrs. H’s soft, cupped hands. They are soft and quite large. The water collects and then overflows, collects and flows over. Paula looks at me and studies my face for clues to what she must do. But I have nothing to say to her. I never have had anything to say to her. I cannot and she knows I cannot. She knows what I am. Everyone implicitly knows what I am. She knows I am not her instructor, nor her aggregator, nor a reminder of her humanity when she least feels human though she believes me all these and more. I am, for her, just there—inscrutable. Where she is awful, she thinks I am not. She believes I love her still. She believes that because I cannot take her with her flaws, I shall not take her at all and let her world so keep her, flawed and all. I do not care. I am only curious. Mrs. H takes her hands apart and the cupped water collapses.

- I don’t know why I do that, Mrs. H says. Mr. H says it’s my maternal instinct kicking in. I tell him to stop thinking in clichés.

Mrs. H resists the urge to stroke her belly. It wasn’t protruding yet. They had been married for five months now. It should be.

- I suppose it’s comforting, Paula says.

- What is?

- Oh? Oh. I suppose they both are—the water-thing and the cliché-thing.

Mrs. H examines the damage.

- It isn’t all that bad. A blotch here and there gives one character. The dress—though replaceable—isn’t inexpensive enough for this place. Inexpensive is better. Expensive dresses are better spent on the dos of the higher floors. They get ripped—and ripped off, she half-smiles—just as much but one minds it less there.

It is a very sunny dress. It even has a few small, light, orange suns embroidered on it in discreet places. Mrs. H produces a damp tissue, slides the crook of her arm behind Paula’s thin frame to lock her in place between the basin and her parted legs, and then proceeds to vigorously rub the green out of the yellow dress. Paula gasps.

- The tiny spider doesn’t bother with the foreplay, does she? Paula thinks.

The blotches were now streaks and lighter in colour.

- That’s only made it worse, Mrs. H says as she straightens up and removes herself from Paula.

- It doesn’t matter, Paula says recovering.

- It does! Of course it does! I think my shawl would look good on you.

- No. Don’t worry about it. I was anyway looking for an excuse to get out of here before . . . well you know . . .

- You won’t stick around? He might be good you know and I had hoped to get to know you better.

- Perhaps some other time; perhaps when I am not ovulating quite as much.

They giggle nervously. Mrs. H takes off her shawl and wraps it around Paula’s shoulders.

A dozen short, thick snakes emerge from under the doors of the occupied stalls and slither towards the basins. They leap from the floor to collect in the other basin, hiss at the two women, and start disappearing one by one up the waterspout.

- Stop them! They’re too young to be on their own!

Two identical women in distractingly pink dresses kick the stall doors off their hinges and lunge at the only snake left in the basin. The snake’s head splits into two. Small, square human-like dentition erupts from their thick gums. A ventilation-grate falls to the ground and a much larger snake pokes its head inquiringly through the opening. The two pink women squeal and protest that thing cannot possibly be theirs. Smaller snakes flop to the floor from the other grates. The air turns most foul. Mrs. H and Paula exit the restroom.

- That’s a very nice shawl, remarks Ms. T.

- It’s mine, says Mrs. H.

- Is it silk?

- Yes. I’ve always said all things green must be silk or they simply cannot be green enough.

- I have felt that exact same thing about blue-ishenss and cotton.

Someone opens a window. An odour so foul it is sweet sticks its many fingers up everyone’s nostrils. Eyes water and contact-lenses slip under eyelids. Some head for the restrooms. Paula blocks them off and Mrs. T peeks into the ladies’ to check if the snakes were dead yet or the women back in their stalls. They weren’t. Meanwhile, the food is ruined. The clothes are ruined. Little green bubbles dot the sides of the chocolate fountain. Everyone self-consciously spits into their drinks and throws them away. The hostess slaps someone; presumably whoever opened the window. The window is closed and fifteen wet, furry deodorizer-dogs are pressed into action. The mirrors spot-over and I can’t see what happens next.

- I must leave now, I hear Paula groan.

- Are you sure?

- Yes.

- This one’s agent claims he was the one that came up with the “we’re all in the pregnant, junkie whore business” line.

- And how exactly is that something that recommends him?

- It’s funny coz it’s true.

- I have given up on writers.

- Yes. They’re not very human, are they?

- I don’t give a shit about that. It’s more about what they’re branching out into.

- Gigolo-hood?

- They’re always trying to pluck naive-realist cherries and that is not their job! That job, says the philosopher-turned-journalist with the standard-issue lopsided grin, is ours.

- Hmph. I still like their little gigolo dance.

- Remember what the agents promised about the last one?

- You mean the girl that came to the thirty-second’s thing?

- I’m not sure what floor it was. It couldn’t have been that low.

- What month was it?

- November.

- So the big tide wouldn’t have come in yet . . .

- . . . and the smell would have been unbearable that far down, yes. Maybe it was somewhere in the fifties.

- In November? The fifties had gone silent.

- The lower sixties then.

- Ah . . . now . . . I haven’t been there for years. I don’t think they bathe much down there. As if the courtyard wasn’t bad enough.

Paula silently swore. Why would no one let her finish a thought? What did it matter which exact gathering of morons had last had a writer? Writers were rare and just as invaluable as cock-farts. There were hungry parties full of hungry people on all of the thousands of floors and artists enough to service them all. Time and time enough alone fed them all. And Time’s little puppets, the cannibalistic hordes of the lower floors, would continue to feed them until the ocean should finally claim the Building. The big tide had been coming later with each passing year; as if the ocean was saving up, gathering itself for the one last push. The whole planet would suck itself dry and its vengeance would come in thousand mile high waves. The cult of shit-what’s-their-name-again would sacrifice the construction workers on the highest floors and magick them into zombies. The zombies are the only defence. – Launch the armoured bummers! the high priest would say and the zombie pilots would fly once again into the storm to negotiate peace. But the Ocean would not care this time and kill them all and then unwrap the Building like an onion and suck it dry.

- But that was only an idle fantasy even if it wasn’t hers alone. Meanwhile, Paula could no longer bear to become imperceptible in the field of yet another audience’s endless empathy or to dissolve in the sea of its sympathetic brown eyes. She must leave.

- What?

- What?

- Did you say something?

Shit, I think, it happened again. It seems I break the wall whenever I strain it overmuch while listening in. My chronicling then becomes Paula. In examining the contents of the glove, I fill it and she sinks below—flailing limbs and all—into nothingness and inconsequentialness. But I can only chronicle. I cannot create. I am drained now and without will. I am impotent. I am no cock, nor its adversary. I have no face, no arms, and no legs. I am all neck. If I fill, it is only because I also empty. I am filterer and farter. But I am still not at peace. A neck never is. So I must pull back to the still-spotted mirrors.

- Yes, she said, I was saying it must have been somewhere in the early sixties.

- Ah. I wasn’t there then. What did that guy do?

- Nothing. All he did was list all the things we do that he said were the same as circle-jerking.

- Like?

- Oh I don’t remember. Things like peeing in adjoining stalls, liking sports teams, joining fraternities, gangs, armies, and . . . umm. . . talking.

- I see. And did it work?

- Sort of. But, to prove his point, he whipped out what he called his “mouth-treat” at the very end and invited us to be honest with each other for once in our lifetimes and that pissed everyone off. We threw him off of course. But it was one of those selfish deaths. I wish we had fewer of those.

The mirrors clear and I can see again. The sun has set. The darkness of the empty sky will envelop and dissolve the world’s many misgivings. But the moon will soon clear the Crater’s rim. It is now nearly midnight; a midnight in the dragon-mating season. It is too late to risk walking home alone. The moon drags the giant winged rats out of their snug burrows in the earth below. In spite of their immense size and their fervent desire to get at all the meat inside, they can never get into the Building and so their mile-long claws and their mile-long teeth are of little consequence to Paula’s walking home. What is of consequence is that they invariably include the Building in their love-making. This season the entire Building shudders every night. They crash into it, pound their free claws on it, and sometimes slide up and down its length. The Building may be nearly indestructible but it gets damaged very easily. Anything not being watched by more than one human can be legitimately consumed by the building to repair any damage it might sustain. There are no cameras in the corridors she needs to walk through to get home to her cat-with-human-eyes. So Paula is stuck here. The lights dim. Mrs. H’s sweaty palm finds hers. A spotlight picks up N and deposits him on the wider, room-facing edge of the big, empty table that now is blocking off the twin exits. At the other end of the room, the much older and much less successful writer grabs a passerby and says, “Don’t leave me now. Not today.” The passerby agrees and sits down. Their hands link in the dark and they turn slowly towards the lighted portions, towards the writer and his audience, revealing  . . . revealing . . .  revealing . . . but no one is looking.

Smiles are exhaled and left to linger. N takes in a deep breath and exclaims “If everyone I’ve ever met weren’t so goddamned lazy, I’d be dead already!”

Indulgent tittering.

- Thank God they close the windows here. I hope there are no closet-Smellers here. Keeping your windows open so the stench of a million dead artists rotting in the Courtyard will fill the holes in your heart is a bit like copyright infringement, no?

Pause.

- But then perhaps not everyone can afford the likes of me and it’s not like the dead need anything more. The story I have chosen for tonight has me committing an awful lot of manslaughter. I know manslaughter is bad. It is not like I don’t know that. It’s just that I don’t think much of the dead. They’re dead, no? Fuck ‘em and fuck what they might want. Aren’t there enough of the living to worry about anyway? The more that die, the fewer there are left to kill me.

 I sometimes think I am dead. My wishes don’t even amount to a fucksworth.

- I do not propose we valorise life or the living. The sun bleeds the earth. Her skin ruptures and bleeds pustules. We are them.

Paula groans audibly.

- My story begins—like all good stories—in the promise of sex. But before I begin I must ask how many of you have been bouldering, mountaineering, rock-climbing, and etcetera?

Most free hands go up.

- Oh okay. I thought I’d get away with more made-up shit. But since you all have been to the Crater’s rim and even had jobs on the rim, he snorts, I’ll have to make up a setting. My story is set in a mountain range and that is something that stands on its own and serves its own purpose. Let us call it the Himalayas. I am assuming everyone knows how mountains work. They are essentially big phalluses. Obviously you all knew that but I had to use “big phalluses” at least once. Twice now. I now cannot bear mountain-climbers or mountain-climbing anymore. All you do is you go up a really big phallus to plant your flag, tent, and etcetera in it and by doing so conquer it. Some instead simulate an ejaculation by reaching the top and then jumping off. The entire exercise usually has only two rules: you climb mountains and you try your best not to jump off once you’re high enough. And so it inevitably attracts only those who can barely manage either. I was once like that. I will not say I was young and foolish ten years ago or that it has been ten years since. Such things assume too much. Who is to say that Time hasn’t stood still from that moment until this one now? Who is to say that it isn’t I that have, in fact, walked?

Paula groans once again. Louder. She squeezes Mrs. H’s hand and Mrs. H groans gently too.

- So anyway, I was much younger and my foolishness was of a much younger sort. I thought climbing mountains was the easiest way to get some. I had not struck on lines like “Yes. I think you are exactly like Woolf and Plath. I think it’s really great you use menstrual flows as a metaphor for sex.”

Pause. Tough audience, he thinks. They are like all audiences: a field of gently swaying necks. Their fleshy eyes follow me around and the blocked-up noses claw the air to smell me. The mouths smile. They are always so awfully silent.

- It was the eleventh day. We were three guys and three girls. We had paired up but it came to nothing. There were only two tents and we were quite frustrated because it was too cold to simply wander off and leave a pair or two alone. One of us had forgotten the third tent at the base camp. There was much suspicion and much resentment. We hated each other like only horny, frustrated teenagers can.

- There was quite a lot of other equipment we had to lug around. Rope, crampons, a million carabiners, food, sleeping bags, cooking equipment, clothes, and so on. We also had ice pickaxes or something. But only the girls used them. Perhaps we instinctively knew it is wrong to claw a phallus.

- We were about sixteen thousand feet above sea level when I fell. Now a lot people I have met believe when you fall at sixteen thousand feet above sea level you fall all the sixteen thousand feet to the sea. This is simply not true. At the very most you might fall a thousand feet. That isn’t all that bad. You might still live though you’d not like to.

Pause.

- I fell. I should have fallen with everyone else but we hadn’t roped up because we weren’t feeling very pally. So only I fell. Well I didn’t really fall. I slipped and I slid down forty or fifty feet. But on a mountainside forty or fifty feet off the beaten path is bad enough. And my situation was in fact quite bad. My oversized belt buckle had managed to snag on a very small rock projection. I lay spread out on the ice unable to move. I twisted my neck to see where I was. I found I was hanging, much like the helpful rock, over a thousand-foot drop.

- Now this is interesting. You see me here telling you about the time I nearly died and you assume I didn’t die then. I did not have that luxury back then. It was like everyone and everything was waiting on me to do my bit and fall: my impatient friends, the biting cold, and the realization I had about how easy it is to die. I was on Kierkegaard’s cliff. I was incredibly free for the first time in my life. There was nothing holding me back.

- When people say their life flashes before their eyes when they are about to die, I suspect, it is very likely that they are being forced to evaluate their entire lives and so decide whether Life’s really all that. It stretches the imagination very little to imagine they all would be forced to overvalue their past under such stress. In a suicide-bid, on the other hand, when sentiment has time enough to settle, one might have a less biased perspective on life and death.

- Now my friends did not really care about the very many epiphanies I had had in under a minute or so. They were yelling at me to get the fuck up already. I still couldn’t get up. I was certain I would die if I did. There was however one more thing that kept me in limbo. I am incredibly lazy. Climbing up to my friends would take twenty minutes easy. Even after that I’d have to keep walking for a week till we got back to the base camp and motorized transport. And even the base camp wouldn’t be the end of it. I might forever be stupid enough to get dragged along to such situations. Would it really be that bad if I just lay here, spread eagle and with freshly ripped clothes, and just let the mountain do with me what it will?

- One of the guys decided I needed some help. He roped up with everyone else, struck a dozen nails into the firmer bits of the ice and passed the rope through them, and slid a few feet down and let an ice-axe slide the rest of the way towards me. I saw it coming towards me and I saw it was way off course. I stretched a little to catch it. I knew I wouldn’t. And then it hit another rocky projection and everything slowed down as I—in much horror—watched it turn direction and gain speed as it sped towards my outstretched right leg. It clipped me and fell over the edge. My nylon pants filled with blood and I leaked over on to the white ice.

- The mountain had kneed me just before the belt-buckle had snagged on the little rock. I was sure the axe had fallen on and killed at least one hiker. One of the girls had been pregnant and had had a leech latch onto her leg the night before and today morning she had found herself a lot slimmer and had been sniffling and whining ever since. And now my fiendish friend had wounded me. I had had enough. I was extremely angry. I wanted my revenge. I reached around and unclipped my crampons from my backpack and fitted them on my hands. I clawed my way back up. It did take twenty minutes. I finally reached the track, threw off my crampons, straightened up, dug my naked hands into a partially-hardened snow-bank, made a melon-sized snowball, and let it fly at the fiend’s head. It came right off and rolled off the cliff as the headless torso slowly sank into the snow. I laughed. The girls laughed. The other guy did not. I did not care. I blamed him for the lost tent and we threw him over the next day. The end.

Pause.

- Is that it? The hostess asks.

- Yep. Now if you wouldn’t mind. I am all spent.

- No. We don’t throw people off willy-nilly. Do you see a satisfied audience here? The Courtyard is a sacred place and not for the likes of you.

- Fuck you. That was a nice story. Now throw me off!

- No.

- I am an anteater whose veins are varicose with ants! They live in me. I am their anthill. They wake now and I can no longer bear it. Throw me off!

- No. Now go to the back. What a fucking waste of time, she says as she turns on the lights.

On Progress.

I see no evidence of progress in the machines of men.

The wheel is only a breast that rotates freely.

Fire is only a penis regrettably caught in an immortal moment of ejaculation.

Shelter eats you but does not kill you. It is a womb.

Expressed beauty is only a cry for help.

I am an anteater whose veins are varicose with ants. They live in me. I am their anthill.

The plight is probably risible. The pain is hopefully less so.

Extract No. 3

The book is titled 'Of Gods and the Like' after a bit of fantastic word-buggering of Spinoza's fabulous Ethics's first part 'Of God.' It is likely I am revising this next bit while you read. The incoherence might frustrate but it is difficult to revise the entire book every time I inject an idea in somewhere. The following bit is the very beginning, which like a funky succubus is still sucking away at the firmness of my ideation after the three years since I started writing for it. Mating Gods with distastefulness might seem distasteful but if it is to be done, I will do it gracefully. This perhaps is more important to me than my squandered supply of love. If you must swear at and curse my ineptitude at impotency, go ahead and include me in your process but keep away from metal penises and do read on for I love you o reader for your act of reading more than you could hate me for whatever it is that I have done to you. Do return. I update frequently.

I

The Numbered

EIGHT: One died. Two died. Three to Thirteen died. Fifteen died. Sixteen died. Seventeen to Twenty all died.

TWO: Rises now from our want for self-preservation a want for witnesses to wait on us in the wake of the demise of our previous self.

FIFTEEN: The want inflates our shrivelled corpses and we are afloat again.

TWO: Addressing the want’s want, rising with its rise, by breathing life into these few words we state the obvious and by this, in another manner of being, begin volleying salvos of stale fartwind into the expectant and patient quiet that would still us if we stilled.

EIGHT: I have long believed that there lies in the forgotten depths of creation an obscenely self-referential metaphor, a meta-creature that is stuck to the firmament and from whose mouth bubbles downwards through these oceans of Being an endless stream of spite. I call it Zero. It is perhaps the firmament. Perhaps we are. It matters little now.

NINETEEN: Like a wicked bar of soap that pleasures itself near Zero so its own vile bubbles may join the interminable stream of spite to issue forth from forgotten depths, our first emission of the stale fartwind--that now tries to flood the surrounding emptiness to make it habitable--pushes us up and out of the fundament. It brings with us the carcass of all that was already suspected susceptible to demising. Having conveniently lodged itself into our coalescence before hand, it too floats up from places too terrifying to know better.

ONE: Despite our best efforts, we have died and so we are certain now that free will is an illusion.

NINETEEN: Perhaps we were meant to die.

THREE: That is quite enough of that all-powerful spittle of spite monster nonsense.

TWO: But who else could stand to gain from robbing the universe of what gives it meaning? Must we now suppose there is such a thing as meta-meaning?

EIGHT: Spite does. How could you be so blind? Our very existence is a continuous struggle against Zero’s breath. Where would we be without the gentle breath that pushes our feet into this soil here? That plants us in the meaningful? We never gave meaning. We only ever distributed it.

THREE: Or perhaps we unknowingly maintain the illusion of free will in some exotic dimension of our existence.

NINETEEN: Or perhaps I alone do.

EIGHT: Perhaps I ought to kill you all out of spite.

ONE: Perhaps we ought to kill you.

NINE: Oh do be of good cheer Eight. Good cheer will probably save us all.

NINETEEN: Eight bites Nine. Now to return to our purpose. . .

THIRTEEN: We are all that now remains of the kind conceiver of all kinds . . .

EIGHT: . . . of all other kinds.

THREE: . . . of all kinds and though it is for us and us alone that a solipsistic world-view is permissible, now that their hands no longer join ours as we try to cup the universe away . . .

EIGHT: I take a bite out of Three. While I masticate, I will be quiet.

ELEVEN: . . . and now that they and their hands have slipped away to the unknowable unknown leaving behind the gaps they leave in our shield of cupped hands . . .

TWENTY: . . . and now that the universe has poured through these gaps and thoroughly offended us and our boundaries . . .

SIXTEEN: . . . we find it hard to disregard their lack, the lack of the lacking two, because perhaps this permissibility can only belong to the whole of our kind.

TWO: Without their napes to nuzzle into, without the soft flesh of their hips to firm our hips against, and without their spread cheeks to bare frothing, pulsating assholes to join ours as we pound away at the quiet, our small circle of the Numbered finds it even harder than before to hold off the innumerable hordes of Unbeing that circle us and the cowardly Universe that has sought refuge in us by violating us.

SEVEN: To remain incomplete though we have been filled to the brim and passed on into irrelevance by whatever it is that promises to complete all that dies, we pile our hopes onto our self-love because it is what primarily causes us. It is an object. Perhaps we gestate it or perhaps it gestates us. We hope our hopes will weigh us down and keep us from being floated further downstream. But self-love is a hungry child. Or perhaps we are the hungry child. We must suckle it all out attention and so we try to dismiss the missing two from our minds, push them into the furthest corners, place their memories behind the folds of a thousand other unpleasantnesses, and find a new whole in our depleted numbers. But we are weak, too weak to take shovels to our hearts and empty ourselves of them. And so in the lifetime of the moment that absents them, till whenever the moment deigns to stop multiplying, we are forced to number nineteen not twenty one. We are to lick the wounds they left when they left.

ELEVEN: Now of the two, the one we can miss more . . .

THREE: And one we must miss more!

EIGHT: Assholes.

SEVEN: . . . partial to staying the only one entirely absent from this something, is the lastborn of our kind, Twenty One. While common sense does its part and calms the flapping gums of our wounds by reasoning she could have fared no better, that she too must have been pulled from slumber and oyster and run headlong through the same abattoir that chewed us up and shat us out so into the safety of this limbo that wholly depends on the beating of a new heart that bleeds none, leads us nowhere, and beats on only because it lets relit desires desire on, crash on like unrepentant drumrolls on the slack skin of our impotence that tries in turn with its slack to stifle them, quiet them, and stymie their attempts to tear it open, break out, and somehow kill us a second time, for the sake of our continued suspension in this limbo, we must be both impotent and filled with longing in equal degrees. So it is that we can do nothing but desire on and wait for rationality to magically redeliver her to us.

NINETEEN: Waking well past our deaths, knowing little of how we came to this end, and being a bit inquisitive about it all, we train the eye of reflection inwards and reflect. Death (whose multiple visitations now seem more likely) and whoever sicked her on us must have found the only weakness we all inexplicably share. This supposition is perhaps far enough from being accurate to be accurate and perhaps it is not but it is ours and as an extension and an exertion of our love for our self-love, it performs and buys us a place to dump our hopes on. We brick in our hopes so:

They take a feather to that most easily tickled bit of hers, the bit that shields the tenuous conjugations of her many manifestations with the universe from the less pleasing of lies. By brushing the sleep off each eyelid, they wake her from the toil of her dreams and then with fingers little, carrots large, and blandishments foul, lead her away from her bed where her inertia could still have weighed her down and kept her from floating away with a pleased vanity’s giggles. Awake and aroused, she finds herself in their bed where an alien inertia spews forth its tendrils and binds her extremities down. Her will is lost to her and almost all of it crumbles when she cannot pleasure away her arousal. Then, a relentless stoking of her incontinence sends shivers of electricity down her spine and blushes squeeze dry her limbs and push all her juice up into her beautiful head till she--like a wet sponge hung from a gentle pinch--is caught in the utopian ideal of repetitive, unyielding pleasure and trembles in incapacitation. Once her limbs cannot drag her away or the mind will itself clear and once the last of her will slides into place and lets her see the only way out of this excruciating ecstasy, she slips off her defences and invites them inside her and our friendly friends--aping Moses in the least literal of interpretations--take her soul to safety by parting her body and plucking out the soul, removing it from whatever harm her vitals might do her and so by shearing away her head, tearing off her arms, hacking off her legs, and punching out her torso, they bind her skittish soul to the refuge of a shrivelled neck where she is reduced to a flipitty-flapatty that can offer sufferance to existence just as well but cause not as much harm and at long last could be returned, like we have, to a self unsoiled by the need for purposefulness and temperance, to a remainder that could return to our love.

Our supposition ends thus. In it she perseveres like we suppose we still do in the universe’s supposition. If she did die, it is likely she is now somehow hiding and if she is now somehow hiding, it is perhaps because some unnecessary remorse saddles her with fatalism and then like a selfish lover mounts her and rides her away from seeking shelter in the windowless sacristy of our forgiveness.

About the Hyenas

The hyenas of war should get fucked and their assholes should be ripped out. The thing is, the mouth needs bones but the asshole does not. Let the hyenas fart all they want with naked pelvic girdles. We will not hallucinate on their fart again and believe them. The hyenas know they cannot use their faces to speak to us because faces are in general ill-equipped to hide the mind's intent. Greed readily translates into slobbering and slobbering is much worse than sweating under pressure which can be misinterpreted as a good thing.

Assholes sweat too but they never ever slobber (unless of course the issue of previous dietary intake comes up). The face will always betray them and so the little fucking pustules let their smooth fat wrinkle-free cheeks speak for the pus that swims in their skulls.

Rip out their assholes and they will matter no more. If I didn't believe they'd bite off penises shoved in their mouths like greedy little farmers who want to eat the goose that lays the golden eggs in the hope they'll shit golden goose eggs, I'd ask for volunteers to have them fucked there too. But perhaps that is overkill and such willing penises are needed elsewhere and elsewhere is a wonderful place!

Women should not be bought and sold for their sex and neither should lawyers, engineers, doctors, or any other kind of stupid fucking philistines be told theirs is an honest and acceptable prostitution of the self. Prostitution is the debasement of the self for the pleasure of others and soldiers come from the lowest (or the highest) form of prostitution. Fucking hyenas that tell stupid come-receptacles of soldiers to go to war for moneys and glories should be stuck on a spit, slowly roasted, and fed to themselves.

I missed a chance and it is a terrible feeling. So, go forth and fuck the fucking inbred pigfucking hyenas whenever and wherever you can and go forth and multiply so your offspring can fuck any such swine of the future and along with the shots of pure satisfaction that are bound to fry your brains over time, you will get a nice little family tradition out of the whole deal.

You fucking hyenas.

An Indictment of Organized Sport

This has been a long time coming. Now anyone who has met me would know I look like the sort who would rather watch sport than play it. That assumption is entirely without merit and I would like you to immediately put such a thing out of your mind. I am working out, burning calories faster than usual, and eating healthy. I can almost feel the fat in my belly squirm as it is forced out of my various openings. But, fit or unfit, I refuse to partake in the trillion-dollar orgy that is sport.

My views on organized sport are similar to my views on organized religion and God knows I don't think much of organized religion. . . (a subsequent "not!" would be too trite to actually make obvious.) I could start with statistics to show how wasteful institutionalized sport is. But I'd rather start with a little quoted quote from a much quoted monologue.

And what is that which I ought to pay or to receive? What shall be done to the man who has never had the wit to be idle during his whole life; but has been careless of what the many care about - wealth, and family interests, and military offices, and speaking in the assembly, and magistracies, and plots, and parties. Reflecting that I was really too honest a man to follow in this way and live, I did not go where I could do no good to you or to myself; but where I could do the greatest good privately to everyone of you, thither I went . . . What shall be done to such a one? Doubtless some good thing, O men of Athens, if he has his reward; and the good should be of a kind suitable to him . . . There can be no more fitting reward than maintenance in the Prytaneum, O men of Athens, a reward which he deserves far more than the citizen who has won the prize at Olympia in the horse or chariot race, whether the chariots were drawn by two horses or by many. For I am in want, and he has enough; and he only gives you the appearance of happiness, and I give you the reality. And if I am to estimate the penalty justly, I say that maintenance in the Prytaneum is the just return. 

There is no need to say this is from The Apology of Socrates but I do anyway. Let us assume for the sake of the argument that happiness perhaps can be measured in dollars. Then it is not enough to question the purpose served by the trillions we pour into the coffers of sports teams, their managers, and that many-headed hydra called Marketing because we could point to the questioning  of why we should do anything really. Instead, we should, like we should whenever in doubt . . .

Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and your self melt away.

Gandhi's talisman is not without merit and it is just far too easy to not worry about the world not forced regularly down our optical tubing. Far too easy. Another quote and one that describes Gandhi becomes necessary:

It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.

Churchill's comment is with less merit but serves its purpose well. Why does it take a Middle Temple lawyer to make a Gandhi? Mohandas was not exactly a carpenter's son. It is convenient to imagine the human race conjured up the first bourgeois whores in 18th century France. But that is sadly not true. We have to take what we can get in way of enlightened individuals. The bourgeois do not treat the message as a message but as a metaphor for loss, gain, pain, pleasure, and sacrifice; specifically what the individual had to endure to make the message. Thus their eyes turn Gautama Buddha into a generous and self-sacrificing Prince Siddhartha. Churchill, the embodiment of the British bourgeoisie, does something similar. The capitalist whore will deride socialism for being anti-intellectualist and yet will fear the intelligent individual.

This fear gives rise to organized sport to fulfill the desire of always having something to do.

The Socratic method now finds expression only in the fatuous pugilism of debate teams.

Intelligent discourse is made to bow before heated discussions over pointless player statistics. Revolution to talk of revolution and that to the virtue of tax-deductible donations. Pointless rituals to preen the young and teach them the way of the bourgeois.

Money-making is a sport? Gambling is a sport? Sex is sport? What is not trivialized to being sport?

At this point I would like to refer to the Swedish cartoon of Mohammed. I did not see the point. There was none. No artistic merit. By "art," with some teleological bent,  I point to the cause of whatever being is.

What has no artistic merit need not be.

Instead we are forced to learn by rote and repeat what earlier versions of us, in their turn, learnt by rote and did. Fire good. Fire bad.

By watching sport, we are returning again and again to the expected unexpected, to the unexpected that strays only within reason. To the comfort of reality tv.

I, for one, would rather watch something with a script.

I would rather live out a scripted story than go through the motions of a pointless expression of my bastard individualism.

I leave with Heraclitus:

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man. 

Once the Charm of an Absurd Existence is Spent. . .

If I say my life is absurd, it is not because I mean to boast but because I wish to force a reconciliation between my self and my belief in all life being absurd. So I repeat so: my life is absurd.

Oh!

Faking excitement now consumes much of my day. I blame everyone.

I wrote a small little nothing a few months back. It goes like this: "But, most of all, we are what we are not." It meant little back then. A nothing. A something that was just contrary enough to amuse me.

Then, yesterday, I finally realized what my subconscious was trying to tell me. I was talking or walking or eating or whatever-the-fuck-it-is-that-I-do-now and suddenly I realized I do not have a subconsciousness. I do not have a consciousness. I am empty.

I am what the rest of the universe uses to counterpoint itself.

I am where the rest of the universe stores its junk.

I am a non-entity pressed into existence for the sake of the universe.

I am the bit of plastic the pole-vaulting Universe uses to stay in the air. I am not the pole. I am the bit of plastic that it snags ("plants" makes its role seem benign) its pole in to life off.

As soon as I realized what I had realized, I felt the weight of the entire Universe (minus me if it is that I do exist) pressing against me. I suddenly felt extremely inviolable but also extremely unhappy.

Paranoia is a strange and lovable thing but to suddenly come to know that the universe has created me solely for its selfish purpose of continuing its existence is not really anything like the wet dream I remember having about the time I finally figure out the purpose of my being.

Calling it acute claustrophobia is putting this feeling mildly. Claustrophobia--as I see it--relies on the person's knowing that there is a small possibility that the self can explode (or just swell up) to exactly fit the dimensions of the confined space it is in. There is something about joined walls that makes us want to feel them out, to lick them all over, and to have our forms be one with them.

But the Universe? Does it have walls? Can my fear of open spaces be reconciled with my fear of closed spaces? Not bloody likely.

I feel like I will choke on the next breath of air I take.

I am reading Dostoevsky and Kafka again. I remember now the state of feverish excitement my first reading of "Crime and Punishment" brought and also the indifference towards Kafka my first reading of "The Metamorphosis" brought. This time around, I realize why Dostoevsky could read my mind and why I did not care about the problems of Gregor Samsa.


I am the Underground Man and I am Gregor Samsa. I am my novel's hero and I am extremely indifferent to what I say or do.

To pervert what Kafka says: "I am the nihilistic thought that came into my mind."

Or rather into the Universe's mind because it does not seem likely that I have a mind to call my own.

And to describe myself with a final metaphor: "I am not the person the rest of the universe talks to, cares about, and makes love to. I am the condom it uses to fuck itself."

Extract No. 4

We think with our limitations. I speak for myself but assume you are not unlike me. There are no absolutes--nothing that can really separate me from you. I think we know this and it bothers us. If we still try to find absolutes with our pessimism, we find we can reduce everything we have ever done to either prostitution or masturbation. Even rape can find a place in the two. But of course this is only for the sake of our pessimism. Prostitution and masturbation are hardly mutually exclusive. Also we are still talking about things we do and not about what we are. We are not prostitutes because we prostitute or masturbators because we masturbate.

When engaging with certain portions of the universe, like when engaging with its vastness, solipsism becomes essential. I have always felt that. The premise that brought me to that conclusion when I was seven was not really the same as when I was dead and twenty seven. Twenty years ago, I felt real people were too hairy to be really real.

Now that I am dead, I must revert to solipsism because non-existence does not make sense. It cannot. The explanation for the non-existent must be non-existent.

To offend the pious.

The 'net is full of nuts. It is almost like a divine spider-squirrel is gathering them up all and putting them there for the winter to come.

The Theist side is full of morons trying to convert and defend their faith. There are also those that pour out awful rhetoric in such a defense. The Atheist side is no better. It is full of kids breaking free from the traditions of their parents, shut-ins, and youtube worshippers. They tend to modernism and I will come back to that question soon.

I suppose this post will grow with time.

So to the Theists:

1. Why claim your favourite book has all the answers in the world? Which chapter/surah answers forty seven times eighty three?

2. I came across this in I, Claudius. So I will give it credit for this answer to Jesus' importance: Christianity started off as just one of the many MANY cults. Few survive. Thousands of prophets are forgotten by this world to keep alive the memory of one. And why was he different?

Because he died and it was very poetic.

3. There is no such thing as a good Christian or a good Muslim or a good what-have-you. To say a person does good only because he believes in God and fears the punishment of God if he be otherwise is reducing that person to a mindless husk who can know only fear and no love other than self-love.

How easy is it to admit the good Christian and to reject the Christian who scans verses from the bible to justify the slavery of women and inferior "races"? Very.

Christians have never been particularly forgiving. There are reports of mass-cannibalism by Christian armies during the first crusade. Do the acts of a few good men who happened to be Christians outweigh the deeds of the hundreds of thousands who have raped the planet for the sake of and in the name of their God?

4. I sometimes wish I were Jesus and not Nikhil. Nikhil can only make terribly salty and very nearly unpotable water out of wine.

5. Let's not kid ourselves into believing there is a heaven. Christ didn't make it because he committed suicide. What chance have mere mortals?

If there is, there must be only one very smug occupant. Fuck Him and fuck His apparent smugness.

Maybe Hell and Heaven do exist. Maybe they're on Venus and Mars respectively. Maybe we should preemptively carpet-nuke both them planets thereby cluster-fucking God, Satan, and all their little miscellaneous minions.

And to the Atheists:

1. Religion and Faith isn't all that is wrong with the world. Children get indoctrinated in a great many number of things. It helps their development to trust their elders. To doubt everything their elders say could mean death or ostracization. Blind nationalism is just as big a threat in those terms and perhaps a much much greater one when we look at the tolls of 9/11 (6,000) and the Iraqi Invasion by the US (600,000).

2. You forget how reasonable it is to imagine there is a deceitful God and one that does not care for us. For whom the activities of the moss on a very small pebble can matter only very very little.

3. Those that quote from sections of the Old Testament like Deuteronomy or Leviticus to show what a terrible thing it is that the Bible will make the gullible do must realize most theists believe most of the bible was written by people interpreting the will of God (and for some part to further their own purposes). These then cannot be used to judge the religion as a whole. Men are fallible. This is acceptable to all faiths.

4. For most theists, an acceptance of the belief that God exists is exactly that. An acceptance that is not unlike resignation. "Surrender your will to God" is exactly what they do. They are just tired. We unconscionably accept the certainty of our deaths though we have certainly not died before to the best of our memory. It is a similar resignation.

Please note the use of quantifiers here.

Also, I bring this up.

Why do we smoke?

Peer Pressure?

Why do we believe?

Peer Pressure?

Why do we get married and have kids and pay our taxes and have little parties and make lots of nice friends?

Peer Pressure?

Why do we live then?

Peer Pressure?

I certainly do not find myself talking much with the dead.