I Once Had Sex With a Man; Just to Watch Him Die

The worst part for me was realizing I had nothing to write about.

I had no pain, I had no pleasure. I was a buoy, I was the yellow on the meter, I was the middle lane. I was the step between the predators and the plants. I was the primary consumer. I was neither here nor there, I was just... was. Bukowski says "everyone thinks they can be a writer, not everyone thinks they can be a plumber or a dentist." I don't know if I ever thought I could be a plumber or a dentist or a lawyer or a teacher before I read those words, but after, there was no way. After, I didn't even think I could write anymore. After, what was there I could write?

And there was no great pain, and that was the greatest tragedy, because there was no tragedy. A tragedy is suffering and strength, overcoming or weathering. I was stagnance. I was comfortable. I rode it out, and would continue to ride it out until I didn't know what I was riding anymore. Here's the new boss, same as the old boss, here's the new life, same as the old. Nothing changes, nothing's remotely recognizable from day to day, nothing can be coped with, nothing gives me enough dissatisfaction to actually rebel against it, just enough to keep me where I am and miserable. Just enough to make me wish there was less, but secretly hope that there'd be more, and soon. Always waiting for that last little bit, that last little touch that's going to inspire me or push me flailing over the edge.

I was a bucket on a matchstick lattice, and every day, every book I read, every film I watched, every laughing exchange I witnessed between people not me who would never be me and would never attempt to be, every comment from someone comparing great men to Chuck Palahniuk and thinking themselves unbearably insightful for discovering either pop-culture figure all on their lonesome was just another cup in that bucket, and eventually one would be one too many, and the lattice would crumble, would crash, and there, buried at the bottom with nothing, nothing left, I could build something worth a good God fucking damn.

But that's never coming. It never was coming. That cup never came, there was never a bucket, each cup sloshed and rained through whatever structure there was and came down upon me full, no barrier, no shelter. I was drenched daily, miserable and aching, and in the night I'd dry, and the next day I'd be an exmpty receptable, a new sponge ready to take it all in again, to soak it all in again, to put up with it for another mother fucking day and praying so hard that I would snap, that I would break free, that I wouldn't be the thing that I was that it hurt my beggar's heart. Gears stripped and soul stretched I would leave every morning hoping to shape the life I was living into the life I wanted to live and hoping that no one noticed it.

And who was I to say anyone was good? That any thing was good? Who was I to stand in the face of people who attempted, to achieved, and wave my flag and throw my stones and carry my balls in my hand screaming that I was the one who mattered, I was the one who was right. Intelligence doesn't make you good, it doesn't entitle you. At all. You can be an idiot or a savant or both if you're lucky and the only thing that counts for fuck is whether or not you try for anyone besides your own sorry skin. If you can carry someone else bleeding from your stomach, you're worth something. You needn't do all that, but why risk the margin of error?

Art is dead. Entertainment didn't kill it, but it was certainly found in the room with the corpse. Warhol and Lichtenstein and Avante Garde Film held a gun to its head while they force-fed it its own body, soma and soul, and watched it choke on its own potential, on its own progression. Like they gave a shit, like anyone gave a shit, while they used that fucked and flattened body as a shield through decadence and glamour and sexuality and enough cocaine to powder two of dear Andy's wigs. They stood on the body of their profession to reach the higher shelves, where the Greek masters and Bosch and Rembrandt and Van Gogh and Alrecht Durer and William Turner and Picasso and Dali and Kubrick had hidden their sweets and once they'd eaten their fill they burned it. They burned it all to the ever loving ground that no one might come after them, and they haven't. So no one may ever reach the heights you have, you must stand on the shoulders of giants. Then you must kill the giants.

I wondered if I'd ever have anything worth saying. I wondered if I was that removed, if I was that singular and unique, that there would be nothing and no one interested in what I had to say. That my experience was, like so much else, riding the median line, walking along the fence, just normal enough to be completely relatable but not unique enough to be at all enthralling to anyone who would care to listen. I go to New York and I go to Greece and London and Italy and I stay in my room and I read and look at the world through an Explorer window and call that life experience. I've never been in a fight, I've never been drunk, and I've never shot anyone for the hell of it excepting that lizard that didn't really have it coming but I tried to be as humane as possible for the little guy. Viking funeraled him, without the boat, afterward.

I need to ride a train without a ticket. I need to get a permanent scar in anger. I need to fall asleep somewhere no one knows I'm there, with earplugs, so the only thing that brings me back to life is me waking up and coming back to it. I need to shoot the bottom out of a boat and watch the thing sink beneath me. I need to.

But I need to get a job, so I can pay for gas, so I can go get to work in the mornings. So I can wake up and spend the first three hours of every day in my own head, sobbing in screams for my poor, sleepstarved mind, and the last three screaming in tears for my dead language of a wasted day.

When there's nothing to wake up for, it doesn't make any sense to go to sleep the night before.

...

Boy... what got into him?