Tomorrow's Parties

All of tomorrow's parties, christened with youthful bloodshed, shall serve established order, entrenched power, and connected oligarchies. People may change, but the Beast stays the same, just as voracious, carnivorous, rapacious, and pleasantly oblivious to human suffering. The Grand Inquisitor penetrates and destroys with a cursory glance, a simulated instant of omniscience. The Grand Inquisitor displaced God. Kirilov believes his own divinity, no more fallacious than believing in improbable God.

Aspergillus Cunnilingus

I stepped on the mouldy substance festering on my basement floor doing laundry last Friday. Since then, my motor skills have malfunctioned, my eyesight has dimmed, my sex drive has waned, and my mental faculties have slowly dissipated to a critical point. I barely recall habitual pieces of knowledge - for example, the square root of 9, my mother's maiden name, and the thirteen emperors of the Ching Dynasty - and soon, I suspect, the reaper will call and that will be that. Before I am tossed unceremoniously by these microscopic invaders over the edge into a vegetative state or death or both, I need to satiate a pressing desire to write.

Any unsuspecting fool who waltzes through my front door would find my living quarters repulsive, decrepit, and a literal cesspool. And if such a fool happened to work for the city, he or she - I do not discriminate, even with fools - surely would condemn my humble abode and send me to more hospitable living quarters, or, if he or she were highly observant and remotely competent, to quarantine. But, alas, a clipboard toting hero never materialized and here I am, whittled away by microscopic pieces of shit.

My diet consists of pizza pops - a freezer full of them - and canned soup - a pantry piled on high - and canned sardines. Sure, I have cravings for other foods. But most, except for the occasional pizza or order of Chinese Food delivered to my door (Debit-at-the-Door is an absolute must), necessitate that I leave my home. That is something I just do not do. Leaving the home, seeing the world, meeting "new people" - sure, some people find pleasure in such things and I do not discriminate against this idiosyncrasy, but I do not share their view nor partake in such quirky behaviour.

My companions at home are as follows: my television set - her name is Betsy, by the way; my radio - a family heirloom passed down from my grandpa to my pa to me; it's named Jed, by and by; my fern, whom I never got around naming; but I guess if I were to give it a name, it would be Frederick; and my cactus plant, Maximilian Vicissitude Jones XVI. XVI is one cool cacti. Also, I had a wife-partner-girlfriend-sister-mother-daughter too. She had a name which I cannot recall. She went out for supplies one day, long or not-so long ago, and never returned. I don't think I missed her too much. From what I recall, she got far too loose for my liking.

Books are piled on high in what used to be her room - she was the reading type, I think. Her favourite was a fellow named Beckett, who, from one of the backcover photos, appeared to be a wrinkly pasty bastard. According to the short tidbit included with the unflattering photo, this sonuvabitch was quite the attractive git in his youth, a veritable pussy magnet. Meaning no disrespect to Mr. Beckett, that tidbit must surely be a work of fiction. Then again, an estranged feminine voice echoes in my head, "Isn't it all fiction?" - her echoing bitch voice. Forgetting her philosophic psycho-babble was a simple matter: a swift smack of her golden head. I thought, no I knew, she masturbated while gazing longingly at that wrinkly prune. Sam! Sammy! While sitting on the crapper, I would overhear her self-induced moans. God knows if she actually managed to cram the hardback version of Malone Dies up her snatch. "Isn't it all fiction?" - fucking reductive artsy-fartsy crap. I'd like to see her say that about the bible - accompanied with an anal insertion.

Wasted youth leaves a lingering bitter aftertaste. I wasted my youth awaiting death. I read my bible, went to church, took my vitamins, and awaited salvation. But with age and mounting disappointments, I realized that the Good Book is indeed fictional - stories told and re-told in order to pacify and neuter man. Men who believe in an unjust, cruel, vindicative God, who are convinced killing heathens pleases their Lord, who hold steadfastly to vacuous dreams of a glorious afterworld - a warrior's paradise populated with naked virgins, golden harpsichords, and free-flowing sinless wine - are simply rats running haphazardly through a maze in pursuit of a mouldy block of cheese. God is dead - that implies he 'was' at one point. I don't even think he 'was'. God ain't dead; he never was - just the mysterious enduring fabrication of infantile minds.

I have lived in a era of boundless immaturity glossed over as informed dilettantism. Dilettantism, in fact, was the norm. Schooling was no longer about searching, for oneself, a philosophy of life. No, it was about becoming financially viable, respectable, and to take weekends to read the newest Mailer tome or the Foucault Reader in order to spout sanctimonious pseudo-scholarly prescriptions about the state of this miserable world. Everybody conceives themselves as a weekend scholar, regurgitating half-digested, half-baked ideas: masters of judgment and prejudgment - rendered from the comforts of a coffee shop, a book shop discussion salon, or the wondrous and boundless space of the World Wide Web. My schooling, from what little that I do recall, was defined by cutthroat tactics, sycophantic gestures assuaging the insecure egos of authority - accompanied, in some instances, by fellatio and or ribald acts with middle aged megalomaniacs. The blinding glow of the 'real world', laying beyond the ivory walls of the Academy, forced rational people into doing morbid things. Beautiful women were most adept in these games of careerism - for they possess gifts for duplicity unknown even to the most calculating sociopath. Schooling was about picking up obscure pieces of information for a specific occasion: sitting in a bourgeois lounge sipping cocktails with a obscenely gracious power suit wearing whore.

I remember being late for my political theory class every time I cared to show up. Sometimes I was late by minutes, but most on most occasions, more than half of the lecture passed before I appeared. One day, the professor - an old Platonist - finally asked, "why so late young man?". I replied in cliche, "better late than...". "Than never?" he mused. "Hmm..." He went on for a while. After an meaningless repartee - which I shall not subject you to - I finally connected the dots for Dr. Wilson. "To show up, whether tardy or not, expresses our fundamental relationship with the world. By showing up, I am free, having exercised my choice to be here." "What about the days you do not show up?" he asked. "I'm either hung over or getting laid," I replied tersely. "So on days you are absent, do you remain in your cave?" he continued. "Who's to say this classroom isn't a cave?" I smiled. He laughed and told me to take a seat and continued with his overheads.

The point of this recollection - if there is one - lies somewhere behind that projector. Do you see it? Yes, the busty brunette named Alana. She sat upright - showcasing her immaculate posture and untrammeled poise as her ample breasts threatened to spill out of her low cut t-shirt - eyes straight ahead, scribbling an occasional note. Alana was flat out a genius - a genius with a huge rack. But somewhere below those luminous globes lay a charcoal heart oozing disdain for lesser kinds. I was assuredly one of those lesser kinds. Oddly enough, she did not turn her nose to me, as she did to the others. Maybe it was my proud displays of nihilism - complacency mistaken for rebellion. Maybe it was because I did not constantly stare at her chest, like the rest, when talking to her. Even though she turned out to be an unscrupulous careerist, I have only fond memories of Alana; she was an impossible hope, a brilliant creature dulled and extinguished, like all impossible hopes, by vanity.