IAMA human being. AMA

Sometimes I forget that I am a human being and I don't care that you're hungry or that a hurricane blew the roof off of your house or that you've lost your way and are lost and tired and scared. Sometimes when I read about the horrible things that have happened to you and yours I just shrug and carry on with whatever it was I was doing at the time, like clipping my toe nails or tweezing the hairs in my armpits. 

Sometimes I wish you'd fall on your face and skin your knees through your pants and even if you're wearing some made out of a really sturdy fabric like thick denim you'll be picking at itching scabs and strands of loose skin for weeks. Sometimes I wish you'd bite the inside of your cheek so bad it swells up into a tender little knob that you just keep accidentally biting on every time you eat something and even when you're not chewing your tongue will seek out the bitten spot and prod it relentlessly. Sometimes I wish you'd miss your last bus and drop your winter mittens in a puddle of polluted city water. Sometimes when I hear on the news that your country has been subject to another school shooting or another terrorist attack all I can think about is how much I don't care and how little the lives of those lost mean to me. 

Sometimes I'll stub my toe and I'll wish that concentration camps were still up and running, that slavery was still legal and that no amount of charity fundings will ever ease or end your hunger or your suffering. Sometimes I have to bite my tongue to keep from smacking you right across your stupid fucking face. 

And, you know, I saw on the news about your missing baby girl and sometimes I wish she turns up dead.



But then I remember that I am a human being.

Episode

The bench I sat on while waiting for my train was drilled to the floor, which was a good thing for me since the only thing that stopped me from running across the turnstile and flinging myself in front of one of the moving trains was clutching hard with both hands to the armrest of said bench and squeezing my eyes shut as tightly as I could. No, I don't want to die and I didn't five minutes from that precise moment either, but for a precious few minutes, or it might only have been seconds, I was loose and all my instincts were telling me to jump. Except the meek survival instinct that from the very back of my brain did the chemical equivalence of going "ahem, excuse me? excuse me, hello?" and as I have trained myself to listen for it I heard it and let it reason with me. Still, the sweat was literally dripping off my face and for a moment there I was already dead, or perhaps only grievously mauled against the rail road tracks, I saw my life snuffed out and everyone I've ever met was bawling their eyes out at my funeral. Then suddenly I was alive again, realizing the whole scenario was ridiculous and the passing train was picking up speed again. No blood on the tracks, no blood spattered against the white tunnel walls, no train driver traumatized for life by the sight of a human body having the ick and goo spluttered out of it against his windshield.

I was just going home, but I can be anywhere at anytime and I always have to be ready to fight these urges. These episodes become less and less frequent but as they decrease in occurrence my defenses get more and more lax and I fall increasingly easier prey to them and the lowly voice of reason, the one that exists to ensure my future survival has been drowned out more than once already.

I know that I am weak but in itself that knowledge is the strength that keeps me alive.

The story of Kisces

It’s quite a funny story actually, as you’ll soon see for yourself. It was an ordinary day; sky, wind, oxygen, hot salty-looking pavements and a couple of houses. Almost exactly as the previous day had been save for one difference, nothing major, just the fact that Kisces wasn’t breathing anymore and her body consisted of a rather tattered looking torso, blood-tangled hair and bulgy eyes with a broken look to them. Her legs had been severed slightly below her hips, although severed seem like a far too civilized word for the description of what Kisces’ lower part of her body had gone through before finally being tugged off, by then being little more than skin surrounding a mush of pulpy flesh and splintered bones. No, not splintered, those bones had been damn near sawdusted.

I said this would be a funny story but now I might have to take that back. You see, Kisces was killed by her lover who wasn’t really in love with her to begin with. So with regards to both living and dying, Kisces was a very unlucky girl. And that’s what love is all about; a complete and total lack of luck. To put it shortly, I met someone, started to love that someone, was mistaken pretty badly, and just decided to ignore the whole thing. I didn’t get beat up and destroyed by my emotional side-stepping the way Kisces did, but in some way I still feel the need to be pitied because my heart aches and whines, resembling more than anything else a honey jar that’s stickied too tight to ever be opened again.

Kisces lover (who will continued to be referred to as such, even though he didn’t really love her) was your average guy. He never intended Kisces any harm, at least not until he stomped her kneecaps for a good half hour until they felt soft and almost powdery beneath his boot, but he also never intended for them to be together. Kisces was quite jadish and immature and far too easy to get into bed. When things got too serious she was easy to steer back in line and when things got completely out of hand she was even easy to rape, maim and leave in the woods to rot.

I don’t remember who first claimed love to be like some kind of flower (a rose, wasn’t it?) but whoever it was, they were absolutely right. Love is nice, and sweet, abundant and inevitably wiltering. We need togetherness, results, big talks, physical connection, closure, forgiveness, answers, fidelity, but we should all just shut our needy little mouths and consider ourselves lucky we didn’t meet the same fate as Kisces. Or, that we haven’t yet.

Death of my childhood

They say that your childhood ends the minute you realize you’re going to die. That you are just a mortal lump of flesh that will (albeit incomprehensibly far into a distant future since you’re only 10 and a half) expire and only leave a mere nothingness behind. That your childhood ends when you comprehend that just as outer space is infinite, you will only live once and when you die you will be be dead for infinities infinity, for ever and ever, all the way into oblivion.
My childhood ended a little earlier than that. It happened the first time someone I held in high regard let me down. I don’t mean my parents, even if to most children their parents are infallible gods, because mine had already failed me numerous times by having wills of their own and succumbing to emotional displays of affection that excluded me, so I already knew that they could be faulty and were, close to, but not omnipotent. I’m talking about my heroes, my muses, my celebrity gods who made rock that rolled and nudged my heart like a butterfly’s proboscis and who, even though I was too young to know even a word of English back then, spoke directly to me.

The Beatles.

One day I was casually eavesdropping on my fathers adult conversation with his adult friends, while watching the pickup run along the vinyl tracks of Yellow Submarine, and I overheard the words that would slay my poor innocent childhood and spit on its remains. My father laughed and said: “Yellow Submarine, huh… You’d have to be on some really mad drugs to come up with a song like that!”
My heart skipped a beat. The Beatles… had something to do with drugs? It couldn’t be. Drugs were bad, surely the great Paul Meckarty and John Lemon would know that! It couldn’t be true, it had to be a mistake, a cruel joke, a misunderstanding. My heroes were pure and knightly and would never dabble in those dangerous things that were either chemical and looked like flour or was like those star-shaped green things that grew among my parents tomato plants out behind the shed. I wouldn’t stand for talk like that about The Beatles.

“Daddy?” My jaw set but my lower lip trembling I approached him and his friends as they sat around the kitchen table drinking amber liquid that came in cans and smelled like stale bread.

“What, sweetie?” He patted me on the head and scratched me behind my ear. He always touched me as if I was a dog, not in a demeaning way, just out of the awkwardness he felt around this little being that wasn’t yet an actual real person and who had, somehow, come from him. I knew he would give it to me straight. He didn’t believe in patronizing children and had never lied to me about anything, even when I had requested information that a child’s mind isn’t yet developed enough to process.

“Did The Beatles really take drugs?” There was no going back now.

“Are you kidding? They were completely off their heads on that shit. It’s a wonder none of them died of it!”

The disappointment made it hard to breathe. I broke down crying and threw myself into his arms while his friends hid their faces behind their hands and tried in vain to stifle their laughter at my childlike despair. My father held me awkwardly to his chest and pounded me in the back with his palm (the way men always hug their dudes) until my ribs ached and my teeth rattled. Then he dislodged himself and held me by the shoulders at arm’s length.

“Listen. Don’t ever trust anyone, don’t ever put your faith in anyone. You are responsible for your own happiness and other people’s failure to live up to your expectations will only hurt you if you let it. No one is above you.”

I was 8.