An Inhuman Condition

She worked nights at the jazz club. The stars were glitter on her chest; her legs skewered the moon to garnish a Gibson. The boys called her Strawberry Martini, and you knew from the look of her she was trouble. Her hair was the red of revolutions – writhing in united uproar, curls whipping fury across her slate-blue eyes, lashing out at anything close. Her face was a pale and fragile kind; her smooth cheeks luring you to stroke them gently. Keen to kiss her lips, crimson and wet with little ripples and ripe, raspberry dimples, the smoking scarlet sent shivering twitches down your spine – a primitive warning of danger, an imminent sting and impending venom.

She danced a pole between the bars trapped in the seclusion of her burlesque seduction. They kept her back there like top-shelf liquor so expensive you could never afford a single sip. Stare and swoon all you like, there was no getting into the tigress’ cage. The real irony was in the wild freedom of her dance. We were the ones trapped, stuck under her spell. We swilled and smiled, hollered and hooted, leapt and lunged, longing for a sip of her attention. She was fluid stone, hot magma that kept on moving – too hot to touch and immune to outside intervention.

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Keep calm; carry on.

If you aren’t up for the extremes of death through failure and death through success, I have the perfect answer for you. There is definitely a way to kill yourself with mediocrity. It’s more of a long-term commitment than the other two, but it doesn’t require a whole lot of work. This is the option most appealing to my sample group, and it could be a great fit for anyone.

Do you lack (or have you given up) any real dreams or aspirations? Do you play video games all day? Are you in your mid-twenties and still living with your parents? Are you stuck in a relationship heading nowhere but content to stay because it’s comfy? Have you been working the same shitty job or type of job for more than five years? Are you starting a family? Are you a college graduate making less than $20k a year? Are you just shuffling along day after day? Are you pushing forward in a career or field of study that doesn’t make your dick (or clit) hard? Are you letting bills, rent, obligations keep you from the things you really want?

Then this is the method for you.

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Burn out; fade away.

If that doesn’t work for you, there’s always the opposite. I’m old enough to see the dangers of the folks who choose to grow up too much. There’s always the chance they get lost in it and become this thing they didn’t want. Wearing the biz-casual khakipants or necktie every day can just wear a person down to the point of being a homogenous office jockey. They start to think the career is everything. They fail at being social outside of work; they get the marriage and 2.5 children, and they fade away.

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Live fast; die young.

I’m realizing there’s a definite stage of development for any former “rock and roll” youth type where one of two things happen: you grow up or fuck up. This division seems to happen anywhere between 18 and 25, but it always happens. It’s been odd on this side of things – seeing people wasting away working at Burger King, still sniffing glue, spending every dime getting hammered or worse. It’s sad. These were my peers growing up. We fucked off and got fucked up. We did some seriously stupid shit, and some of us got over it. Some of us didn’t live long enough to get over it.

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Most people waste their lives collecting commodities and idling as if that’s all there is to life. But life is much more complicated, more faceted. Having a mass of body parts doesn’t make a person – there is animation in it, electricity. The house, family, school, job, obligations – those are just insignificant particulars. Those meaningless things disappear eventually into dust. But a real spark – a bud on the edge of destruction – could flicker into nothingness in an instant. The fragile energy of the spark is what life truly is.  It is beautiful and sad and perpetually now, existing exclusively in the present. Life is something only the creative soul with its beating heart can embrace.

Jake spent his youth unwittingly searching for a spark. He saw through the veils and understood that titles and possessions weren’t a life. He had foresworn material culture and rebelled against it. His existence was one flask-of-Jack, punk-rock, cigarette-burning-before-it-faded-away moment at a time. Like many in his generation, he lacked the mental programming for hope and future thought. Instead of simply abandoning the old, pointless rules and rituals of his parents, he disowned those of his generation as well. Like many of his peers who understood even a little, he spiraled into apathy.

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It’s the time of night when everyone is a little lonely. The smooth jazz plays over cooling coffee while my books sit aloft. The rap and tap of rain sings in rhythm while my cigarette burns bright, and I find myself missing you.

What do we do when love is gone? We scratch, thrash and lunge about trying to build ourselves anew. Every destructive impulse of man can be found among this reconstructive raucous as we tear down and remodel, birth and demolish. We are Shiva wedged under Kali’s flailing arms, and no piece comes without its price.

When two people entwine their lives, untying knots is always the hardest part. Ridding, removing and reconciling loss are guaranteed to hurt. Every faded picture, dusty memento and scrap of the other is rent across raw skin seething, burning from within.

But healthy relationships aren’t meant to end, and the nagging truth of knowing it’s all for the best might be the most disappointing part.

She was everything. I made her that and built all the now-fallen walls around us. It’s something I must own, hold and never let go. My ruined city is slowly coming back together. The bricks won’t go back the way they used to, and I know I couldn’t make them fit if I tried. For everything I’ve lost, some new gain must be made. Possibility is a perfect parting gift, and what is made here will have to weather a while. It’s my duty to keep building until nothing is missing and nothing can be taken.

This is the night in which I’ve awoken in the life I’ve made. It’s not too bad here among the lonely jazz and benevolent brew awaiting my lips’ return. The soft whisper of longing concern for some unforeseen connection still holds my wakefulness, but I would try to sleep if this night seemed like it could hold a few dreams.

Dearest Amber,

Your minuet breath still lingers resounding through my ears. I long for the tender touch of your legs entwined with mine. I miss feeling the slight rise and fall of your chest in my arms – sliding my fingers across your sound and sleeping stomach hesitating just a moment to circle your belly button. The taste of your skin, the ever-youthful joy of your smile, the life immortalized in your quiet eyes – those soft, hazel prisms – all of you will reside in me ever thus.

I remember the days when we were the world – forsaking sleep to sit together in urgent ambling through our verbal rambling. We lived entire lives inside those moments. Idling with you was my most pressing passion.

You are responsible for the vast expanse of my emotions from blissful happiness to harrowing sadness.

Watching you kill yourself with determination of your life’s work, seeing the way your beauty and tenderness has been overwritten with decay, watching the world rob away your sunshine ounce by ounce with every day – these things I can no longer do. I have held together the past year for you – to try and help you get back that piece, the essence of the thing that is you. But it seems now that it was lost before either of us ever really noticed it was missing. One cannot hold a wilted flower in winter and forever insist it is still the vibrant, myriad effluvia of spring.

And that’s why I’m going, now. I’m leaving to be with the eternal YOU – the one we can never hold or touch or taste again in this life no matter how hard we try or how determined we are to hold on.

Goodbye my love.
Res ipsa loquitur.

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His bright face fell, fading to a partial frown. The weight of unspoken sentiment dragged his cheeks from their elated pedestals – pillars on which they stood drugged from the nostalgic encounter. As they sat silent, his mind flipped through the scrapbook of their moments and memories only to find the numerous hurt personified in its final pages. This slow dissent into the past’s faded pictures staggered his thoughts with its thunderous conclusion. This gradual forward reminiscence and his merry mood guised the facts, blurred the content of the thing so much that his surroundings were uncomfortable and alien when he abruptly awoke. He was akin to a boiling shellfish slowly simmering to the final choke of its death concealed behind a comforting curtain. The thing had become real again too quickly and too fully for him to brace against the fall; he was stripped bare amongst his own thoughts and once again vulnerable to their venom.

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The whole fucking world has lost its God-damned mind. The military a-la DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is currently perfecting unmanned, aerial vehicles or UAVs to drop bombs and carry out missions of destruction in areas that are too dangerous to send flesh-and-blood troops because when those bastards die, people pay attention. These technological, stygian, deathcraft are capable of killing, maiming and setting ablaze as many poor, brown people as the U.S. government deems necessary in a matter of hours from the wiggle of arcadesque joysticks. Lockheed, Boeing – the big names are all signed up for lucrative contracts making bits of these killer, robot drones so the long arm of imperial law can slither into the third-world rectum.

As if that wasn’t enough, DARPA also intends to build megawatt laser cannons that can intercept missiles or melt enemy soldiers into gooey piles of I-Can’t-Believe-They-Aren’t-Butter. These future-fucked assholes have watched too many James Cameron movies and are so brazen that they want to mount these eye-burning, super-lasers on God-damn jets. If you make the leap of technological gadgetry that has given us a portable telephone that plays television and browses Internet porn, you can see how this sci-fi ejaculation could be mounted on an unmanned aircraft and used to make brown-people stew worldwide without waking some schmuck pilot from the barracks.

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