Posted on September 17, 2005 at 23:29:31.
mon*stros*i*ty 76
By M Satai
mon*stros*i*ty
“There is, on both sides, something cruel—and even monstrous—in the struggle against an elusive adversary, where the distinguished is opposed to something which cannot be distinguished from it, and which continues to embrace that which is divorced from it.”
--Gilles Deleuze
76.
I would have liked to have started this off by saying: “I woke up this morning,” but the truth is, I start this at night.
The night, by the way, is February 4, 2004. It’s a Wednesday, if that matters.
It doesn’t. It’s an anniversary of some sort…I remember, of course, which. I don’t care to name it.
If you live enough years, every day is the anniversary of some ridiculous event, some utterly pointless memory, some sort of humiliation.
Right now, I’m boiling water for tea. Mint tea, it’ll be, so as not to be kept awake. To be kept awake: probably it would be better not to be so afflicted. Tomorrow morning at 5am, that’s soon enough to be awake.
Now I’m in the bedroom, lying on the bed. It’s 11.26pm. Now it’s 11.27pm. Now it’s 11.28pm. I watch those particular minutes pass on the electric clock before I can think of anything to say. Now it’s 11.29pm.
You see how things can just go on like this, on and on and on. I’ll sit here, lie here, actually, trying to think of things to say, as I watch the minutes pass by on the clock.
By the way, I just took my socks off, black socks, as if that matters. I’ve had them on for a couple of days. I imagine they stink. I threw them on the floor.
I’ve lit two candles in the room. It’s very quiet. Earlier this evening, I talked to V on the phone. We had a meaningless conversation.
Last night, she gave me a blowjob. Afterwards, I fell asleep and some time just before dawn I dreamt that she wanted to see someone else.
It’s stupid when I remember stuff that happened in the past. The past is irrelevant. Five minutes ago, the world was something else entirely. Everything’s different now, whenever now happens to be.
Maybe it was yesterday morning when it occurred to me that when you get to a certain age, life becomes the art of putting off things you don’t want to face as long as possible…until you die and don’t have to face them at all. I guess this is another reason why they like you to have a family: so you’ll still feel responsible to your creditors even after your dead.
There’s a real comfort in not having any friends, family, or loved ones. There’s a real advantage to it: you can think of it as a revolutionary freedom.
Well, there’s only five minutes left in February 4th. Now there’s four left.
…and now I can say it: I woke up this morning at 5am. I didn’t get up, though. I fell back to sleep for another half-hour or so. I woke up in the midst of, what I called even then, “a fusillade of farts.”
This morning, by the way, I weigh: 155.
Before I woke up I had a dream that V leaves me, but then she calls me back. I lie there thinking about that for a while, and then I get up and take a shower. I just miss the 6.25am bus because I have to buy more bus tickets. Now I’m waiting for the 6.35.
Some old guy in the waiting area says something to me about leaving his suitcase while he runs to the car to get another bag. I shrug and sort of smile politely and that annoys me, but what else could I reasonably have done?
Rudeness intrigues me: I think it takes real self-confidence and strength of conviction to be actively and creatively rude.
I get on the 6.35. It doesn’t look crowded, but it is. I sit next to an old bald guy with a grey mustache. He’s probably really only in his 50s. I have to ask him to let me into the seat: but what if he’d refused? These are the little dramas that occur 800 times a day.
I sit on the bus thinking. What I think is that it’s better to lose everything even while you’re alive, even in the midst of life, because you’re going to lose everything anyway. It’s inevitable—and, therefore, *real.* I lost a wife that way, among much else. It’s not a bad thing: who would have wanted to see her waste away from bone cancer, for instance, if I still loved her? Now it would be a pleasure. Instead I uncovered that she herself was a cancer: greedy, manipulative, sucking, clawing, crablike.
Oh, Im too exhausted to go into that again, ever again. I regret having brought it up at all.
Today it’s Thursday, February 5. Its chilly out, but not freezing cold. There’s some sun. I might have seen a full moon this morning: if not full, than pretty full.
Last night it snowed. Yes, another night came and went and now it’s Friday, February 6.
Yesterday, I was a human being again, whatever that is. I spent the evening with V. Later, in bed, I put honey on her cunt with my fingers while I sucked her nipples. She moistened quickly and I went down on her, slowly licking the honey off her cunt with a finger inside her. I looked up at her body: her head to the side, arms bent at the elbow, fingers lightly curled, eyes closed, looking so abandoned. She orgasmed, and I moved up her body and put myself inside her. I separated my knees and felt my anus exposed.
I thought: it’s a shame we often can’t tell each other what we’re really thinking when we cum.
White blast…its like looking into a grave, or a series of rapidly flipped flashcards, each depicting a sanctified atrocity…
It’s raining now: 11.12am. I’m sipping tea in the office.
Last night, coming out of the grocery store, feeling happy and content, I noticed, as if for the first time, how ugly and tired and unhappy everyone else looked. And the I realized with a shock, that this is how most people look 97% of the time. And then, somehow both more and less shocking, I realized that’s no doubt how I, too, must look 97% of the time. Without the masks we wear for sex, money, social situations, etc., human beings, especially after a certain age, are really quite hideous, even frightening, to look at. What you are looking at, primarily, are all those years of frustration, anger, loneliness, disappointment, unfulfilled desire, etc. that build up like toxins in the flesh. You’re looking at untouched bodies, bodies without orgasms, unreleased bodies, unseen bodies, poisoned bodies, empty bodies.
It’s a world inhabited by monsters and monstrosities: you get the feeling that these hideous, grey, happiness-starved zombies might fall upon you at any moment if they catch the slightest whiff of your joy; that they’ll tear you limb from limb if they see the least opening, if they can get away with it.
That’s what the night’s for, metaphoric and otherwise.
You get the feeling that you have to kill them to preserve your own happiness; that, in effect, it’s necessary to kill them to be happy.
I’m on the bus now, going through the tunnel, and it’s raining. I’m dressed for colder weather, and after racing to make my connection, to beat the night, I’ve broken into a rank sweat. I’m sitting alone and its 5.15pm.
He steps from the car dressed in purple hotpants and lavender platform flipflops, a short, tight tanktop, his body smooth and softened by the surreptitious hormones he’s been ingesting for months. His girlfriend has brought him to the clinic to be castrated and now she leads him by the hand across the parking lot of the office complex.
The “doctor” is an older lesbian who believes in the Cause. These kind of politically-correct fascists would rather be slaughtered than listen to reason.
--He’ll be so much easier to control this way, she says.
She has the girlfriend lead him to the table, where the feminized boy is quickly strapped into the harness. It’s all routine. The doctor casually squeezes the atrophied balls with a gloved hand and barks out a laugh.
--Well, neither of you will be missing these mushy peaches all that much.
Writing is a kind of castration—a feminization process that leads to receptive impotence. One feels as if one might destroy the world by writing, either erase it or appropriate it—both really—one word at a time.
It’s 5.41pm. I’m supposed to be home by 6.30 but it’s still raining, and traffic is crawling. Thousands of hungry dead souls—all going nowhere just like me, but not all of them, not even most of them like me, I’m writing.
Rain, rain, rain…the bus is almost two hours late, the bus home. I don’t even want to look at my watch. Trees stand in water-filled depressions. Rain. Tailights.
…..I eat chinese food at a buffet. I go home, shower, change my clothes. Im not interested in recounting everything I did—at least not now. Besides, its Saturday, February 7th at this point, nearly 3pm, and I’m lying on a bed looking out an attic-bedroom window. Bare branches, snow-covered lawns, other houses mixed in with pine trees and more bare trees.
Somehow this seems important: I just took a shit a few minutes ago—a huge, hairy-looking thing, like the root of something dug up, which instantly turned the toilet water the color of whiskey. It was a heavy and thick shit and it smelled, somehow, like a combination of meat and mud. It felt both satisfying and like something of an accomplishment to have delivered myself of this thing: I can still feel its absence in the very path it took as it passed through my intestinal tract. Every once in a while, I feel my sphincter contracting on an emptiness…
It’s February 8 now, Sunday, it’s 6.43pm. I just took a shower. I’m sitting in a wooden chair. My hair is wet.
The less I’m myself the more I become who I am. That’s a fairly idiotic thing to say.
I read a review of an artist who made a list of all the things that interested him and then over the next 10 years painted the mythology that took shape from all those things. I have very little interest in seeing his paintings, but I do have some interest in making up my own list.
Here are some items on a list of things that interest me:
Monologue
Tarot
Cyclones
Transexuals
Cyborgs
Cancer
Zombies
Slime
Insects
Guns
S-M
Violence, in general
Crows
Nomads
I have one great disadvantage in dealing with other people: I don’t have a fixed idea who I am. I have to shuffle through such a varied list of characters that by the time I choose one the moment to act or speak has slipped passed. I’m not self-conscious. I’m self unconscious.
That’s a boring observation—what nonsense.
There is nothing to say.
I hear three sounds right now: something being chopped on a chopping block, a kid reading the flap of a book, and a very faint mechanical whine.
Imagine me sitting here in a straight-back chair, on a cold February night, letting my hair dry and having nothing to say. I’m sipping seltzer every once in a while. I’m going to sip some right now.
It’s difficult to write words as empty and trite as these…and at the same time: it’s all too easy.
Are you there? I both hope so, and hope not. In the end, of course, it makes no difference. I might as well be semi-conscious, alone in the final moments of my life, having oxygen forced into me with a hose.