the drunk mink--

I.

I remember the old man from work. His hearty bushel of white across the upper lip, his tanned skin, his heavy glasses. The curious thing looked quite like a walrus.

The old man from work used to stalk me. Between the rows and rows of books and magazine stands, he'd suddenly appear not unlike a Cheshire cat. He'd stop dead in his tracks, deliver a wink, and then pull back his lips slowly into grin. Quite disconcerting to a vulnerable young morsel such as I, you know. He'd ask if I had found a girl yet. He always asks if I had found a girl yet. Innocent bystanders would be forgiven if they thought he were running a rather public girl-trafficking operation. And there he was, collecting his quota from an anxious, impoverished small-timer who hadn't caught any today or yesterday. Quite unacceptable, sir!

The explanation for all this is rather innocuous. Disappointingly so, perhaps. You see, the old man, let us call him Walrus, was quite bemused with my state of affairs. First time Walrus and I met was at the children's section. I was busy piling bargain items on some wooden platforms. These items can only be succinctly described as large, bright-colored contraptions parents would offer as sacrifices to their small, atavistic children. Walrus, who was attending to his duties nearby, caught sight of me, strolled over, and introduced himself in his thereafter signature fashion.

Walrus asked me many questions. My name, my age, how long I had worked there, where I was from, what I had studied, and whether I had a girlfriend. My answer to the last was inestimably devastating to his weave of consciousness.

What?? No girlfriend?? No female to smooch in the dark and between the covers? A boy at your age? No, it's quite impossible! You jest with me, boy!

No, I'm not kidding. Nope. Nada. Nyet. No second degree burns on my johnson, I kid you not.

Thus began his animated crusade to goad me into attaching a female to myself. Whenever he saw me, he'd pounce his girl question on me. Sometimes he'd just unfurl his hands, his palms and say, "So?" It was understood. There was an unsaid understanding between him and I that he was a sort of extortionist, perhaps a bully with a heart of gold, and I was to produce a girl, somehow, lest my moral and existential standing in the world be permanently diminished.

At first, I played the part of extortionee reluctantly, as you'd imagine, but then with some enthusiasm. I'd parry the metaphorical ball back into his court by coyly insisting he find a girl for me instead. Predictably, he'd laugh it off and suggest I prey upon the many young bachelorettes who enter the store each day (Nevermind the fact that they'd fire my ass if I tried). Soon there was a second unsaid understanding between us - that he was a sort of laissez faire-ist with a strong aversion to intervention lest everyone be looking for handouts. A bit like God, he'd likely say.

But Walrus gradually endeared himself to me. To be sure, his pestering was annoying. The sort of thing they should hang once-a-year-seen aunts and uncles for. Still, I was secretly appreciative that Walrus, blest with his mad animal mind, seemed to believe that I could have a girl-love of my own. Wracked with innumerable insecurities and having the heart of a small rodent, I hadn't dream to dare. But Walrus believed and believed vigorously.

Walrus never had a trace of irony in his voice.

Perhaps I'm projecting.

But I don't think walruses are capable of irony.



II.

One day, I was haphazardly assigned to the information desk. An intimidating place where many questions are asked like, where's a section? where's a book? may I book a book? And if the hapless individual behind the desk doesn't faint under the weight of all this Guantanamo-like interrogation and is fully knowledgeable in the arcane mysteries of bookery, all. goes. well. Supposedly. I found it exhilarating in an absolutely terrifying sort of way. The sort of blood-curdling exhilaration one gets from watching a horror film, taking a ride on a roller coaster, or being chased a mile by a crazed man with a fire axe.

I digress.

Because my mind is such a shameless beast.

There was a girl who approached the counter. Voice like little bells. Inquired about "Gypsy Morph" by a Terry Brooks. So I tippity-tapped-tapped the computer, read the location of the book, and went off for it. Fetched it back. She didn't want it, she said. Not this cover. She was quite apologetic for all my trouble. It was then only that I got a good look at her. And those little bells sang like a choir of animated fairies in my ear.

I was quite smitten. Swooningly so.

She was slightly diminutive, some inches less than me. Twenty-ish, I would guess. She had apple-red elf cheeks, their color warmly accentuated by the smile she drew. She gently pushed the book back. It's okay then, she said. She sang those words! Pretty prettier prettiest bells. They chortled like wind chimes against a gentle breeze. Champagne glasses clinking amongst themselves, compelling its liquids giggle and claw at the walls. Of my chest. Bloated, ready to burst out like a horrid seppuku experiment.

I was taken aback. Taken hostage by boyish catatonia. I, frothing at the mouth, you could see it in my eyes. I wrung my hands and wrung them and wrung them. Below the desk, out of sight. I wrung them like the stubborn syllables of to-mor-row. They wouldn't go away, they couldn't make themselves useful.

She, let us call her Belle, could sense that I was troubled. Terrified to the 't'. I wasn't the proverbial deer caught in her headlights, retinas slowly melting away to a nice vanilla glaze. I was something smaller. A beaver, perhaps. Or a ferret. And she backed away as if painfully aware that she had frightened the little thing. As if she knew if she stayed or pressed the issue, I'd immediately descend into spontaneous cardiac arrest. Probably true. Got a weak heart, you see. Too little fat, too much young, foolish blood.

So she left. Or began to leave, as her pace slowed considerably in my dreadfully faux movie mind. I then noticed two individuals who were her escorts. First, an intimidatingly tall man-creature who had clumsy hands molest her bare shoulders and neck. She had a tattoo of a skeletal wing perched high on her back. Not particularly impressive (or original for that matter) but still I swooned like the forgotten fool who discovers crayon could be applied to skin.

Belle had another companion, an elderly woman of similar height. Had an almost perfectly round head of brilliantly white cotton, the sort young children are goaded to stick on paper as 'clouds'. One imagines her either to be Belle's grandmother or a cleverly disguised cauliflower. It didn't help that such a fluffy manifestation brought memories of Barbara fucking Bush. That dazed woman who shat out a President who shat on the world and himself.

Suddenly the three were gone. And I swear I could've heard poor, bitter Walrus sneering behind a rack of fishing manuals that I let another one go. Another oyster, gone! Escaped! Poof! If he ever asks, I wouldn't say that Belle's man-creature companion terrified me. No, certainly not. Not his impressive athletic build, likely put to tearing into young ferrets for their tender meat. Or strangling elderly beavers, then stripping their hides for use as a sort of ritualistic underwear for alpha males. Nope.

I'd tell Walrus that Barbara Bush was the issue. Genes, I'd say. The little bastards that make you and I and your eminent bushel of white. Suppose Belle and I had a litter of human-lings and they surreptitiously came to say things like "nu-cu-lar". They'd never be respectable physicists like their papa wants them to. That just wouldn't do. Just wouldn't. Walrus would of course scoff at first, scrunching his 'tache like a disapproving wizard. But Walrus would understand.

His animal instincts would eventually overwhelm him, you see. And he'd be back, behind every rack and magazine stand, waiting to pounce on any hapless bachelor boy. This is the essential, unchangeable nature of walruses.

The old woman down the street, second house from the end, thinks I'm a drug addict. She told my aunt that she saw me smiling to myself as I swung my cigarette about near the street end.

I don't deny it, really.

The crazed smiling, I mean. I'm afraid illicit substances are out of my financial league right now. But I'm sure old-woman-down-the-street is quite horrified that a questionable boy of mere twenty-three, only a man-ling, living just up the road has powerful magic powder stashed away somewhere.

Perhaps somewhere unhygienic. Like his underwear. A square packet pressed against his crotch. Gives new meaning to those perennial words, "I did some blow back in college."

Surely it must violently perturb old-woman-down-the-street's gossamer-knitted mind. Now in her dreams, puffy sheep that dutifully dole out Social Security checks are strangled to death by teenage juveniles high on glue and flour. Hence, society collapses, its backbone of little old ladies having succumbed to strange boys who smoke out on the street.

But I do smile to myself, I do I do. A difficult thing to suppress when one has a trillion-mile mind. A thing with long showgirl legs crowned by frou frou skirts. A thing that chortles a la-la-la with every skip. A thing that hatches a butterfly into a fish into a Persian rug.

A wonderful thing that one could marry.

I tell everyone I love that I want to marry their head. That I wish to keep their uprooted brains with me all the time, in candy-colored jars filled with maple syrup. Something depravedly endearing like that.

But as I was saying, my mind has a mind of its own. It expands in any and every direction of its own volition. Or rather it has no volition, but expands regardless. Kind of like the amoeba that goes two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four, and so on and so forth. Kind of like the grotesquely fertile maiden who spreads her legs, resigned to the fact that her progeny will eject forth to devour her and then the world.

This is my mind. Mind you, I can't change it even if I wanted to. It eats and eats and eats, swells into a buxom cat obliviously high on its own nauseous binging.

Here's how it works. For example... My aunt, an oft-petrified mole of a person, warns me gravely of Indian robbers on bikes. Hapless Sebastian, a regular street smoker, must surely be vulnerable to the wheeled thugs. Very amusing, I think. I picture Apu (from The Simpsons) charging at gray-haired ladies with his bicycle. The rudimentary light of his two-wheeled contraption triggers a sudden arthritis attack that paralyzes the said geriatric, unable to defend herself with her two-ton bag filled with flagrantly abused prescription medication.

And my mind, quite unsatiated, continues...

What did Indian robbers use back when they didn't have bicycles? Say, three-hundred years ago. Elephants, I suppose. I think of tremendously irked pachyderms ridden by a robber (and perhaps his merry band of men) swatting aside terrified grandmothers with their trunks and then reaching for dropped purses (or harvested produce, if one is to be contextually sound).

Old women would often run back to their villages, screaming about being mugged by elephantine outlaws. Career elephant slayers would step forth - gruff, humorless mercenary men of questionable character. They would scour the vast Indian jungles for the perpetrators, armed with only spears and a cage of starved, voracious mice (a horrible cliche as an elephant, one to never forget, would tell you).

But my mind, MY MIND! What a curious thing. It goes on and on as a plummeting feather does. It makes speaking quite impossible. The other day, when I wished to say "re-ha-bi-li-ta-tion" to my father, I said "re-ha-bi-li-LE-ta-tion" instead. Even when I tried to correct myself, I kept saying it over and over.

Re-ha-bi-li-LE-ta-tion!

It's as if my mind quite unsatisfied with the number of syllables in thing, instinctively ties a ton of butchered meat to that cow before letting it go. Thus so, my mind decides it is pretty. Like a cat with a tiny bell around its neck. Everyone else, however, thinks it's a gruesome trick hatched by the sadist living in the abattoir.

No doubt the way I enunciate disturbs more than a few people, feeding the perception that I'm hooked on an array of exotic chemicals. "Yes, ma'am! Weedkiller cocktails with those cute little umbrellas stuck in them," said Sebastian to future inquirers.

My AHs and EEs, my NIs and OOHs - they terrify the common folk. My vowels, my pretty marbles of air, forcibly squeeze themselves between their fellow consonants like filthy mobs of rapists jostling to get a piece of the action. Onlookers, like literate Peter and Jane, can only gawk and gasp.

"See Sebastian contort himself into a babbling witch doctor. See him bite a bat's head off."

When I told a friend that my internship supervisor didn't like the way I spoke, she noted that this was simply a matter of race. "You are the weasel that scares the rabbits," she said.

Fair enough.

I want to go through life as if I were a small, crazed rodent.

"I bite and claw, hop and more,"
my resume would say.

For winter, I'd burrow into the navel of a pale-skinned goddess and feed on her silvery lint. A solid plan, no?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/07/fashion/shows/07DIARY.html?pagewanted=1&8dpc

"Where the masculine ideal of as recently as 2000 was a buff 6-footer with six-pack abs, the man of the moment is an urchin, a wraith or an underfed runt."

Fuck. Yeah.

Love,

Urchin.

You know what would be a good name for a nightclub? The Labia. You know what would be a good name for a rock band? The Labia. Just sayin'.

I'm growing dreadfully thin. Everyone thinks I'd just get stuck between their teeth. Why bother? I'm a filament. The sort of nose hair that germinates exclusively in an oversized light bulb.

Also, also...

The sky is naked tonight. I can see freckles planted across her back. Am I content? More than I should be. Perhaps that's all there is to it. Perhaps that's all that's there.

So this is how it went.

Lamb cutlets, turkey chunks, pepperoni slices, scoops of pasta, a bowl of creamiest mushroom soup-

I was a ridiculous glutton that night. A change from the usual lustful, prideful, envying creature that I am. (I'm quite convinced my veins are a sickly green.) But that night, I thought I'd eat away my malignant heart. How heavy and monstrous a beast it had become. An obese worm.

I said to myself, "Just you wait, monsieur! I'll swallow a gallon of fat tonight and thus pad myself forever against misfortunes!"

A daft thing to say. All that only made my stomach sick. The wine, however, worked splendidly.

Glorious, glorious red to placate my filthy green. They didn't have white or champagne. But I forgive them that mortal error; have to be magnanimous this season, you know. Red will do will do will do. Makes your brain into a fluttering mush for all the fruit flies to love.

As usual, there were many predictable questions thrown my way. Small talk from small people:

Why are you so skinny?

"Oh, my kind madame, how thoughtful of you to ask. It was a dreadfully spare month at the orphanage. Poor Marcel was dying from tuberculosis. Day after day, all we had was Marcel for breakfast, lunch, and supper. We are saving his thighs for New Year's. He was a good runner, you know. But anyway, I will have to have Christmas here." Wish I'd said.

What do you plan to do after you graduate?

"To do a bit of slutty porn, my good madame. Do not look so surprised. There is a huge market for me, for us, you know. Us skinny, starved orphans. We would press our small, frail bodies against large, rotund women on camera. The mind-shattering contrast would incur a highly charged explosion of forbidden eroticism. Imagine, madame. Imagine the subversive political implications. The First World fucking the Third." Should've said.

Instead, I answered courteously, rolled my eyes as theirs wandered away, and quietly sipped on my whiskey. They had whiskey, oh my sweet fishes. Whiskey. Bless their souls and curse their palates. McCachlan, it was called. I think. Likely a Scottish bum grazing about the highlands without his underwear. The host raved about the bottle. Wonderful wonderful wonderful. His little eyes bounced with the blunt cadence of his adjectives.

The drink itself had the taste of dish-washing liquid, neat from greasy factory pipes. Every sip a nauseous wince for each time your tongue died. Still, it was powerful magic. To steady myself, I dug spread-out fingers into the couch as if maniacally squeezing a pair of fleshy buttcheeks. Of course I'm fine. Of course I'm awake. Of course this conversation is fucking fascinating.

"Do you see it? You see it, don't you? How everything is moving towards the end-times. The bible says Israel will sign a pact with many. The bible says with many," said the host, a squinty-eyed man married to my cousin.

"Yeah, yeah. Of course, of course. The Anti-Christ will make it all happen. He will bring peace to the world. And everyone, the world, will believe him..." replied Dad. I reckon he hadn't had that much fun since sixteen-sixty-six AD.

I got up many times from my seat to get some food or some booze, or both. Each time, I dreadfully feared toppling over, under the influence of woozy McCachlan, and finding myself on the lap of some hag of a relative, my fingers excitedly appraising her heavily powdered cheeks. "Oh, what a ravishing apple you have, ma cherie!" An apple thrice glazed with a thick, suffocating layer of formaldehyde that is the McCachlan swimming in my brain. Observe! my fellow necrophiliacs - a wonderful lubricant for the dead.

A miracle-worker, Lady
Lazarus.

Fortunately, I avoided any incident involving apples, metaphorical or otherwise. But after awhile, after drowning myself in an ocean of red, all I wanted to do was to murmur "Mmmm-mmmm-mmmm." Loudly. Audibly. As if I could call down a plague of droning insects on the assembled guests. Instead, I sat on the stairs, away from everyone, making make-believe calls to make-believe persons. Cellphone pressed against ear, I said...

Um. Uhuh. Yup. Sure. No worries. Thank you, Bob. John. Nick. Jen. Lynn. Faye. Hillary? Course I know her! We go waaay back to Wellesley! Bama? My man, Bama. My man, my man. I think there should be a mass culling of mooses since it's proven that they contribute to global warming. Though I strongly believe Chuck Norris would look good in antlers.

"No one must know about the insectoid affliction that rages within my mental cavities." Last thing urgently whispered into the phone.

When we reached home, I ran down the street and sat on the sidewalk of the main road. I blew loud, sticky kisses at the passing cars. Shouted at the top of my lungs, "MERRY CHRISTMAS!" to each one. Happiness is possible, I realized. I just need the fruit flies to talk to me.

Alas

a piece of peace. Not to be.

Something's always wrong with him, that limp monsieur. Something crept up into his ear this time. A bug. A woman with secrets to whisper as tiny stilettos. She takes up self-styled residence in his aural cavity, and slowly etches her onomatopoeic name on his eardrum. A coy mistress as afflictions come.

Sebastian stands out on the street and draws a cigarette. Oh that wonderful panacea for the chic and the dying. He sucks in the gray and expels the gray. It floats away like a twisted corpse, his own no less, with vine-strangled limbs and wings. His eyes spy at the corners, half-expecting a demon to leap forth and drag it away. Where are the dogs? he thinks. They'd love to see this. A supernatural marvel appealing to their most basic canine instincts.

He mutters an apprehensive "la vie est jolie" under his breath, afraid that they might steal it away from him. He's been doing it all month. He does it to the mirror in the shower too. He cracks odd smiles at it, flashes a full grin sometimes. He's sure the person on the other side of the looking glass is quite terrified but obliges for that very same reason. He's a complete loon. Half-delirious and half-expecting a flea to murder him with a kiss on the scalp. "Too weird to live, too rare to die," the Duke might say.

On nights like this, Sebastian ponders about the state of things. An obsession. A little habit of counting to make sure one counts in life. Does he? Will he ever?

Stay tuned. He won't make it to the second season.

TONIGHT as dawn creeps in like a warm-bearded giant, Sebastian clutches his belly, picks it up and rocks it in his arms. He coos at it, blows a 'shh' and another and yet another. He runs his fingers through its minute grass-hair, caresses its head as if appraising a tender fruit - to say, Ah! The apple of my womb!

Hush now, hush now and rest... our protagonist, our pregnant MOTHER (blessed-is-the-fruit-of-her-womb) pleads.

To no avail. Our restless baby, our PREMATURE fruit, squirms and flips about like beached fish. Fish, also like fruit, definitely perishable. Question is

when.

So it is. Sebastian is up. Or down, depending how you look at it - this perennial question of fruit and fish. Sebastian listens to the Goldberg variations for a lullaby. He hears a dead man go mmm-mmm-mmm with the keys, as if smothering his fat, stubbly chin in blood-stained silk. Ladies and gentlemen, a high-strung TRAGEDY of a razor in a bathroom. Hum now, Humbert.

Hum now.

I flushed down my underwear. I fuck you not.

You see, I pulled the lever, and the toilet bowl flooded and swirled. A hungry whirlpool. I reached for my clothes, underwear and all, placed at the sink. With clothes in hand, I swung to the door. Exit stage left. As I did, my arm made the unfortunate, sharp pivot that sent Underwear, Black flying into the bowl.

"I'd rather not be friends with your crotch any longer, Mister. Irreconcilable differences. This is it. Goodbye. I'm going to Sweden."

Gurgle gurgle gurgle and it was gone. Poof. Faster than you can say, "That was fuck-ing insane."

I shall try to explain the previous post. A good beginning would be:

"We have to stop! We have to! I need to..."

We did. And she swung open the car door, and stuck out her head. There was much retching accompanied by many sharp coughs. My heart fell, felt like it plunged eight stories and smashed against the sidewalk. I couldn't do a thing. And she was there suffering out of her mind.

We placed our hands on her back, rubbed it a little. I felt like Yossarian from Catch-22 going, "There, there... there, there" in some droning, catatonic exercise of comfort. She was our precious, hapless Snowden who did no wrong except to be caught in the German line-of-fire. I imagined little Germans running around in her, vandalizing her innards with sharp swastika replicas. Fuckin' Nazis, they're all after us.

It was then and there that I found purpose. Watching her. Watching pain play itself out with screeching violins that sawed at souls limb-by-limb.

Not more than an hour ago, she was locking lips with a boy at the club. Some red-blooded boy, some drunken sod with some derring-do. I doubt she even knew him. Poor bastard, I had thought... a billion flu organisms must've leapt from her tongue to his. Love is more disease than you know. My heart, for example, is a malignant tennis ball, always bouncing, never sticking. This game is rigged, mister Referee, rolling headless in your gilded grave.

Kiss now, puke later - a little pox spat on us by the great big universe, laboring on its celestial couch. But I was struck by this order of events. The imagery was so apt, so mind-shattering, so like a cat bursting forth from a cocoon (please, there shall be many references to cats in anything I write). It's only obvious that tragedy should follow love, and this would be followed by more love and more tragedy in endless, cyclical madness. My poor friend, who seemed at that moment to have puked out half her organs, was the most fabulously beautiful thing in the world, if only for what she represented.

Where does one start? Sisyphus pushing a large rock up a mountain only to have it roll down again, or Milton's Satan in heroic struggle against God? They both claw at that big, malignant question - why do we do it even though we are inevitably fucked beyond all hope of redemption? Why do we go on living our lives when Nature, red in tooth and claw, waits 'round the corner to snatch our babies when we parade them to the world? It took a splattering of vomit to remind me that meaningful life is defined by struggle against futility. That our tender humanness is birthed only when we rebel against the inevitable.

So I took perverse and guilty pleasure at watching my friend suffer, watching her cough every fiber of her already petite self on the asphalt. It is an indescribably terrible thing to witness someone close at their frailest, most defenseless, and yet the scene coursed all the same with strange, blood-red beauty. Kant would've called this 'sublime', the highest sort of beauty. The sort of thing that is simultaneously terrible and pleasurable to behold. Something frightening, painful, threatens to consume you whole, but also draws you in utterly mesmerized. I thought of Munch's 'Scream', how my friend was an all-too-vivid manifestation of the screamer with his gaping, shimmering 'O' of a mouth.

But I shall tell you why my friend was wafting in sweet sublimity, why she was my burning bush. She was poor Sisyphus and spurned Lucifer. Very soon, I thought, she will recover and love again only to be broken again to love again to be broken again to love again to be broken again, et cetera and ad nauseum. In this, she is both irredeemably and wonderfully human. I love that deliriously, to have my chest swell with pride and empathy for our beleaguered race. To declare, as if hopelessly intoxicated, I love us all if only because we are so happy and so fucked. And realizing, as Hesse's Goldmund did, that the former can never be torn from the latter. A face writhing in pain is uncannily alike one gasping in pleasure.

You must know that I am often a sad, resentful, self-hating thing. That I'm always wishing to be elsewhere and somebody else. I have a 'friend' (or rather acquaintance) who brings out the worst in me. He's an arrogant little (Donald) Trump-ish figure, claims to have an eye-popping harem of two girlfriends and extremely ambitious entrepreneurial plans. He's always telling me of the many girls he's splendidly charmed (or hoodwinked) into bed or at least hopeless infatuation (such stories are as entertaining as repeatedly stabbing your eye with a festering carrot).

Most of all, he claims to be a Very Serious person, just like the businessman in Saint-Exupery's 'The Little Prince', I thought once. Naturally, he often declares that he's only interested in "matters of consequence", to use Saint-Exupery's term, and has little time for idle fancies (like traveling), the very things persons such I treasure to deathly death and beyond. He also despises people who are un-serious, who do not have long-term, enterprising business plans in life. People like me. Although he shows his displeasure indirectly, always advising me this or that, or speaking contemptuously of other such persons.

Sometimes, I think he is right. After all, he is rather successful thus far (is popular with many people, including lobotomized throngs of girls, if he is to be believed), and knows exactly what he wants to do in life. Whereas I am virtually clueless, always lost in half-thoughts and vivid reveries. But the very curious incident of my friend puking revealed to me why this man of mans is tragically flawed.

He is, I think, surely a "monster of incuriosity", what philosopher Richard Rorty called our sweet beast, Humbert, of the tale 'Lolita'. Like Humbert, he is quite unable to accept things on their own terms, therefore is pathologically "incurious". Instead of playfully indulging in the multitudinous scents of the world, he feels he must conquer it, must claim it like some immortal trophy. But the world (and its women) cannot be owned just as the stars cannot be owned by the businessman in 'The Little Prince'. These things must be appreciated and cherished in their own nuanced ways, although we are both doomed and liberated to assign our subjective passions to each of them.

In short, my Very Serious friend is unable to experience wonder, nothing excites him. It is a sort of death, a sort of degenerative disease that numbs one's nerve endings. The death I fear more than any other death. He is unable, like your protagonist Sebastian, to behold a kitten and coo a lengthy, breath-taking 'Ooooooooooooooooooh!', or be moved by the random seeding of stars on an unsheathed night sky. Yes, with the ability of wonder inevitably comes the possibility of disappointment. But rip wonder from the human, and the human is essentially a machine, its faceless gears to be oiled from time to time with food, water, and obligatory intercourse. But in the end, is nothing more than awkward clutter on picturesque sceneries, a rusted tank at the bottom of the Seine. I am grateful that that is his tragedy, not mine.

So I am happy to be Sebastian, perhaps more than any other time in my life. I suppose I could be someone else, with wealth and physical attractiveness and other such shiny attributes, but I'd also likely lose the gift of wonder. And what is the human without wonder? There can be no meaning and no passion without wonder preceding them.

Children, of course, are the most apt to wonder. They are defined by wonder, by their little pokes, earnest questions, and senseless frolicks. Wasn't Humbert's regret at the end of 'Lolita' that he violently plucked Lolita from her place among children? The modern world and its fanatic multitudes of Very Serious peoples are then but a far more intimidating Humbert, stripped of all charm and erudition. They snatch children from their beds, and teach them to see the world in numbers and exchanges, in quotas and audits. The most depraved pedophile could do little worse.

As my friend puked, I wondered what my Very Serious friend would think of her. He would certainly write her off as un-serious, a pathetic thing not worth knowing. But only hours before she puked, she, another friend, and I were sitting cross-legged beside a road, imbibing large amounts of booze. We spotted a small animal hurrying across a telephone wire. Unsure whether to call it raccoon or fox (nevermind a fox on a wire would be a strange sight indeed), we cooked up a compromise portmanteau, "raccox", and lobbed it fearlessly at the animal. "Raccox!" we shouted in unison. And the animal scurried away, terrified that we'd conjured a strange aberration to be its linguistic shadow.

We laughed our hearts out. We giggled, dug our fingers futilely into the asphalt just to anchor ourselves. We hopeless children. We are so doomed, so beyond redemption of civilization, but yet so brimming with mad mirth. That is enough, I think.

Yesterday night, I watched an intoxicated, flu-stricken friend puke again and again. She was in an incredible amount of pain and it broke my porcelain heart. I couldn't sleep at all when I got back to the house. The image both disturbed and fascinated me -- I am a hopelessly depraved thing, you might say. Here are the many ethereal objects my fevered mind latched upon, (largely) in no particular order, during that period. You could say Sebastian's had a wondrous, terrible epiphany.

I fuck you not.

pain, J. Heller's Catch-22 (esp. the scene with Yossarian and Snowden, and the later scenes in Rome), bad high school experiences, the human condition, A. Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus, mortality, Planescape: Torment, absurdity, the gift of wonder, Albert Einstein, human nature, freedom, Fukuyama's end of history, Hegelian master-slave dialectic, Friedrich Nietzsche, Immanuel Kant's 'sublime', Edvard Munch's The Scream, V. Nabokov's Lolita, R. Rorty's 'monster of incuriosity', theodicy, the biblical creation myth, religion as communal ritual and worship of society (R. Scruton's essay citing R. Girard), Richard Dawkins, scientism, L. Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, tragedy & comedy & tragicomedy, Greek tragedies, irony (dramatic or otherwise), the cyclical nature of ancient Greek beliefs, history as reoccuring, Lord of the Rings as Christian propaganda and narrative, reactionary Romanticism, modernism vs. postmodernism (esp. modernist vs. postmodernist literature), T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Lord A. Tennyson's "...Nature, red in tooth and claw" and Charge of the Light Brigade, Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est, horrible trench warfare, World War I, World War II, futurism, Dadaism, industrial-scale genocide, the Enlightenment, modernity vs. postmodernity, commodity fetishism, the history of the Jewish people, Christian and Muslim antisemitism, Sylvia Plath's Lady Lazarus (esp. the line,"...bright as a Nazi lampshade"), my college crush, Before Sunset, going to Paris with my Romanian sister/nymphet, Lost in Translation, emotional symbolism of pink wig, my father, Michael Hoppe's Silver Screen Romance, the piano, the Nobel Prize for Literature, my arrogant entrepreneur-to-be friend, William Randolph Hearst, Viktor Shlovsky's defamiliarization, the value of art, everything being either a manifestation of art or politics, the child as the ideal, Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince, 300 (the movie), the Spartans and Spartan society, the military as an institution, squirrel, curtsy, Heese's Narcissus and Goldmund, Woody Allen, projection of desire, hypochondria, the ranking of suffering, stereotypes, Thomas Nagel's 'What is it like to be a bat?', the nature of friendship, William Shakespeare, foreboding signs of disaster (see Macbeth), Harold Bloom, a play within a play, love, muses.

Dogs are horrible mutilators of the mind. Maybe not all, but at least this one. The one wants me.

I found it waiting for me just outside our gate, lying flat on its chest. It got up and walked away slowly as I approached, but I think it's merely feigning weakness. It wishes for me to let down my guard, turn my back, and then it'd be lunging across. Sinking its many teeth into my thighs, my arms, maybe my pretty neck. I am virtually all bone. What a treat I'd be. Its dog appetites would applaud, its bastard young would play catch with my femur.

It is a black thing with long stilt legs. A black glove fashioned for the long, invisible fingers of some malevolent deity reaching down to asphyxiate me. An odious thing. Harbinger of ill-fortune, death, take-your-pick. I'm reminded of the Egyptian god, Anubis. Except Anubis had the head of a jackal, this skulker was a particularly fiendish Great Dane, as far as I could tell.

Let me tell you a story about Great Danes. My father's story about Great Danes. Ages ago, before my father was my father, he lived with his family, which included a pair of Great Danes, on a great patch of land. His eyes glimmered with nostalgic glee as he told me this.

Hah. Dogs. I rolled my eyes hard like millstones. Giant ones that could squish colonies and colonies of hapless ants.

He didn't notice, and went on. The pair of Danes had a particular hatred for cats. Many a cat would wander into the compound, and these great beasts would brutally hunt each down. If they caught one, they'd pin it to the ground, and seize its head with their jaws. They wouldn't kill it outright, however. They'd only hold the cat's squirming, squealing head against the ground until someone, like my father, comes along.

When he does, the Danes would squeeze their jaws shut, instantly killing the cats. This was an act of devout love, my father told me, suddenly bristling with strange excitement. These Danes wanted to say 'we would kill for you', he added. And they did, again and again. Such creatures of unconditional love they were. Scores and scores of cats unfortunate enough to find their way into the compound were executed in grisly fashion. My father buried them all under an old rambutan tree. This was decades ago, whoever bought that plot of land would've found a mass grave of cats beneath the mass of red, hairy fruit.

A few nights ago, I ventured for a smoke out on the street when I found a Great Dane laying right at our gate. It moved slowly out to the street as I approached, but not too far. Never too far. It walked back and forth along the street, its head and neck in a permanent pivot towards me. I see you, little man, I see you, it told me with seemingly socketless eyes.

I didn't dare walk pass the thing so I stayed right at the gate. Slowly easing the gate open, I stepped out nimbly and blew nervous, scattered smoke into the air. It watched me from a short distance as if I was making love with its spouse right in front of it. As if it happily eloped with one of my prettier, neatly wrapped cigarettes and was happily married ever after in a luxurious pound in Italy. And now that cigarette was in my mouth, blowing smoke in its face, making a mockery of its soft, puppy heart.

So we stared at each other. Unsure who is more terrified, or who is more unbelievably pissed off. I waved my cigarette in the air as if to say, if you come close, motherfucker, I will burn the fuck out of you. I will scorch. I will incinerate the festering scab of a canine that you are. Every dead kitty would sing with joy.

Using its jaws, it grabbed a flat plastic object lying on the road and toyed with it. This is your head, little man. This is your head.

Many nights ago in a club, a girl quite casually bumbled her way to me. Plump with cheeks of orange sheen - they say she's an air stewardess. "You dance funny," she remarked, and then flitted away from me, dragging her giggles along like a trail of wobbly smoke. And I stood there, still reaching into earth and sky, bouncing and shaking so crudely and clumsily as if compelled by a puppetmaster of brittle, oversized fingers. A wide smile was latched onto my face like a terrifying, malignant leech. Any moment then, I could've toppled over. I could've fallen limp and lifeless to the floor, a victim of a grisly murder by an assailant swimming in my own blood. They all saw it in my face. My face horribly, horribly mangled by glee. They giggled and cowered all the same.

Funny? What did she mean? I thought. I pained my dizzy, ditzy brain cells to piece together comprehension of this. Of this fun-ee. This derisive adjective of the truly fuck-ing strange. This exponential explosion of ecstasy. This queerness that asylums were crafted to contain.

This monstrous expression of me.

See for yourself. This is from one of the other nights. The madness is the same, frothing uncontrollably from my deepest, atavistic child instincts. Pardon the finger - I was not-so-politely intercoursing with the world that night. But in the end, know that this boy belongs in a

cage.

I watched Lost in Translation again. The pretty, pretty, PRETTY film. The one with the soft, dazzling expanse of city lights. The one that makes me daydream conversations with some special female being who takes long, staggered breaths of smoke. She laughs and sighs, then pauses like a languid, stretched-out cat. Casually strings her words along waves of silence, content to see them crash against the shore and then ebb again like teasing ethereal fingers. Her stalk-like legs are drawn up against her chest, and she rocks herself on the cold floor like an eager child. Like me. Like us. Like we and us and I in our most tender places in the heart and mind.

I was going to watch Me You and Everything We Know, which I also love to little finger-bits. But I found that I couldn't. Me You and Everything We Know is mostly set in suburbia, and Lost in Translation in the city. And I am a decadent, depraved city thing. I devour cities. Pretty cities like Tokyo and Paris and New York. That's rather shallow of me, I know. But I look at cities and am mesmerized by the infinite sprinkling of lights and hues, the cacophony of a million different voices and rhythms. You might ask, who lives around this corner? Who lives around that? What kind of socks would they wear in April? What damning secret or unearthly oddity do they have tucked away in their most intimate of safes? What do they think of the great big sun, or decent men turning into cockroaches?

This post overflows with filthy mushyness. This is Sebastian prostituting himself to you.

Yesterday, I dreamt of Slovakia.

Also, I've been bitterly envious of girls.

She nods. I asked if she was bored. We shout into each other's ears like the most juvenile of children.

ARE YOU BORED?
WHAT IS THIS WE'RE DRINKING? (I suppose she could've said, OH THANK GOD, NOTHING OBNOXIOUS LIKE MERCURY... THAT'S SO PASSE...)
ARE YOU STILL STUDYING?

The beats from the dancefloor drown everything else; reach up with pulsing hands to pull whatever they can underneath the waves, to feed on their kinetic blood and then spit them out as limp hisses that fizzle out in the dark. Half of what I say is mutilated by the noise. She dutifully digests them like a birdling receiving chewed worm from its mother, then masticates something back to me in a yell.

YES [FAKE, EMBARASSED SMILE]
IT'S GIN
YES, GERMAN

I feel as if we are an intimate food chain; feeding, living, growing solely on our back-and-forth voices. Falling marionette-like dead and inanimate at their abrupt absence. I drink more because I tell myself drinking will scare away the bats in my tummy. With the bats evicted, I will digest easier. Words. Sentences. I will spit a spongey essay at her to soak up her rapt attention.

A silver token bobbles on the pink velvet of her tongue. And I stare it, mad-eyed tranfixed, thinking of sticky pearls polished by honey-thick soups of saliva. I'm sure it isn't polite but I can never help myself in situations like that. I'm a mad, mad fetishist that way.

She's majoring in German, and works at clubs. She thinks this is trivial. Me. Her. Them. The smoke-choked atmosphere from which we asphyxiatingly draw our breath in sadomachistic pleasure. The whole, detached

IT

of her life. She shouts this is un-laughably routine for her. This is work away from work. I'd imagine she's here just because of a mutual friend of ours, who's leaving the country for a bit. I'd imagine... she thinks of herself as wretched nymph endlessly gliding her fingers over a deep pond of murky gray cement, trying not to get any on them in a futile exercise. Her lithe digits eventually stick, harden, become statuesque has-beens of unrecognizable ichor.

I feel incredibly amateurish because it seems as if she's seen it all. All, in its dazzling succulence, is merely her profession, a badge, a shift. Not like me. Not like my school girlish, kitten self that sniffs about, prods about, yelps with utter excitement with the prospect of a night out. Who is stricken mute and lost at the prismatic tickle of lights on supple skin twirling and swaying, hopping away like throngs of frogs underneath some thunderous calamity of thumping thumps that heave against the chest like monstrous beatles to say LA LA LA LA LA LA of many frenzied trips to the palate...

But I suppose, all this is just superficial. Tried and... hung, given time.

I try to maintain a semblance of conversation. It becomes more and more difficult as I slip under the covers of gin-inspired intoxication. Somebody cut a heavy granite slab and conveniently left it on my head. Something to think about, he might say. Something to sink in, to dip in cheese, to iron out those tissues with issues.

She shouts paragraphs at me, her life story, I suppose. I laugh maniacally now and then, as if on cue in a sitcom, a collective audience hovering about like a specter. I hope she feels that laughter is an empathetic phenomenon. Comedy is tragedy plus time, says Mr. Allen who is undoubtedly God, stammering through the clouds with peeking, infant rays of light.

When it is time to leave, I stumble my way outside. We're all going to a nearby club on foot. Precious feet. They tap the ground in criss-crossing permutations. I hope she doesn't notice, but she probably does.

We reach and everyone disperses to find some random conversational partner. Someone to yell at in the blinding darkness. I sit on a ledge jutting out from one wall, hands on knees, thinking "Must not fucking collapse... must not fucking collapse... must not fucking collapse." I squint, and marvel when I turn the spinning lights into amorphous, twinkling stars on a galactic canvas of flashing black.

"Dude, are you okay?" says friend who walks up to me.

"Yeah, totally. Excellent. I'm fine." And he walks away to yell at someone else.

I leap to my feet, almost instinctively, forcibly shambling myself to the dance floor. It feels like the right thing to do in my slavishly wrong condition. I throw my limbs about as flailing tentacles hungry for visceral expansion. How amoebas feel like, their naked bodies spilling forth and consuming the world.

My head feels lighter and lighter, perhaps from sucking in the air around me through my ears. Me, a helium balloon, funny voices echoing in my ribcage. The granite slab on my head slowly crumbles away like bits of biscuit. And I dissolve into sweet, fizzy liquid. You are what you drink. I'm merely a school of nymphomaniacal mermaids lounging in orange soda.

Afterwards, outside, she comes up to me and says, referring to my little number, "You, I saw you. You were smiling wide all the way through." She chuckles, I blush a bouquet of deepest red and smile. As if pins sank into the corners of my lips, holding it up as a dame might to her dress, revealing hard white bone. The filthy, discolored chalk of my soft heart.

I want to dance again.

The cat is a malignant, mesmerizing thing. A blood-tickling miasma of coos stretched and squeezed into a word of fur, whiskers, button nose. A word. A thing. A skip of the heart.

It runs up to me, meowing. This almost never happens. Usually, they run away. I go up to them with pat-ready hands and they dash. Poof! It's sad, it's comical, it's cartoonish. I believe every cat calculates its steps like a ballet dancer would. There is rhy-thm even in the get-a-way. In the soft thump-thump-thump of padded toes touching ground. A high-strung Wagnerian cascade when a cat is frantic, when every beat is a scurry.

This one is desperate. This one pleads. It bares its fangs with every loud meow. Not to say 'I wish to rip you to shreds, silly human' but to exhale and to expel its entire being in an ephmeral wisp of a meow. A word. A thing. A skip of the heart.

It follows me down the street, hurriedly criss-crossing my path. A play of tic-tac-toe to say 'I own you, little man, little girl! I own you!' I light a cigarette, I slow down. I don't want to kick it accidentally. On and on, it runs wildly in diagonal courtship. A cascade! A love me love me love me.

I say, "I have no food, man. I have no food." Which is my mistake. Because cats aren't really masculine in any way. There is no 'man' in cat except if it ends 'wo-man'. Everyone knows cats are intrinsically feminine. They linger on every step and pivot even if imperceptibly. They lift and stretch their sickle limbs to a spidery burlesque number. I think of this one as Audrey Hepburn in the fur.

We reach the edge of the street, and I drag at my cigarette. Audrey's still there. Around my ankles, running in circles, meowing. I squat and pat her on the head. Not a single, apprehensive pat. A pat pat pat pat pat pat. An indulgence of patting and ruffling that spills forth with all pink, syrupy swooning. She's confused at first, tries to snap at my fingers. Ahah, food at last! But then she mellows and stares.

She has dirty-brown fur with black stripes (though the orange streetlights color her like them) stretched on a long serpentine body. Pitch-black oval eyes - they never blink or squint. They resemble perfectly-shaped almonds of liquid fabric, weaved straight from the night. And I fall and fall and fall into them. Spiral and drown in rich, midnight oils. What else could a boy, a completely defenseless girl do?

I begin walking back and it follows me. Will it follow me to my gate, I wonder? Into the house even? She would scare the misofelinic gonads out of the family. But she stops half-way and stares as I get further and further away. Pitch-black oval eyes saying, "Love me love me love me!"

Was it love or did she just want something to eat? It's every lover's insane quandary. She loves me, she loves me not. Shelovesmeshelovesmenotshelovesmeshelovesmenot. Does she? Should she? Is she? A wise fly once said, "a buzz in the head is a curdle in the chest." Love. A word. A thing. A skip of the heart.

A leap of fucking faith.

I was walking across the highway bridge the other day, when a curious-looking boy held out a yellow balloon at me as he passed. He was probably in his late teens. Tan-skinned, a dazed look in his eyes, a languidly open jaw. He looked possessed, embalming fluid fed through every facial pore. Staring away at marshmallow clouds descending and swallowing whole flocks of sheep, and then excreting their yet undigested body parts down to the earth. Something grisly like that, I'm sure.

I looked quite a mess that day - scruffy hair, a slouch. A shambling drag to the mall. But I had to have cigarettes. I had to have magic. Ethereal limbs, a scent of cinder.

A yellow balloon. I hate yellow. It's sickly, meekly, and ickly. The color of jaundice. It's really too garish like it was celebrating some plague. A gold necklace says, 'look at me, I froze someone's pee around my neck.' A yellow balloon is logically a pustule... with strings attached.

Yellow is a timid middle color among middle colors. Not decisive or bold like black or white. Not swimming like blue. Not as passionate as red. Not as coquettish as pink. Not as sly as green. I love green. It fits a serpent, it bristles with envy. It is also deranged, uninhibitedly silly.

In other words, green is so me.

A green balloon instead! Poor boy. It seemed as if shrewd lines were sewed across his mind to form an intricate maze. He had not a blink of an eye, nor drop of visible emotion. He was all hunk in a mindless zombie kind of way. Many girls fancy this, I thought. Give me green, my mind shouted to his. After much stammering, it only replied, "Inflate! Float! Colors are for racists."

I want to hug my lecturer. He is leaving soon (permanently) and could use a magnificent squeeze, I think. But how do I do it without making it look like a rabidly homoerotic come-on? The poor man would mace me.

How? HOW?

How is everyone? Are you feeding well? Are your feet tapping to mysterious tunes lodged in your brain? Tell me. Indulge me. I wish to leech your glamorous lives clean.

That is all. Sebastian is feeling rather uninspired.