by Roman McClay
And you are my older brother, my predecessor. My model of how to be. Jesse James had his brother Frank, a man of grandeur and retribution and gravity. A man of weight. A man in league with his brother and his country, the Confederacy. I had and have in you, contrary to what Jesse had, the exemplar of what not to be.
But enough of this. Let me fret for your soul. You ought to, as well. You ought to worry because you are a shallow man and your suspicions to this effect are correct. And you don’t have the ingredients to be a man of substance even if I handed over the recipe. So, I won’t lie to save us both the embarrassment of who you are. My big brother, a coward, and a petty, silly, coxcomb man.
And your brother, if he was to confess, is a man with hatred and malice and murder in his heart for all things weak that should be strong, and all things rough that ought to be soft; a man who thinks men should be men, and women, feminine.
My charity is a façade , a legerdemain to hide the truth even from myself, to wit: I was built by God and Nature to destroy anything that offends my eye; an eye as old as Marduk and Horus too.
I’m a revanchist, an Oldman shaking his fist at the new gods. I was born not enough in a world of too much ; and I pretended not to notice and to not be sacred. But, I know that this world will be the end of me; and this makes me so angry at the ostensible injustice of it all that I grow selfish and mean and eager to destroy the world. I look around and see weak men, stupid men -and rough and vindictive females- and I reject it when you all insist that it is good; I condemn it as wrong. I judge it as deserving my worst crimes.
And this is a fatal flaw in me, it’s my weakness, known to me as you confessors know your own.
A humble man would submit to the judgement of the world. My arrogance locks my knees. And in the process, has jailed my heart away it seems.
I’ve told you the truth, and it does bite. I have told you of confessions and given you mine. Good luck… you -like the rest of us- are gonna need it.
- LJM
35. Best Vote Ever Cast
I dream of greatness and utility. I dream of Science restoring to Nature what Luxury and Civilization have stolen from her: pure hearts, the forms of angels, bosoms beautiful, and panting with Joy and Hope
Consolations in Travel or the Last Days of a Philosopher [Davy, Humphry]
Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low enjoying power
The Whale [The Author]
Nathan Bedford Forrest had 30 horses shot out from under him, and he killed 31 men in hand-to-hand combat; he said he was thus a horse ahead in the civil war
The Civil War [Foote, Shelby]
I. 2014 e.v.
“Men have no remorse,” she said as she cut around at the edges of the tenderloin he had laid on her plate.
“Men -on average- have low empathy, that’s true,” he cleaned up her assertion. He’d yet to understand where this contretemps was heading, and thus -as default- he employed the rational part of his brain. He thought he was attempting to meet her half-way; to admit to the biological reality that men -and thus he- had faults that were legitimately up for examination and critique. He tried to be honest, and -like all things- he used honesty as a weapon to beat down his foils. He was strong enough to be honest, he’d assert, unlike the great mass of men who need lie just to survive the greater forces of the world.
His honesty -he thought- was noble, but not good; a distinction most men, most humans, would not understand. But, he knew even less of his motivations -and even less of what honesty was- than the molecules of air that cavitated around her hair as the fan blew down on them both and the music filled the gaps.
“Exactly, and I told her to never expect a man to be anything but a cheater and coward,” she escalated things now and dug into her meat. She used words like she to confuse, deflect, as slight-of-hand. She was a genuine psychopath and told lies as a matter of course. Her methamphetamine addiction had also hardwired deceptive behavior alongside the dopaminergic reward centers that connected behavior performed in proximity to the drug’s impact on the brain. The central nervous system of humans is sophisticated, and it learns all on its own.
If you tell a lie to acquire drugs, then tell a lie to run off and use them, and then get high, the brain links up the first, second and third behaviors: the lie, plus the lie, equals the intoxication of the drug .
And just like that you have a neural connection, like a 3-tumbler lock, a 3-digit code to open the door to the vault, the door to all your dreams. Drugs like amphetamines or opiates activate the meaning centers of the brain, not merely consummatory reward like food or even sex. Drugs mimic meaning, they make the user feel like events -even mundane ones- have meaning, and this is a feeling sought by the brain desperately. For meaning is a precursor to action that is both beneficial, and useful, and can help the organism survive long term.
Meaning is handled by the hypothalamic and thalamic regions of the brain, and dopamine in those regions are the fuel to power the engine of meaning. Drugs release dopamine in those exact regions and the drug addict feels not merely high but swaddled and lifted up in a reverie of meaning, in deep ontological meaning and if a lie or two must be told to gain this feeling, this rapt meaning, then that is what the brain will most certainly do. Did not God use a lying spirit to trick Ahab?
Sarah lied without remorse due to her psychopathic alleles of COMT, 5-HTTLPR, ANKK1 and ARL6IP6 -with snp11682518- but she told ornate and powerful lies thanks to her own brain’s pairing, linking -logically, metabolically- with the impact of deep -religious- meaning brought on by the methamphetamines.
She was born to lie, and she augmented her own brain with drug use to become the most florid and constant -and permanent- of liars he had ever known. The problem, for him, was that his right hemisphere knew it in a language that the left hemisphere had yet to take the time to learn to speak. And so, for three years he suffered from her lying, until all at once, like a door slamming in the wind, a bolt from a cloud, or the hammer dropping on a single action revolver, his left brain realized exactly what he’d known all along. But by then he was ruined. By then it was too late for all but one thing.
“I could say women have no pride, no honor and one could expect all manner of scandalous behavior to come from that deficiency too,” he began to raise his voice in anger.
“Why are you yelling at me?” she asked.
“Because I’m angry,” he said; she spoke of men around him as if -in the king’s castle- it was appropriate that any other males should be mentioned or the king himself should be impugned. Sarah was modern, and of the modern world. A man had no standing with her -or any modern woman- even in his own home. A woman, she thought, could mention men all she wanted; and the man of the house could be insulted up to 99 times without upsetting any natural order at all. Modern women jumped from buildings and airplanes with no concern at all for the fall. They stuck their hands in the mouth of lions and expected no spit on their digits -let alone- to pull back a stump.
“Anger is a secondary emotion, men are so dishonest, emotionally dishonest,” she was thinking of how her life had not turned out how she wanted; she knew that she was aging, ungracefully, and that the other men around her were not slaking her desire for something ineffable, something that men were supposed to just provide. Does the body know what nutrients it needs from its food? No, you eat and the body figures it out , she thought. Her desire for men was supposed to work just as this food deal did. She would collect men around her and what she needed would just be extracted from them by the body. But it was not happening, and she was angry.
“It’s not dishonest, it’s real. I feel anger, I admit to it. Boom. Honest,” he said. He had grown tired of having to explain the basics of all logic, all moral thinking, all of life to her. He’d told her on their first date that he’d not be able to be monogamous and wanted to be honest with her about it; and allow her to leave now if she found this distasteful.
She had said it was ok with her and asked if
she too could share these other women with him to which he grinningly agreed. But -he had said- she could not have other men, it was not an open relationship. He got other women but she had to stick by him. She agreed eagerly, and said that, he was more man that she could handle anyway, with a giggle that made his insides glow with the exchange of mortars as they drove through the alleyway behind his house in Valverde. Summer heated up the mornings earlier and earlier at that time of life.
It’s true that women -most women- do not need more than one man; the sexes are built differently vis-à-vis sexual congress. And so her acquiescence was taken as normal within the parameters of his evolutionary psychology readings. It made sense to his left hemisphere and comported with science and so he didn’t hear any creaking in the boards nor tap on the window; he heard no barking of dogs in the distance -much less howl of wolves in the forest- all those many days ago.
“But you really feel something else. Anger is secondary to fear or hurt,” she corrected him now; she felt superior to him in these moments. She had read a recent article and thought that this was more relevant than the old books he had read. She was up-to-date , she’d surmise.
“Often yes, but the anger is real too. You're asserting that one can only have, fear or hurt, that these are the only legit emotions. Animals feel anger; you ever see an angry dog?”
“That dog is afraid,” she said with confidence. She used her knife with more pressure on her meat.
“No, it’s angry. Fear may be first, but anger supplants; it’s a real emotion. In fact, anger is often a way to countermand fear, to promote action. Just like Olive Drab is not the same as Lincoln Green; they’re different; but you keep insisting that green is green is green as if there are no shades or differentiation.”
“You're the one with black or white thinking,” she said this, offered it, as a non-sequitur to confuse him. This was the genius of women. She’d scrambled him with that one.
“Maybe at times, but not now; I'm offering shades of green in my analogy,” he said with her weird comment still stuck in his craw.
“Worst analogy ever,” she interrupted with her pique; she chewed open mawed. If she could attack him on the battlefield of language, she felt the wounds she inflicted -while rare- would be devastating. She had no idea how right she was. Like the shark has no idea how perfect it is, she just was Sarah, an unencumbered and modern woman, she just killed men with one comment and moved on to her next prey. But for now she merely circled.
“I’m offering shades of green and shades of grey,” Lyndon said. “Men have emotions. We feel remorse, but we have low empathy; we have high feelings of pride and honor and these feelings can and often do lead us to do the right, the moral thing. Women feel empathy and that leads to moral behavior in them. But these are two roads to the same town .
“Women use empathy to get to right behavior, they feel for the sick child, the weak old person; they feel empathy and help that child, help that old fucker. Men feel pride and honor, and we help that kid because we think, we feel, what kind of man would we be if we didn’t help? We ask, what kind of man would we be if we didn't help the sick or the infirm ?
“We worry about our honor or our reputations or our ability to call ourselves a real man. So, we help women and children and the sick and the helpless all the fucking time. But no, maybe we don't feel their goddamn pain; we rarely weep with them. We help them so that we may avoid shame or feelings of weakness in ourselves. You women feel their pain and help them to assuage your own commensurate pain.
“Why this is more noble than our rationale is beyond me. We both help people, we both do our duty, we both contribute to the welfare of others, and we do it, like all things men and women do, we do it for different fucking reasons. And as any solipsistic and fatuous person, you think your rationale, your feelings, your way, is the only way.
“Well, I happen to think there are many, many shades of grey, and that maybe there are a vast ocean of feelings beyond mere empathy; complicated feelings that maybe you don't know anything about, feelings that only a man can feel; and those feelings matter and are real and are noble too. Maybe if women had more pride and more nobility they wouldn't sleep with their ex-boyfriend’s friends or cry in public at all. Maybe they'd act with more decorum.
“But, even worse, you show me a man without pride, without a feeling of honor, then I’ll show you a man who will never do the right thing. Because he has no endogenous empathy -as you rightly pointed out- and if he be divorced from pride and honor, there is nothing he won’t do to save his own skin, and there is nothing he will do to risk it,” he sometimes used stilted language like that; and it jangled her. He sounded like a nigger, she thought, with that if he be divorced , shit. He thought it sounded like Shakespeare or Milton, but it sounded like a crackhead, she thought.
“He’s as dangerous as a woman without empathy, because she has no innate pride or honor for certain, being a woman and all, and without empathy she’ll cut a motherfucker to the bone," he pointed at her with his steak knife and she knew exactly what he was accusing her of.
“I have more empathy than you’ll ever know!” she screamed as the food was being cut and gobbled in haste by a woman so slight she could disappear by turning 90 degrees. She did have empathy; in surfeit. And she knew exactly how to wound a human, for she had detailed blueprints of anatomy and where it hurt in her own -and thus your- red and wet heart.
She had had sex with his so-called friend Jeremy Costilow earlier that day, surreptitiously, and it had not banished her depression at all. And the man had begged her not to tell Lyndon, and she had felt wounded and -no knowing this- had wanted Jeremy to bravely admit to this liaison so as to insult the honor of, and thus mortally wound, this man she loved so much .
Lyndon ought be wounded like she was wounded , she thought, and the only way was for her to use other men to attack and injure his pride. But none of them wanted to admit to it; they were all scared. And this hurt her heart, as if she was good enough to fuck, but not valuable enough to help her destroy her boyfriend. This is why she was hurt and angry and confused. This all made so much deep sense to her, it would surprise her if everyone couldn’t see the harmony -and thus truth- of it.
As she ate with anger the juices making soft dew on her lips, he hated her; he envisioned slitting her throat. But, he knew he had too many things to do, too much to accomplish; to kill a woman -no matter how much she deserved it- was an unmanly thing to do. She, like all women and weak men, escaped the guillotine they deserved, purely based on this honor code that alpha males had both holding them up and pressing them down.
“You say so. But, you act like a psychopath every chance you get,” he said and slammed his fork and knife down as he now could no longer eat. He -also unware of it in the left hemisphere of the brain- felt nebulously and nervously, inarticulately felt, that she’d betrayed him; the slight bio-chemistry -pheromones- of another man on her skin, inside her, was available only to his sagacious right hemisphere. His left had no rational reason to suspect her; it had no words yet to think or to say.
And so two thirds of him -the lower layer down, the bulk of his ship- was shocked by betrayal and was thus inarticulately vengeful, while that part of the ship above waterline, was scrubbed clean and rational and logical and had decided to be that way with her now. He would attempt reason; he would talk; he would use mere words. But the sea between her craft and his rolled on, as it had for millions of years beforehand and would for millions more in the fore. And his inner waters roiled and boiled and the steam headed -slowly- up and into his brain. And the sharks did swim and never once think one word.
Lyndon had been collecting information like this for years; 40 of them now. Evidence and cortisol, heartache, heart pain, the pain of betrayal after betrayal by women and men and family being stored all below decks in the part of the brain below waterline. It was inarticulate, unformed; nothing he could bring up on deck and name and show to his crew. He had no doubloon to nail yet
to the mast. And as it lay there, well below decks, collecting, augmenting, accumulating at each port they stopped in, the vessel sank lower and lower -more heavily- into the sea. Neither he nor the people around him, understood why his big ship foundered, and when it finally was subsumed by the water, that hull’s ballast -they assumed- would be forever buried at bottom of not just his double-hulled ship, but at the crushing, hydrostatic, cheating bottom of the sea.
II. 2004 e.v.
On the hanging scaffold pressed to the 44th floor of the 2121 AlaWai building he saw Bugzy turn slightly and expose his muscled back; sinew lined him like a wood cut. He had a birthmark, brown and oblong on his lower latissimus dorsi of his left flank. It was hirsute, as if a small bear rug of protection was thrown over it by some impulse deep and old inside him.
His laughter always buoyed Lyndon and seemed to reassemble him from some entropy that wore him, abraded him like the salt water air of the Hawai'ian archipelago. A patina of rust was laid down on every metal thing he owned there; and it ate away at the rebar in the concrete in all the high-rises of Waikiki . Bugzy and Lyndon did spall repair on these 200-foot tall buildings; cutting the concrete away, grey dust spewing like spoutings of whales, jack-hammering once a perimeter was made. They jammed away at the fissures and blemished facades ; then mixing new patch-cement on the rig that was suspended over the -fecund above & lava below- ground.
The Kona winds came for two weeks in July that year, and what that means is no winds at all.
The island’s humidity closed upon you like a Polynesian fist. But today the winds blew strong Siah, a Samoan who -like all his race, looked like he had neither elbows or knees, only large thick muscles hanging from wide shoulders and trunks- had fallen off the rig and was hanging by his lanyard 120 feet above the ground on the west side of the building they all flanked on each of four sides.