R/T/M

by Douglas, Sean

  Until you’re numb.

  Until there’s a warm, soft, forcefield between you and everything around you?

  Like you’re the center of everything.

  Maybe it’s not the addict’s fault.

  Society exerts a continual pressure upon people to live up to its expectations, but it’s not that people have changed. The rules have changes. Society’s expectations have changed. With the exponential advances in our artificial technologies, obtaining employment requires a steadily increasingly complicated set of skills.

  Without a high-school diploma, you’re destined to live a life scratching out a living on minimum wage. Or hustling to get what you need to survive.

  Living under the radar.

  Living in fear.

  We’ve outsmarted ourselves.

  People are worried that we’re going to accidentally ruin the planet.

  They’re worried about recycling and global warming.

  I think that’s stupid.

  Recycling is a myth.

  98% of America’s waste stream is commercial and industrial waste.

  And there are, like, around 300,000,000 people living in America.

  So even if you live a completely waste free lifestyle, it’s only going to decrease the waste stream by one-three-millionth of two-percent.

  Think about that next time you’re washing out a tuna fish can.

  Or carrying around a bottle until you can find a recycling kiosk.

  It’s all just self-indulgent bullshit.

  The only reason to recycle is if it makes you feel better.

  The only time that recycling is going to make a difference is when it’s too late.

  When we’ve finally used up all of the available resources.

  The landfills will become goldmines.

  People will be fighting for the right to dig up everything anyone has ever thrown away to facilitate humanity’s last ditch attempt at continuing its existence as one of mother nature’s failed experiments.

  Global warming?

  How self-centered of humanity to believe that we’re a danger to the planet.

  Planetary phenomena are larger than humanity.

  Maybe our behavior just happened to coincide with larger astronomical events. Maybe the sun is getting hotter.

  But maybe this time we’ve managed to screw things up so badly that we threw things permanently out of equilibrium.

  Maybe the surface of the planet will become so warm that all of the water will break down into its constituent gasses and in a billion years, an alien life form will wonder if there was ever water on planet earth.

  The way we think about Mars.

  Television transmissions theoretically radiate in every direction forever.

  What must alien races think about our culture reflected in our media?

  What will people a million years from now think about our lives today?

  That’s the problem with people.

  We can’t appreciate the beauty of anything that doesn’t revolve around us.

  Just look at the language.

  Sunrise.

  Sunset.

  The sun doesn’t move, at least not in relationship to the earth.

  Our planet is just a speck on the universal map.

  A year is one of the planet’s orbits divided by three-hundred and sixty-five and a quarter revolutions of the planet on its axis.

  If the earth stopped spinning, but kept revolving around the sun, would it be the same time all year?

  If the earth kept spinning, but stopped revolving around the sun, would it stay the same day?

  These are the kind of things that keep me up at night.

  My only consolation is that nothing matters on a long enough timeline.

  In five billion years, the suns going to go supernova and everything you’ve ever known will be nothing more than space dust.

  Maybe global warming is just Mother Nature’s menstrual cycle.

  The extinction of humanity will be just like mother earth discharging ropy ribbons of menstrual blood into space.

  Another failed experiment.

  Anthropomorphistic analogies aside, Mother Nature is not humane.

  Mother Nature does not care if you live or die.

  Maybe we’re the melanoma.

  The cancer that keeps growing and growing until the systems start shutting down one by one.

  But maybe we’re not the first.

  Maybe the dinosaurs were mother earth’s first brush with cancer, but her immune system was able to take care of it. Maybe the dinosaurs were a problem, so mother earth flushed them out.

  Some people think it was a giant fucking space rock that hit the earth and reversed the earth’s polarity and then it fell into orbit around the planet and we call it the moon.

  But no one knows for sure. We weren’t around.

  We can’t even predict next week’s weather and we’re presumptuous enough to think that we can figure out what happened millions of years before anything that we would comfortably call a human being walked the earth?

  Fuck that noise. It’s all guesswork with science kits.

  But I’ll take the scientific option over the creationism concept.

  Remember that time in history when humanity thought that the world was created expressly for them?

  Let me get this straight.

  There’s this giant conscious being that exists in some trans-dimensional place.

  For some reason beyond our grasp, he decided to make our universe.

  A universe that is so large that it is truly beyond our ability to wrap our minds around it in any real sense.

  And while he was designing the universe, he decided to make our solar system and our planet and our species the whole reason for the entire project.

  The universe is a giant playpen for these smart monkeys that live on a planet in a solar system that isn‘t even in the center of the universe as far as we can tell.

  Some people even think that dinosaurs were created in simultaneity with man.

  Mostly creationists. Who are just stupid.

  Let me get that one straight.

  Every variety of animal now in existence on earth lived within walking distance of Noah’s Ark?

  And everyone on the planet was bred from the same small group of people?

  So we’re all the product of incest?

  That explains a lot for me.

  Organized religion never really had any great appeal to me.

  I’ve read The Bible, The Book of Mormon, The Sri Isopanishad, and the Tao Te Ching.

  They were all great works of fiction. Very interesting, but equally useless.

  Church was a boring place that my parents made me go every Sunday where nothing that the guy behind the bureau said ever made any sense.

  There were all these stupid fucking parables about loaves and fishes and blood and wine and Good Samaritans, and doing unto others as you’d have them do unto you.

  I remember being forced to attend Sunday School where there was a sheepish shrewish young woman that spent most of the time trying to deal with our restlessness.

  I was forced to memorize the Our Father and get my first communion, but at least I was smart enough to negotiate the terms. My mother said that if I got my first communion I didn’t have to go to church anymore. I guess she figured if I got my first communion then my soul would be saved.

  Insert irony here.

  I didn’t think much about religion in high school except to know that I didn’t have much use for it.

  I tried out Wicca.

  It was just retarded.

  It was kind of like Christianity but the books were a lot cooler and you got to play with cooler toys.

  One had miracles and the other had magic, but at least Wicca was sexy.

  I learned how to read Tarot cards, but I never bothered to memorize what the cards meant.

  All I really learned was that tarot cards look cool and people will believe almost anythin
g you tell them.

  I took a couple philosophy courses in college. I was really good at logic.

  It was great to learn how to express the vague but pervasive disagreement I had with Christianity.

  I had a revelation.

  The qualities inherent in the Judeo-Christian God are Omniscience, Omnipotence and Perfection.

  In layman’s terms, he is all-knowing, all-powerful and perfect. He can not ever be wrong.

  This is important. I hope you’re paying attention.

  God knows EVERYTHING.

  He knows everything that has ever happened and everything that is ever going to happen. Since God already knows everything you’re ever going to do, then anything that you’re ever going to do has already been decided for you. This is called predetermination.

  If God is all powerful, then it follows that humanity is powerless. If humanity is powerless, then any delusions that we have of the ability to effect our destiny through action are false.

  And perfection. Well, I don’t really have to explain perfection for you.

  Fine and well.

  But if everything that I have ever done or am ever going to do has already been determined, then everything is God’s fault.

  Kids with cancer? God’s fault.

  Global warming? Thank God!

  Child molesters? Rapists? Murderers? Racism? Slavery? War? Abortions? Blame God.

  John Wayne Gacy? Jeffrey Dahmer? Ted Bundy? Andrei Chikatilov? All God’s children.

  It’s such a relief.

  If you believe in God, then you should be absolved of any kind of personal responsibility for your actions. So, in essence, being a Christian means never having to say you’re sorry.

  That would be great if I only could believe in God.

  Invisible man lives in the sky?

  And if you get on your knees and clasp your hands and wish real hard he makes thing go your way?

  I just can’t get behind that.

  Instead I choose free will.

  These days when people ask me what religion I am I tell them I’m an existentialist.

  Or a Satanist.

  A more complicated but more honest answer is that I practice chaos magic.

  I try to create a situation as close as possible to my desired results and I roll the cosmic dice and take my chances.

  I really think that’s the best anyone can ever hope for.

  At least this way I don’t have to meet up with a bunch of other people every Sunday so we can compare clothes.

  I grew up in a housing project.

  And no, I’m not going to tell you which one.

  But you can write that down in your little notepad.

  “Lived in housing project.”

  I’ll wait.

  There.

  I used to spend whole days outside just roaming around the woods on the outskirts of town.

  I loved the way that there was an infinite variety of difference in the natural environment compared to the artificial sameness of the city.

  For some reason, single pages of pornography littered the woods.

  I didn’t think about why when I was a kid, it was just something you grew up with so you accepted it without question.

  You’d see a bit of glossy pink paper and you’d pick it up since it caught your eye and there it was.

  A naked woman with a big hairy bush grimacing with pleasure or a naked man standing with his fists on his hips with his thick veiny cock sticking out in front of him, defying gravity.

  Now that I look back, it was probably homosexuals rendezvousing in the woods on the edge of town after dark to avoid the judgeful eyes of the city.

  Maybe child molesters taking their prey out to the isolation of the woods to make their move.

  “Hey. Kid. You ever see a naked lady? See? Does that make you hot? No? Well is makes me hot. Maybe if you let me touch you. No? What if I gave you a dollar?”

  Speaking of child-molesters, no, I wasn’t molested as a child.

  Although my grand-father was a child-molester who diddled all his kids.

  Most of them buried it deep down inside of them and turned out alright.

  One of my uncles ended up being a pervert and there were a lot of rumors about him being a child molester.

  He volunteered as the first aid guy for the local little league.

  Let’s just say there were rumors.

  Thankfully he didn’t try anything funny on me.

  One day my mother looked at me really strangely and talked slower than she usually did when addressing me, like one talks toward a child or a moron.

  She asked, “When you stay at you uncle’s… does he ever… do things to you?”

  I didn’t answer right away because I was trying to figure out what she was talking about.

  I knew some of what was said in hushed tones when people talked about my uncle, but it didn’t mean anything to me.

  “What do you mean ‘things’?”, I asked.

  She looked at me like she was trying to read my mind.

  Like she was trying to look inside of me.

  She was trying to decide if I was lying.

  Because she knew that if my uncle had ever done the “things” she was asking about, then I would know exactly what kind of things she was asking about.

  So she looked at me really intensely for a minute or two and then her expression changed and she said, “Nothing. Don’t worry about it.”

  She was so close.

  So close to that moment where she had to decide whether or not to explain the kind of things she was asking about.

  Whether or not to ask if my uncle ever asked to take a bath or shower with me, or played “sexy games” with me, or did anything unusual to my “bathing suit area”.

  Then she decided that the awkwardness of having to explain was more intense than her suspicion that her brother was molesting her son and she let it go.

  Thankfully he had not.

  Not that where I lived I was invulnerable to dangerous sexual adventure.

  One time I was playing in the woods behind my house. I don’t know what I was playing. Maybe some make-believe Indiana Jones adventure thing. There was dense vegetation with a narrow path through it. It was like Lord of the Flies. I was trundling through the path and there were two people up ahead. Two girls. I recognized them. Everyone knows everyone else in the housing projects. One of them was a retarded girl that lived up the hill. She wasn’t Down Syndrome retarded. More like fetal alcohol retarded. She had a bowl cut hairdo like Johnny Ramone and a scrunched-up distorted man face. She was with a dark-skinned black girl who looked like Buckwheat’s older sister. I only knew her by her nickname, Pooh. I can’t make this shit up. Truth is stranger than fiction.

  The path was narrow so we met.

  I don’t remember the entire episode, but the girls had a hunk of dogshit on a stick and the deal was, they wanted me to show them my dick or eat dogshit.

  I remember somehow knowing that there was something inherently wrong with the situation.

  Maybe I should have just gone along with the game.

  Maybe I would have gotten a couple of blow jobs. Or maybe I could have had sex with the both of them. But I was, like, six, so it probably wasn’t physically possible.

  But maybe they’d flip the script and try to put the dogshit on a stick up my ass.

  I never found out.

  I bolted out the way that I came in and I never mentioned it to anyone.

  Until now.

  Around the same time I had a friend named Neil.

  Neil was one of those kids who always looked dirty.

  Like a real-life Pigpen.

  He always had gummy brown dirt on his hands and around his mouth.

  Neil would drink his own pee if you asked him to.

  I don’t know how I first discovered this inclination, but all you had to do was ask him to and he’d undo his fly, pee a little into his cupped hand, and drink it. I didn’t think of asking if he’d dr
ink my pee too. I’m not sure if that’s a missed opportunity or not. How many people can say that someone else drank their pee? Probably a lot more than the average person would ever want to know.

  Neil told me that his dad had a stack of Playboys in a closet in the house and I told him to go get a couple so we could check them out. I waited outside while he went in. About twenty minutes later his mom came to the door and said that Neil couldn’t come out to play.

  His dad caught him and he caught a beating. I felt bad, but at least it wasn’t me.

  Speaking of urine, when I was around seven, I got busted at the babysitter’s talking her daughter into letting me watch her pee so I could see why girls sat down when they peed. It was kind of hot. The little girl had those batgirl underoos. I spent the rest of the day catching accusatory looks from the babysitter while not knowing why what I did had been so awful.

  My mom came to pick me up and she and the babysitter talked in hushed tones and looked over in my direction every now and then. They never talked to me about it, but I was also never trusted out of eye’s distance with her daughter again.

  That’s how people are.

  I was still a sexually curious child and this interest sometimes worked itself into play.

  I remember I was playing in the woods with a kid named Shane and a little girl whose name I’ve long since forgotten.

  I think we were playing some kind of imaginary G. I. Joe adventure whatever.

  I had a switch that I had plucked all of the branches off of.

  I remember thinking I was imagining myself as, like, a Baroness kind of character, and commanding the other two kids to strip while waving the switch around.

  I don’t know what I was thinking.

  I guess I was just curious about what the other kids looked like naked.

  Maybe I wanted to have them get together like they were having sex and see what happened.

  The other kids weren’t having it, thankfully, because I would have hated to have inadvertently permanently scarred two kids that early on in life.

  Not that all of the trouble I got into as a kid was sexually oriented.

  My first day of kindergarten my mother watched me from the other side of the fence.

  They let the parents hang out the first day to ease separation anxiety.