Right now, I feel like I need to take a week long shit.
I feel so dirty and rotten and sore inside. Surely only the most profound of ablutions could cleanse this mortal sinner of his unholy and profound taint.
Or cleanse his taint, for that matter.
I feel like living breathing oozing filth. I am filth, I live in filth, I exude filth, I contaminate all that I touch, and the world would be a far, far cleaner and more wholesome place if my entire existence, past present and future, could be expunged.
With a really big spunge. Er, sponge.
I wish I could clean up my act. I wish I could get my shit together then flush it. I wish I had the power to attack the enormous amount of cleaning both my place and my person need before they can be considered clean.
But I can barely imagine myself doing it.
Actually doing it is beyond me.
Plus there’s that evil little voice in my head saying “What’s the point? There’s no such thing as a clean turd. The cleaner the outside is, the more obvious it is that the inside is nothing but rusty batteries and dog turds floating in dirty ditch water. At least when you wallow in filth, the inside and outside match, and you can pretend the problem isn’t that bad. Besides, you’ll just get dirty again anyhow, so again : what’s the point?”.
That motherfucker needs to die.
Another sad truth is that when I truly clean up, it also cleanses my senses and everything starts to seem too loud and bright and shiny and real, and try as I might ot adapt to that, I just end up longing for the muting effect of my miasma again.
That’s just so damned pathetic.
But that’s me. A sad pathetic creature nobody could love or even tolerate for long. A dirty, smelly hobo with the crazy eyes that most people don’t want to even make eye contact with and who is beyond accustomed to being chased off by angry citizens from any place he might lay his lice ridden head.
Only not that, because then people would know I exist and I would have a place in the community and an established role.
Instead, I am a bizarre nonentity who makes little to no impact on the world despite having godlike powers of intellect and creativity at my proverbial fingertips.
And my literal fingertips, come tothink of it.
Ad all this as my garbage scow of a life burns down on ocean’s far horizon,. I can’t face all my health problems either, and they’re going to kill me or land me in the hospital for something truly awful any minute now.
And all this happens with a backdrop of life in the time of plague where we cannot evn get together for Christmas for fear of contaminating one another.
I’m a very sick man with a very sick life in a very sick world, and I’m very, very sick of it.
More after the break.
This just popped (lol) into my head :
Me (at the move theatre concession stand) : I’ll have the hot buttered cockporn.
Employee gapes at me a moment. I stand there completely impassive. A clock ticks.
Employee : Uh, sir, I think you meant the hot buttered popcorn…
Me : I know what I said.
A few more clock ticks.
Me : Bu in lieu of that, I guess I’ll have the popcorn.
That’s the sort of thing I would do if I wasn’t so shy and sensitive.
Another thought : sufficient empathy more or less forces you to be a good person, at least face to face.
Because if I feel what you feel, then when I hurt you, I hurt too. That conditions a person to not hurt others.
On the other hand, if I make you feel good, I feel good too. Thus nice behaviour is rewarded the same way bad is punished.
I’m been highly empathic my entire life. As a kid I didn’t initially grasp that this was not true for everybody.
To be honest, while I know that to be true, if you really get down into the nuts and bolts of things, I still have trouble imagining what it’s like to be so alone in your own head.
Anyhow, as a natural empath, I naturally became a pretty sweet and caring guy.
Not that I don’t deserve credit for those things or anything, mind you.
But the thing is, empathy is the foundation of morality but it is not morality. You can have great empathy and still be a bastard to people.
For example, you could be a sadist and enjoy the pain you inflict on others.
Less diabolically, I could easily have become a con man. I have the charm, the charisma, the verbal skills, and the devious mind to do it.
And most of all, I have the empathy for the job. I can “read” people and get a sense of what they are thinking and feeling. Furthermore, I understand what makes people tick and it’s usually their watches.
OK, not really.
My point is, all the things that make me such a sweetie could instead make me one hell of an effective predator.
All my empathy would do is make me prefer to screw people over in ways they don’t know about until I am long gone.
That way I never have to experience their pain. By the time it happens, I am out of range, so to speak.
Luckily for my soul and the general welfare of the populace, I also developed a very keen moral imagination that can easily imagine the empathic effects of my actions even if said results were happening on the far side of Venus.
Still, it’s not hard for me to imagine that, if life had pushed me to becoming a more coldly selfish person who took a “me versus the world, take whatever you can grab” attitude towards life, I might have become a very evil person.
Thank goodness my life was not that particular kind of crappy.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.