Smoke and Bounce

6:00 am EST

"THE FRAIL AND WRETCHED KILLER"

Man is grandiose because he is wretched. If he recreates the world in his own image, then his skin is a gunmetal holocaust -- I guess the microscopes haven't been invented yet. But wait! They have. And people choose to ignore and forget them for want of comfort. They'd rather not be disgusted with themselves... so they project a sense of superiority over what they deposit in the toilet.

Man is nothing what he thinks he is. His true soul is the essence of a beautiful forgetfulness, but his very heart poisons him with the impulse -- the eternal mission -- to title the name no mortal may know. He permits not himself to enjoy what he cannot judge. He wants nature's glory dependent on his own glory, and has not an inkling of responsibility -- at his very best the entire duration of his survival is an act of conscious sacrifice; a reluctant corruption of all that is humble, mild, healing and sympathetic. He knocks on God's door as a tax collector. He wakes fossils from their slumber with the percussion of an oil drill. He deludes himself: to know is to master. With an orbiting satellite he tries to command the morning and screams with hostility at the dawn to know its place. His sufferings are objective things indebted to him; he does not embrace them. His joys are payments; all gifts he refuses. As a mirror he prefers his shadow and bloody footprints. If Christ himself sat down next to him at the bar, man would insist on paying for the drinks. The grass is to be cut so that little ants may not step on and crush frightened man. Every last leviathan he seeks to castrate. He enslaves himself, happily donning chains, for the purification of his ego. The most violent beast of all, his arts are sublimations of his killer instinct. He makes vestigious the facets of his brain which fail his self-deception.

Then finally -- finally! when his suffering is so awesome and undeserved, he finally profits. He wails. He knows the race of his very spirit, and confesses his murders of the meeker gods. He smells the corpse he lives in; the chlorine of his lungs, the vinegar of his teeth, and the dandruff of stupidity underneath his dirty fingernails.

And so then: the man's debt is to run to the store and steal a bottle of Pepto-Bismol for the lord Satan.