This is part essay, part whinge. A whinge is a British expression for a bitchfest.
I am in pain, a great deal of psychic turmoil. Partly, I think, it is due to the weather; the gloom of a Pittsburgh winter is nothing to sneeze at (although, ACHOO, the flu IS going around). Sometimes my brain, that bipolar, increasingly fragmented pile of neurons, roils like the sea. They say the brain is the consistency of Jello. In my case, I fear, the Jello hasn't set yet, but boils, melts, steams, then solidifies in new and painful shapes. There is snow on the ground, and will be until May, probably. It stopped being pretty within 24 hours, and is now a grey slush that soaks the shoes and makes the socks filthy and wet.
What the hell am I trying to say? Why am I posting this? To smash my skull against the Internet in the vague hope that somebody will briefly click by and say, Hey, that self-loathing looks pretty! And I laugh the laugh of the damned. My avatar is Pinhead, of Hellraiser fame - once a man, now a demon. Forever seeking fresh experience, always denied the simplest of comforts. Eternal hunger for something I can't define. What taste am I looking for? What drug haven't I tried? What experience haven't I had?
I've seen religion, I've talked to God, I've dreamed of Satan. I know they are real, in ways that the materialists deny. I laugh at the materialists, and envy them their myopia. The presence of human suffering does not rule out God, my child, it proves the Devil. No evolution can, in any amount, explain the satanic glee of the child-killer. Blood in the gutters, blood in the mind, blood in the soul.
What are we? Not apes, I think.
The trigger for this depression was the capture of Saddam Hussein. You'd think I'd be happy, wouldn't you? You'd think that I, the staunch warhawk, the Republican Bush supporter, would be crazy, giddy with glee?
I was, for a moment. For a moment, I thanked God.
Piles of bodies, piles of suffering, eternal suffering - stench-filled dungheaps of festering humanity that is better off dead. Mounds of Chinese soil covering over the peasants of AIDS.
One man had everything this world could offer a powermad dictator. He has seen his armies fail, his ambitions shattered, his fortunes seized, his sons killed, had himself humiliated and considered a coward by his countrymen, and now they chant for his death. Ah, the wheel, how it has turned.
The Bible says that when we see a man suffer justice at the hands of God, we must not gloat, lest the angel turn towards us, for who can stand before God?
We are not angels, are we?
How can we hope to expiate our own guilt before the justice that seized upon Saddam? Is there any way to build something that does not merit destruction before the Lord? So much innocence destroyed - and they say that destroying innocence is the only vice that retains any pleasure for the truly damned.
Is there enough blood in my veins to spill out, to somehow stop it all, to somehow make this satanic merry-go-round stop its infernal racket, the giggling clowns on television leering at me, the ceaseless racket of human misery, the gunshots, the thievery, the joyless copulations and meaningless excesses?
They say that Jesus will come back, to save us. I think not. If he was, he'd have been here by now. We are damned. This is Hell. What kind of man takes joy in the failures of another? In the humiliations of another, no matter how deserved? And yet, the crowds spill into the streets, chanting, waving their fists, as though they were entitled to more justice than the rest of us? What tidal wave of anger, of venom, prompts such actions? And we smile, like tolerant fathers.
Masters. Daemons. Demons, we, dispensing Hell's justice of pain, gloomily awaiting our own turn under the Iron Wheel.
Ah, to admit my weakness in such a forum, ah, I must be hurting more than I realize.
CZAR