THE CULMINATION OF EGOTISM
Low-level energy tonight. Can't tell if there's been some excavation of the soul or the fact that I’ve been drinking red wine since noon. I couldn't help myself though. I woke up with something like a panic attack. I had difficulty breathing. My throat felt full and rigid, its canals stuffed with cotton balls, along with a bloated belly that practically lifted me out the window like a hot air balloon. I don't want to belabor you with my specious logic and vicious stubbornness developed over a ten year period. The most I’ll say is that I need to avoid spicy food for the foreseeable future.
It rained today in gentle waves, soft sheets of water passing overhead like a primordial baptism, washing away the sins of the city and, perhaps, the greater world. Next, we pray for the sun to make its presence known, to dry our tears of anguish along with the virus that has plagued us all this last month. There are thousands that have died, and thousands yet to die. My heart aches for those souls careening into the atmosphere, souls that took ‘lo these 14 billion years to coagulate into human form. It's odd if you think about life and death as intervals of time, a wave with a crest and trough. I often joke when referring to Death - perhaps out of youthful intrepidness and/or veiled sense of existential dread - that we have all been dead before our births, and we will soon be dead after our deaths. Hahaha. Death is an old banana. We’ve tasted it before. To the young, it is uninteresting, practically nonexistent. That is… until it isn't.
I know it's a bit gauche to admit my own fear of Death, being a mere 37 year-old with no pre-existing conditions, but if this ends up downing me… this bitch of a virus… I cannot help but think what a horrible waste of a life I’ll have been, flailing for dreams that would never come to fruition. Of what use were those years staring down an angry father, an angry god, assured that better days awaited me? What an absurd waste of energy! I’d rather have been a pulsar ejaculating x-rays into the eyes of scientists. I’d rather have been a green photon, riding the solar wind over Alaska with natives genuflecting beneath my iridescent light, casting their hopes and dreams upon me.
Why? Why a person? And, a demented one at that? One whose soul stinks an unrefined odor as pungent and onion—esque as a demon.
I told Mandi plain and true - sober as I could manage - that the virus was coming for me, that the virus was created for me. “The culmination of egotism,” she replied. …Hell, I tend to agree with her.
