Miscreantism
When one hasn’t a fucking clue what a person is, or, for that matter, a first person, writing in it seems impossible. My guess is that a first person would be God or Adam or Jesus Christ, certainly not you or I. It stands to reason, then, that writing in this first person idiom would be like writing a new Bible or giving a scripture reading at a Mosque. Or scribing with a quill or a sharp stick, or punching holes in a piece of cardboard. Not knowing what or how one writes in the first person singular, as all things, death especially, are experienced on one’s own, in single file, so to speak. I assume that the best things is to get on with it and write; nothing less seems plausible or worth the time and bother. Illiteracy, though always an option, is not something I care to re-experience, as signifiers and signifieds are things best left to children and savants, not false prophets and miscreants such as I.
Who I am has in part been determined by whom I am not. I am not many things, or some things, or a thing that requires other things to determine who and what he is. I am what I am regardless, though in many ways something that I have and had little control over, a connivance of sorts. I am a conniver, a Borgean trickster, a rapscallion, a poor judge of my own characterlessness. I am not a magistrate or a banker, nor am I podiatrist or a Green Peace advocate. I am none or neither of these. I am, nonetheless, something; a thing that was determined long before I had a hand in it. When I did, when I hand a hand in it, I quickly realized that hands are useless movers of thoughts and character and did away with thinking that I had or could have a hand in anything at all as regards myself. It is much easier this way, much less confusing and conniving. Hell will freeze over and I will have had no hand in it, none whatsoever, and for that I am grateful. Hell is for the likes of a Dante or a Dostoevski, not a fool such as I. Idiots, so I have come to learn, fare much better in places where coldness and fire are indistinguishable, in hells and deep holes where the light of day dare never show its face. Men with clubfeet, clerics and connivers, these are the things and non-things that make up the opposition to my life. I would do well to stay clear of them and let bygones be bygones. But alas, that I cannot do, nor would I if I could. All such miscreants and ill-humored men are like poxes and open sores that refuse to be stayed or scabbed over. Need I tell you again, this is a fool’s story, not a recantation of warnings, rules and omniscient protestations? I am nothing less, but perhaps much more, than the scoundrel’s evocations that you keep well hidden in the gall of you’re innermost hell. I am all those things you think but never put words to. I am the stink that slums in the sanctum or your thoughts, your paltry excuses and well practiced apologizes. I am the end of all ends, the beginning of all beginnings, the end to end all beginnings and endings. I am nothing and grateful that I will never have to pretend that I have the answers to the questions you might ask of me.
She has an uncorrectable under bite. Its is beyond me how she can possibly eat anything without unhinging the bones in her jaw. She must grind and pulverize food like a gristmill until its small enough to be swallowed or chewed, or spat back up onto the front of her dress. And he, the one on the bus, he had such horrid eczema I though he’d surely scratch a hole in his elbow right down to the bone, perhaps further. How these people make it through the day is beyond me. And I, one who has no convictions or a socialized care in the world, feel a tinge of guilt and sympathy for such beastly devils. Then there was the one with the ghastly scar, a fissure or serration running from the clove of her brow to the cleft of her lip. She must have a tough go of it trying to sheath her lips around it, like a calf on a saltlick I would imagine. I dare say I would give it a go, though not without first applying a salve or balm to prevent chaffing and skin derision. I recall using my mother’s Oil of Ogle to help facilitate a far more pleasurable and efficient self-pleasuring. Freud, of course, did not teach me this, however he may have had he lived longer and known where I lived. There are too many sad, pathetic people in the world. More than a God or a Brahman or a Buddha could ever possibly care for and unburden.
My great uncle stove in the cow's head with a sledgehammer. Crackles and graylings of bone sharp as razors choused in the cool autumn air. A murderous rearing of hooves, scrapping and clicking like lice against the barn board. And my mother, hair twisted into braids, climbing the elm that kept the light from brightening the summer kitchen. My great uncle’s hands were so gout with muscle and hard yellow calluses that he couldn’t fit gloves over them in cold weather, so resorted to wearing children’s mittens that my great aunt knit him each fall before the snow flew. My mother spent summers on the farm tending to the calves and swinging in a tractor tube slung with a rope over the branch of a tree. My uncle tended to the larger cattle; brown and black splotched Herefords with swayed backs and hoards of flies caulking eyes black as jujubes and sad as cancer. Staving in cows heads ways done once they’d stopped producing milk and we’re useless for anything other than filer for chicken feed or cheap fertilizer. Perhaps that’s where I learned how to cave a dog’s head in, mincing bones with chalk and talcum powder. Some say we inherit things, traits and ways of being that we’re unaware of, never quite understanding why it is we do the things we do when we’d never learned them, or read about them in books or magazines. Perhaps I am such a case, one of Darwin’s miscreants, an example of natural selection running roughshod over reason and good manners. My great uncle died in the fields tending to his cattle. A heart attach or a stroke or an aneurysm. Maybe his hands, sheathed in woolen mittens, couldn’t brush the snow away from the curse of his eyes and he tripped over a furrow or a cow’s afterbirth left steaming in the open grass. Perhaps it was his time, and that was all. Death is merciless, having no patience for lollygaggers and hangers-on. When it comes it comes expecting one’s full attention and cooperation. We are born into death, dying as we live, living as we die, and in the end not knowing which it was, life or death that put an end to us. When my childhood friend died in a car crash he died not knowing whether he was dead or alive, just on the brink of something he would never understand. Death is like that, sneaking up on you and swiping life right out of your hands, or as in my great uncles case, hands gout with muscles and hard yellow calluses. I will die impatiently and with much lollygaging and an indifference to being helpful and cooperative. When death comes to hearse you across the river Styx, barge pole in hand, waves slashing the prow of your forehead, good manners will count for nothing I assure you that.
My great uncle stove in the cow's head with a sledgehammer. Crackles and graylings of bone sharp as razors choused in the cool autumn air. A murderous rearing of hooves, scrapping and clicking like lice against the barn board. And my mother, hair twisted into braids, climbing the elm that kept the light from brightening the summer kitchen. My great uncle’s hands were so gout with muscle and hard yellow calluses that he couldn’t fit gloves over them in cold weather, so resorted to wearing children’s mittens that my great aunt knit him each fall before the snow flew. My mother spent summers on the farm tending to the calves and swinging in a tractor tube slung with a rope over the branch of a tree. My uncle tended to the larger cattle; brown and black splotched Herefords with swayed backs and hoards of flies caulking eyes black as jujubes and sad as cancer. Staving in cows heads ways done once they’d stopped producing milk and we’re useless for anything other than filer for chicken feed or cheap fertilizer. Perhaps that’s where I learned how to cave a dog’s head in, mincing bones with chalk and talcum powder. Some say we inherit things, traits and ways of being that we’re unaware of, never quite understanding why it is we do the things we do when we’d never learned them, or read about them in books or magazines. Perhaps I am such a case, one of Darwin’s miscreants, an example of natural selection running roughshod over reason and good manners. My great uncle died in the fields tending to his cattle. A heart attach or a stroke or an aneurysm. Maybe his hands, sheathed in woolen mittens, couldn’t brush the snow away from the curse of his eyes and he tripped over a furrow or a cow’s afterbirth left steaming in the open grass. Perhaps it was his time, and that was all. Death is merciless, having no patience for lollygaggers and hangers-on. When it comes it comes expecting one’s full attention and cooperation. We are born into death, dying as we live, living as we die, and in the end not knowing which it was, life or death that put an end to us. When my childhood friend died in a car crash he died not knowing whether he was dead or alive, just on the brink of something he would never understand. Death is like that, sneaking up on you and swiping life right out of your hands, or as in my great uncles case, hands gout with muscles and hard yellow calluses. I will die impatiently and with much lollygaging and an indifference to being helpful and cooperative. When death comes to hearse you across the river Styx, barge pole in hand, waves slashing the prow of your forehead, good manners will count for nothing I assure you that.
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