Post

What, is it only one day later? Feels longer. Usually this thing passes, but it's stayed with me. I like to suppose I'm not noticeably depressed while in public. Subdued, sure, but people don't know me, so they wouldn't notice my quietude. But I had to be in a public that knows me this morning, so I adapted as best I could, trying to stay out of the way. Yes, I am aware of these things, even in my self-absorption. I find myself actually twitching, and flinching. There's this frantic tapping of a finger or a foot. I hold my breath. Grimaces. I could weep like a little bitch for no reason. God damn this world.

Let's call it an anatomy of melancholy and pretend I invented it.

There's nothing to be done. I'm not going to do violence, to myself or another. My hands ache and grow large sometimes with the desire to murder, wrap around a throat and assert my ego. That's always what I did as a kid, when I got into fights. I turned a kid purple once across a schoolyard bench. Broke bloodvessels in his eyeballs. I might have been ten. I pulled a kid by his neck out of his chair from behind his desk and held him down while I banged his head on the floor. French class in '73. He'd shot a spitball at my eye -- stuck to my horn-rimmed glasses. It was the disrespect that did it.

My old violence tended to be psychotic. There was no bluff, no flailing inefficiency. I really was, for the moment, going about the serious business of terminating a life. I always stopped early -- a momentary rage only, albeit subsuming. A matter of pure intention. As I recall it happened once every year. I never got in trouble. Too fast. Even in French class, Ms E, who was so hot, just sent me into the hall to calm down. I was calm.

My father had a bullwhip that he used on us, my two brothers and myself. We used to go to Tijuana and pick up souvenirs -- pots, firecrackers, wrought iron, leather goods. One of my brothers imagines he was sorely abused with the whip. I have no sympathy for him. He deserved anything he got. He should have got more. He should have been tied to a post a flogged until he was crippled. Maybe he was. For me the worst of it was the emotional oppression. The constant, literally constant disapproval, criticism, blame. Who did this!?! The lectures, as we called them, that would go on for hours and hours, about his childhood -- how they sodomized and stoned to death his little horse -- and the curse, and how he was a failure and we would be too, how we would be bad fathers, it was the curse. I'd go back to my room and be as cold and emotionally shut down as, well, as I am now. Not all whips are leather.

This of course explains a lot. I don't know how it plays into the whole of my inability to trust. I cannot face but I cannot avoid the idea that I was interfered with sexually. It would explain everything, but I have no hint of actual memory on the matter. I was sexually active as a very small child, four five six seven, but then the behaviors stopped, if not the physiology. In any case, I know by now that I really was ruined, somehow, and that I am incapable, by now, of true health, mental or spiritual. I function, and I do good in the world, and somehow I have a son. But I will never again have meaningful intimacy, and I will grow more and more alienated from normality, and I will die alone.

It's so much easier to write, as here, than it is to speak to actual people. I don't need to trust you. You don't exist. People do, with their judgments and agendas. Even friends, even people I love ... I have loved before, and I can think of no instance, save my son, where it has not resulted in rejection and or betrayal. So today, when I'm at my lowest ebb, well, I was in public, and who can say, the damage I have cause, the enemies I have made. You may scoff. But my experience has always been that when people find out how I really am, they hate me, or something that amounts to it. I couldn't fake it today. Hello, nightmare.

It's not hard to write this, with my large and intentful hands. I am cold. I feel rage at injustice, and I mourn my lost potential, but something needs to be beaten to death, and it might as well be me. Slowly, this time, and subtly. Oh, I'm subtle.


J