Black Maria

It was just another day in the coal mines.   I was sitting in a bar on 30^th Street.  It was around midnight and I was in my usual bewildered state.  I mean, you know, nothing works right: the women, the weather, the economy, the bums, the streetlights.  Finally you just sit in a kind of stricken state and wait like you’re on the bus stop bench waiting for death.  People lose their minds on bus stop benches, I see them arguing with phantoms or playing odd musical instruments to doting imaginary audiences.  I had walked out of my place just to buy some orange juice and soda water to help me get through the hangover but ended up in the local with nothing to show for it except the whiskey and water sitting in front of me.

I had been sitting there thinking about some subtle cues that I had picked up on recently.  A friend at work told me I was riding high before a great fall.

“Whaddya mean by that?”

“Well, you go out boozing all the time.  You’re always dating a bunch of different women.  You’re charging hard, man.”

“Elaborate.”

“Well, I’m happy in my married life.  I don’t want to go out, I want to do my married life things.  You’re single and you want to do you’re single life things, and you’re doing it.”

After an initial effort many of my friends become lost after they got married.  Sucked into the vortex of what they call ‘married life’.  They stop going out, stop doing things altogether.  I have no idea what they must do all goddamn day, sitting at home, staring at each other.  I’ve had girlfriends that were like this.  The lovely Christy.  She was so sweet and beautiful.  She could have walked straight out of the pages of a Victoria Secret magazine.  She would come over, plop down on the couch, and stare at me.

“Hey, what do you want to do today?” I would ask.

“I’m doing it.” Her innocent green eyes would tell me with a vapid smile.

Her only ambition was to be with me.  Sit there on the couch, staring at each other, being together.  It wasn’t for me, I had to cut the strings, it was driving me insane.  My married buddies always crowd in with eyes glowing like a child’s on Christmas morning when I roll into work on Monday.  They have been doing ‘family things’ all weekend while I was out hunting.  They were sitting on couches or remodeling bathrooms while I was out savaging the earth.  Society itself has a vested interest in having men get married, they are less threatening to the social order.  These men are emasculated.  Sterile.  Emotionless.  They are the dead.  It could be argued that by having children and a family that they are  prospering  while I am actually the one cut out of posterity, but there is nothing dynamic in their lives.  There can be no threat of defeat in their lives, so there becomes no potential for victory.

I’ve had a number of dates, serious dates, with dinner and drinks and conversation and bullshit.  All the trappings of human pair bonding.  Clean clothes and brushed teeth and deodorant.

There was the vegan I took to a steakhouse.  She only told me after we arrived at the restaurant that she was vegan.  I ordered a giant steak, she the shitake mushroom burger.  We were at one of those places where you grill your own food.  There we stood, huddled around a roaring flame, me grilling my massive steak – she grilling a giant fucking mushroom.  She got drunk off two martinis; I think that was the only thing saving her from vomiting as she watched me destroy a pound and a half of raw meat.  Her contorted facial expressions as she watched me eat are clear in my mind even to this day.

There was the obsessive compulsive girl that freaked out that there might be gum under the bar, moving her hands in strange ritualistic ways as we talked.  Wondering endlessly whether she had left her flat iron on at home and if it would burn the house down.  I, eventually frustrated with her insanity, swiped my hand under the bar.  “Nope, no gum.”  I then wiped my hand off on her shoulder.  She cringed, then sat frozen – disgusted beyond the capacity to act.  She eventually had to leave, she was worried about her dogs.  She had four daschunds.

There was the twelve stepper I met out for a drink one Thursday night.  She preached on and on and on about ‘the program’ and how great it was.  The more she talked, the more I drank.  She had been sober for four years now, quitting the stuff when she was only 24.  I asked her why she did it, was there some event or great tragedy that drove her from booze? ; Hoping that there was just one sign of life within her.  She said that she had simply been drinking too much and she needed to quit.  I finished my drink and left.  She was lifeless.

I’ll tell you this because I know it, every man or woman has buried within themselves a dark side, a savage side.  When a man is taken out of society and left to create his own norms, he rediscovers those instincts, which have lain dormant since the beginning of existence.  Survival of the fittest, physically and intellectually, is the foundation of these instincts.  I remember being back in West Virginia for training some years ago.  We were using an abandoned mental institution for close quarters combat training.  The town itself had only one main intersection.  The mentality, the disposition of people there, coal miners.  You don’t work that job without knowing that you’re going to die.  There’s a desperation to it, a sense of abandon.  You see your friend killed, buried under a pile of shale, then go back to work the next day, that’s just the job.  You start to develop this careless sense of your own mortality.  People who have been working in some of the most dangerous occupations there are, it creates a sense of fatalism and a lack of fear of death.  That type of thinking was pervasive there, and it’s all about hopelessness.  You don’t see a lot of optimism about the future.  These were common people, but that sounds pretentious and condescending.  They were the salt of the earth.  They were fearless.  They drank fearlessly and lived fearlessly.  They fought the world and they fought each other.  They chopped away at life like their shovels and pick axes chopped away at the unforgiving earth.  A place where they all knew they would end up.

I have had these experiences as well.  There are monsters in this world, and since monsters cannot be allowed to roam the civilized world, someone must be sent to destroy them.  I have been sent into the wilderness to slay monsters.  To find the monster, you must take the same path as the monster.  This path is a journey into one’s own mind, soul, and true self.  While on this path you will never see evil so clear and defined as in your own reflection.  In taking this path, you run the risk of becoming the very thing you are trying to destroy.  When fighting monsters you should be careful not to become one, and when looking into a void you must be aware that the void also looks into you.

In returning from the wilds you must face the duality of your new existence.  You are in the world yet forever separated from it.  You are full of emotion and simultaneously emotionless.  You ask yourself, “am I the only one who is alive or am I the only one who is dead?”  Your soul seeks to embrace nihilism, a philosophy of nothingness where there is no ultimate meaning to anything.  Modern society is becoming nihilistic. You are profoundly alone.  Your parents don’t understand you, are absent, except for insisting that you progress along a conventional path.  You look around you and find nobody to trust with your feelings; most people everywhere are not genuine.   You start to view humanity with intense disappointment, even cynicism.  How is it that the older people get, the farther from authenticity they get?  Meanwhile, the gradual deterioration of the body disgusts you.  There is no allure in growing older.

Authority does not seem related to wisdom, either.   People tell you to find direction and thus stability, but you view such advice as both suspicious and naïve; playing such a game is inauthentic.  Going your own way autonomously, as a law unto yourself, does not work out so well either most of the time, so it is unclear where you might find legitimate authority.  Religion is pure garbage.  Individual achievement is being replaced by misplaced notions of virtue in society and in the state.   Humanity has become ruled by ‘the mob’.

Whenever you feel the urge to meet someone, to call up a girl, to have a social experience, you end up sabotaging it.  You might want to sleep with a prostitute, to party with strippers, to feel human comfort, but this will not do.  You might want to interact with friends at a bar, but you end up saying something hurtful or raw so that they abandon you.  Pushing them away provides a deeper and deeper loneliness, but at these moments of choice you are willing to endure it rather than eventually face the ultimate, devastating loneliness of your nihilistic heart or compromise yourself and become non genuine.

The greatest tragedy, aside from your loneliness, is in the relationship between the pain of actual experience and feeling your own feelings.  They both posses an equally destructive numbness that comes with shutting down your emotions in order to overcome suffering.   After being faced with death, parts of you essentially shut down, forcing you to lose attachments to other people. You repeatedly tell yourself how important it is not to get attached to anyone, you have an independent streak now, and they will let you down anyway.  Then, every once in a while you meet someone pure and true, reminding you that you still hold the capacity to love, but when you look at her, you feel smothered by the same tortured feelings of realization that we are all doomed.

This is truly an existential crisis. Everyone around you, everyone you see or interact with, is completely full of shit.  They have not stared into the abyss, their existence is trite and meaningless and ultimately superficial.  It is this superficiality that drives you insane.  The fact that no one is acknowledging how trivial and fleeting life is, compared with the grand things we tell one another about reality—how difficult it is to truly love and share oneself with people knowing that all will eventually die—causes you to burn with frustration, contempt, and even rage.  Knowing that on some level one of the most profound truths of mortal life: the superficial matters little because it will not last, yet it is made to seem so much more important.  Meanwhile, all around you, you must watch superficial people win honors through their artifice.  You yourself are even castigated for your honesty and hard work, while the mindless superficial sheep are raised high.  You grow to hate society for embracing so superficial a perspective.

In the end, all you truly want is some authentic living, to hold on to someone true who knows nothing of or is enraged against the world’s superficiality and therefore is not tainted by it.  You remember all the greatest moments of your life, standing alone on the icy mountaintop, and you seek to experience this again.  You push living to the extreme, like the coal miners, erasing the lines between what should be done and what can be done.  This has been a solitary journey and none of the superficial or sterilized people have or will ever understand it.  Your only hope is that at journey’s end you have satisfaction in your own choices and actions.

So I slowly sip my whiskey and water.  I’m alone in the bar now except for the bartender.  I listen to the cars speed by outside, the news reports bleating from the old tv set hanging in the corner.  The wind is blowing hard now hinting at dark and turbulent seas.  I have to go back to work tomorrow, back to the starving eyes of my coworkers.  I had authentic experiences this weekend.  I lived raw and true and proudly wear the scars to prove it.  So here I sit, waiting, with my whiskey and my doomed wondering, like a Neanderthal putting flowers on a grave.  Genetic testing shows that there was zero breeding between Homo sapiens and Neanderthal man.  They were a completely separate race of creatures living on this planet, yet they had souls.  I finish my drink, consider walking home, through this soulless city.  I pause momentarily, close my eyes, hold my breath, and swallow hard against the truth – I’m still waiting to meet someone who will come and help me shake the pillars of heaven.  I exhale and walk home.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Related posts:

1. The Black Beast Strikes Back
2. The Black Beast
3. Hissing Cockroach
4. Elvis Has Left the Building
5. Sinking Ship