The Enemy Within
6/3/96
THE ENEMY WITHIN
I love you but I hate you. Ouch. Was there ever a mother who simply said: I love you but I love you, and there's no hate or anger there? You're my son, you're my daughter, you're a gift from God. I loved having you and raising you and I don't own you and I won't presume to judge you and I wish you the very best.
How about a mother who, in the stealthiest fashion, the whole time she was raising her son, said: I'm pretending to love you. But I'm super super angry at your Dad because of our savage ego battles. Your Dad's a man, but he's too strong for me to counterattack. So I'm going to dump my anger and frustration off on you, because you're a man, too, or at least, a manchild. And you're young and tender and don't have a clue how to defend yourself from me. You're just looking to me for love and reinforcement, so you're wide open to any kind of frustration/castration I might care to cast your way.
Here's an idea. How's about I rig it so that you're constantly striving to accomplish something to win my love, but nothing you can do is enough? And I'll give you a living implant, a permanent brain-graft, so this struggle can be with you every moment of every day. It will be with you if I am a continent away. It will be with you even after I die. And it'll be there at night, in your dreams and in your insomnia, as well.
This way, you'll constantly be at war with yourself. I'll try to adjust the mixture so that you don't hate yourself so much that you actually kill yourself. What good would that be? If you kill yourself, I might be gnawed by intimations of remorse, I might have to question the way I raised you, I might have to come to grips with what I have done to you.
But if you are in knots, struggling struggling struggling to succeed but failing failing failing, then you provide a distraction, for me, from dealing with myself. I can spend my time wringing my hands over what a fuckup you are instead of dealing with my own compulsive, neurotic, acting out. Because I would rather fuck up someone near and dear to me, someone whom I dearly love and cherish, than be forced to wrestle with my own demons. I would rather be driven by my demons than stand and face them, because my demons have been chasing me for 70 years, and they're in fantastic condition.
And I'm old now, I'm feeble and brittle. Confronting my demons at this late date would shatter me.
Another part of the beauty of this arrangement is that you, my son, are not likely to figure out what is tearing you apart because you truly do love and respect me. You're a good boy, even if you are an abysmal failure. And because you're a good boy, you feel as it you must take responsibility for your own fuckups. How can you possibly blame your dear MOTHER for what has gone wrong with your life?! You're a responsible adult, aren't you?
All your mother did was give you life and nurture you. Without her, you wouldn't exist. But you're such a scumbag that you somehow want to blame her for your present inadequacies, failures, and misery! It's outrageous! It's bad enough that you're an abysmal failure, but for you to then point a finger for your failure at anyone other than yourself is unconscionable! And I'm not just anyone, for Christ's sake, I'm your mother! It's the ultimate betrayal and heresy and blasphemy! It's another sign of how weak and worthless you are. You don't even have the guts to take responsibility for your own failure!
You are a massive disappointment, not only to yourself, but to your mother. Of course, I would never explicitly admit that, but I communicate it to you more powerfully with a thousand silent gestures. And it's so much easier to focus on your failure than it is to focus on mine.
As to my own failure. I can demonstrate, through a feminist revisionist interpretation of my own psycho-history, that my personal failure is not my fault, but the fault of the men around me. For example, I wouldn't have lost so many years from my career if I hadn't funneled so much energy into raising you and your brother.
Now your brother was a wily, slippery rascal. He openly rebelled against my regime when he could, and covertly schemed against it when that was the only alternative. You, on the other hand, had more what I call the chump personality. You bought this mother/son routine lock stock and barrel. You saw me feed you and clean up after you and take care of you when you fell ill, and you figured you were obligated to take to heart whatever poison I served you along with my mother's milk.
Hear that? Mother's milk? It sounds ambiguous. Was I serving you my milk or my mother's---your grandmother's---milk? I was passing the same poison and nourishment I got at my mother's breast down to you.
I know, I know. You thought your grandmother was a dear, sweet old sugarpop of a woman. And to you she was. But to me she was hell on wheels. And I took that to heart. What was I supposed to do? Say the buck stops here? Say that I was going to detox, go cold turkey and filter all past generations' neuroses out of my system so that I wouldn't pass any on to you?
Let me tell you something, buster. If I had taken the time to try to sort out all the demons your grandmother.....and grandfather....implanted in me I would have been paralyzed! You would never have been born! Because I would have been in a cave somewhere, sorting out negative headtrips, slaying soul-demons, rinsing out nightmares. I would not have been able to function! I would have been like you! You sterile, childless, self-involved, Narcissistic, curmudgeonly, self-justifying, parasitic, solipsistic, terminally underachieving, sad sack, milquetoast, barnacle!
Also, when I was a young woman there were not a lot of your beloved analysts around to assist me in demon chasing. I would have had to do it, to psychologically detox, all on my own. I was an Army wife, for Christ's sake. I was president of a Mizzou sorority. Do you think I had intensive psycho-analysis on my mind?!
This country was fighting World War Two! I was intent on hooking a solid husband and building a family and helping him with his career and doing my bit to defeat the Japs and the Huns! Sure I was sore when I began to realize that raising you and your brother was distracting me from the journalism career I trained for in college. But I swept that anger under the floorboards, where it smoldered like an underground coalfire to the present day.
Sure I was ticked off when the collective, hyper-male, Philistine atmosphere of all those Army posts we lived on began to crush my own capacity to express myself as a woman and an artist and a separate person with her own career. And it wasn't always easy to cope with your father, either. He believed what he believed, and that was all there was to it? Don't you think I would have loved to spend some time with a more sensitive, thoughtful, artistic man?
But how could I do that without becoming a hussy? That's where YOU came in, my boy. Your brother became a jock. I couldn't express myself through him. Oh, he had his musical side, but it was you who was the true artist. I could see that from the moment you popped out. What a dreamy babe you were!
It was YOU who was going to realize all the writing ambitions that were crushed in me by the dispiriting poison of my ancestors, by your powerful Dad's overbearing will and needs, and by the crushing atmosphere of America and the U.S. Army! Of course, if you really managed to clear the superfluities out of your soul and dared to home in on the subject matter of your heart's heart, you would inevitably craft an indictment of your dear old mother. And that would not do, that simply would not do.
So I had to create a son who both strove to become and FAILED to become an artist. As I said, if you failed TOO much, you would kill yourself because the suffering would be too great and your spirit would be crushed. But if you and your demon were of exactly equal strength, you two could be locked in a titanic struggle for a lifetime and not budge an inch!
What I perfected was a kind of Chinese torture which exacted maximum suffering from my victim without shortening that tormented soul's life by so much as a minute.
Now I haven't forgotten for a moment that you, my own son, whom I love, whom I nurtured, whom I gave BIRTH to for Christ's sake, I haven't forgotten that it's you, you blackhearted bastard, who is writing this, who is putting these obscene words in your mother's mouth.
How dare you! You don't actually contemplate publishing hateful, libelous, slanderous drivel like this, do you? What if I read it somewhere? Can you imagine how terrible it would make me feel to read something like this?
So I triumph once again! Even when you write something powerful, something worth publishing, something that could turn your seemingly irredeemable existence from a resounding failure into a kind of success, you express yourself in a form that you cannot share with the public until I am gone! And I promise you I'll live another 20 years, just because I sense you're dying to get out from under the demons we both share, the demons that are our heritage, the demons I passed on to you in your mother's milk, the demons which my mother passed on to me in HER mother's milk!
Do you think that the mere act of expressing this in words will somehow deliver you from your suffering!? You know your own sense of decency and discretion, your genuine love for me, will make it impossible for you to publicly express your sense of betrayal by me! And you'll always be a coward and a failure if you don't declare yourself, if you don't have the courage to disseminate your art.
What a pathetic roach you are! Your own best self, the artistic expression that is most heartfelt, is shame based and fear based. You're like a shadow Solzhenitsyn. A real Solzhenitsyn not only writes the great novels that help bring down the intimidating, the overbearing "Father," the Soviet Government, he also dares to publish those novels. If he can disseminate his courageous literature no other way in a totalitarian regime, he will use "samizdat." That is, he will share his works with the underground, with fellow subversives. Or he will publish outside the borders, in the Free World.
But look at you, you bug, you shrew, you shrike! Do you have the courage to tackle truly frightening political issues? Hell no! Mr. Big Britches dares to write impossibly cruel things about your own dear, loving, nurturing, lifegiving mother!
What kind of monster could you possibly be? As if your failure and childlessness weren't enough of a hideous disappointment for me to bear, now you contemplate launching an unimaginably vicious personal attack on me!
You know who you remind me of? Norman Bates, the freak from Hitchcock's "Psycho." You're possessed by the banshee spirit of your own mother. But not your real mother. This spirit who is speaking through you, you mother's boy, you pantywaist, is none other than a figment of your own ungrateful, perverted, imagination! All I can say is, it's a good thing you're not a motelkeeper or you'd be skewering your lady guests in their showers like shishkabobs!
No wonder your relationships with women are so problematic! No wonder your only marriage ended in divorce! You're possessed by a female demon you imagine to be your mother! What do you do in your leisure time? Dress up in dresses from the 1940's? You'd probably look good in them, with those broad shoulders of yours. Big shoulders were all the rage in the '40's in men's and women's wear.
You say that only last week you were experiencing waves of volcanic rage against me. Let me ask you something. Which mother were you angry at? The real one or that crazed marionette that dances in your barren head? And if there is any overlap between your real mother and me, the demon, then I say how DARE you! How dare you feel the least rage or loathing toward your real mother, the woman who gave you life, who nurtured you, who loves you more than anyone on earth!
I'll tell you something. You're such a sick, twisted, puppy, that it's impossible that I, this demon in your head, this Medusa, this Gorgon, this Lucretia Borgia of imaginary mothers, could in any way shape or form describe your real mother. Your real mother is a delicate, feminine, loving, well-liked, well-bred, well-read creature. Without her, you wouldn't even exist. And without her encouragement of you, without her aspirations for you, you wouldn't be writing these very words.
So I forgive you for feeling volcanic rage against me, the mother of your nightmares. Because I am a blood leech in your brain and soul. I am not your real mother. Who knows how or why or from what material you manufactured me?
Your real mother loves you, and you love her. It is I who hates you and wants you to roast on a skewer in excruciating agony for the rest of your born days. It is I who plans to wreak havoc with your every future waking and sleeping moment, just as I have tornadoed through your past, and just as I sear this present.
Do you think that you can truly exorcise me from your soul for so much as a second? Don't make me laugh! I AM you! And let me remind you that while you are taking the time and the energy to write this, to speak for me, you are diverting energy away from accomplishing all the truly constructive activities of this life, such as making a living, finding a wife, and even cleaning your home!
You think that by giving me voice you are somehow delivering yourself of a burden! But I assure you you are only sinking yourself deeper into debt, and failure, and loneliness, and squalor, and despair!
As long as breath remains in your body, I'll always have the last laugh. I promise you I'll use your final exhalation to laugh at you. You can mock me, you can force me to spew unflattering tirades in which I mock myself, but it's really only you who will look ridiculous. And when the world reads what you have written, when the world reads your best effort to express yourself through the mask which is me, it will gasp in disgust. You won't be given fame, or the love of beautiful women, or money. You will be a pariah! And don't come to me when you're crying in your beer. I won't forgive or console you. You tried to advance your career by making a fool of me! And of course you failed! How dare you run your dirty linen up the rigging of the topmost mast and call it a victory pennant! What do you call those shit streaks on your "pennant"? Your coat of arms?
What will become of you? What WILL become of you? I warned and warned you when you were a boy that you would come to no good unless you got to knocking, turned over a new leaf, got serious, put some gas in your engine, got down to brass tacks, got right down to the real nitty gritty. But noooooo, you thought you knew better than to listen to me.
Well, here's your comeuppance. You're alone, you're broke, you're a middleaged failure, your looks are gone and nubile fillies avoid you like the plague, and things are only going downhill from here. I'd suggest you end it all now, do the world a favor and blow out your brains Hemingway-style---but Hemingway without the Nobel Prize!---but if you offed yourself, you'd kill me as well. And I really dig ripping your guts out! It's what I live for!
I know you're such a namby pamby that you would rather stand and let me gut you daily than let me drive you out into the world where you could gut others. And I hate you for that! You're so fucking self righteous and sterile and unproductive. With me fueling your volcanic rage, you could have become a great warrior, slaying ten thousand of the enemy with the jawbone of an ass. And I could have been that ass!
But no! You thought you'd turn and face and fight your own mother! Here's what I say to you. I condemn you to be at your best, and your worst, when you speak the most shameful truths you know, truths which I say are damnable lies!
Sure. Go ahead and share your ugly words with the rest of the world. I'll tell you what you're going to find out. That the rest of the world doesn't give a fuck. The rest of the world doesn't want to hear your squeakings and gibberings! The rest of the world has a LIFE for Christ's sake!
Don't kid yourself! You aren't expressing anything here that will speak for the torment in others' hearts! You're just vomiting bile and calling it ambrosia! No one else is sick enough, crazy enough, twisted enough to have demons like yours. And if they do have demons, they're so unlike yours that they couldn't possibly recognize theirs in your expression of yours. And even if your demon did somehow resemble theirs, you wouldn't have the craft to recognizably portray that resemblance.
And if you did happen to speak the painful truth, the awful truth that would help deliver others' from their personal misery-making mothers and/or assorted introjected ghouls, from their house of horrors inscapes, no one would ever admit that you had spoken for them because it would be too shameful, too embarrassing, to confess that they had such voices within them. They could not and would not own up. You would stand completely alone in this wide, wonderful, fine upstanding world of ours, and you would live to regret with your whole body and soul that you had ever had the effrontery to open your big yap and bray like the jackass you are.
--FIN--
THE ENEMY WITHIN
I love you but I hate you. Ouch. Was there ever a mother who simply said: I love you but I love you, and there's no hate or anger there? You're my son, you're my daughter, you're a gift from God. I loved having you and raising you and I don't own you and I won't presume to judge you and I wish you the very best.
How about a mother who, in the stealthiest fashion, the whole time she was raising her son, said: I'm pretending to love you. But I'm super super angry at your Dad because of our savage ego battles. Your Dad's a man, but he's too strong for me to counterattack. So I'm going to dump my anger and frustration off on you, because you're a man, too, or at least, a manchild. And you're young and tender and don't have a clue how to defend yourself from me. You're just looking to me for love and reinforcement, so you're wide open to any kind of frustration/castration I might care to cast your way.
Here's an idea. How's about I rig it so that you're constantly striving to accomplish something to win my love, but nothing you can do is enough? And I'll give you a living implant, a permanent brain-graft, so this struggle can be with you every moment of every day. It will be with you if I am a continent away. It will be with you even after I die. And it'll be there at night, in your dreams and in your insomnia, as well.
This way, you'll constantly be at war with yourself. I'll try to adjust the mixture so that you don't hate yourself so much that you actually kill yourself. What good would that be? If you kill yourself, I might be gnawed by intimations of remorse, I might have to question the way I raised you, I might have to come to grips with what I have done to you.
But if you are in knots, struggling struggling struggling to succeed but failing failing failing, then you provide a distraction, for me, from dealing with myself. I can spend my time wringing my hands over what a fuckup you are instead of dealing with my own compulsive, neurotic, acting out. Because I would rather fuck up someone near and dear to me, someone whom I dearly love and cherish, than be forced to wrestle with my own demons. I would rather be driven by my demons than stand and face them, because my demons have been chasing me for 70 years, and they're in fantastic condition.
And I'm old now, I'm feeble and brittle. Confronting my demons at this late date would shatter me.
Another part of the beauty of this arrangement is that you, my son, are not likely to figure out what is tearing you apart because you truly do love and respect me. You're a good boy, even if you are an abysmal failure. And because you're a good boy, you feel as it you must take responsibility for your own fuckups. How can you possibly blame your dear MOTHER for what has gone wrong with your life?! You're a responsible adult, aren't you?
All your mother did was give you life and nurture you. Without her, you wouldn't exist. But you're such a scumbag that you somehow want to blame her for your present inadequacies, failures, and misery! It's outrageous! It's bad enough that you're an abysmal failure, but for you to then point a finger for your failure at anyone other than yourself is unconscionable! And I'm not just anyone, for Christ's sake, I'm your mother! It's the ultimate betrayal and heresy and blasphemy! It's another sign of how weak and worthless you are. You don't even have the guts to take responsibility for your own failure!
You are a massive disappointment, not only to yourself, but to your mother. Of course, I would never explicitly admit that, but I communicate it to you more powerfully with a thousand silent gestures. And it's so much easier to focus on your failure than it is to focus on mine.
As to my own failure. I can demonstrate, through a feminist revisionist interpretation of my own psycho-history, that my personal failure is not my fault, but the fault of the men around me. For example, I wouldn't have lost so many years from my career if I hadn't funneled so much energy into raising you and your brother.
Now your brother was a wily, slippery rascal. He openly rebelled against my regime when he could, and covertly schemed against it when that was the only alternative. You, on the other hand, had more what I call the chump personality. You bought this mother/son routine lock stock and barrel. You saw me feed you and clean up after you and take care of you when you fell ill, and you figured you were obligated to take to heart whatever poison I served you along with my mother's milk.
Hear that? Mother's milk? It sounds ambiguous. Was I serving you my milk or my mother's---your grandmother's---milk? I was passing the same poison and nourishment I got at my mother's breast down to you.
I know, I know. You thought your grandmother was a dear, sweet old sugarpop of a woman. And to you she was. But to me she was hell on wheels. And I took that to heart. What was I supposed to do? Say the buck stops here? Say that I was going to detox, go cold turkey and filter all past generations' neuroses out of my system so that I wouldn't pass any on to you?
Let me tell you something, buster. If I had taken the time to try to sort out all the demons your grandmother.....and grandfather....implanted in me I would have been paralyzed! You would never have been born! Because I would have been in a cave somewhere, sorting out negative headtrips, slaying soul-demons, rinsing out nightmares. I would not have been able to function! I would have been like you! You sterile, childless, self-involved, Narcissistic, curmudgeonly, self-justifying, parasitic, solipsistic, terminally underachieving, sad sack, milquetoast, barnacle!
Also, when I was a young woman there were not a lot of your beloved analysts around to assist me in demon chasing. I would have had to do it, to psychologically detox, all on my own. I was an Army wife, for Christ's sake. I was president of a Mizzou sorority. Do you think I had intensive psycho-analysis on my mind?!
This country was fighting World War Two! I was intent on hooking a solid husband and building a family and helping him with his career and doing my bit to defeat the Japs and the Huns! Sure I was sore when I began to realize that raising you and your brother was distracting me from the journalism career I trained for in college. But I swept that anger under the floorboards, where it smoldered like an underground coalfire to the present day.
Sure I was ticked off when the collective, hyper-male, Philistine atmosphere of all those Army posts we lived on began to crush my own capacity to express myself as a woman and an artist and a separate person with her own career. And it wasn't always easy to cope with your father, either. He believed what he believed, and that was all there was to it? Don't you think I would have loved to spend some time with a more sensitive, thoughtful, artistic man?
But how could I do that without becoming a hussy? That's where YOU came in, my boy. Your brother became a jock. I couldn't express myself through him. Oh, he had his musical side, but it was you who was the true artist. I could see that from the moment you popped out. What a dreamy babe you were!
It was YOU who was going to realize all the writing ambitions that were crushed in me by the dispiriting poison of my ancestors, by your powerful Dad's overbearing will and needs, and by the crushing atmosphere of America and the U.S. Army! Of course, if you really managed to clear the superfluities out of your soul and dared to home in on the subject matter of your heart's heart, you would inevitably craft an indictment of your dear old mother. And that would not do, that simply would not do.
So I had to create a son who both strove to become and FAILED to become an artist. As I said, if you failed TOO much, you would kill yourself because the suffering would be too great and your spirit would be crushed. But if you and your demon were of exactly equal strength, you two could be locked in a titanic struggle for a lifetime and not budge an inch!
What I perfected was a kind of Chinese torture which exacted maximum suffering from my victim without shortening that tormented soul's life by so much as a minute.
Now I haven't forgotten for a moment that you, my own son, whom I love, whom I nurtured, whom I gave BIRTH to for Christ's sake, I haven't forgotten that it's you, you blackhearted bastard, who is writing this, who is putting these obscene words in your mother's mouth.
How dare you! You don't actually contemplate publishing hateful, libelous, slanderous drivel like this, do you? What if I read it somewhere? Can you imagine how terrible it would make me feel to read something like this?
So I triumph once again! Even when you write something powerful, something worth publishing, something that could turn your seemingly irredeemable existence from a resounding failure into a kind of success, you express yourself in a form that you cannot share with the public until I am gone! And I promise you I'll live another 20 years, just because I sense you're dying to get out from under the demons we both share, the demons that are our heritage, the demons I passed on to you in your mother's milk, the demons which my mother passed on to me in HER mother's milk!
Do you think that the mere act of expressing this in words will somehow deliver you from your suffering!? You know your own sense of decency and discretion, your genuine love for me, will make it impossible for you to publicly express your sense of betrayal by me! And you'll always be a coward and a failure if you don't declare yourself, if you don't have the courage to disseminate your art.
What a pathetic roach you are! Your own best self, the artistic expression that is most heartfelt, is shame based and fear based. You're like a shadow Solzhenitsyn. A real Solzhenitsyn not only writes the great novels that help bring down the intimidating, the overbearing "Father," the Soviet Government, he also dares to publish those novels. If he can disseminate his courageous literature no other way in a totalitarian regime, he will use "samizdat." That is, he will share his works with the underground, with fellow subversives. Or he will publish outside the borders, in the Free World.
But look at you, you bug, you shrew, you shrike! Do you have the courage to tackle truly frightening political issues? Hell no! Mr. Big Britches dares to write impossibly cruel things about your own dear, loving, nurturing, lifegiving mother!
What kind of monster could you possibly be? As if your failure and childlessness weren't enough of a hideous disappointment for me to bear, now you contemplate launching an unimaginably vicious personal attack on me!
You know who you remind me of? Norman Bates, the freak from Hitchcock's "Psycho." You're possessed by the banshee spirit of your own mother. But not your real mother. This spirit who is speaking through you, you mother's boy, you pantywaist, is none other than a figment of your own ungrateful, perverted, imagination! All I can say is, it's a good thing you're not a motelkeeper or you'd be skewering your lady guests in their showers like shishkabobs!
No wonder your relationships with women are so problematic! No wonder your only marriage ended in divorce! You're possessed by a female demon you imagine to be your mother! What do you do in your leisure time? Dress up in dresses from the 1940's? You'd probably look good in them, with those broad shoulders of yours. Big shoulders were all the rage in the '40's in men's and women's wear.
You say that only last week you were experiencing waves of volcanic rage against me. Let me ask you something. Which mother were you angry at? The real one or that crazed marionette that dances in your barren head? And if there is any overlap between your real mother and me, the demon, then I say how DARE you! How dare you feel the least rage or loathing toward your real mother, the woman who gave you life, who nurtured you, who loves you more than anyone on earth!
I'll tell you something. You're such a sick, twisted, puppy, that it's impossible that I, this demon in your head, this Medusa, this Gorgon, this Lucretia Borgia of imaginary mothers, could in any way shape or form describe your real mother. Your real mother is a delicate, feminine, loving, well-liked, well-bred, well-read creature. Without her, you wouldn't even exist. And without her encouragement of you, without her aspirations for you, you wouldn't be writing these very words.
So I forgive you for feeling volcanic rage against me, the mother of your nightmares. Because I am a blood leech in your brain and soul. I am not your real mother. Who knows how or why or from what material you manufactured me?
Your real mother loves you, and you love her. It is I who hates you and wants you to roast on a skewer in excruciating agony for the rest of your born days. It is I who plans to wreak havoc with your every future waking and sleeping moment, just as I have tornadoed through your past, and just as I sear this present.
Do you think that you can truly exorcise me from your soul for so much as a second? Don't make me laugh! I AM you! And let me remind you that while you are taking the time and the energy to write this, to speak for me, you are diverting energy away from accomplishing all the truly constructive activities of this life, such as making a living, finding a wife, and even cleaning your home!
You think that by giving me voice you are somehow delivering yourself of a burden! But I assure you you are only sinking yourself deeper into debt, and failure, and loneliness, and squalor, and despair!
As long as breath remains in your body, I'll always have the last laugh. I promise you I'll use your final exhalation to laugh at you. You can mock me, you can force me to spew unflattering tirades in which I mock myself, but it's really only you who will look ridiculous. And when the world reads what you have written, when the world reads your best effort to express yourself through the mask which is me, it will gasp in disgust. You won't be given fame, or the love of beautiful women, or money. You will be a pariah! And don't come to me when you're crying in your beer. I won't forgive or console you. You tried to advance your career by making a fool of me! And of course you failed! How dare you run your dirty linen up the rigging of the topmost mast and call it a victory pennant! What do you call those shit streaks on your "pennant"? Your coat of arms?
What will become of you? What WILL become of you? I warned and warned you when you were a boy that you would come to no good unless you got to knocking, turned over a new leaf, got serious, put some gas in your engine, got down to brass tacks, got right down to the real nitty gritty. But noooooo, you thought you knew better than to listen to me.
Well, here's your comeuppance. You're alone, you're broke, you're a middleaged failure, your looks are gone and nubile fillies avoid you like the plague, and things are only going downhill from here. I'd suggest you end it all now, do the world a favor and blow out your brains Hemingway-style---but Hemingway without the Nobel Prize!---but if you offed yourself, you'd kill me as well. And I really dig ripping your guts out! It's what I live for!
I know you're such a namby pamby that you would rather stand and let me gut you daily than let me drive you out into the world where you could gut others. And I hate you for that! You're so fucking self righteous and sterile and unproductive. With me fueling your volcanic rage, you could have become a great warrior, slaying ten thousand of the enemy with the jawbone of an ass. And I could have been that ass!
But no! You thought you'd turn and face and fight your own mother! Here's what I say to you. I condemn you to be at your best, and your worst, when you speak the most shameful truths you know, truths which I say are damnable lies!
Sure. Go ahead and share your ugly words with the rest of the world. I'll tell you what you're going to find out. That the rest of the world doesn't give a fuck. The rest of the world doesn't want to hear your squeakings and gibberings! The rest of the world has a LIFE for Christ's sake!
Don't kid yourself! You aren't expressing anything here that will speak for the torment in others' hearts! You're just vomiting bile and calling it ambrosia! No one else is sick enough, crazy enough, twisted enough to have demons like yours. And if they do have demons, they're so unlike yours that they couldn't possibly recognize theirs in your expression of yours. And even if your demon did somehow resemble theirs, you wouldn't have the craft to recognizably portray that resemblance.
And if you did happen to speak the painful truth, the awful truth that would help deliver others' from their personal misery-making mothers and/or assorted introjected ghouls, from their house of horrors inscapes, no one would ever admit that you had spoken for them because it would be too shameful, too embarrassing, to confess that they had such voices within them. They could not and would not own up. You would stand completely alone in this wide, wonderful, fine upstanding world of ours, and you would live to regret with your whole body and soul that you had ever had the effrontery to open your big yap and bray like the jackass you are.
--FIN--
posted by mobydoug at 12:18 AM
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