Seducing the Seducer, or How a Wickedly Alluring British Princess Stole a Brash American Seducer's Haughty Heart Without Even Trying
Try not too enjoy too much; just when you didn’t think the entertainment could get more sublime, I don’t disappoint
Seducing the Seducer, Part III
More acknowledgments: first for all the younger college girls like a Samantha Keegan or something and our epic eye-contact courtship that lasted months, and an Isabella of Locust Valley high school who bused tables in Buckram Stables where a similar intense ocular affair unfolded until I finally started talking to you; for all my starers, oglers, gazers, and beaming-smilers writ large; for the girls who blush and laugh when I don’t even say anything funny; for my ex-college ex-girlfriend who blocks my number and unblocks my number, reblocks it and unblocks it—ad nauseum, ad absurdum, ad infinitum—and for like the million girls who have ever ghosted my paragraphs of impassioned drivel— I am perpetually having a drink for you; for all the girls who ever had the bold temerity to grab and grope me especially in broad daylight in school or heckled or catcalled me in public; also the women who tried to seduce me: Paige Williams, Tiffany a blonde beautiful forty-two year old who made someone switch seats to sit with me on a bus (I still reimagine your leg against mine for the second half of our journey when I am alone in my bedroom), also the Geneva nurse who tried to seduce me the very morning after I seduced a college girl on a plane; for Jackie Steinmann for successfully seducing me—congrats, I know as I can imagine it was not easy; for the funny girls I scared away like Riley Poisson, who was also hellbent on seducing me, or Fleur Lennox or Casey Mcmanus, all in my dazed and confused senior year of college (you’re very funny); for my incomplete seductions (or the wise and lucky, shrewd and discerning ones that got away…) the middle-aged and stunning, Danielle Greenwood, and my mom’s friend Christine, who it never dawned on her to my anguished bafflement when I got her to go hiking with me how completely uninterested I was in talking about jobs!—Christine whom I came to find so so so annoying I lost interest in trying to seduce, despite thinking at first how she made the perfect target; and my supermarket mom friend Jill too I suppose who witnessed me trying to seduce Christine on the hiking trail and was fascinated by it; and not a few others who are slipping my mind; for my funny neighbors; for my beautiful sister whatever she’s doing; for my close male friends who even Ghost me to my infinite vexation, Chris Ohara, Colby Chase and Alex Lorie (again)— I hope you guys are Ok; for Marcie something who stopped fucking me to masturbate to me instead; for the girls who arch their butts, eyebrows, and flip their hair at me and catch me looking at them and then resume staring me right down; for myself again lastly because I am the most important just for still having the overconfidence besides the arrogance and the accursed genius to even think to try and save the West through the romanticization and mythologization of all of our lives; and for Rose Puffle for being the prettiest fifty-nine-year old woman alive or ever lived for that matter who confessed as of late to wanting to buy me a bottle of whiskey for Christmas, she not doing it because she thought I might interpret it as “weird”—It’s not weird Rose! Any beautiful woman who wants to ply me with liquor go ahead! You are not alone. So many girls and so many women have bought me drinks and can’t help plying me! There is the Maria who bought me a mini bottle I scarfed down in the bathroom one day. Lol! I am America’s meanest youngest, beautifulest straightest, manliest drunkest madman writer!—the enraptured look on my hot mom friend Chrissy’s face the other day when I told her how I am the most informed, well read, eloquent, handsomest man in America! And for the girl who came into the supermarket from high-school, reportedly allegedly asking does Jay Burkett work here? From the grades below me—I love you too, and I don’t even know who you are—all I remember hearing is all the girls in the grades below me talked about me incessantly. I don’t blame you. Thank you. And lastly for all the insane heavy, heavy heavy drinking, hardcore rock and roll and heavy classical music I listen to for my writing routine!
“I can’t listen to that much Wagner you know? I start getting the urge to conquer Poland,”—Woody Allen, “Manhattan”
“We can only understand our life backwards but we must live it forward.” —Soren Kierkegaard
“Whatever Grant is drinking, I want it given to every other soldier in the Union Army!” Abraham Lincoln, America’s greatest president, in exasperated response to complaints about our greatest General Grant’s drinking
“In this world you can be a cop or a criminal, but when you’re facing a loaded gun, what’s the difference?” —Jack Nicholson, “The Departed”
“What we commonly call man, the eating, drinking, planting and counting man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, but the soul, whose organ he is, would he let it appear through his action, would make our knees bend. When it breathes through his intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Oversoul”
“And now I’m in the world alone,
Upon the wide, wide sea;
But why should I for others groan,
When none will sigh for me;
Perchance my dog will whine in vain
Till fed by stranger hands;
But long ere I come back again;
He’d tear me where he stands.
With thee, my bark, I’ll swiftly go;
Athwart the foaming brine;
Nor care what land thou bear’st me to
So not again to mine.
Welcome, welcome, ye dark blue waves!
And when you fail my sight,
Welcome ye deserts, and ye caves!
My Native Land—Goodnight!” —Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race,” —James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
“It may appear strange, but now, when we were in the jaws of the Gulf, I felt more composed than when we were only approaching it. Having made up my mind to hope no more, I got rid of a great deal of that terror which unmanned me at first. I suppose it was despair that stung my nerves.
“It may look like boasting—but what I tell you is truth—I began to reflect how magnificent a thing it was to die in such a manner, and how foolish it was in me to think of so paltry a consideration as my own individual life, in view of so wonderful a manifestation of God’s power. I do believe that I blushed with shame when this idea crossed my mind. After a little while I became possessed with the keenest curiosity about the whirl itself. I positively felt a wish to explore its depths, even at the sacrifice I was going to make; and my principal grief was that I should never be able to tell my own companions on shore about the mysteries I should see. These, no doubt, were singular fancies to occupy a man’s mind in such extremity—and I have often thought since that the revolutions of the boat around the pool, might have rendered me a little light-headed.” —Edgar Allen Poe, A Descent Into the Maelstrom
“On the gathering storm comes a tall handsome man in a dusty black coat and a red right hand,” —Nick Cave, Red Right Hand
“Why is it that all those men who have become extraordinary in philosophy, politics, poetry or the arts are obviously melancholic, and some to such an extent that they are seized by the illnesses that come from black bile?”— Aristotle
“Three thousand years of sleep-unsheltered hours,
And moments aye divided by keen pangs
Till they seemed years, torture and solitude,
Scorn and despair,—these are mine empire…” —Percy Shelley, Prometheus Unbound
“Look out kid, no matter what you did”— Bob Dylan, “Subterranean Homesick Blues”
“Hunters in the Snow” by Pieter Bruegels, one of the most beautiful and amazing paintings in Western culture
Seducing the Seducer, or How a Wickedly Alluring Blonde British Princess Stole a Brash American Seducer’s Haughty Heart
Part III of a Sustained Series of Mini Novels about the Sunset of Western Morality, the rise, decline, and fall—because I found love— of my career as a tortured neurotic pick-up artist, who by means of the principle of transference, thus exploits his gifts with the opposite sex to try to escape his own neuroses, and towards a theory of Seduction, as a moral existential-liberationist value and philosophical concept in its own right. The most extraordinary thing you have ever read and will ever read.
By Jay Burkett
“The only time he’s ever sober is in AA meetings—out of an overabundance of respect—although he leans torturedly, creaking crookedly forwards at night and backwards on it in tempo with the anguished points he was at severe pains to make on a gilded fancy cane that he does not need, being in his late twenties with no injury or disability or anything, looking like he’s about to keel over in all events as if only from the terrible weight of his own self-exhausting genius alone—when they ask does anyone want to share how many months, weeks or days? I heard from someone, he leaps up and springs like a frog out of his silent seat, and rails How about how many hours, or half-hours, or quarter hours quarters of quarter hours or quarters of quarters of quarters of hours, or minutes, or half minutes, seconds and split seconds, or split-split-split NANOMICROMILLICENTISECONDS since your last drink? Sometimes to resounding applause, raucous laughter and standing ovations, as he wearily slumps back down,” Celeste Butterscotch warned the already fearless, heedless, feckless, unamused, un-disabused and intransigent Lily Hunter…
The immortal George Carlin, a comedian, makes fun of the phrase near miss describing when two planes almost collide as a near hit, not a “near miss.” He says a full-blown, overt collision is a near miss. And it was very much a near miss or a collision in this sense when Emma Randolph— the sweet, somewhat insecure, somber some days, and slightly implacably unstable (just like him, with labile, melancholy mood swings and her predisposition to Obsession and Obsessing and Obsessiveness) and wildly, ravishingly pretty little, sick anemic, languid and fatigued, not to be underestimated for her sheer passion, and pitiless and merciless spirited wrath: blonde, bombshell British Barbie English girl (as he was somewhat unnaturally, unfashionably handsome and vindictive and vengeful in his own solemn sovereign uncontested and incontestable right), as you and people would refer to her because of how her descent and descendants distinguished her, set her apart and raised her high contemptuously above the ordinary trudging, judging, damned, mediocre, democratic Americans…
Beneath her; beneath her infinitely; beneath her regard for judging her somehow for being too young or something to have her handsome and precocious, prodigal little perfect blessing of a son…—when the poor, impoverished, and struggling Emma, who came from a zillion dollars, whose parents denied her in a sense every cent, who threatened to take her house from her and more, so she subsisted to every degree on the small fortune she made as a Manhattan real estate agent like ten years ago and whatever she made as a social media company researcher, before she resigned steadfastly implacably, uncompromisingly because her boss was having a demented affair with another employee, and that this underweight waif of a British fearsome Barbie would not could not tolerate: looked him up online, Googling him, stumbling upon his doomed and demented blog, The Unredeemed or Unrepentant Reaganite or something, his tormented blog; whereupon she found him appearing to boast and swagger apparently self-absorbedly if not misogynistically of not being able to hold down a relationship like women were just big fish or something, and not women, fish, and not even wanting one; not only and just because he’s not quite capable of one, but because he would seem genuinely to prefer not to be in one, because he was a goddamned accursed “seducer”—which to her had to mean he was a womanizer, and of course he was! Heavy drinking and womanizing and literary genius tend not to go untogether. It was a personality stretching back to ancient times. It went all the way back to Dionysis, the Greek God of madness, wine, sex and pleasure. It described anyone of a passionate artistic nature. Female geniuses had the same problems, drinking and sex and rebellion. There was nothing misogynistic about it, unless you wanted absurdly to argue that artists were all antifeminist or something ridiculous. It was feminists and political ideologues in general who were anti-art.
Therefore the poor wickedly lovely Emma, offended and insulted, humiliated, which she was used to, being no less disreputable and piratic than he was; she was just loathe to admit it, too classy, too dignified, too refined, too sensible with too much British modest dignified self-respecting sensibility—Emma was on the verge, the very precipice of calling her first date with him sadly, miserably, tragically—sadly—off… And text him she’s a proud damned pretty English girl when her glorious also wickedly gorgeous mum stepped in onto the stage that was all life was in the end, an endless comic drama, and her mum thankfully to save the world persuaded her—her mum herself surely some kind of diabolical seductress who said Emma would later tell him basically disdainfully and high-handedly (or this was how he liked to imagine it), in the old days in my day, “we never looked anyone up online,” haughtily, gloomily, arrogantly, “we just winged it!” Bombastically…
And that decided it.
Especially when after getting all primmed and prettied up she met him at that Fancy French Restaurant without compunction without hesitation without anxiety, miraculous that little British Barbie waif with her waif-like beauty; he not even knowing whether she came from money, or wherever she came from except England; he simply assuming she had to be struggling financially if she were a single mom, a “mum,” which she was, because her parents were pitiless towards their belief in her need to be monomaniacally self-reliant and autonomous and never ask for help, for handouts; something he would admire so deeply much about her great, cruel and wicked parents; he originally was anxious the place would be too expensive for a girl he did not know would come hailing from money; and she looked in and through the window after coming swaggering, illustriously like the royalty and princess she metaphysically metaphorically was, because she was a proper dyed-in-the-wool aristocrat like he was, although he came from less money, his dad being some famous tv journalist or something—he was upper middle class—not real money any less than she was actual royalty; she just came from a shitton of money; and she could see how deeply profoundly forlorn and desolate, and helpless and vulnerable, and destitute he was, a metaphysical Byronic exile out of Albert Camus, straight out of it, a wanderer, the Nietzschean protean young artist she did not believe was or was only rather just a seducer let alone a womanizer, because of course he wasn't; no one this timid and anxious and sad could possibly be, could even be in the mood all the time to even approach women; Colin— Colin never having even been before on a complete as in completed, and un-incomplete date before, especially a hyper-unconventional as in a traditional one such as this, where they sat across a table designed explicitly, graphically unapologetically for just Two, Face to Face… He would tremble and hunch, crouched somewhat like a bear, like a bear’s cub, a little cute and cuddly bear afraid of nature, afraid of the wilderness being a momma’s boy still living nevertheless with his own mom, needing a mom and someone to mommy him in all events, afraid of the world, and ten times cuter for being afraid, for being timid, afraid of rejection, afraid of himself, afraid of what he might say, hoping he wouldn’t scare this one away, and the OCD fear of suddenly his credit card maybe not working, because he spent, was always spending so much on it on mainly booze, but also ludicrous luxury clothes, and books endless—the fear that maybe, what if he maxed out his credit card limit and in his aspiration to be a blast from the past, a real Quixotic gentleman he needed, desperately needed to pay the whole meal for her, which was why this scared him so much, needing not to be like any one of the other men nowadays who was unwilling or something or thought it was Ok not to pay for their Lady… As this remarkable like remarkable— he would soon find that she was not only remarkable but truly extraordinary which is a strong word, but she deserved it, deserving the label, not being one of those cretans nowadays who says they disdain “labels,” because indeed labels being the essence of life were what existence was all fucking about— brilliant and marvelously British virtuosic (writing; she was a writer too; cooking; fashion; she went to college in NYC for fashion! Jack of all genius trades was Emma bloody, bloody hell fucking Randolph!) Barbie doll of a bombshell of an English girl of thirty-three (girls in their thirties being the most appealing age, being between girlhood and womanhood, moms or “mums” as well as still naughty funny silly little frisky girls still, still, still, but also ladies, mature, proper but girls, moms or mums but irresponsible wild little girls still; it was like having all of them in one, a thirty-something-old girl or woman or lady or soccer mom or mum was like a “hat trick” in soccer, the soccer, not only the “football” her son excelled at, of course being excellent and precocious and a born gifted prodigy as she was, as she still would become under his welcome presumptive, arrogantly presumptuous stewardship, a mixed goodie grab bag of mom-girl-lady qualities and essences and natures— she was everything you could ever want all wrapped up in one sublime package accomplished with a ribbon like a satin ribbon tied across it!)—he was twenty-seven—as this truly memorably remarkable remarkably girl or woman or mom or mum or whatever she was, would tell, informing and apprising him and filling him with her incandescent dark mystery of a wild hellacious and beautiful romantic, so romantic past, her strange and unexpected and unlikely prodigious and prodigal, profligate life-story, like the best people, the “best of us” as people said, quoted, full of unanticipated, unanticipated and unexplained, and inexplicable and unexplainable, inexorable twists and turns, peaks and valleys highs and lows, high highs and low lows, half-turns, u-turns and dead inexplicable ignominious inexorable dead ends; he felt like he was sailing the perilous stormy, treacherous high seas all around the world with her some days, but especially particularly on that first awful, god awful, awfully awesome first date with that unforgettable and unforgettably gorgeous, endlessly fascinating and captivating extraordinary Emma Randolph, the buccaneer of an outlaw of an aristocratic British girl who she told him in a flurry lived in his town, down the street or up the road from him in downtown, downstream Salt Valley, was also another writer, also came from money; they were the perfect couple, but a real perfect couple, like a “match made in heaven” but an authentic one, who resurrected these repulsive phrases rescuing them from the abysses and depths of horrid cliches—if only this English girl would start saying “Horrid” in her Britishness; oh so horrid so dreadful and ghastly oh dear, oh dear what nonsense, so dreadfully horrid, then he would really be ready to die for her, as he would pledge to her majestically handsomely with so much consummate brash American hypermasculine majesty later, like it was nothing, and it wasn’t even saying anything his lover’s bravado spilling and belting and booming ricocheting out of him; even if she wouldn't take him; even if she dumped him for no no reason; even if he was never to be a successful or a famous writer, he would still die for her, die for her and her great son, die for them both and all; it would be his highest honor, his last wish, Colin, wanting all his life to die for if not to be just slain by whatever woman or panoply or palimpsest of women he knew at once when he was as young as four or five would come marauding into his life and breaking down the door of that passionate shy haughty Byronic heart, making him willing to do anything for them… He loved women and girls more than anything in the world, even his own art. It and she herself were so fascinating he couldn’t keep track of what you would think would be some of the most important parts, like how her father, some extremely wealthy asshole, who owned a zillion car dealerships, or something, a “self-made” man, one of those unfortunate sad specimens, and fossils living, alive who worshipped at the altar of bowing and praying and hoping and foolishly believing in, short of just sucking outright: his dick, fondling his balls, and eating his semen—no dick less than that of Elon Musk, the far hyper-right-wing troll who Colin believed either truly or falsely would some day or was every day spelling the end of humanity, with self-driving cars, Mars, or going to Mars of all goddamn places, and not Hell, and this absurd thing called Neuralink, why anyone wanted technology to help them with anything rather than manfully to do whatever it was you needed by yourself alone, Colin was determined to die and die hard not being able to wrap his sodden and depraved and disinherited head around….
What was Musk or Elon as his fans called him doing? Intentionally or unintentionally? He was acting as if he couldn’t give mankind or “humankind” for the politically correct, which he was absolutely not, even not having read a word of George Orwell—he didn’t know why either; Orwell just sounded kind of boring; not experimental enough for him, and too sci-fi and allegorical, and with no women or alcohol or anything; and for now that was all Colin cared about, whiskey and pussy—because the PC could suck his goddamned dick with how those Orwellians abused by perverting by watering down the (our) English language. No, Mankind. It was never not going to be Man period. Man and womankind, or PeopleKind or Trans-kind for example just sounded politely insane. Elon Musk, speaking of trans, and queer people, because you had to doubt someone like Elon Musk’s sexual orientation and gender sometimes, and even his humanity, with being on the spectrum, and Colin not caring whom he insulted, whether it were even someone on the autism spectrum—whether you had autism or not, to Colin you were still just a plain old retard, and what could get more retarded than a man who fetishized technology and spent all his money on attempting to take People, or We, the People or Trans-kind to space and Mars or TransMars for example—Elon Musk the cocksucking loser and known semen-eater was behaving as if he really could not give trans-kind enough reasons to off itself by and via surrendering to technology and automating the will and the phallous one day, automating consciousness and genius along with it, and relegating the conscience, too, which already someone had quite a bit ago, consigned to morally surer times in history, since narcissistic sociopaths like Donald Trump became president.
These brain cancers these tumors of fake men hilariously, hysterically posing somehow—you had to try and muster some semblance of pity and compassion for them—posing as “real men,” despite how they didn’t drink or smoke. Because what real men, proper real men were and would always be: were guys first like Ronald Reagan, but also Humphrey Bogart too and lately as depicted in tv as Tommy Shelby as played by the great Cillian Murphy in Peaky Blinders, or Donald Draper as depicted by John Hamm in Mad Men, or Rust Cohle in the first season of True Detective rendered by Matthew Mcconaughey, who you would never have known was even a remotely good actor until you watched, and Colin watched and rewatched True Detective Season One to death, such that he was quoting the shit out of it… What defined and distilled and distinguished, besides distinguishing real men as opposed to fake men because if there were real men, then there were fake men: was how nicely suavely they tended so much so often to dress, the supreme self-regard they had for themselves that extended not least to all the pretty ladies they had chasing after and practically stalking them… How they smoked and drank like there was no tomorrow, as Draper says in episode one of Mad Men, “I live like there’s no tomorrow, because there is no tomorrow.” He was right there fucking wasn’t. Only the past. They say and do all kinds of outrageous cliche bad ass things like that. They were almost caricaturable and cartoonish, being such real men outrageous men, they lended themselves histrionically and paradoxically, ironically to parody. They had to. They were obsessive too, to an egregious fault, secretive, private, reserved, and reclusive, plagued by melancholy, anxiety, depression and melancholia. And perhaps what the DSM calls “Melancholic Depression.”
He loved so much how in Peaky Blinders we basically never see Cillian Murphy eat. Not a morsel. His diet is Irish whiskey right out of the bottle in a glass, and unfiltered cigarettes. Just like Colin’s. We don’t see Draper eat either or Cohle. Real men do not eat, which was why every modern American was not a real man to the extent that they ate or dieted or needed to lose weight, because they were all overweight and obese. If they were fake men, then they were also automatically pathologically homosexuals. All of them. This was why so many even ostensibly straight men Colin would find coming onto him and gazing at him, no less or more than women. It was an outrage. Real men indeed were very negligent about their healths in general. They of course have a number of tortured relationships, and they’re often lifelong bachelors, or they’ve been divorced and married multiple times. Remarrying or never marrying again. Real men authentic men drink and smoke and gamble and spend a shitton of time alone, not caring about money, loving and needing it, but never giving a damn about it. It wasn’t because they wanted to; it was because they goddamn had to. Despite all the girls all over them, they needed their privacy, because they needed shelter, isolation, because a bottle of hard warm brown liquor, always brown, real men not needing or preferring anything or any other liquor—it was superior at times even compared to all the mad girls, and usually they liked and sticked to crazy women—also because they had to—especially the contemporary ones nowadays, who demanded you to be “emotionally available,” whatever in the hell that meant, whatever that was supposed to connote, evoke or denote or provoke. If Colin had to be emotionally available, and every woman depended absurdly on this, he would just as soon and no sooner never be with a woman, another woman again, as he said fiercely to his close and closest friends—whichever and whatever friends he had left, if he had to choose between winning the Nobel prize and having sex ever again, or getting his balls cut off, he would sooner become a eunuch and never have fierce jealous enviable sex with all the hottest girls again. That was how little Colin pretended he needed women. Much less needed sex in his life. Sex. Idle and empty futile, vain, vapid, shallow and stupid sex. Why every guy he knew in college was so damned desperate for it he never understood. You could save yourself the trouble by watching porn and masturbating. All that older lady pussy he loved he could find online. And it was endless. These girls in their thirties and forties. Endless endless content. It was so much better than the real thing. His favorite porn actress was India Summer. He wondered if he was a famous enough writer some day whether he could smash her. Have you, has anyone ever once stopped to imagine what it must be like, and feel like to have your dick sucked by a professional passionate lover of porn of a porn actress? The hottest milf in all of porn with her jet black raven hair and her sultry voice that after he used to smoke pot, he could jerk off exploding volcanically, jerking and jerking all day too? God was she hot. Aging she still is and would always forever be. Her hair was blonde now. And he hoped she made a lot of money. And she was very comfortable because she is one of the best porn actresses who was ever and still was in the industry. And Colin was a connoisseur and snob of porn, and watched a shitton of it. Why have sex with an inexperienced, insecure and immature, and unstable and stupid college-age college girl, in real life, when you could be fucking pussy like the perfect dizzyingly euphorically, euphemistically and ecstatically, divinely, and disparagingly and grotesquely pretty India, India, India Summer in your head! Reality could be better at times than fantasy. He acknowledged it but at times too fantasy could be much better than reality. It depends. The world was starved for Fantasy though. This was what made Emma Randolph for example so damned interesting like Interesting, and her entrance onto the perpetual tortured agonized sex stage agonizingly of his joyful joyously sorrowful tortured Nietzschean existence, Joycean… Her father that guy that so easily like the best characters lended himself so well to caricature: was not Emma’s real biological father.. Emma’s real and biological father died in a car or motorcycle or train or plane accident or something. He couldn’t remember not being able to remember. Because he couldn’t and could not keep track, because Emma was so fascinating, and he was so drunk late at night talking to her, just texting because he wanted to, but also because if he weren’t drunk, and unless he were piss and stone drunk, he might not have been able ever once to stop texting her—he needed to pass out lest he just text and text—and text—because that was the way he was, because he was obsessive and only because he never heard of it, so he didn’t get a chance yet to read about it, so he might have eluded, evaded, and avoided, and therefore, preventive, successfully dodged it, like a bullet to their relationship to the dreaded ROCD.
All Emma said, with as well as in, Dread, she knew: was that her real biological father was extremely wealthy and revolutionarily good looking, enough to start and finish and win Revolutions. Political ones. Yeah. Little and so little did and would she ever know how this would fascinate, captivate and astonish to death practically, metaphorically her new American literary genius—all American last macho male American artist, hideously godawfully male artist, so much testosterone tearing through his work, of a genius of a boyfriend of Colin Macallan to no goddamn ignominious and dreaded End…
“I thought you wrote down some very interesting things on the questionnaire,” Lily said weeks and months and it felt like years now Ago… in one of their first meetings… And, Colin sighed in recognition not used to being and always so consistently flattered to be recognized… Paradoxically.
“Yeah so the British maverick intellectual, polymath savant scholar of Robert Burton, mentions once in his classic The Anatomy of Melancholy, a guy who famously crawled over a canyon using just a bare barebones plank, a French Jewish guy, at night at midnight, not even knowing most importantly, he crawled straight right across a goddamned canyon of course… when he woke up in the morning, and he realized the insane near death risk he accidentally took near deathly the poor French Jewish bastard died of sheer fright of terror of what he did; that he could have nearly plummeted to death… And I don’t know about you, Lily, but every time I stand at any great height over the ground, the hard flat killer abysmal earth—all I think about is what it must be or feel like to hit it, to impact the impotent earth… I have a number of sentences and images such cursedly in my head and one is from Stephen King; I can’t remember where or in what story or novel he wrote it, but he mentioned that falling from a building or tower or whatever was—this was specifically precisely (Dear God) the metaphor he used—exploding like a bag of blood, when you hit the ground. Christ!” He Colin shook hilariously a little in his riveted seat unexpectedly. “I get all these perverse morbid images floating and flooding through my absolutely hilariously ironically detached and morbid stubborn diseased imagination. Like one day when my nurse was taking blood, I suddenly imagined her who was coming onto me like everyone irresistibly with a vagina—I imagined her taking all my blood, and God her handcuffing me to the armrests of the chair in the hospital where I was visiting for a hypochondriacal check-up, my gastro—”
“Okay,” Lily said to encourage him. She had to; even before he was dreadfully so to speak “in love,” she had to constantly and chronically remind and motivate him somehow to finish all his trailing off sentences that irrevocably trailed and were always trailing in the process of trailing circuitously, circularly, circumambiently, precipitously calamitously off…
“Circumambiently,” Lily insisted smirkingly, emphasizing hardcore. Some people were gratuitous emphasizers. And highlighters.
“Yes!”A word he used in some short-story he wrote just because it sounded cool having found or rather seen it printed first perhaps heard it in Faulkner’s short-story The Bear. Fitzgerald famously cautioned not to use a sophisticated word where a simple one would do. He questioned that. He even wondered why you shouldn’t just use sophisticated words and even over-sophisticated words for their gratuitous gratuitousness’s self, self-indulgent sake. That was what James Joyce did, didn’t he? He just threw a million bizarre words against the wall to see what stuck and what sounded cool he left there, whether it made sense or not. Sense be damned. Eminem does that in his best and his worst music. Or Jackson Pollack who drank whiskey in the middle of the day and then started painting more or less chucking random paints onto a canvas. What would make his writing different was how to cultivate and invoke the sublime, his sentences would double back on themselves, the way that Jack Sparrow in the Pirates films just confuses people sometimes with circular tortured speech that no one can follow, to spellbind people, captivate people cast a spell over them like magic. Because that was what we had art for not reality; it was for illusion fantastic illusion. He considered his writing not exactly metafiction or modernism or postmodernism or some variant of romanticism; it borrowed from all of it, or magical realism; the direction he was taking American literature which thought in keeping with his modernist forebears whom he admired and took inspiration from the most with the deep heavy dark subject matter—what he fancied he was pioneering was an aesthetic and a style he took to calling Fantastic Realism. All to illustrate the exponential moral potential of the individual in a disturbing moral universe unlimited by convention, tradition, or reality or anything. As if there were never any moorings at all no history, no religion, no science, and we were all like our own Gods deciding right and wrong for ourselves like in fairy tales and Greek mythology. And no monotheistic deity had ever arrived to tell us what to do and bend us to his erratic temperamental will.
Fuck God.
“So” Colin restating and gathering back and regathering in all events his bearings like his balls some gloomy days perpetually abandoning him, “your questionnaire asked what were two of my biggest regrets? Which I couldn’t decide because I regret everything, thinking immediately of a million reasons why I’m going to regret doing it before I even commit any kind of action at all, or why even in my inaction, or in my contemplation of taking any action, I am also taking an action that I am already regretting. Hell I regret manipulating you to seduce you originally and of course histrionically but romantically dramatically and melodramatically crashing into this cute but cold and oddly stifling and unoriginal office that lacks decor and personality for an interesting woman like you; couldn’t you have the taste to hang up more interesting things and not have fake plants all over it like a jungle! This feels like Cambodia in here; it makes me hot; it gives me or my OCD rather a suffocating sense of humidity and heat and mosquitoes snakes and bugs and parakeets, and monkeys, frogs and all that incessant noise you see in movies, I never having been to a jungle; it would give me an anxiety attack with all the creepers and creepy crawlies, yeah-uhh,” he cringed in his seat. Like he were being attacked by mosquitoes as he spoke about it with his graphic, explicit disturbed overabundance of imagination. “I’m sorry.” (Later he would say how his girlfriend could usefully freshen and touch things the fuck up in here if Lily couldn’t, because not least she was English and stupendously creative with as wicked an imagination as his own, leisured withal with all the sense and sensibility in the history of the world and still left, Making Her Bed in the morning like a proper mother, drinking tea directly imported from the UK, jolly, merry, cheeky old England; it was very good, like English breakfast but superior with more flavors; he always couldn’t wait to have more of it whenever he drank it).
It was a stultifying, growth-killing, anemic to the soul, emaciatingly ugly office, he was right, with not enough decorations, not enough ornament, no personality, nothing to give a soul like his any comfort, like he wasn’t the only person with anxiety depression and OCD in the world, with alcoholic and womanizing tendencies. So far considerably depressed despite occasional urges and impulses to drink all day starting in the morning every day, or going so far as wanting to sleep with everyone in that damned supermarket and the world. What in God’s name was the old quote Keep Calm and Carry on?” Was it really Churchill who said that? It was such a meaningless crass commodity now. Or was it one of those myriad sayings attributed to great men like that why to lend some exaltedness to what was really a cliche and a stupid trite hackneyed saying! Terrible how that genius was commodified, first by smelly druggy hippies, turning the Victory sign with the two fingers into a “Peace” sign. The very last thing that Churchill was, was a pacifist. There was nothing that could ever be cool by unsexy “peace.” Peace was for cowards and chickens and pussies, like JD Vance and national conservatism. Only war. Only victory. Only through constant strife is what makes you a man. The only world worth living in was unsparingly unpityingly pitilessly hierarchical, full of winners on one side and losers on the other, masters and slaves. Yes you PC woke left retards, Masters and Slaves—you heard that right— who believed that words commit traumatizing violence, which constructing trauma loosely they do, but that was what made words good; they could fight wars without even having to fight them; they negotiated peace too, peace only being desirable when war became boring and not worth it anymore, so in the mean time we could replenish our diets for war by looking searchingly for new battles to wage.
“But the two regrets I listed regurgitating them sporadically up eschatologically were that first I got so close to the edge of the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland. A girl on the trip who having a seduced me over a period of months would later tell me I think that as soon as the guide warned everyone not to get too close to the edge let alone right up next to it like I did from a base horrific impulse to get as close to the edge as I could without falling off or maybe even with the considerable chance that I would, like perhaps a part of me was not only tempting fate, but ceding to my quasi-suicidality plaguing me for years at the time; everyone on the trip too was half-convinced that I being this quiet anguished troubled guy in a navy blue oilskin Barbour jacket, a troubled genius, an exile and an outcast was sure and bound to take the leap, too superior to modern life to stand it even in my early twenties, barely being drinking age at the time. However my concern was not even that it was a suicidal Thanatos of an impulse driving me to get so close to the edge, just to look over and see literally death and gaze upon it and feel myself that close to it—I wonder if I just wanted to experience being so close to death for the visceral existential dread, the sublimity of which it would provoke; you don’t get a lot of opportunities to experience something like that in life; and maybe it was a way of coming to terms with whether I were actually going to kill myself or not; maybe subconsciously actually Lily I just wanted to ascertain for myself for all time whether I wanted to live or die, and this was a way of testing how suicidal I was, and I firmly remember neither feeling in the moment like I wanted so much to live or die; when I looked down over the edge I just felt powerful more of a man more of an individual more existing authentically than everyone else who would never dare to go that far and defy the wisdom of the local authorities; so there was my competitive narcissistic need to assert not for them but for myself that you couldn’t tell me what to do and I was no timid soul like the average person; like if I slipped and fell, then so be it; I was not going to play it safe in life; not just because I love danger in particular; I’m not some kind of sociopath bungee-jumping and riding motorcycles obviously; but I just have so much contempt like infinite raging contempt for everyone who prioritizes playing it safe, who pits safety rating it over above against danger; I want not to bungee jump but to live a deeply dangerous life on a moral philosophical kind of level, on the level of knowledge, knowledge about existence and right and wrong and things like that; daring to ask questions that would confound the most intrepid bungee jumper and make him shit himself with fear. My concern what keeps me up at night now was why I would take the risk of falling by accident without intention. Was that necessary that you risk a potentially colossal accident; was it necessarily worth it to experience that stupid feeling of existential power, that base narcissistic self-aggrandizing defiant need to go right up to it after being warned with all these stories not to? Some guy fell over backing up taking a selfie, was one hilarious story. I was such a cynic I wondered that if they just told everyone that to scare people. Like they added it was some tourist from Italy. You wouldn’t have to tell us where he was from if it weren’t some effort to make it more realistic for us to imagine, why, probably to dupe us because it wasn’t even true! It sounds plausible enough. People did stupid shit that was that dumb these days all the time now. Especially for photos. So it didn’t matter whether it were true or not, but it made me more defiant to disregard it if there was any possibility that perhaps they just told these stories to scare people. It was like when I was a Boy Scout when I was little, and we were camping in Caumsett once, and one of the Scout Masters a Salt Valley dad was telling us the story of this female ghost in Lloyd Neck, and it terrified me honestly; I was younger, and all these older kids just laughed him off stage, but I was scared at the time; but I remember so wanting madly to disbelieve in it with the older kids laughing; to be able to laugh at anything scary seemed so desirable and empowering to me, and it still appeals to me, which is why I’m such a good satirist I guess, such a humorist; the power to knock things off a pedestal even knock your own self off is a hell of a thing. Anyone who fell off the Cliffs of Moher automatically dies by the way, expires, though looking down it was hard to understand why you didn’t just fall into the water, but I suppose it was really shallow so you killed yourself on the rocks shattering your bones; because the drop wasn’t so great; well it didn’t seem it not in my memory. And people died there all the time, like on a regular, or at least occasional basis, which may as well be regular considering how no one should be dying there at all. So I had company experimenting by putting my life on the line for no goddamn reason besides the thrill of needing to be as close to death as possible back then, as close as I could get without dying or killing myself; I was genuinely suicidal for years, and now though I’m pretty self-destructive, I’m not suicidal—there’s a difference; like between writing and typing—there’s a difference between self-destroying and squandering yourself and outright trying and seeking to kill yourself, or just fantasizing about it which is the first step to taking steps to kill yourself, like between seducing and breaking hearts, and outright womanizing where you’re juggling multiple relationships and being faithful to no one; at least as a seducer one is faithful to oneself despite being an incorrigible tease and leader-on; also nightly binge-drinking versus biologically dependent outright alcoholism where you’re sweating shivering and shaking. I will say for now it stemmed from a very strong rebellious need to revolt against the guy who embodied all the safetyists of our times, so you don’t want me go right venturing up, adventuring to the very edge where the mud because of the rain, could just give out from under your feet, and I were to plunge headlong headfirst into the rocks and the churning Irish cauldron of sea. He warned us about the susceptibility to erosion too. Still I did it! And like a lot of the clinically mad, clinically handsome ingenious experiments I’ve undertaken, it fills my soul because of my memory with trauma and traumatic nightmares that I would be having in any case because I’m not well up there. Unerasable deliberate near-death by foolish accident experiences. That’s not the only one.”
“What’s the other one?”
“Am I having a bad day?” He lashed out outraged, enraged outrageously as well over the awfulness as in the dreadful indescribably ghastly distaste of a customer— not dissimilar to the hilarious, hysterical phrase intrusive thoughts in psychology as if any thought concept or memory, even the most painful the most troubling, the most disquieting, the most disturbing could ever possibly conceivably foreseeably be not welcome, or unwelcome, oh please; I love intrusive thoughts! How about invasive thoughts! The more and the more disturbing the better, the merrier. What difference did it make being a dumb supermarket cashier, and thus a human mortal automaton like ChatGPT basically or Siri its predecessor, whose sole task and God-given purpose as it relates to you is to ring up your goddamn groceries so you can get the hell out of there. Would you ask ChatGPT and inquire whether it, like it were a person with significance to you with emotions, whether it or presuming a robot were a man or a woman or even transperson…. whether he or she or it rather whatever were having a bad day? Signs of the times, he refrained hilariously. Tim Baker giggled. Tim had a very eighteenth century Enlightenment type style giggle like modern life were an endlessly rollicking pastoral romp through the eighteenth century English countryside, the woods of Nottingham or something with dueling and dueling over someone calling you a “rascal,” needing to avenge desperately your honor, at the point of a sword and put your life on the line because you were ignominiously slandered as a “rascal,” which today you called a kid in way of complimenting him (amazing how times change!) It was like that scene like three quarters of the way through that absolutely hilarious picturesque classic The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by the great moral philosopher Henry Fielding. Oh how those were the days, Colin pined and sometimes he opined occasionally too wistfully. When you could shoot anyone who bothered you, just shoot them, and it wasn’t even illegal, it wasn’t only legal, but culturally it was sanctioned, sanctified; in fact it was wrong morally because it was ignoble and unmanly not to rise to the challenge of shooting whoever slandered you, or just because you don’t like him or whoever. There were gay men for example—because there were gay men everywhere, who hit on him or just looked at him, a guy from college once who said and blurted over text blabbering, blathering, blundering, that he should at least come to the city because their argument whatever it was, the remnants and remains of it would make for good “pillow talk” the faggot quote unquote said—the FAGGOT—the creep in Ireland too who told him suddenly to kiss him, to whom he burst out laughing and he said serenely like an asshole, “I’m not like that,” meaning yeah I’m not a faggot, can’t you see, you fucking faggots in the world? Because why couldn’t you even just be polite to a gay man without the pervert making some perverted move; there was also a manager at the supermarket who was gone now but who would constantly harass him with inquiring about his low mood, who would ask him how he was feeling in the creepiest possible way such that now it impacting his OCD besides supposedly traumatizing him so much, he could hardly ask how someone was ever “feeling” using the word feeling without this creep this pervert, this creep appearing in his mind, who even he made the girls at work uncomfortable, like he wasn’t only just gay, he was a real pervert, like someone who was attracted to everything!—genuinely, honestly sincerely everything.
So sometimes Colin wished he could just shoot gay men either for annoying or traumatizing him or just for being gay. He told one of his friends at work that Andrew Jackson for example was a bad ass of a president, because he just shot and dueled any and every man who gave him a problem. When journalists or political rivals for example told lies or spread rumors about his adored Rachel, his wife he dearly loved, he shot them. Point blank. Shot. Or that was the impression he got just from reading John Meacham’s bio. He actually identified quite a bit with Andrew Jackson, having a massive head of incredible hair, doing what you had to do, at any price, drinking whiskey, loving war, being a man of fiery passion, and massively tall but gaunt and insanely in love with his wife; because his grandmother’s maiden name was Jackson that she also considered naming him (Jackson) his mother actually insinuating that they could actually be descendants of one of America’s all-time greatest presidents of all time. He treasured about how in the old days in the Wild West mainly there was no law or no law that prevailed over the will of the smelly stinky impulses of rash, brash and reckless sweaty dirty grizzled men; guys like Clint Eastwood and Colin, the days, gone were the days when you could shooting from the hip, kill all the men in the world inferior to you, you despised! And all the faggots! The ignominious psychos who between admiring you for sipping brown liquor in the middle of the day hated you, and pretended to judge, because they couldn’t be you, who wouldn’t because they couldn’t be obedient dogs, the idiot canines they were and accept by resigning to their place in the social existential orders of social existence, for all time, embrace their infinite inferiority, and just kiss Colin’s ass; all these faggots drinking light beer in sweatshirts and sweatpants and baseball caps indoors staring at him in his unmistakable navy blue blazer—in an airport bar—drinking his third or fourth whiskey and laughing uninhibitedly, gloatingly and self-indulgently, self-absorbedly, buying the kindly man who indulged just by suffering to talk to him another drink, before he left and left forever and got hopping onto a plane, and planes like everything else in the world triggered terribly his neuroticism so much, whenever he got on he thought about it burning and crashing or crashing into the water and drowning or being taken or held hostage by terrorists; ever morbidly imagine what it must or might have felt like to have been on the planes taken hostage that hit the WTC or the Pentagon?
He wanted to just shoot these guys, these ignominious pussies and sons of bitches and faggots to punish them for their innate inferior weaknesses. Fuck you, fuck you and fuck you too simultaneously. Fuck you you pieces of shit without the hard refinement of palette to just drink bourbon in a glass the way men used to before you modern feckless ingrates of cat people, you transvestite hermaphrodites—you trans specimens. The old good old days when you could just kill a guy for not looking at you the right way the way you wanted to be looked at. As a man, not the way these allegedly heterosexually straight as in “straight” quote unquote guys half like they hated and wanted to kill him, because he was that much straighter, as in that much cooler, or not the losers they were, than them, and half absurdly like they wanted to fuck him. It was outrageous! He fancied even some straight men he was so attractive that around him at least they were, eh, not so straight after all…
Celeste Butterscotch and Catherine Delilah Shockington were pensively perambulating through bloody awful (as Emma Randolph might have in her consummate Britishness described it) Caumsett on a cold day they didn’t feel as a cold day because it wasn’t just her, Celeste was a very excitable, still extremely horny sexually active if not overactive, not with her husband but mainly with herself (he gave her plenty of attention; it still just wasn’t enough to sate her because in their late thirties, a woman is almost at peak horniness, like no less than a man in his twenties), her own self, masturbating relentlessly, obsessively-compulsively to some of her hot guy real estate clients in avoidance of the dreadful supermarket cashier, putting him out of mind desperately though sometimes letting one go to that pretty boy young man of colossal genius—he deserved it; he deserved to have every girl in the country masturbate to him—horrible too the more she did it, the more she wanted, she craved it. Craving it. Snowflurries were descending flickering, flickeringly, flurryingly worryingly softly through the gray thin skinny air. She got it plenty to be sure from her lovely strong, dependable, secure, severe good and nice guy of a decent mediocre husband, Tom—Tom Tomlinson. You see? Some men were like this. They could make all the money in the world and pose as truly adequate, but they were nothing compared to the truly great artist of great artists, for example. When you met a great artist, even if he weren’t gorgeous, your good man of a husband just evaporated, vaporized, vanishing. Butterscotch was Celeste’s not unkept unkempt Maiden Name actually, and she didn’t care who knew that she wasn’t, not ready yet, to relinquish it. Because of work. Or so she told herself. She deep down just loved the bourbon flavor of her last name that suited her sweet, hot caramel personality of her usually strawberry blonde hair (but it depended on the lighting) so well. Butterscotch was like a persona, a gruff, gritty, edgy exterior—another separate identity, a shield, armor, a very cute and cuddly piece of pretty caramelly chainmail—for a gorgeous still young so lovingly lovable lovably fuckable mom with multiple kids, whose body was so damned consummate who worked out so normally, who ate and dieted so normally you would never be able to tell. So many women who had kids looked just as good as if they had never had them in the first place; or after having them, it didn’t matter in the least, or maybe they were more like maximally more appealing for being mothers regardless of what it did to their bodies! Who cares!
Who could possibly fail to ever love this nervous, neurotic fidgety flighty great Celeste… Catherine Delilah Shockington on the other hand was very quiet, too very quiet—as Colin would later say about the silences, the enigmatic and mysterious abysses like abscesses obsessing when he and his great big little English girlfriend of all possible conceivable English little British girlfriends—they would suddenly stop ceasing beautifully talking or conversing or discussing; because they were always deliciously talking so much they hardly kissed, and hadn’t even made love after months! They were that so crazy about each other, all they did in their hideous levels of extreme attraction to each other, as a measure of how profound their wild wicked connection was, all they did was talk; they couldn’t stop relating and filling each other with knowledge and insights and beliefs, and working out all kinds of intellectual difficulties and neurotic things neurotically between them, they barely even kissed! They were having so much fun. They weren’t even ready for sex. Silences so brave so strange and so deep because they beautifully hideously much overmuch, “a profound silence,” he burst out to a customer, “that was more than silence—” a “silence that was more than silence” indeed could not and could hardly be any more or less silent than the deepest utterest bleakest silence, damnedest… She, Catherine Shockington was physically massive, imposing and intimidating, nearly six feet tall with dark brown brunetteish nutty hair like the walnut stock of a beautiful old rifle; she her with a deep dark and fruity air like the dark fruits that laced a dark scotch like a Talisker Eighteen Year Old that cost well over a hundred bucks.
Indeed she was gorgeous as a shotgun could sometimes be with black lustrous lusty eyes like two smoking barrels, she was smoking smoking hot… This was the thing Colin liked of all people: this was one of his infinite types: Mrs. Shockington to all her children’s friends who couldn’t even hardly look at her she was so exquisitely sharply angularly beautiful—that is to say some women had a sharp serrated beauty, like the edges-of-a-knife beauty. Beauty. With a penetrating intellect and a sharp little mouth, and her sharp pointy chin, pointy little ears under that walnut rifleish hair, a high forehead that betrayed and was almost too high but was not, that fine pointy penetrating mind like a scalpel like a laser, a razor. She was pretty like a barracuda or a lizard was pretty or a snake, an electric eel or a giant squid, an octopus or a black widow spider or a tarantula—but being an arachnophobe was Colin this was not easy to write, because to even think about spiders would provoke that powerful imaginative imagination of his so intensely he would start imagining spiders all over himself, biting and molesting and crawling creeping all through his hair and sinking their awful terrible spidery fangs like into his sorry penis, the tip of it, God knows a scorpion was beautiful, and him being a scorpio that made it a little easier as an arachnophobe, the scorpio the astrology sign allegedly of the genitals that had to unexplainably explain the horniness that dogged doggedly him day and night himself and would for the rest of his life feeling like he could fuck remorselessly heedlessly without fear unheedingly of attachment every pretty female creature, every woman that ever walked the earth, wherever— it was true. Some women even in their fifties could walk in suddenly in his daily life catching him off guard and he would feel his penis almost instantly stir, coil and rouse, aroused jolting him astir in his boxers through them practically that hole in the middle like a provoked cobra in his Ralph Lauren corduroys crashing hard unpityingly against the soft wall of his zipper. One reason supposedly he was OCD about his fly when he left the bathroom was that lest it were zipped, someone might or could catch terrible sight scandalously of some godawful hellacious hellscape of a hell of a boner of his… Hideously, hilariously pretty was this Catherine Delilah Shockington; that was her real name, sharply beautiful—did I mention her nose? One of those with a pointy tip that turned up slightly up-turned in open transparent haughty naughty contempt of every other pretty goddamned thing in nature that didn’t get anywhere remotely near to approaching her in terms of how loathsomely pretty she was defiantly and unremittingly and unapologetically and unforgivably—Remington Twelve Gauge pretty/style drop dead-to-kill-all-the-unworthy-men-in-the-world beautiful —six cylinder, locked-and-loaded-revolver beautiful. She conjured every old fashioned beautiful explosive dangerous weapon in the dictionaries that haven’t even been written yet! She was extremely radically threatening with just her face and her massive former-model body. Once you glimpsed as soon as you did petrified sight, mortified with sheer fright, like if looks could proverbially kill she just thrust and plunged daggers through your heart, your soul, your skull, your trembling tremulous weak and infertile impotent reeling frayed and constantly ever-fraying nerves of personality— once you caught awful torrid horrid torrential sight you couldn’t look away. Like Medusa. Why couldn’t Medusa have won? Why did the men in Western culture, in Western literature always have to win, always have to beat the femme fatale villains of vilely drop dead beautiful and gorgeously heinously pretty women, who in real life usually as always won, what feminists could never wrap their attractive-women-hating self-hating heads around, those weirdly grotesquely masculine lesbian heads; that some women all they had to do was show up and marry a CEO, or a CFO or a lawyer where she abruptly suddenly married willing into her life the successful the most powerful, politically connected and influential man in the world, the most popular their slavish little puppies of slaves of men to them, to these women now in their unspeakable, unthinkable irredeemable sheer awesome fantastic repellant and repulsive attractiveness…
Speaking of slaves there, where was the young troubled disturbed genius only twenty-seven-or-something-year-old Master? Say there! Aloha! There he was genuinely toiling up Fisherman’s Drive at them. Without a girl, without his girlfriend, the blonde dynamite cutthroatingly beautiful English girl? Where did she go? Rumor had it they were breaking up. They were always breaking up like all couples if they were ever even together. Whoever was “together” was in the process of disintegrating the bonds of their togetherness every day, chafing and fraying, rusticating and corroding. Whatever couples were left just withstood themselves—their own natural unabated need to self-destruct by self-dissolving. It was only owing to luck that they didn’t slam too many doors, utter too few apologies, pardon not enough the other’s transgressions, because you had to bear and put up with so much, it was because the younger generations were too feeble and too afraid of it not working that they never cared to jump into a relationship at all; but it wasn’t supposed to work; you weren’t supposed to care. So he was Alone again. Alone for now. As usual as always til the end of time Alone. Like Timon of Athens eating his heart out Alone. Condemned Alone. Like Prometheus chained to a rock with birds like woodpeckers pecking his diseased massive overactive liver, no less active nor more than that indomitable unvanquishable, cobra of a cock. It did even rear quite or not unlike a cobra, having one of those shafts that curved parabolically upwards so it allegedly always hit a girl’s g-spot so which was why it was true; as he reported, I always make them cum. Cum. Cum. Cum. Cum!
He was the Satan of Milton’s Paradise Lost alone. Angry with God. God angry with him. Angry for exiling him. Exiling Satan from Paradise. The Paradise of bliss of happiness of romantic affection. A mother’s embrace. A woman’s caress. He was eating his heart out like it was no one’s goddamned business, because no one had a right to know, and he didn’t care who knew, and it didn’t matter. It was the hallmark sign that you were in despair when you believed that really nothing mattered. There was a depression that for some people was so deep it was like boredom, such that you couldn’t even commit suicide, because you were too bored to do that; not even ending your own life could save you from despair this deep. He was like this a lot; which was why when he did ponder suicide, or undergo suicidal ideation, it was in a state of mind like suicide was a foregone conclusion; indeed if he believed in suicide that is in a perfect world, it would be commonsense to escape from a pointless life riddled and laden with despicable suffering and evil, but he didn’t believe there was any escape; when you died you were surely either born back into the same exact life to live it all over again, including you killing yourself, or you were reincarnated. Because even the finitude of our lives was finite, meaning there was no finitude, and we were all as if incapable of dying and not even really alive. We were in eternity! And there was no point seeking to correct especially the cosmos that you couldn’t correct, because they were corrected you, and there wasn’t even anything to correct; because it was only a matter of subjective opinion what correct even was or incorrect, or what any of it meant.
“Hide!” Celeste cried, yanking at her walking mate’s black quilted walking coat, coat-sleeve.
“What’s the fuck’s the matter?” Mrs. Shockington to her son’s friends who couldn’t even look at her, growled beautifully. She hadn’t said, because she hadn’t she hadn’t needed to say a word, not one single word not one syllable not even a swear, or a blaspheme in months!—that was how gorgeous because of how spoiled she was. Her husband was terrified of her, terrified of the force and power of his attraction to her, oppressing him, driving him crazy driving him mad sending her off with hundreds in cash in her wallet just to appease her, before she even had to hurt him, just before she lashed out with how rawly sharply her gaze struck his inadequacy. Either you melted, or you froze, or you turned silently to stone. She was such a real-life fire-breathing dragon. No one not even other gorgeous nauseatingly stunning women could not risk dropping dead around her, if looks could kill, not like Celeste or Lily Hunter, vanishing vanquished into the air, the thin thin air out of which originally emergently came, hailing, ailing, railing shrieking from within and without with the fury of unsatisfied sexual yearning, with all that fury, frustration and tortured longing Colin in his mad depraved rakishness was supposed to save her from, that he intended and set out to save her from, from the misery of.
It was a wise adage to let sleeping dogs lie. And Catherine Shockington was such a massive old bitch she was like The Hound of the Baskervilles you just waked and roused its head-splitting bark of a demon sleeping dog in the basement of a spooky old run-down, down-trodden church in the old deep dark American South. Where she slept famished and alone…
Emma Randolph was just checking out. She was always checking out. Everywhere everyone was checking her out. All men; well everyone, aghast it included women who weren’t as pretty as her, even very pretty ones. The features of her perfect exquisite little early-thirties suffering face. She was ornately beautiful. She was fairylike a nymph, a waif, ethereal and serene. She checked in and checked out, out as soon as in. She was in and out: like her American boyfriend, the horniest man alive had fantasized about his eventual conquest of Lily Hunter. That was the way seduction was In and Out. America’s last macho male artist; its last modernist who revealed in chaos, disorder and instability on the page and off. Like Jackson Pollack drank at midday before painting and splattered paint and Hunter Thompson wrote with the Hell’s Angels and pioneered “gonzo” journalism. Now he had his “fantastic realism” he called it. This was long some time well before he became America’s Prometheus with his liver, chained to rocks and eating his rotten heartbroken hitherto heartless scoundrel, unredeemed bad boy bad ass heart out. If he had gone overnight from bad boy to good man, then that also made him now a sad man as opposed to an angry young man too, because to attempt to play the hero in this world was necessarily to embrace a tragic fate. It was driving him crazy. Even if he were already crazy. It didn’t get, because it couldn’t get, crazier. He was the mad man, who was so supremely arrogantly mad he committed himself voluntarily to a psych ward, didn’t he, albeit on the condition that it was only three days… After all. Adderall that at noon stoned off his perfect little butt that a girl grabbed in broad daylight in school once and complimented him on. He didn’t know a man could have a “nice butt.” He was shocked at her audacity. He was shocked at all their audacity. He thought he was too intimidating to want to do that too, but to some people he was the antihesis of intimidating; he was weak, naive, ignorant, sheltered and vulnerable and cute; even being very handsome intimidated one half of people, but the other half it spurred on to toy with him however they pleased and grab, and grope him, manipulated him and push him around. His first girlfriend who was also crazier, who still may be crazier than he was had ADHD. She sold adderall to people all over campus. She had an endless unlimited prescription. This was why people worked so obnoxiously annoyingly hard nowadays, and they didn’t know how to sit down and have a drink or just not work and just do nothing like he did using his charm to copy girls’ homework and cheat on tests in high school and college, cheating on everything, always cutting corners to get vulgarly ahead in the worldly world of non-ideas and frenetic unthinking uncontemplating action, ceaseless busy, self-occupied, self-serving, self-interested activity and money-making, and money-saving—saving was grotesque, saving for what? College, retirement? What was the point? Save for your funeral maybe, the one thing that mattered in the future being your imminent death— and vulgar rituals like dating, the worldly stupid unthoughtful world he had infinite, absolute sovereign uncompromising contempt, to which he was unutterably, unspeakably, unthinkingly and unthinkably indifferent. Cheating on everything except the SAT not because it was impossible to cheat on but because he couldn’t pay attention to it, like he could never pay attention in class, paying attention requiring so much discipline for nothing that mattered, because what did trigonometry matter or a “college education” even with all the “doors” his dad said his Ivy League education opened, when it still left the question open no matter how well you did in school and no matter how much money you made, the question of how to live a good life in consideration of how some day, any minute you were going certainly to die; it was also boring when thoughts of mortality were more stimulating; he was too horny too, and it seemed much more important to get laid as soon as possible rather than take a crude test which was a crude measure of your crude raw pragmatic intelligence, not the depth of your soul, or the heights you might go to appease the disease of abstract thought that no earthly urbane test designed by people could measure, indeed in the old days it would get you burned at the stake worse than failing a test for daring to do. Because the old tests were designed by the church fathers, how do you think Francis Bacon or Isaac Newton or Galileo would have done on tests, even though history proved them correct and everyone else wrong? This was why academic accomplishment was actually a sign of poor genuine intelligence; at best it was a sign that one was talented at knowing and giving the answers and circling the letters like T or F or A,B, C, or D that teachers wanted, which wasn’t a good thing in the sense that it just signaled how pliant willingly you were to the reigning authorities, whatever the status quo the establishment.
The genius (by nature) deplores and abhors all institutions, all establishments, all authority. Religious authority, secular authority, state authority, even the authority of his genius forebears. All he was ever thinking about at the time too wasn’t just sex or death or suicide, but Geneva Noonan, the coquette who stole his heart in the anguish fire and hell of eleventh grade, prefiguring the profound depression he would spiral into for much of senior year especially in the spring near the end. Depression always smacked him hard in the spring. Unable to appreciate everything churning up through the ground, all this greenery and all the rain nauseatingly filling all the earth up ripe and pregnant earth, all this mulch and flowers outside and landscapers moaning all the sudden, and light, despicable light, and pollen, everything so sticky and wet, and clinging, everything clinging to everything. The air gravitationally denser. At the time he really pondered just killing himself, specifically by hanging himself with his khakis during the ACT too. Compared to concentrating for even a minute all your efforts that would better be applied elsewhere to stolidly, stubbornly pursue the girl who didn’t like you back, even ending your life altogether was preferable, well it had an appeal. Who wanted to go to school anymore? After high school didn’t people really want to get out of school of all kinds as soon as possible? If school was boring, then why even go to college to become a doctor or a teacher or a lawyer, not just to do anymore school, but especially to get a professional job, which was no better, wasn’t it?
Anyone who enjoyed those jobs and found them fulfilling without just telling themselves that it was, because they were doing their part or something, was just crazy or lying. But this got at another thing that was degenerate about his generation, the mania about education, and after that a good job, then to have a good family. It enraged him! Only cocksuckers and cunts and lazy mediocre and modern slaves wanted anything that was “good.” Because he was a great artist or even just because he desired so strongly to be, even if he weren’t one or never became any, he’ll be damned if he ever desired any less than Great out of life. And Greatness. Greatness which had nothing to do with because it was diametrically opposed to goodness on the other end of the scale. Which was the real reason why he didn’t know at the time why he didn’t care about his schoolwork or whether his parents were pleased with him—all he hoped for was that his parents didn’t kill him for not going to any college or getting too many C’s—especially when he was so obsessed with being a Great Tennis Player (what would the world be if professional athletes only wanted to be “good” athletes? There would no doubt be any professional sports at all!), but now because he couldn’t be the greatest tennis player ever, he had to be the writer of the century, if not one of the American writers of all goddamned fucking time. And he didn’t give either a damn or a shit or a flying fuck what or which of all these awful now Hamas-dick-sucking, Jew-hating American colleges he went to. You could avoid it by going to Notre Dame, or Clemson, or Holy Cross, or SMU like so many of his ultraconservative, ultrarightwing nihilistic hedonistic high school dumb friends; the problem with those colleges was that they were too big and too Christian, too Catholic. They loved Christ! They loved Jesus! And God he hated Jesus. He hated Jesus not because Jesus was not a great man. In many ways he was; the problem was with the example he set of loving your neighbor as an equal, which led to you loving yourself as an equal to your neighbor; that was the criterion of Christian love; that no one was different—that everyone was the same, uniform, monochrome; it made daring to distinguish oneself unholy sin, only because it would rub your neighbor the wrong way! The problem was because what if you didn’t have neighbors fundamentally? “Brothers” even less, which was one reason why he had so much infinite strutting swaggering haughty sneering vainglorious prideful contempt for people in frats, and the insane slutty girls who liked young men in frats. Was he in a frat? Everybody asked him. "No,” he muttered in unconcealed bitterness and derision.
If you were a genius, then you were by virtue of your supreme higher nature, peerless… And not everyone was fundamentally equal; and if he treated and comported and behaved towards literally everyone in his life like he was biologically superior to them, then that was because he was, and people who were biologically inferior, the meek, the frail, the self-doubting and unconfident, the shy, the awkward, the obedient were inferior, because they were. He was entitled to ride roughshod over the rest which meant everyone else in the world who got in his way, whoever they may be, family friends, girlfriends; any one who said you can’t do that; you have to do this; no Colin that’s not right; no, Colin that’s not smart; Colin you have to get a real job; Colin you need to find yourself a girl bro; are you ok? Have you thought about antidepressants? Thou Shalt. Thou shalt not do that. Thou Shalt not act and behave this erratic reckless, wild curious, strange way. You have to Treat Other People The Way You Want to Be Treated. With Kindness, Dignity, and Respect. Suck his dick. They didn’t deserve kindness who all sought to control him in the abused disgraced name of presuming to know what was “best” for him or because they “loved” him or any of that nonsense. These people didn’t deserved to be listened to or even fucking looked at; don’t even mention obliged. Just think of all the scumbags and scummy crummy crappy cruddy excuses for humanity slouching like existential losers through the narrow-minded simple simplistic black and white uncomplex, unbeautiful, incurious and unquestioning unreality they hopelessly hilariously risibly pretended artificially superficially deludedly to live in like what we called modern organized neighbor-loving society was worth living in which it wasn’t.
He deserved to ponder suicide from time to time if only because of how pestilential current contemporary stinking life was—full of brimming ugly Teslas and young men who pretended hatefully to be above women who drink raw milk, Elon Musk, Donald Trump and Newsmax. Ozempic, and people who believe you can “manifest” things like your perfect dream life like a perfect life wouldn’t be a living hell rather than a life of any worth at all and absurd abysmal technology like Smart-Watches and Chat GPT and even the idea of a self-driving car! Even protein bars!
“How did she get you then? What do you mean?” Lily inquired long ago, so long ago before she vanished back into thin air and even shut down her disgraced and scandalized mediator mediating practice that after he started writing about all around the world was bombarded and invaded with brilliant young men trying to seduce their therapists. She was sick of it.
He was still so smacked in the head, he was concussed with his Love supposedly for Emma Randolph, it was unbearable for Lily to even say her awful name. But she had to know, she just had to—she had to know how she seduced Colin, and seduced a seducer! How did you go about that? It had to be ungainly. Lily was no proper Seductress. She had had her fun absolutely. But she didn’t play around with the affections of men like Colin played deliberate games with women like it was some kind of perverse sport. He compared heavy drinking to a sport. How you paced yourself whether fast or slow, and he drank inferior lesser mortals, inferior men under the table, who couldn’t handle him and the altogether other plane his intellect was not ever off, but not least drinking straight hard liquor sipping it and not drinking shots.
“You said she seduced you.”
“Yes she did.”
Lily was getting tired of how laconic, brief, brusque and curt he was being. Who came to therapy to stare blissfully. In raptures and enraptured. Blessedly unperturbably and undisturbed straight into space like love were some kind of fabric he was all cocooned in, a magical all-enveloping pink like space-blanket. Love. What the hell. What the hell Lily thought as she often always did now before she would disappear.
“Well how?”
“You want to know how. She sent me mixed signals. Apparently some of my pretty lady friends don’t like to come and see me there in the supermarket if they’re not feeling like they look pretty enough. I would catch her running away from me some days almost as if—but I was afraid she didn’t like me. Then other days on the other hand, I could see by the way she smiled at me, and the inquiries she ended up posing like she liked me a lot. And then but she hardly ever came to my cash register. She always always went to self-check out. But she liked me enough so often to stop and say hi and talk too on her way out, pushing her shopping cart inevitably past my register. So it was maddening gradually; and she’s no seductress, but you can seduce someone without intending to or meaning to or knowing you even could be, even by accident; if we desire someone, biological imperatives and instinct take over. She had me hooked before I was at all aware of it like a drug, mixed signals and hard-to-get, arousing me in some way appealing to my intellect too; these things have a very powerful seductive influence over me; so the times even where I knew a girl was trying to seduce me, as my college girlfriend seduced me and I knew she was and others, I didn’t care, I didn’t mind so victim I am to all or any of this. It was like you lamenting being a mother provocatively, controversially, originally before you disappeared and I had to hunt you down. Like I said seduction consists not in someone’s assent, not any explicit conscious consent; it’s the refusal, the inability to say No after you make yourself undeniable.”
Celeste pulls the unwillingly reluctant stone-faced indomitable Catherine Delilah Shockington into the trees off the dirt trail over towards a rusty rundown depleted, annihilated wooden rotted old shed, sinking disintegrating, collapsing into the wintry frosty old Caumsett leaves dilapidating into the resistant hard ground. The door, the entrance, all told, to it was collapsing and Celeste frantic, tore at it and tore it off the rusty hinges and she pulled her big quiet, too quiet friend (used to communicating with commanding looks from her eyes alone) inside, the shed that could collapse at any moment on them. But a multiplicity of a cavalcade of a cavalry of vampire bats were disturbed and they shot screeching and screaming Fire out, like they were shot out of the thinnest barrel of the oldest musket with the longest range in the history of the world and muskets, and took off somewhere into the dark cold gun-metal Long Island winter sky.
It was getting approaching nearer and nearer dilapidated dimpled sundown early in the lonely isolationist mid-to-late afternoon, and you weren’t allowed to stay past sundown. Not that they cared. They were too undeniably pretty and rich so goddamn filthy—awfully too—extremely rich and hellishly wealthy to throw or think about kicking out. How dare you; how dare any man conceive of even conceiving reproaching presumptuously someone especially like Catherine Delilah Shockington you didn’t even notice and couldn’t afford to look in her eyes, because they might fuck you up so fiercely so severely just as Celeste screamed like an idiot at the bats, and thereafter there only being a lonely menacing owl, and the baying of a distant mean dog. The sharp unremittingly uncomfortably unforgiving piercing gaze of a pair of daggers, hurling harrowingly out from Mrs. Shockington’s eyes stung and tased Celeste so ferociously with their sharp smoky single malt Talisker Remington Twelve Gauge goddamn smoky peaty scotchy beauty—Celeste fell on the ground, twisting and writhing in the leaves like she had just been electrocuted. “Stop it! Stop it! Jesus Christ! Stop it! Catherine please!” She wailed.
“What’s your other regret?”
“Cheating at tennis.”
“What’s wrong with that? I cheat all the time whenever I can get away with it.”
“Well that’s not good, Lily. Cheating is wrong!”
“Losing is wrong.” Now it was her turn to be laconic and lazy.
“Well losing by not cheating is ok; better than winning by cheating. It’s dishonorable. It’s not wrong to me so much as base, petty. But it’s interesting you should say that because it calls to my mind a championship tennis match no less when we played against our archenemy, Syosset. They were having trouble calling the lines, and so I was summoned as a linesman. I with my injured knee at the time, so I couldn’t play. I didn’t want to though either. For some reason I was so obsessed with my ambition some day to become the writer of our times I didn’t care any more about being a pro fucking tennis player, so I even cared little whether we even won the Long Island Championships. I was consumed with my unreciprocated love and being a poet. And so I disagreed with my own side’s call! My coach told me later you have to agree with your team’s call—if it’s out, it’s out—even if it’s in, even if you think it’s in because it’s your team; your conscience for the truth be damned. Because it’s your team, the truth has to, because it must, go out the door. This was repellant to me at the time, but now I wonder if he were right or maybe he’s still wrong, but my own integrity to uphold the truth and reality were not motivated by an unsavory narcissistic need to flex my burgeoning but always all-abiding integrity all the time. Like I was trying to be Huckleberry Finn or Atticus Finch, and play this role of self-sacrificing Socratic truth-teller, selfishly using my own team to which I was supposed to be loyal no matter what as my backdrop for performing my moral superiority, to perform my superior character; in which case even if I could be judged from the standpoint of principle to have done the right thing, as a principled man, I think you could also argue that my motivation for doing it corrupted it! Now I think there is a time and a place for telling the truth and lying. You know it’s wrong to go along with the collective delusion that Jews were a threat to the white race in Nazi Germany, but I regret to this day during the Long Island Championships when I served to cheat my own team out of victory from a vainglorious need to tell the truth for the purposes of self-aggrandizement, especially when the linesman for the other team was resolved to lie for his team. What made me think I should do any better than lie for my own side? I hate myself for this! On the other hand I don’t feel that sorry. Even if it was narcissistically motivated it was a staggeringly noble thing I did to turn my back on my own team in the name of a higher ethical principle, but let me admit Lily, and I think this is just my OCD talking but I’m haunted by something darker I may have done which is maybe that in my insane need to contradict my own team, a preexisting subconscious desire that the ball was actually out and my team was correct, but I willfully chose to perceive it as in not from a place of conviction in moral high principle but an aesthetic desire to flex as morally principled!” Colin shivered.
“I agree that would be fucked up.”
“It would make your rationalization of cheating all the time better categorically than my need to tell the truth out of vanity, such that I’m paradoxically distorting the truth to pretend to tell it, and to come across as someone who’s better than everyone else for telling the truth. But I could just be thinking about this way too deeply. The memory is unreliable, and it’s hard to know what your real motivation for any action is in the first place. So I’ll never really know why I stood up to my own team on that day and whether I should be proud of it as a sign of my ethical moral development as a young man and an individual with a courageous conscience to always tell the truth despite your loyalties and allegiances, or it’s a sign of my moral degeneration that I would bend the truth to pose as the former as a boast; but it gets more fucked up because even if it were the latter, I can congratulate myself that it was an early sign that I am a real great artist, in service of peddling the illusion of truth as an instrument I have no qualms about bending to the whims of own creativity and whatever aesthetic image as an artist I desire to create imposing on the world and reality: out of reality—and, as an addendum to what you were saying about cheating at tennis or golf for that matter, arguing in contempt of the honor code that because it’s a game doing whatever you can get away with to win the game is all that matters—that’s what you were saying right?”
“More or less.”
“I’ll admit it’s hard not to cheat in tennis, and there were times very few but when I did cheat. At least three quarters well really like ninety-five to ninety-nine percent of the time, I was actually giving the guy the point like you’re supposed to out of honor and magnanimity when I couldn’t tell whether it was in or out. Nevertheless it doesn’t sit easy in my conscience that I ever cheated. It doesn’t because nothing I feel can make up for cheating or justify it. Not cheating in school on tests is different, because getting ahead not to fall behind in the blind race to please your parents so they don’t kick your ass is of cardinal importance, and I have so much contempt for school, and any education that isn’t self-education at large, because anyone with an iPhone or a library card can educate themselves faster than any teachers could. I never cared if I ever cheated on a math or a science test and copied all the cute girls’ and friends’ homework, and they copied mine. Everyone cheats. Everyone lies. The best tennis players were all cheats. Nadal and people are all on steroids or they were Serena Williams. They all get quietly busted but because it’s so rigged, it’s always covered up. A coach I had told me Federer blood-dopes, like they take your blood out and spin it in a centrifuge and put it back in it. I know Lily it’s so nasty. I’m so squeamish about blood and anything having to do with the tissues and the organs of the body. When I think about it for too long and feel faint like I can’t even exist knowing that’s all we are tissues and bones. Oh god I can’t even touch anything to realize it’s like the blood I’m compressing in my fingers. And when I walk—what I was saying is because every athlete is on performance enhancing drugs, and because of Wall Street and self-dealing bankers and corrupt politicians, it’s clear that most of the world agrees with you Lily. But I don’t like it, and I wonder if by drinking so much, I’m using that as a performance enhancing drug. But if all athletes are on steroids, and every great writer drinks their throat off, then I suppose I’m no exception. And so it’s not a bad thing if we cheat. If we lie. If we forge. And cut corners. At work I don’t charge for bags ever. Too cool for that. If I feel like I might not have scanned an item I don’t check to see if I did or not, and I’m often letting my customers thus get away with things they haven’t paid for. Let’s say then there’s good or there’s noble cheating, and there’s bad cheating. Cheating at school makes no difference because it’s school. Parents are so pushy and the race to get into school is so competitive it makes no difference if education is a meritocracy or it’s a kleptocracy. In the workplace, it’s also another variation of every man for himself. School and work are contemptible. Tennis though is such a respectful honorable sport. Calling the lines fairly is an unspoken rule you have to respect to be able to play at all. What if you started calling balls out that landed right in the middle of the court. Then you couldn’t even play! Drinking and writing I would have to add in contrast is not foul because there’s no morally pure or upstanding way to write. There’s no such thing as civilized art. Art is ugly an ugly discipline, and the artist is an ugly, shady, unscrupulous amoral and shameless person in the world. Alcohol is no less of a fair influence on your writing than any other novel you read or painting you looked at or piece of music you listened to or girl in your life or anyone in your life. There are no rules in art so you have a license to create with whatever means you have at your disposal. Everything is at an artist’s disposal who bears a strictly coldly instrumental relationship to everything and everyone in his life out of which he makes his art. Artists are all lying, cheating, filching and poaching barbarians and we don’t care what our words will be interpreted by idiots as meaning. The greatest artists defy their reader to interpret them correctly or accurately or truthfully. Even the most self-aware artists are sometimes at a loss to explain what their work is about. For example I don’t care if some of what I write is virulently homophobic, or if I misrepresent my family and friends as assholes or girls being more crazy about me than they actually are. I don’t care. I can’t afford to care, because the great artist is absolutely lawless and unprincipled, beyond principle. The great artist is like Donald Trump and Elon Musk.”
He likes to write at night; he likes it when it rains, and when it really rains, blasting heavy hard rock and roll like Led Zeppelin Jimmy Hendrix or Nirvana. He likes it even more when it thunderstorms; he has a bottle of whiskey close at hand, he swigs and swigs away from, as the rain pelts, crescendoing brassily down out of the old God of the Old Testament vengeful sky, pushing him, disciplining him because he can’t discipline himself; he has to follow right close behind that maniacal horny angry penis …the rain crashing down into the gurgling, gargling murmuring portentous gutters slithering like eels slithering along them whispering down deep around his mother’s house, his mother fast asleep as he defied the house rules she set that if he were caught disobeying too much she had to threaten justifiably to kick him out. But he wrote like a bloodletting like he was being bled out. He was dying with the liquor flowing like and mixing with the blood in his veins so that it was erasing, evaporating and vaporizing the blood and now there was no blood anymore only liquor and women, and not even liquor, only after he was buzzed enough, women, women, women firing across that intellectual genius he was racing to bring to life on the page all the girls he ever gazed and stared at and gazed and stared at him and ogled him and longed for and fell in love with and he would for the rest of his life fall in love with, remaining in love unyieldingly interminably terminally like cancer the lust and heartache tearing him apart and driving his angry horny, grandiose, and self-destructive mad literary genius that never gave up and never gave in, that never compromised, not for his friends, not his family nor even for girls, not even for women, not for himself even, but no I would have to take that back—because he probably might compromise something for women, something the right woman the right girl like James Bond confusing the girl with the mission half the time, irrationally one pretty usually volatile woman versus saving the world and millions of lives, a real man not knowing the difference between the life of one woman and the survival of his own people, risking king and queen and country to go out of his way to save one glorious Bond girl he would be damned if he let down; he had to save too. His morality was identical, the finest highest art in the world not worth the price of losing the finest woman. And this was of the essence of why women were so dangerous to men. There’s nothing a real man at least won’t do for them. Most men today were not constituted like this though. Most men were cowards. Most men were weak. They hated women. Most men today WERE women. — Celeste Butterscotch
He heard Celeste’s scream, Colin, not knowing it was Celeste who screamed or whoever screamed; he wouldn’t even have remembered who Celeste was, whether she lived in or was from Salt Valley, he had never known; though he would remember, not anything about her, but he would remember her, herself as an individual—because how could you forget Celeste? She was unforgettable—what she looked like, what her personality was like, because of how much a smoking piping hot mom in her late thirties she was with and amid all her nervous girlish libidinal energy, and the exciting magnetic physical tension he felt with women like her that made him and her always feel so warm that they were sweating and touching their hair, she pushing it behind her ears, he flipping his back over his forehead. Late thirties had to be his favorite age type, sort of the final years of young womanhood. All Colin had for the moment was the lock of strawberry blonde hair that fell out from the teeth of a vampire bat thirsty for blood that disturbed and unsettled tore through Celeste’s unfortunate hair. He caught the mercurial hair as it drifted and hung in the air heroically for him. Not knowing it was Celeste, just to hear any woman scream, he was instantly alarmed and his heroic instincts that found their purpose in playacting as rescuer and saver, savior redeemer, knight, lord, prince, it pricked and set him off. She sounds attractive the unarticulated thought went into the back of his head, because you could even tell just from a scream how old someone was and how feminine they were intuitively; and if he were the first one to ever say this, what he heard sounded like a “hot girl scream.” But regardless even if whoever the screamer was not or if she was even unattractive the physically weaker sex was in trouble and perhaps danger.
He had had a good solid long day of being Prometheus, Icarus, too and Proteus, and Timon of Athens. Now you had to pull your head out of the depths of your infinite self-absorption to do what you always implacably intended and besides intended were bound by fate or God for that matter to do; so he hastened hearkening to the primitive cry. To do what all men even crude mediocre vulgar abysmal and shallow men were outfitted to do in the world, defend and protect women from other men mostly. And get your self-torturing head out of your ass and do something for someone besides yourself biologically female who needed help. He stopped pretending like he needed the silver gilt cane he was melodramatically hysterically pretending to need to use to walk to do anything because of the weight of his massive intellect, the torpor of his sorrowing spirit and the heaviness of his heart broken a million times being broken again and again every day; and at once he ceased all the affectations of gravitas seeking in beauty and the self-creation of his character and personality escape from the dreary drudgery and torments of existence without creation, without imagination; and he ran. He bolted. He just ran headlong in the direction of the late thirties, pretty woman, hot girl, hot mom scream.
“I don’t get it,” Lily frustrated. “I’m sure you get a lot of mixed signals. I do too. I don’t always like them. And I don’t even noticed them as mixed, and I would never think to assume there was any intention or design behind it.”
“Now this girl—I love her,” he lost track of what he was about to say. “I really love her. She’s adorable. Everyone falls in love with her. She’s like me. If everyone loves me, who for argument’s sake, wouldn’t even be a woman who didn’t in some way fall in love with me—all men love Emma, who wouldn’t be men if they weren’t in some way downright mad out of their miserable fucking minds about her. Mixed signals don’t work if they don’t get your attention despite being mixed, so they have to be attention-getting; there needs to be a pattern that is not a pattern; like a Jackson Pollack painting where it’s all a big mess; but if you look closely, intrigued by the mess, you can see a synthetic, abstract unity in all the disorder and the mess, hence Abstract Expressionism. Like a Jackson Pollack painting Emma had to get my attention first. She had to intrigue me like a messily beautiful painting, or a work of art that frustrates and obsesses the most astute critics. And I’m not sure—it’s hard to say how exactly Emma first got my attention, just like you don’t know how or why rather you bother to pay any attention to a big splattering of a million paints. You never know where and when an ostensible great big mess appears like a work of high art. So you never know where all this emotional turmoil and tumult starts with a girl giving you mixed-signals, playing hot and cold. All this whirligig of frustration and sexual desire and longing and tender affection just sets in like a gathering storm— irreconcilable and unreconciled mixed affections, does she like me? Or does she not like me? If she likes me and she likes talking to me, then why does she run out of the store sometimes and put on her sunglasses and duck as if in avoidance of me, then why other days does she stop what she’s doing just to talk to me, and apologize for not seeing me more like she really likes me almost more than the other women chasing me there, and she didn’t care how much she let on about it; so she wasn’t shy at all; but if she wasn’t shy, then why was she running away sometimes; she also knew I liked seeing her, which was why she was apologizing; not all women can tell how much I enjoy them!
“She was one of the most gorgeous of all women there. Now because I love her, she takes the prize for number one. She also had a son, and I didn’t know what the story was. She was a great mystery. This adorable little melancholy stunning English girl. What she was doing in America and a single mom whom you assume is struggling, but who went skiing on vacation, visits Essex England regularly, and she tells me her sister is studying at Cambridge! It was so confusing. She was confounding. Like are you poor or are you rich? Were you married? Did your husband die? You’re too rich not to have an abortion? Was it an accident? You’re too smart to have accidents! Where did the boy come from? Where and who was the father? He had to have died, because I assumed he couldn’t be a bad guy. She wouldn’t end up with anyone who mistreated her. She couldn’t be divorced already in her early thirties! All these questions were blowing like the wind through my intrigued, bewildered and hot and bothered head. I was increasingly more and more attracted to her. She went from being interesting and pretty and cute to having a mystique an allure, a darkness, a tragedy, a certain gravitas about her. The mixed signals first confuse you then they intrigue you, and sooner or later, you get this burning hideous loving passion for them. I liked her for a while. I was attracted to her immediately. But after a long enough time, and enough of these curious encounters, I was infatuated with her and coming home and telling my mom about her. Mom did I tell you about this English girl? Mom I saw the English girl today! Mom I think I want to ask her out. I like her and I think she likes me and it seems like she wants me to ask her out. She’s always so excited to see me, and she asked me how old I was. Her son likes me.”
Lily was nauseated.
Colin backtracked and lowered his voice, “This was someone in particular who first roused, aroused your as yet unawakened pangs of passion; whether with a glance or a stare or a smile or a flirtatious wave, a flirtatious manipulation of the eyebrows, glances cast going past my cash register everyone so desperate to admire for a moment my handsome facial features; they see my back; they see how tall and robust I am; and my hair; and they have to turn their heads and look upon my face. They always smile with interest and satisfaction, sometimes to themselves sometimes fondly at me. It’s crazy, and I’m not used to it. I’ve never gotten attention quite like this. If you were me some days, you would feel just from being out in public in one setting for six hours a day, especially when it’s busy, you would feel like you were the handsomest most desired man in the world. Before they exit the store sometimes they cast a glance back over the shoulder at me. Some of the ones I know some days will blow kisses at me and flip their hair at me. Like when I told this very pretty older woman I was a writer, which was why I work there in stoic avoidance, evasion of professional work, she said what do you write? And saying that flipped her hair not in an openly but implicitly provocative way. A hallmark signal of interest transcending that of familiarity between friends. What’s so baffling is that you’re desirable for no apparent reason. No godly reason. With no money. Actually a lot of debts. No corporate or remotely real nor even a full time job. Living with my divorced mom. Not looking for jobs. Driving a car poor people drive. Having no friends anymore because they moved for work, and him who hides his girlfriend from me not even because he doesn’t trust me or her, but he can’t stand how I compare to him in the eyes of his demanding girlfriend, and how she flirts with me to drive him crazy for fun! But sometimes I wonder whether it’s because I have no money. Because I have a drinking problem. It’s because I have a chronic illness or two or three. It’s because I have an embarrassing irritable bowel disease. I am sometimes insomniac. My lower back kills me. My feet kill me from standing around all day. I have this chronic full body nerve pain that comes and goes. My OCD makes my mental life hell sometimes. I have such a hard time Checking all kinds of things before I leave the house, I can’t even get to work on time. I count the money as much at work I can hardly safely give it to the customer, and sometimes I ask for the money to count it one more time. Amazingly though I wonder if it’s all these discouraging signs and possible red flags that are actually the constituent basis as to why I’m so sexually desirable for everyone and even romantically desirable to some, for the very bold the very intrepid, like Emma.
“I’ve compared her to a girl in a gothic novel who learns about a man rumored to be dangerous dwelling and brooding in a castle who’s drawn to get to know him, because, because he’s rumored to be dangerous. It’s the danger that is the essence of his appeal that induces her to seek him out, on which her curiosity is contingent and it’s piqued. Emma is like the girl in the Phantom of the Opera and I’m the phantom. I’ve always been drawn to crazy myself. And I always wind up with crazy girls. No one who’s normal would dare date someone as fucked up, deep, dark, and complicated as I. My college girlfriend practically stalked me before seducing me over a period of time, fascinated with how I wasn’t as immediately into her as every other guy back there. She just knocked on my door after following a friend to my dorm junior year and found me smoking pot by myself, hitting a bong and drinking countless beers; and she sat on my bed and she hardly spoke for the longest time. She would watch me hit the bong and hit it with me, then she would listen to me go off about everything in the world that I deplored specifically regarding modern times. I was a lot angrier and more self-destructive and depressed back then. I hated everything. I hated my parents. I hated my sister. I hated my country. I hated other guys, and I hated girls too even. She would listen in silent rapture staring at me and smiling and compelled by all the anguish and angst. I was the most authentic guy who just wanted to rail against the world rather than lie down and rail her, and that was what we did for months together. I was the unlikely outlet for all her own anger with our times that she hadn’t realized or given vent to before, not before she met me, someone who didn’t behave towards her like other men, who didn’t see her as only a girl, a pretty girl; I regarded her as a fellow, an equal, a peer in my war on modern society. And she fell in love with that, warts and all, my manifest sexual inexperience, my propensity for self-destruction. She loved how sensitive and gentle I was in my madness and frank and honest. When we fucked, I told her I was a virgin up front and didn’t know what I was doing. I had never even kissed a girl before. I didn’t know how to do that either. I compensated for my ignorance by being very passionate in my drunkenness. Later she would say it was like I was ‘invading her mouth,’ but she loved it, and I made her cum thrice. I was so perfectly drunk that I lasted like at least forty-five exhausting minutes. All the guys on the all-guys upper floor would be very jealous of all the banging around we did.”
“I can’t tell sometimes whether you’re boasting or being self-effacing or self-deprecating,” Lily said.
“I can’t either.”
“Speaking of which something about me that always drove girls crazy is how I’m never being myself. I’m always cosplaying as a fictional character either that I saw on tv or I made up in my head and now I’m experimenting by performing as. For some reason girls want you to just be yourself. That’s a very modern cliche. Be yourself. Even people who are cosplaying as whatever are not being themselves. There is no true self. When you’re not posing as some figment of your imagination, you’re posing unimaginatively as the person your parents, your school, your social background, your friends, and peers and work colleagues want you to be. No one is themselves. And in that sense, we creatives adopting personas just for the hell of it are more authentically human not pretending to be ourselves, but, in our flaunting the nonexistence of a true self; what makes everyone else so uncomfortable is how we demonstrate that the self is an illusion along with all the other illusions of organized society we call institutions; like that science is fact, and religion is truth, and education is good, and that we are all equal, and human, and that you as an individual matter, or that you as a citizen rather than illegal immigrant matter; Black and/or Blue lives matter for example.
“Regardless the case against it for me is that there’s no fun in being your static miserable unchanging-for-all-time self. And in my my defense amid my constant performing, I’m not as pretentious as people accuse me of; because I never fully inhabit whatever persona I’m inhabiting. I always have one foot out the door stubbornly attached not to my true self, but at least to my nature and my identity as an artist, as a man as Colin, also as a writer, as a neurotic or a seducer, or a romantic, an idealist a lover, etc. The only way we can never define who we are is by appealing to types and tropes and characters in personalities whether in literature, art, culture and cinema or in the material contemporary so-called real world, although there’s no good reason to believe the real world isn’t just a book, and everything in life isn’t just one narrative on top of another for eternity. If you’re an artist it means you have no identity granted; but in the sense that an artist’s identity is always changing, then can’t we say that his protean nature is his or her true self? Unless you want to say there can’t be a self that is not a self. Or defies self-explication as self. For example one of Bob Dylan’s friends said that he was always playing some character, and whenever he saw him he was being some new different personality or an archetype or something. That doesn’t mean however that Dylan has multiple personality disorder or schizophrenia to the extent he still signs his name as Bob Dylan, right? He’s still Dylan. He’s the same man who likes to pretend to be other men. He’s still just a great musician, and we’re never going to know entirely the origins of his genius, and what’s going on upstairs but that is as it should be. It would ruin the genius to be able to wrap it around our finger. That’s what frustrates me about a lot of these girls. If you’re me you want to be a changeling or a free-spirit, in other words. Every girl who wants me to stop playing myself only wants to pin me down to please herself, and unwittingly to herself, certainly serving to destroy the enigma, the riddle about me that drew her to me in the first place!” He shrugged, shrieking vexed at the paradox. “I mean I understand and I can sympathize with a girl’s desire to fully know and get into the mind and inhabit the man of her boyfriend, but they need to know up front, to save themselves the trouble, it’s not in their interest to attempt to do that.”
“You seem to be arguing not just that it’s fun, and not just it’s your nature as an artist to perform, but that you should perform for ethical reasons. Am I wrong? There is an ethical necessity you seem to be giving the value of performing.”
“Indeed Lily. Indeed. You don’t want to be blandly who you are or be yourself. You want to become who are you. You want to become yourself. You want to become. You can only do that by trying out new things, new styles, new aesthetics, new personas. And migrate through different phases. Incorporating random things creatively into your personality in your pathological means to live your life creatively as an end in itself. Because the only good life let alone the best life is a damned creative one. In an Emersonian way. There was a guy in college who said of me in a group of people that I was like a present day Ralph Waldo Emerson. That’s exactly what I am. It was one of the highest compliments someone ever paid me. Up with the lady the other week whom my neckerchief gave ‘Princess Diana vibes.’ Quite like Diana actually what makes me such a genius is that what makes my overall persona so great is that I’m not even failing to play anyone any less than myself. What makes Diana such an arresting besides enduring personality— what makes it so effective is that she comes across as completely authentic. And she is authentic. But don’t tell me that shy, demure thing she does with her head bowed down and her eyes looking up at her interlocutor isn’t also a great big performance! It says a lot in favor of what I’m saying that in public she was this gracious betrayed, melancholy tragic open-book of a princess, who’s unfairly criticized now by anyone who’s jealous of her as attention-seeking when anyone can plainly see who’s an honest student of her life—the last thing she ever wanted was attention, which ironically brings people more attention; and it was attention, publicity that killed her in the end; also King Charles killed her by never loving her in the first place precipitating all of it; she never would have been in that car with that guy that last night hounded by reporters if it weren’t for the stupid, narrow-minded spineless Charles needing to please his family by marrying Diana and be with his true love at the same time, thinking you can have your cake and eat it too; I hate men like that!—she was that gracious, altruistic, tragic beauty in public to conceal the volatile disreputable woman she was in private, nearly throwing herself pregnant down the stairs to kill her children in the womb, cutting herself I think, suicide attempts or ideation at least, and the eating disorder of course. So if I’m a character and whatever character I might play, I am always just like her my own character. And I don’t bow my head demurely or anything, but all my swaggering and drinking is half a performance. I am unapologetically myself in all places and all settings and all contexts, my outward asymmetric contradictions all an illusion, a representation of my deep symmetry, my deep inner wild arresting inner, inner harmony. My glorious girlfriend—she’s starting to understand and appreciate it—but for a while then we started dating she was wrestling with the notion that there has to be some kind of cut-and-dry difference between the persona and the man. There is a difference, but they’re not distinct, my persona, my personality the character, the aesthetic of Colin is always just the product of who I am, and the person is just its whimsical expression, like my art though it not being strictly speaking absolutely autobiographical is also self-expression. Ironically Emma is herself a rakish young woman. To answer your question she got me in a mirror image of the way I got her. My English beautiful blonde like bombshell British beloved—just imagine an intellectually brilliant Barbie doll who in the flesh is better looking than any Barbie doll or Barbie designer or manufacturer can hope to create or Margot Robbie can play in a movie—she is a doll of a girl with a quintessential British accent. Yes English Barbie that transcends Barbie and makes Barbie repellant who superior she is and unworthy of any comparison to dolls. Can you imagine Lily anything cuter in the history of civilization than what I just described? There is nothing inwardly and outwardly more arresting more unfathomably staggeringly stunning than Emma. She’s a single mom that therefore most people would automatically assume was struggling. I did too. And she is struggling, sort of. Just not in the way you think. Not like other single moms. The opposite. Then she shows up to dinner though dressed to the nines. She’s full of incredible surprises. Every time we talk I learn something new about her. She’s like the gorgeous British girl embodiment of War and Peace. Her past is dark, tragic and disturbing. She has a strange autoimmune condition called paraneoplastic syndrome, which usually strictly cancer patients have, but it doesn’t mean she necessarily has cancer; she very well could but it’s so microscopically small that it can’t be located with the highest tech microscopes. I love her and I love her son so much, and her family and her dog. And her mom and everything having to do with her so much.”
He started running in the direction of the pretty woman scream, he not knowing what that direction was; sound was so elusive. It wasn’t like sight. When you saw something someone, you could trust your eyes to tell you exactly where they were. You could see them. Hearing wasn’t like sight. Hearing caused sound to boomerang and yawn around, and cause you to start running even in the opposite direction from which it came. The greater the distance depending on the topography, the less likely you were to know where the hell sound was coming from. All a man, a horny sexually frustrated young, uncommonly chivalrous man, a young artist, a neurotic genius had was the second sight to distinguish to infer and surmise that this scream was the scream, it could be no other, than an extraordinarily, fascinatingly, astonishingly pretty woman by the name of whom he could not put a face to, nor her name to her face, even if he could remember her name, not yet—Celeste Butterscotch a woman whom he had only met a few times before he made her so uncomfortable with how intensely charmed and intensely intrigued she was by him she had to get out of the store and not come back: consummately and fantastically funny, and intelligent, too intelligent, and bubbly, and hot, her face her body her legs, quiveringly horny, and therefore completely lacking self-possession, trembling, blushing, touching her hair and her necklace too much, and short of breath around Colin, despite all her natural confidence and ease of manner otherwise in every particular. She was very social and extroverted. She went to Colgate, where she studied communications and marketing and played club lacrosse and got straight A’s. She was a professional career woman and happily married to a big broad handsome man with dark hair who worked in insurance she loved, mother to three beautiful children. And it didn’t seem to make the slightest difference. There was no exceedingly charming, tall dark and handsome kind of man on rare occasions no matter how much she loved her husband who couldn’t light her sexuality on fire. Her sexuality which she was afraid was stronger than all her friends’ so she told no one about it, and no one could tell because they weren’t paying attention to how she still sweated and got red in the face on these rare events like she were still fifteen. What was so frustrating was how she got it from her husband plenty. But it didn’t matter. It wasn’t enough. She wanted more from other men, which was forbidden, and she forbade herself from having any affair ever, but its forbiddance only made her more anguished and fantasize about it more; perhaps if she had an affair it would stop her thinking about it (not that it was a possibility anyway); she acknowledged it might make her want another and another likewise.
From one of her innumerable anxious meetings with her elderly therapist, Mary—
“Mary, am I hypersexual?”
“No,” She said exhausted with reassuring this woman, not like a good therapist. But all the other strategies seemed to make Celeste worse off, more anxious. “If you were hyper-sexual, you would be promiscuous meaning you would already be sleeping around everywhere.”
“But I’m so sexual.”
“Everyone is,” the therapist was like iron. And meetings with Mary only enhanced by burnishing her desire not to help what Mary considered to be an attention-seeking rich housewife, enamored with herself and her stunning good looks, using her obsession with men as a narcissistic coping mechanism to offset her very womanly very feminine feelings of inadequacy as a mother and a wife. She was a white collar professional, a straight A type A person, who never partied too much or much at all, was a healthy-eater and very athletic. But like a lot of perfectionistic personalities like these, they pushed themselves too hard and gave so much, they always wondered if they were still good enough, and no one could give them the appreciation they craved to feel good enough. Even praise only reduced them to feeling like they hadn’t even done anything insofar as it pronounced the achieving part of their nature fulfilled and concluded like nothing was really achieved at all now that it was over, the emptiness; better to tell such a person they’re a failure! Even after accomplishing something big, because the only thing that kept them from having a full-blown mental breakdown was the fear of failure. Success was paralyzing. She wished she could decline to accept all the real estate awards and tennis trophies she won rather than stand around feeling like an under-accomplished temporary success.
Celeste could never get good enough grades, never make enough money, so now that she was rich and married and comfortable, she started setting moral goals for herself. But because getting attention and approval was the object of her whole life, her moral litmus tests had to revolve around this pseudo-anxiety that she was about to cheat on her husband, or that she wanted to. But she would never cheat on her husband. She didn’t really want to, and she knew it. This was just a lifelong overachieving petty wealthy, healthy horny housewife, who had achieved everything, but was still dissatisfied with herself because that was her personality.
“I feel like I’m more sexual than any of my friends.”
“I doubt it. Maybe more. Maybe less. The difference is that they’re not preoccupied by it.”
“But shouldn’t it preoccupy you?”
“No. It doesn’t matter how much you love your husband. You’re still going to check other men out. It’s human nature.”
“But it’s wrong.”
“No one said nature was right. Of course it’s wrong! But who cares!" Sometimes Mary just wanted to slap Celeste in the face with cold water. She actually had impulses to beat up all her clients at one time or another throughout her career. That was what happened when you specialized in anxiety. You got all the annoying ones. “Do you want to cheat on your husband?”
“No! That’s the whole reason I’m so worried!”
“Then you won’t. If you don’t, then you won’t. It’s that simple!”
“But how do I know that I won’t? What if I did? What if I did without wanting to or meaning to by accident? Like what if one of my real estate clients put his hand on me? What if I didn’t push him away? What then? What if that kid at the supermarket wrote his number down on my receipt? What if even after throwing it out, I went back into the trash to recover it. What if after just looking at it once, his number seared itself onto my memory? What if all my worrying weren’t just idle worrying but it was significant of a deep-seated subconscious wish? Women get bored, men too. Or they meet someone else.”
“But you’re not bored. You admit you’re dissatisfied but you’re not bored.
“No. I’m not,” Celeste was rocking back and forth on the sofa feeling genuinely miserable. Miserable with anxiety and self-loathing and extremely prettier all because of it.
“What if your real desire is not not to cheat, but to be induced somehow to cheat, not necessarily to actually cheat, but Celeste all your life you were a highly accomplished person. Maybe what your anxiety is, represents a disguised wish not to be accomplished to have confirmed that you’re as fallible and flawed as so many other people are.”
That theory sent Celeste of course into a tailspin like a fighter jet shot down out of the sky, screaming to the earth. Therapists weren’t supposed to do that. This was why psychiatrists were better. She was quietly moderately abusing various substances not to crack up from her neuroses that of course she worried made her more vulnerable to the thing she feared most, which as Mary pointed out, maybe wasn’t a fear, it was a perverse wish. It didn’t necessarily mean that she would ever cheat on her husband even once though; she could console herself that much. She just had a feature about her personality that left her predisposed to fantasizing all the time about it to the point of needing to talk about it to get attention; she was even tempted to confide to her husband about it; he was a very understanding man. Here I am. Here I am. I’m a weak woman. I’m a pretty woman, and I hate all the attention I get, because I love all the attention I get. I know I’m a narcissist or just a mental patient. I know I’m annoying. Help me!
It was not reducible to to a bid for attention though. She had to fight herself not to check random men out in public especially in Salt Valley, everyone else’s husband. She was insane. And she hated herself. Sneak-reading trashy romance novels on her iPad waiting for her kids to get out of school, having to hide the literature like it was S&M porn, speaking of which she was constantly clearing her search history and paranoid. Between glasses of wine, she was sneaking shots of surreptitious tequila and taking Xanax’s before afternoon naps, and sleeping pills before bed. None of it worked. No matter how much she slept or numbed her anxiety or how furiously she some days worked out; nothing could shake the thought that her overachieving nature left her predisposed to histrionically obsess over whether she could be induced to cheat on her husband to feel that despite all her achievements, she was still underachieved and unfulfilled. As the unintended principle inexorable and ineluctable result primarily of all her achievements. It was the last thing she ever wanted if you asked her, but it was also the most natural place she could have ever ended up in life, and a part of her congratulated herself that she had had to really really overachieved to self-sabotage just to feel that there was still more to be achieved. In a higher, high-minded realm that of the perfection of her moral character and virtue.
It wasn’t that Celeste’s husband didn’t love her or fuck her enough. It was that he wasn’t scholarly enough, though it struck her as absurd, and it was her first instinct to blame Colin just for existing. Secondly she wanted to blame her husband for not being on Colin’s level. Thirdly she wanted to blame herself for feeling divided in this way. More darkly she reasoned that it would be better if she could rationalize having an affair with Colin, rather than be split down the middle, on one hand living in avoidance of encountering him, and on the other wanting to cheat on her husband with him. It was as if in her indecision she weren’t just on the verge of betraying her husband, but she were betraying Colin by actively denying her strong desire for him, and she were betraying herself by betraying her best interests and her whims for pleasure; it was like she were scorning and suppressing both love and pleasure at the same time, and of course it made her miserable.
Her husband wasn’t as young, as handsome, or horny or erudite and as deep or profound—refined, elegant, sophisticated, stylish, and enraged, so enraged and intoxicated chronically and smoking, drinking and smoking like his life depended on it, like frail, stupid, abysmal life hinged, the length and longevity of it hinged on how much and to what extent the scope was of the madness of how much an angry horny, hypermasculine, depraved roguish degenerate young man drank and smoked and all but hanged himself in the fire and fury and longing and lust of that genius that so needed a good hot roasting raucous fire to galvanize itself and galvanize him to serve as the dogged voracious volcanic carnivorous carnal implacable irrevocable impetus to make him write—to force that roguish renegade aristocratic hyper-elitist angrily masculine penis of a man’s self-serving, self-regarding, self-motivated and selfish, so so selfish, and self-interested pathologically amoral genius to write… Not to bring to life by way directly of bringing all the smolderingly pretty moms killing it in their thirties, forties and fifties on the page by and through not least the inviolable immutable immortal power of the written goddamn word, and the ever-expanding universal cosmic goddamn English goddamn language for all time, because it was moms, it was mothers, all the “milfs” (an acronym whose crudeness he deplored!) and “cougars” (another heathenish slang term), and voracious soccer moms (that was better)—supermarket mom he was hoping to popularize—these pretty people who didn’t know it because they were older than he was, how they were infinitely prettier for being older so much older, and older than him—older than him and his godforsaken doomed Gen Z of an abysmal abhorrent ghastly generation. How little did these aging volcanic gorgeous messes of gorgeousness of beautiful women know not how he made them feel young forever, freezing them in time, immortalizing them in his work, glorifying them forever for all time in his whiskey-sodden works of supreme fine true raunchily hardcore American literature not to be outdone or even within a hundred million miles contested by the likes of the contemptible loser writers of his terrible reality—relatability, relatableness— stricken and scarred and traumatized, paralyzed, immobilized and isolated, sweetly coldly and implacably isolated these godawful times, not by pretentious phony, fluffy, unhorny, unangry, unproperly truly goddamn really literary at all: Jonathan Franzen, Ottessa Mashfegh, Michael Chabon, Zadie Smith, Haruki Murakami and others.
More beyond inferior, inferior to inferiority, they were so bad, fathomlessly mediocre and untalented soft and weak and simple cowardly and unprofound, unprovocative, uncontroversial, undense, uncomplicated, and most of all uncool. Unfuckingcool. These arrogant pussies and lame bitches—Donna Tartt, good fucking God—couldn’t hold a cheap match or an unlit toothpick, let alone a visceral candle to even David Foster Wallace who wasn’t a lot less mediocre, but he was less infinitely inferior. For all the torture that bastard witnessed, he was still not even a good writer. Little did all those women how much delightedly older how much suaver how much like the James Bond of the supermarket, how much more civilized and smoother they made him feel…
“It will but if it were never to work out, if it were to dissolve, dissolving into dissolution, and I were to spiral into alcoholic dissolute dilapidation, disintegration then we would at least she and I have the glory Emma and I of having been the Byrons and Lady Caroline Lambs of our times while it lasted. She’ll say of me flatter me that I’m mad, bad and dangerous to know. And I’ll say the same about her. But even if it is meant to be, and I’m still more than convinced it is—even if she thinks I’m crazy, and I think she’s crazy; we both know we both are—it’s half the reason we’re so so in love. So much goddamn true love. Did I mention, Lily, she’s obsessed with my past relationships like I had any, besides the girl in college, and obsessed with my drinking, not knowing the harmless innocent extent of it in ignorance? She’s too funny, Emma. I don’t obsess over a damn thing about her. I could, but I choose not to. I know why she’s more reluctant to trust me. She’s had too many bad things happen to her, and she’s a mum; she can’t take any more chances, even though she will have to if she’s ever going to find love again. But she’s never been in love, she told me. I’m the first man she’s ever loved. I love her so much that if she were lying to me about her whole past, I pride myself on how I think I still wouldn’t give two sorry goddamn fucks!”
He affected a limp, so he had to adopt a cane like a rescue dog. He just picked it up, made it an essential invaluable aspect, one of his affects, incorporating it into his incorrigible intractable, impetuous character—a character whichever, what, whoever, whom he played, whomever, wherever whenever, a new character; the girl complained exasperatedly one night over text, the girl the poor sick sympathetic beautiful English girl from Essex. She lived in downtown Salt Valley in one of the oldest houses in Salt Valley with her son, with her moody temperamental and ravenous son, who the author could see right away would some one day make a killer goddamn poet, some man of letters, a novelist a short-story or a screenplay writer like him, who at just ten had all the anguish in his soul anyone with any remotest vestigial vestige of talent ever needed, and the face to break and ruin a million pretty girls’ hearts, the son who in turn recognized in him, in Colin a certain rare extraordinary man would make a good match for his lonely mummy, his dear mummy who had already suffered the torment of a hundred twisted terrible gnarly relationships gnarling still more the ungnarled unmaimed still unharmed body of her sickly quintessential English rebellion; she didn’t care how many times how many inferior stupid American godbloodyawful contemporary modern men would attempt to take her down the Barbie girly girl, who was better it was understating it to say better for being Barbie with brains, if a girl ever had a brain as tormentedly creative—Emma Randolph was incomparable. She was inestimable. She was unequivocal. And this was why it was unfair, it was meaningless, it was hideous, it was a heinous desecration of justice that didn’t do justice to Barbie. Poor Barbie. Poor Margot Robbie. All the girls and all the flaming hot sexy wild rebellious and recalcitrant, heedless, stubborn, and unyielding, piercing, brilliant and sharp girls, no less sharp than such wickedly immorally gorgeously shapely serratedly pretty women than Catherine Delilah Shockington who cut through men in her day to this day still like butter loaves of bread and sticks of butter; she was that sharp, she was that unpitying, and ruthless it being a miracle or a catastrophe that men didn’t fall in halves when they stood stock-still when they were confronted with her and that shapely shapeshifting unforgiving countenance and sphinx-like complexion, those rotund piercing pointy daggers of smokey smoking dark, revolver barrel eyes—whip-smart brilliant and fun girls; no one nevertheless matched, no one was a peer, or was in any remote way capable of making a contrast with Emma, either with one look from her dovish brown eyes, that long blonde straight hair, the freckles on her fair English skin, annihilating contrasts, too, abominating comparison even in theory, unrivaled for melancholy; unrivaled for anemic wan autoimmune Victorian languid illness. She was a sight that turned sight on its head and abolished sound. The way some girls struck you so hard you couldn’t hear what they were even saying, and you couldn’t look them in the face. It wasn't sensory overload. It was sensory overthrow. Emma and every girl out there who was anything like Emma— but no one was like Emma— a walking incarnate, quaking violent volcanic insurrection to the nervous system of sheer wild appalling gorgeousness to Mankind. And Man. She was biblically freakily freakishly awesomely beautiful.
She was the love of his life.
That was why she was as if condemned to endure all these abusive relationships. Some superiority is so inferiority-triggering that people, especially men, cannot maturely handle it to suffer to tolerate her—tolerate this waif, this nymph, this angel, this fairy. Forever. Only until she might ever meet her unimaginable matchless unmatching match for a man. Who had to be a prince. A demon. A devil with demons who only because she an angel could tame his untamable heretofore untamable beastly nature. That mind that would go to no end of lengths, likewise the penis, seeking the implacable realization and irrevocable revelation, the enactment of the most fantastic phantasmagoric fantasies. Emma trusted her mum was giving her good advice—well Emma’s mum, Jessica Randolph was just like her; she was her; she was her before she was Emma, and Emma was her— she having been having endured a great number of tortured relationships herself, most despicably the genuine villain of the remarkably rich, remarkably good looking venomously very bad man who was a “lord,” who was dead for good reason, dead in a car accident, dead to them, dead to Jessica, dead to Emma, but undead too, his untimely demise that couldn’t be more timely—thank goodness, thank awful goodness—if he were and had never been born, and he never met Emma’s mum and whatever he did to her, because she would never tell Emma, and Emma didn’t want and maybe would never want to know; she didn’t even want to imagine or imagine imagining the unimaginable that of course being the demon her Colin fell to obsessively imagining—who was this guy? How bad was he or could he be that her mother wouldn’t ever tell her anything about him, and Emma was so terrified that Emma didn’t even want to know? Colin not being a real demon, unlike that depraved English lord, outwardly mad, inwardly good was Colin no one believing it though, Colin being much less of a heavy drinker than he wanted people to idealize him as. He wasn’t any more of a drunk than any of his literary idols like Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce or William Faulkner. Emma as well not being a true angel. She was a mock angel, because although it could have been her mum, Emma was not entirely as sweet inwardly as she outwardly seemed, and she had her own demons, the product of a real authentic demon whoever he was. Just as her son was a part of her, yes, but also the regrettable child of her of Emma’s abusive demon, ex-early-twenties criminal of a boyfriend. And now Colin was obsessing over what whether it were a coincidence that Emma and her mum endured and suffered the trauma of violent abusive relationships or it was something inevitable about them that brought their own houses of lives falling down on top and all around them without taking them down with them, her mum finding a decent if mediocre man by whom she had a new number of talented precocious children, and now Emma found Colin!
When she made her glorious overjoyed ensemble entrance into the French restaurant on their first date, her face betrayed the utmost triumph of conquest. She owned, she really possessed Colin, forlorn, sad and hopeful Colin sitting there in all his desecrated, desolate undefeated vulnerability, and he didn’t even know it. But she knew it. Not now. Later. When she realized he wasn’t playing a new character every day; that was an exaggeration. He was playing himself. Therefore it didn’t make a difference whether she ever really knew or could wrap her finger around him, the handsome genius that no woman could ever quite wrap her head let alone her finger around! Give up. That was she needed to surrender to the mystery like everything else in her strange and unforgettable and beautiful life. The mystery that she would never solve. That spurned and scorned solving. And just let this handsome genius put a ring around your finger instead!
“At the end of my favorite of his books my favorite philosopher writes, ‘the tragedy begins.”
—Colin to Lily over text
To be succeeded by a fourth volume called “Seducing Oneself” where Emma and Colin have a brief falling out or quasi-(cosmopolitan)break-up