MISANTHROPY AND MUSINGS ON THE HUMAN CONDITION CIRCA 4 AM EASTERN STANDARD

I know quite well that the Internet is a savage item, a virtual wasteland populated by fools and whores and poison-tongued libellists, a truly wretched hive of scum and villainy, to borrow a phrase from Ben Kenobi.

Even so, I now attempt to lay bare my life here, spread out across this space all my impulses and neuroses like so much clockwork and try to make sense of all the intricate, interlocking components: what fits where, which turns when, how it works, if at all. I sincerely hope, by the end of this sprawling text, you will begin to understand, at the very least. I do not expect the same for myself.

First and foremost, I am what you might call a “misanthrope.” I look at everyone I see and know and love, at one time or another, with alternately hate, sadness, disgust and disbelief. It isn’t so much that I plainly hate people. I most certainly don’t. A person can be a precious thing, capable of wonderful little permutations of thought and feeling. It is instead a problem of transcendence.

The disappointment embodied in humanity is staggering and seizes up the chest on many an occasion. Our bodies are imperfect and constantly under siege by organisms smaller than the width of a hair and choices larger than whatever deity pleases you. Our minds mature so slowly it’s agonizing, and soon after we can only watch in abject terror, years and years passing, as our facts become notions and our memories become might-have-beens and our loved ones suddenly look like strangers. We claim intelligence and civilization, and yet we have only preserved a native, primal savagery. The only differences are numerical and aesthetic. Whereas before our loinclothed ancestors battled mano-a-mano over resources and realms, we now wear suits and kill billions of our own kind in the name of things we can’t even see.

I cannot help but see the same misery in everyone around me. I see people as wells of opportunity, possibility, potential that have been dried to the last logged brick. I see people decay and die before my very eyes, and yet they become no smarter in the end than in their first moments, drenched ex vivo, clutched by a latex pair of hands, groping the air in a haze, selfishly swallowing the space and screaming. I see people yell and lie and brush the truth aside as one would a stray hair, nagging and troublesome, from a shoulder. Quite simply, they waste their time, and they are ungrateful for the amount provided them. They are intent on pushing each other away and building their walls, physical or otherwise, despite their inexorable descent into the very same valley of death. No, sir. No shadows here. The legitimate phenomenon.

And nowhere is this grand disappointment greater than in myself. I am the pinnacle of the nadir. I want to write, to have my words live on and elaborate, extrapolate, illuminate, but what I write is routinely pedestrian and unworthy of anyone’s time, and the moments of genuine brilliance, however small, are fleeting and uncontrollable. I want to act, to be a physical conduit for passions and persuasions decades, even centuries old and still pulsing with life, but my body and my very personality have doomed me to play the bit-part neurotic for the rest of my days. I want to make music, to move people’s hearts and people’s feet, to write songs of intelligence, sophistication and timelessness, and yet I am bereft of the necessary skill to flesh out my inspirations on a number of instruments, and I haven’t a clue whether or not the time spent plucking a string or staring at a snare drum will ever amount to anything. My own frame rebels against me. My genes have cursed me with a dead and ironically very vital organ, a face perpetually scarred for no particular reason and an oily mop atop. My family has been destroyed. My mother and I are jobless and frequently short financially. My father is in some other state, divorced from the rest of us in ways both legal and metaphysical, and my step-father was imprisoned for bank robbery, a music minister turned criminal in the name of economic desperation. My sisters have forsaken college education and had children and formed lives with men I don’t think they truly love. And perhaps worst of all: all the women I’ve loved have left me, some gently, some callously, others with the subtlety and comfort and enduring peace of a gunshot to the gut.

I don’t know what to do anymore. Academia means nothing to me now. I simply see a round of theatre that neither informs nor educates, a dog-and-pony show that garnishes a largely meaningless certificate that all-but-guarantees me a dreary occupation and decades of regret and emptiness.

I wonder, in a perverse sort of way, whether any of you have noticed my inevitable disintegration. I’d like to think I’ve done a good job of hiding it, smiling and laughing at all the proper cues. You mustn’t forget that I am an actor, a master of roles. I am different for different people and different times.

I thought it best that I inform you all as to why I sleep for ages and skip my responsibilities, why I avoid some of you and quietly scowl at others and stare at more still with envy and rage. I do these things because I am breaking down. I have utterly lost the plot. What is there to do now but gaze at the yawning darkness outside my window and wonder, “What in the hell is it all? And why?”