Let Us Now Praise Foolish Men . . .

. . . And women, if it comes to that (I won't discriminate).

Oh, you who look to the ivory tower as the bastion of human knowledge you so desperately want it to be, let me assure you, it is a refuge for knaves, scoundrels and sycophants of the first order. You will never escape unmolested; you will clap your hands to you ears to block the bleating of herds, the shrieks and hoots of scornful children. Absolutely, positively no escape. Academes crave drama like anyone else -- perhaps even more so -- to fritter away precious breaths and hours in order to ignore the yawning abyss that awaits us all. Everything is at stake because precisely nothing is. Molehills for mountains, teapotted tempests for tumults . . . these will be yours for the price of admission. Manufactories of drama, theatres of petty resentment -- in short, today's university English departments.

Sac-religion

Many today would have us believe that human beings are nothing more than sacs of chemicals. But if this is indeed the case, the question remains: Why must a sac of chemicals tell itself that it is nothing more than a sac of chemicals? Why must it offer itself this affirmation in order to be at home or at ease with itself. Need a weed tell itself that it is nothing but a weed in order to be at home with its weed-ness? Need a dog tell itself it is nothing but a dog? Such a conviction can only suggest one thing: that the will to transcendence, native to every sentient human (to one degree or another), has turned in on itself, as it were, and can only assuage its apparent sense of defeat by finding itself to be nothing more than an anomaly peculiar to a certain type of entity.

In other words, neurochemistry is the last refuge of a scientistic scoundrel.

The Scales Have Fallen from My Eyes, Allowing Me to See Clearly the Scales of Injustice That Weigh My Reward in This Life

I called her this evening -- afforded myself an opportunity to vent spleen and bile. Again, my entreating her for a few therapeutic words of truth was met with stubborn defiance. I could not even invoke seven years of selfless devotion with any success. I did, however, gain a certain hard-won, and late-in-coming, insight into my ex-wife.

My ex-wife is, in essence, emotionally retarded and, what is worse, given to universalizing her retardation. From such an individual one can expect no consideration, no sympathy for one's despair, even if this individual is responsible for it. Seven years might as well be seven decades; the end result is the same: the relationship one has with her forges no enduring bonds, makes no lasting impressions, provkes no insurmountale regret. Rather, she consigns these years to the memory hole of the heart. A broken marriage (one she smashed) is, according to her perverse philosophy, simply something she and all other parties involved must move on from, as if the inevitable hurry of time is an anodyne for a broken heart.

My ex-wife is an automaton, a veritable Turing Machine of emotions. Hence my undoing: when to a woman all emotions are all equally inauthentic, it becomes difficult for her lover or husband to detect authenticity, especially if he is someone who has resisted all contemporary encouragement to sacrifice his humanity. To such a woman he becomes as much a curious prodigy as the man from the reserve is to the other Soma-popping, pornography-glutted characters of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

Reader, I married her -- an emotional retard of a woman bred from a town that causes emotional retardation: Tucson, Arizona. A pox on her!

A Tear for Lexapro E.

What does it take to coax a tear from your eye? A tear to wet the sand of seven years run through the glass? Does the Prozac choke them off at their source? Do you cry, D---? Can you cry, cry a tear for Lexapro E. . . . and thee?

Timely Meditations

Unfashionable fashion can be made fashionable once more; unfashionable sentiments seemingly cannot.

* * *

In these times of commodified individuals with their commodified habits (lifestyle) and habiti (fitness; cult of the body), one must mount an enormous amount of critical resistance simply in order to preserve the humanity he feels himself to have. Otherwise, his humanity will be dragged from him like a prisoner from the Bastille by the hedonistic Jacobin hordes surrounding him.

* * *

Unlike magicians, who use mirrors to make things disappear, the contemporary American woman must use mirrors to make things appear.

* * *

Our current mania for pharmaco-psychotherapy, in the form of a nearly universal promotion of SSRIs and related antidepressants, can only result in the death of genius. Perhaps this is why Christ delays his return -- because even He would be put on anti-depressants. Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor is today a psychopharmacologist.

* * *

The hero may fall bravely on the field of battle, but the coward lives to cringe another day.

Snickersnee

Got great fever today. Pinchbats tourney proved ineluctable, though squires in the wickets, dodgy sorts, loved the ladies with red knickers -- an unqualified success, to be sure. Heaven helps the hero who allows himself to be schooled by the coward, an individual who is nothing if not successful. Someday, someday we'll enjoy the feast due us, and then we may bring to table those who'd wish us starved. No great threats in the great hereafter.

I am a stained man. Honor flutters not to my exhalations. Breath, however, is the last resort of the living. My entire life, I have wished myself dead.

American University Gothic

Out of the searing, swampy tedium of the past summer months comes a new horror: the beginning of the autumn semester at The University of Arizona. In just a few weeks, I will walk into classrooms in which my freshmen charges will be arranged in rows like the lazy, hormone-addled turnips they are. I will be saddled with the impossible task of shining the light of learning into the undifferentiated pulp of their vegetable minds.

The semester will follow the same progression as semesters past. My students will initially be on their best behavior -- the best behavior they are capable of, that is -- until they sniff out how strict or officious I am likely to be. After shopping composition instructors during the "Drop / Add" period, they will then begin to indulge their various vices -- almost hostile indifference, childlike restlessness and inattentiveness, chronic absence, near-illiteracy, and so on. The most discouraging fact, for me or any other composition instructor, is that we know thoroughly and completely what to expect, and yet we are powerless to change anything about what will come to pass in the next sixteen weeks. It is as if we composition instructors are condemned inmates who somehow miraculously survived the first attempt at our execution, but, instead of a pardon for enduring what we endured, we are told that the sentence must be carried out in a second attempt. We are back in that same corridor, having just enjoyed our final meal for a second time; the same priest walks beside us, mouthing prayers and benedictions, and we glimpse once again at the end of the now familiar corridor, in a dim brick room, a utility closet of death, the instrument of our demise awaiting us as expectant pie-faced gawkers look on.

Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Swine Admit Impediments

You and your landscaper, dull swinkerer, toiler and tiller of earth (though of the Chosen he be), deserve each other, you minimus, you malign pragmatist, YOU VERITABLE MONSTROSITY OF HEART, MIND AND FLESH! You claim he's but a casual lay. But, I ask, why do you surrender to him so cheaply what I have purchased so dearly? Mine is the nobler mind ("freakishly intelligent" you once called me), and yet it was the eminently eligible hecatomb for your base freedom, defined narrowly by sex. Unfettered, you fetter yourself even more tightly to the perverse imperatives of the Culture Industry -- fuck whom thou wilt is the whole of the law. Lover as accessory, as lifestyle accoutrement.

How, though, does he manage to adorn you better than me, whose soul is as heavenly as his is humous? Gather ye slopjaw while you may, for you two are as uncaringly, unsparingly lustful as any swine that fuck, shit and eat in the same wallow.

Missive to the Missing One

Will you say to me
When I'm gone,
"Your face is faded
But lingers on . . . ?"
-- Iron and Wine

Sometimes sorrow fills me, completely, achingly, and I think about our life; about how there was no petition plaintive enough to penetrate your icy defenses; about how tears keep at bay for years now find easy egress, thanks to you; about how you believed that chasing the weft of legislated hedonism, masquerading as "self-realization," was preferable to the bottomless tun of love I poured upon you, consecrating you to me as the one who would see me to the grave, to dust.

My mind, you see, is of a particular kind when it comes to memory; it is steeped in a fixative which will not allow your image to fade -- ever. This is my portion, my burden, my punishment: to have you come to me at odd hours, throwing me out of rest and into darkling grief, silent and alone, the hot streams upon my cheeks reminding me of your comforting warmth as you breathed reposeful, somnolent breath next to me softly and rhythmically -- a lullaby to a haunted mind.

And now we will die at the termini of divergent avenues, you and I. I had but one dream: to feel your lips against mine as I went to my quietus. A dream that is to remain unrealized, though you will attend my death as an image of the dearly departed for the dearly departing, an image of a face that fades only as the flame of my mind is smothered, and Nothingness claims me.