October 23, 2010 - Breakfast

So the big lesson here on this website is supposed to be humility. This is supposed to be my autodidact's master-class in monastic obedience. But what has emerged is that it's all ape stuff.

That thing, the seeing-it-all-as-ape-stuff thing, used to be a phase, and a predictable one, where, when I was depressed, I'd get into seeing fellow humans in their monkeyness. The distance between me and all other folk would increase and I'd just see hooting, rutting gorilla-creatures, mouths open to shout, or stuffed with animal meats, or otherwise foraging through the streets. Silverbacking. And my paranoia would increase, and my sense of distrust and basic fear. I would hunch over as I walked to the train, peeking to the sides. This is how the world looks to me when I'm like this:

It would last for a few weeks, and then one day things would change up and I would see humans less as animals but again as just folks. Not potential killers. I no longer worried that they wanted to kill me and slowly eat my fatty brains, so rich in essential vitamins and anxiety-producing hormones. I felt less need to mark my own territory, and shied less from strangers. I'd start sitting up straight instead of hunching. But now, for months, ape stuff is all I see. Even when I'm happy. It's the world.

Because it is the world. Even when I'm working; even when I'm writing. Something about Project Littlesocks--this urgent need to use all of science in order to reproduce. Something about my need for starches--the way I have to collaborate with machines in order to get some semblance of my better self in order, and the keen analysis of everything that passes through my body. Something about the cats, the way they interact with us; we might as well be gorillas as far as they're considered, when we pick them up and squeeze them. They can't see the consciousness, only the big hands swooping down to poke a belly.

I just can't get away from primates, external or internal. And their terrible aging, their tumors and tumescences. That endless rot. No wonder thin people live in the suburbs and have large smooth refrigerators that are cool to the touch, with a pocket in the chrome that dispenses icewater with the press of a plastic lever shaped like a raccoon baculum. You need that stuff if you're going to avoid feeling like a monkey.

So I began to despair, a week or two ago, because I couldn't make people look like people. We had a party and as I introduced strangers, as if to make them friends, I saw odd overlaps of territories, competing desires. Any one of these people pressed into an extreme circumstance could, it is possible, kill and eat me. I also found myself thinking more frequently of Nazis, looking at home movies tourists made of Hitler rallies, now scanned in and posted to YouTube. If it's all ape-stuff then we are so rightly fucked. The global warming, nuclear weapons, holocausts, and so forth. The whole world's ready at any moment to go Tea Party. It's got its signs out.

As I write this I'm imagining presenting it to a room of strangers, doing a reading. All the territories inherent in that presentation. Why? Am I seeking their approval? Wishing to be desired and understood? Hoping to implant into them some idea that I am powerful and dominant? And do they wonder why they are not standing where I am, posed in a cheap thrift-store jacket? Could they not do better? Yes to all of the above. Certainly you could do better. But I'm at bat right now. This is a room of apes after all, supposedly here for some kind of enlightened moment but if you peel it away isn't everyone here to advance their own agenda? To find the shred of power or control that will allow them to feel mastery of their world?

Then, after all of those thoughts, a miracle: I crammed onto a terrible, crowded F-train, into a a mass of hot flesh, bodies imposed upon other bodies. Strangers. Proximity alarms going off in my nervous brain. A group of pretty girls and an old man pressed straight into my skin as we bump slowly through the tunnels under the East river. Salt on salt. I was keenly aware of my own heat and sweat, the fatness somewhat but not fully returned radiating outwards, the mutual links of horror of the tightly compressed, and a panic at not being able to move my arms. And then a beat.

And another beat.

And we all... relax into it, all together now. No one is happy but it will be over soon. This is the price of living here, in a place of lesser ecological damage and mixed cultural ferment. But this thing should be a fucking bloodbath. This should be sharp elbows and knives out. This should be a Ballardian/Thom Yorke slow-motion dissonant-chord nightmare of dripping sweat and close-up shots of long-nosed crones and old drooling men. Someone should be in silhouette, bringing down a mace onto a shrieking baby's skull, the silhouettes made by the light of burning corpses. Black teens should be strangling white teens with garottes made from the intestines of Latino teans as priests ejaculate into the mink hats of ultra-Orthodox Jews, and a Ricky Nelson song ("A Teenage Idol") should play in the background to enhance the ironic, dissonant nihilism of the scene. And yet for the most part the monkeys just want to do right and follow the (absent, implied) leader. People are laughing and rolling their eyes. No one is horrified that they must touch me.

Something could set us off, of course. Someone could run through holding a gun. Someone could say something racist. Someone could squeeze the breast of someone else's girlfriend. Still it remains, the thing about humans, the differentiating factor, is that they can conceive of something better and then decide (despite the absolute hunger and the immense pressure that their ape-brain puts upon them to do what is gratifying in the moment) actually do the better thing. They have a sense not only of consequences but of politeness. Not enough, obviously, but enough to fill up the city, enough to get us to our destination, to a better place than this cattle car.

The better thing in this case being the open train doors, and walking up the stairs or gliding down the escalators, stopping at the bodega for a pack of smokes or a beer, opening the door to whatever is there. For the most part no one kills you or takes your stuff. Not always, but for the most part.

I continue to see people as hooting apes. And myself as well, all my various hungers which seem, to me, so urgent, so immediate, so incredibly important that it's hard to imagine any circumstance in which I should allow another person precedence. An ape in the mirror. But of course I do let people push up against me on the train. Which seems to be part of a parcel with eating less, with moderating my inputs, not swallowing anxiety and fear with a Pop-Tarts chaser. So another lesson in humility: Humility before the machine of culture as well as the ape that makes it.

Weight: 311.5 lbs