I Would Never Claim to be a Sociopath

When I was younger, I wanted friends. I watched the ones who had friends and adapted their traits until we laughed the same way. I heard Kyle, one of the boys who honed girlfriends, even in sixth grade, talk about how well he could rock the baby in the cradle and I put a Yo-Yo on my Christmas list. Unfortunately, I had the same level of skill at implementing new trends as Wal-Mart does and by the time my father taught me Walking the Dog, the children with friends had moved on to Pokémon trading cards.

Around the same time, I attended a church service where my parents listened attentively to a single mother shakily hold the wireless microphone (new technology, because god gives in mysterious ways) and proclaim the demonic history of those cartoons. “I found my son’s deck of cards and we sat in front of the fire while I threw them in, one by one. We saw horned faces rise in the flames. You see, the demons were leaving.” Luckily, for me, I was behind the trend and my parents were too behind on rent to present anything other than a dollar store Yo-Yo for Christmas. No demon faces in the flames for me.

I kept on with this drift of adaptation because my parents stifled my interests to fit within what they could pull from their box of Christian sensibility. Once, at a Disney store in the mall, I went through every pile of plush toys available and picked out witches, anti-heroes, and minions. My arms as full as a homeless man moving everything he owned into another alley, I approached my father and asked if I could have them all. He said, “Why are you drawn to the evil ones?” That was the first time I saw a mole grow on my soul of what I would eventually become.

Still, this trend takes place in modern day, as we all find ourselves adapting towards the swelling debt that creates adult versions of ourselves. Last weekend, a woman drank an entire box of wine, gripped and wept into my shirt. She begged me to love her and I backed away to smoke a cigarette while she said, “Please stay. It’s nice when someone is nice to you."
            I know the colors that make up love and how often the hue changes. I know that the lone wolf inside us will never admit just how lonely it is. I know that everything I want now will eventually change and then that will change and my emotions will continue to remind me of the metamorphic rocks I learned about in grade school that become completely separate beings over time. We are not coal being pressed into diamonds. We are diamonds being dulled by the crush of the mundane. These days, I see the demons in me and still wonder where that single mother thinks enflamed faces ran off to.

It Would Spit at Hurricanes

            It’s funny to think what becomes of a job. At first, the backroom looks like a dream you had when you were twelve and only half remember. Give it two months and you’ll dread seeing it because you know it means you’re worth 8 fucking dollars an hour to some shithead who’s driving around a new V8 whatever. Sometimes, the old CPUs get thrown out and you take them shooting with you. On the drive to the desert, you talk to the motherboards to keep them calm. You let them know that their processor children will be just fine, that everyone is going to make it in the end. Happy endings are a perfect pattern.
            All jobs are the same. It’s new, maybe even exciting, if you like learning new information, but eventually, there is nothing new to learn or, if there is, you don’t give a shit to learn it because it’s all under the umbrella of the Platonic computer knowledge. Eventually, you realize that everything is under that umbrella. All knowledge is a collection of trinkets on some overweight, decaying, feces-smelling mother’s shelf. She tells herself she keeps them around as conversation pieces, but who the fuck is ever going to visit her house? Her children don’t visit and she hasn’t had a lover in six years. She may as well not exist and those trinkets may as well be melted down and poured over her head, scalding her gray scalp.

            So, you wake up. Say, “I matter,” into the mirror. You post something on the Internet to be heard because your opinion matters because you are unique. You are the cracked Liberty Bell. You are the bed sheets that have period blood stained into them forever. You can show your scars to the world and they’ll notice. You’ll be revered. But you’re still worth 8 fucking dollars an hour the minute you clock in and this is defeating. Even if you made more than $13,000 in a year, you’d still have the same stress. It would just take on new forms. Instead of rent, you’re worrying about the dog that was turned inside out last night on the reservation. You’re concerned with not being able to shoot free-throws still. You want someone who actually loves you, who will want to listen to your bullshit for the rest of their life.
            The trick to relationships is not having them. Or at least keeping them vague. Hold off on communication for various lengths of time. Don’t just talk about your day, if you have to talk at all. I hear that the mystery is what entrances people. The newness. Be new or don’t be at all. It doesn’t matter to me. It doesn’t matter at all. Keep shoveling the ground where all your rent money will go. Get a better job. Get a kinkier lover. Find someone who doesn’t do anything with their day other than smoke pot so you can discuss ideas instead of people. Give up more frequently. Feel the meaninglessness of your life in the back of your eyes when you wake up hungover after buying some young girl’s drinks in false hopes of being between another person’s thighs. This is the key to life. Unbuckle your seatbelt every time you drive and throw your cell phone out the window the next time you’re driving on the 101.

Satan is my Lucky Number

            I see your success and want to kill everyone who knows you. I know it isn’t real, but on the Internet, success is always real and that’s all anyone sees of you. I saw my reflection and suddenly realized why you did what you did. I looked like I wanted to put my head through a window and I still do. Every time I think of how I fucked up, I catch another view of how you will always be a tapeworm in my heart, how, when I am fucking other women to attempt a compensation for your absence, I will realize emphatically, like being held under water during P.E. in elementary school, that, for the remainder of my span as a human, you will eat any chance I had at being happy with anyone but you. You will be at my table for all of my existence because of one fucking night when we talked about serial killers and you put the camouflage leggings wrapping your skin over my waist while we slept in blood and glass on your bedsheets, shot through with cigarette burns. Concerning the contingency of things, Spinoza was completely correct.

            A man I know fairly well told me that the women I will and have loved will be rings within a tree trunk. We discussed that, no matter how much someone tries to paint over or rub out the dark edges of those eternal circles, they will permanently endure all time and faked hatred and heads through windows. You are the first circle in my trunk and when everyone sees me, years deeper in existence, with a woman in her thirties, they will imagine her to be this worked-for outer ring, a halo of my soul, they will think they know that I now know what love is because I am older. But wisdom is a bruise, not a band-aid. Wisdom is knowing when to guillotine one’s senses, in hopes that new ones grow in its place, like a Hydra, or a lizard tail of understanding. But mostly, wisdom is a callus over the soft spots of our baby skull hearts that will never blister and fall off in the heel a sock.