Preface
by Precipitate8
“So…what do you think?”
What did I think? The process was somewhere in the middle of: Friend’s daughter–only a baby but for now she was a three foot teenager with pubic hair. Her mother wanted to talk to the girls, so the little lass stayed with me all day and eventually we took a nap. Just us in a small bed and one thick off-white cotton sheet. Both on our sides, her facing my back…it seemed like she was trying to comfort me by relating the joys of family picnics but what came out were prophecies of degeneration–personal corruptions–all gentle, all sweet. I think I could give her my death, but I could not give her my life.
Took pictures of syringes in shot glasses. I’m gonna start injecting the liquor. There’s serious thought in this–no denaturation from stomach acid. No bad kharma and just as much brain damage.
They’re all in movements, salvation junkies, the Hitlers of feminism, animal rights, restrictive lumber, and Styrofoam recycling. I don’t know why that attracts me–save the idiots and educate the miscreants. At times, mostly when they realize that I’m just along for the ride, they fall completely out of love and very pointedly–searing needle stokers–demand that I acknowledge the Fundamentality of my Uselessness, slap my wrist, “you fraud.” I’m too lazy to lie. Called me an infiltrator. If you’re not with us you’re against us. Well, I am sleeping in your bed.
“I think…I like it.”
Rollins College
I.
Memories of my collegiate years are spotty at best. I account for this lack of nostalgia for two main reasons: dilatin and the corruption of academic endeavor. Upon arriving at Rollins College I promptly developed an idiopathic seizure disorder for which the doctors could find no particular cause and no particular cure. So they put me on a strict regiment of dilatin to decrease the electrical activity in my brain. There are some mild side effects associated with this drug, for instance, it turned me into a fucking zombie.
My mind was a haze. I wasn’t high or disoriented, I just didn’t give a shit about anything. Couldn’t motivate myself to study or play or talk or even have sex…eighty five years had passed over my youthful body and I would never fully recover. The old man still lives in my head, pained and sluggish, disconnected from the world. And the funny thing is, I was still having fits of convulsions.
Well, didn’t really matter much. Modern academia is a sham anyway. No longer is the liberal arts college a refuge for the thinkers, the trouble makers, the intellectually elite. College is where you go if you don’t want to get a job.
So I spent three years in this state, only to recapture a semblance of my former self in the fourth after ditching the medication. The isolation had changed me…the fetid atmosphere had changed me. Vague apathetic recollections are the only way I can begin…
II.
Dorm life is a stained image. A fairly minimal security prison fully equipped with babysitters and programmed stool pigeons. The Resident Assistant is that vile component geared to become your friend and then fink on you the minute you’ve broken a house code. They set up activities to promote good wholesome social interaction between living constituents; but I wasn’t falling for it. I didn’t intend on making waves, but this time they’d forced my hand…
The “Tell us about yourself” bulletin board:
Happiness is dead. Just another confabulation of the ignorant (like god, freedom, morality) to help them survive this existence. I can’t decide whether I want to be stupid or not. The truth is sometimes more comforting though. The conceptual illusions can be somewhat “fair weathered” as knowledge is often difficult to ignore; but the truth is there, painful and pleasurable and numbed to dissention, pervasive in the now.
Reality has left me somewhat motivationally impotent. I live here because I have no money and no place to go that would be more amusing. Of course, I am influenced by persons of notoriety that impress me, and that gives me a little direction. For better or for worse, all of my chosen role models are degenerative assholes; hence, I want to shoot my wife in the head despite the fact that I am a homosexual. As well, I already own a pair of black converse sneakers: all I need now is a kiss from Dave Grohl and a shotgun.
You asked–
Occupant of room 109
Fuck’em…they should’a known better.
III.
I finally had another seizure. It was one of those get two hours of sleep nights followed by a 13 hour sleep night. It’s happened that way before. I was putting my clothes on in the afternoon and sorta came to in the writing center on campus. Apparently (although I have no actual recollection) I had a seizure in my room, woke up and went walking around campus in a disoriented and topless state. A guy I know found me and brought me back to his room. He let me borrow a shirt and waited with me while campus safety opened my door (I had locked my self out). Some girl in the writing center is friend’s with Anne and called her up to tell her she thought I was having a bad trip. I was told I talked to quite a few people while incoherent and left some very strange impressions. It’s hard to be embarrassed when you don’t remember any of it.
Really, the only bad part about the whole thing is that I’ve retained some sort of residual psychosis chemicals. It’s hard to explain, but it’s like being nauseated; not in your stomach–in your brain.
Today was ash wednesday and all the catholics were sauntering about with their charcoal crucifixions. Eat my body, drink my blood, and smear my feces on your forehead. God has an immaculate sense of humor.
Been craving chemicals to give my boredom a place. It’s the kind of craving a flaccid penis has for ejaculation–all in the mind.
IV.
There is an eerie demeanor to all students that attend this particular institution. Some are just strikingly ignorant, while others…are more difficult to describe.
We were sailing on the small lake in the warm afternoon sun. The wind was light, and the boat was slow which made for a very gentile mood.
“Ya know Carrie?” Justin asked, nodding toward her boat while flicking the ashes off his cigarette and resting his hand back on his knee.
I told him that I didn’t know her, but indicated that I understood who he was talking about.
“Well, she’s good friends with my ex-girlfriend,” he paused to take a drag off his cigarette. It seemed difficult for him to talk any faster than the pace at which we drifted along.
“I was out with them and another friend of mine one night, gettin pretty tanked at O`riley’s,” again he sucked on the cigarette, “and by the time we were home, you could tell she an’ Tommy were gonna hook up.”
I looked over at Carrie again and saw her and her sailing partner struggling to control the boat from a gust of wind. The wind passed and their boat settled.
“Sounds cool, right? Well, the next day he told me about going back to his room, an’ things were going good until she took off her bra. Then shit got fucked up.”
He took one last drag and flicked the cigarette into the water.
“First of all, one of her tits is bigger than the other one, and then he said that her nipples covered half her breasts. Like aboriginal tits you see on those Africa specials. He told her to put her bra back on and kicked her out of the room.”
I just nodded in vague affirmation. He made one more comment, “She must have some kinda’ fucked up disease, or birth defect or somethin’.”
V.
There is no escape from the demented energy of this place. It streams through the mind without regard as to what you are trying to accomplish or whom you are attempting to placate. We often do our labwork alone; but not today. There’s a mild vibration in the lab. Put your hands flat on the long, black table. Feel it?
Been dissecting cats for a month now. Today we expose the heart. Usin’ shears to snap each rib in the cartilaginous area. Snap…snap….snap. Spreading the chest exposes a cavity with a real fatty, slimy tissue; must be the epicardium. Forceps, an pull it off, my god is it a bitch. Damn thing doesn’t wanna peel. Eventually I get it though.
Cat heart looks like a really big walnut. It’s amazing. Whole thing is solid muscle; hard muscle. Even in this decayed state you can sense it’s strength. Hard and relentless, a calculating entity.
I once saw an interview of an EMT who had given an open heart massage to save the life of a patient. She kept going on about how pumping this man’s heart and giving him life was the most spiritual experience she’d ever had. I couldn’t help thinking how that wasn’t it. In her face you could see something else. While she mimicked the procedure in the air with her hands, the thickening came out. She breathed heavy; the heart had throbbed in her hands, more powerful than any other force against her flesh. Shivering and massaging, she pumped the heart with a perverse passion. Her intimacy was no longer for the procedure or the patient; her rhythm was for the heart. Her perversion, was for the heart.
The vibration is strong now. My specimen is beginning to move, undulating with accelerating wavelengths. Non-abrasive–like gentle ocean waves lapping the shore, the torn cat flesh strobes. I loose time, and the waves subside.
Looking up, the rest of the students in the lab are gathered around a single specimen. Curious, I can just barely get a peek above the other’s inquisitive postures, apparently this specimen was pregnant. I catch sight just in time to see the instructor remove the uterine sheath to expose the tiny fetus. Some of the women begin cooing over the incidentally aborted kitten and I find things strange.
My specimen lies the Johne. The vibration is gone.
College has become a drone.
The undergraduate intended on a Biological Science major should have less restrictions of graded consequences so that they may pursue their whims and be creative within their field. Doctors are but the engineers of biology, not needing the artistic mindset of an originator of philosophy. What things add to creativity but all things of the environment and all things of an intellectual pursuit as in music, science fiction, intoxicated conversation, screaming lariats, trapped dogmas for dismemberment, the destruction of sexual inhibition and the abuse of technological advancements to name a mere few. We need a think tank not contrived–one with no objective for we all have our own agendas which will combine in their own mutilated (but enlightening) synthesis. The criteria for admission is retarded. Theorists are the risk takers and accidentalists…they either contrive the idea’s or stumble upon them…pursuance…objective…the lines have disappeared….
