FREUD

Most.

IN MY LATE TWENTIES

...There are so many interesting guys in Bushwick these days. I guess I'm just worried I won't be able to experience them all. All those interesting guys in Bushwick-town. Because it's hard to pick which one yer gonna take behind an abandoned paper factory and shoot in the back of the head. Sometimes they die and sometimes they don't, and you have to go around with them, carrying them in your arms everywhere that you go; and you have to wipe up their spittle and show them pictures of themselves from when they were young and in uniform, playing baseball and the like, and they cry. But then it's October again, and you have pumpkins to carve or your own needs to attend to, and you take them on a long walk along a steep hillside, step up to the edge and release, forgetting that mass dropped in air has a tendency to sink. And at the funeral you're not stirred to speak because you're shaken...not stirred, to speak, so to speak, so, to speak you reach down deep inside yourself and you do it for the people, and, if it's a Catholic service, you flirt with the young priest afterward because you're feeling despicable, and bored. And you recently got a new tattoo and you want him to see it. And you tell your mother all about it in a moment around the kitchen table that seemed to cry out for honesty and a truce, yet she pivots and concludes that you're invidiously confused; but you tell your best friend about it while she's driving you to CVS for sugar-free gum and tampons and she totally gets you. She says that she'd never do it because she has an aversion to spittle but that she totally gets you. And then you find a testicle lodged within your labia and you realize, all the sudden, that you are para-sexual, that you were uncleanly divided at birth and you are un-kosher, halal-less, impure; that your body is not a temple but rather temperamental. And extemporaneous. And so you read the Old Testament again because you're sure that all strange mythologies are buried within it, that at its root it is a book about oddities and uncertainties and belonging, and then you dip into the New Testament where you find that the biggest weirdo, the most inconsistent mover-and-shaker of them all is the Apostle Paul, who cannot seem to get a grip on his vast intelligence, surrounded as he is by simpletons, men whose only injunction is to poison the mutton of improper believers, of heretics, whereas Paul is just trying to throw one very large block-party, and, while he is strenuously concerned with etiquette and propriety, his most pressing effort is in seeing that the invitation gets out to everyone. ...Pity and fear are the tragic emotions, supposedly. But for a time, in human history, those two words were translated from the Greek of Aristotle as "compassion" and "horror." When I look at your face, lover, I do not feel pity but compassion. When I smell the scent coming from your steaming, organic body, I do not feel fear but horror. And meta-physics is called "meta-physics" because it came after the physics section in Aristotle's papers, but he didn't give a name to it so some monk or other called it "meta-physics," which means "after physics," but I mean, the word seems like so much more: the word seems like a reason. ...Why do we die? I want to, very much, to die—whenever I'm not either drinking or dancing I feel like killing myself—but I'm not sure if that's my final answer. "Death." Do you have regrets in the grave? Do you wish that you were less modest, and that you sprung for a luxury casket instead of this plainspoken pine one? Or do you wish that you were cremated, and now you are scattering, scattering away, wayward and fitful as dust, as dust and dust and daffodil dust? Or does it all go blank in a ridiculous instant and you're gone without thanking anyone?