PENGUIN CLASSIC INTRODUCTIONS

PENGUIN CLASSIC INTRODUCTIONS

Physical objekts, mental objekts, digital objekts. Yawn. Rock paper scissors…

I was like a piece of clay that people left impressions of their keys in, discarding when they moved away and the keys became no longer useful to themselves, but the relationships changed me against my say-so, I had absorbed their personality type, their trait. For keeps. There’s an extended metaphor here that I don’t care to investigate. If there’s any piece of the novel-in-progress that should be retained, it’s that: I’m like a moon that had kept the craters of every other celestial body that has made impact.

The persona isn’t real. Or, if it is real, it comes from a hologram so deep inside that it can’t be seen from any other angle save fiction. Relax into that.

I have dreams of groups of people, focus groups, bands of traveling partners, all unable to handle my sexual turbulence. I’m the chaotic unhappy member of the collective en route. Bisexual id dreams, nightmares really. Freud, light my lantern show every night.

Waking up from deep slumber to check and see if all digital objekts are still in place, checking my phone’s social media and email with a compulsion as insecure as the tot feeling around to see if the alphabet blocks and dolls are still in their box where they were left when he went to sleep, the toys his mom gave him. I also check for new digital objekts by looking to see if anyone added to their pile, the blue dragon-dot of notifications.

A grommet of scab on the end of my nose — a physical objekt, of the type that heals slower as I get older. Healing into a deformity. Enough body horror, it’s time to switch to body awe.

Every girl’s voice singing on the radio sounds like the voice of the valley girl who died of fentanyl in 2022 was it? California dreaming. I need an Eris-permit to think about her, hear her voice, see her among a thicket of mental objekts still unknown because I never knew her.

I look at pictures of you online, posing with a drink next to one of your friends. The doubling of expressions make them cooler, more vicious in their beauty. Two faced and Vacant. I blame you for a look the same way I hold you responsible for your body’s clear imperfections, as if your natural appearance were some decisive action of yours. This is the physical side.

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It’s all non-fiction, of course. I dont care to hear the objections to fiction, in either direction. If I thought it, it’s non-fictional in the sense that it’s an event that truly happened in my head.

I had lunch with Mathias the other day, at Social Eats. We talked a lot about God, or I should say, it was mainly me talking while he made facial expressions. I told him the thing about how I didn’t want to go to church unless it was certain I would be moved to tears. “A high bar,” he said. We talked about CS Lewis, how I had listened to a book on tape of The Screwtape Letters when I used to clean churches. I’d be in the empty sanctuary at the First Presbyterian in Delhi, vacuuming between the pews, spraying lemon-scented whatever it’s called on the wood chairs, the throne where the pastor sits during the service when he or she is not speaking, listening to this demon telling his junior partner how the real triumph of evil is not to catch the horrible sinner — the dissolute drug abuser collapsed on a couch next to a couple diseased prostitutes — but to capture the soul of the moderately devout churchgoer with his middle-class anxieties. That’s the challenge.

I told Mathias the story about how when I was going to Hannaford in Oneonta once, I saw a beggar standing by the egress looking for handouts. I’d been going in to get medications at the pharmacy. I was hungry. I got from the hot bar a bunch of chicken wings, onion rings, I got two pistachio muffins, some bottles of water. I paid and put a $5 bill on top of the food. Then when I drove out of the parking lot I put the bag out the window. The beggar was a middle aged grizzled-looking big guy with headphones on. No sign, just him standing by the exit of the parking lot. I slowed down and handed him the paper bag and he said, “God bless you.” I worried about what the car behind me might have been thinking; it was a busy intersection. So I sped away without saying anything to the beggar.

I drove home with my medications. I’ll cut to the chase: I proceeded to have some of the worst suicidal ideation I’ve had since I’ve been on my psych meds. Something about the act of charity made me feel like I wanted to kill myself. I can’t explain it. I hardly ever give charity. There’s no clear opportunity to do it in my life as I walk around and do my errands and what have you. I know there’s places to give online, amongst the digital objekts. I’m talking physically handing a hungry person food. It made me feel like I wanted to end my life. It was very emotional.

I told Mathias this at lunch and he laughed, but not as a particularly humorous reaction. I think it was discomfort. It was a pained laugh. I got the impression that within that laugh there was a kernel of something wherein he was trying to leave the madness of reactions such as mine behind. The whole lunch was sort of like that: me pleading for spiritual advice from someone with a newfound ability to see clearly. And that person tries to say what they can to help but there is a slight yet unmistakable impression of shrugging you off to perhaps save themselves.

I could be and probably am non-fictionally wrong about this. I’m often full of wrong ideas about people and things. It’s my unnavigable field of mental objekts. It’s like an ocean where you can’t get your footing or sense of direction because the waves keep coming, and it’s deep. I sometimes tell myself I write because I am trying to measure the distance between myself and what I am thinking. I don’t know what to say next except maybe that this act of writing creates ripples in all three fields — physical, mental, digital — of objekts cluttered around me.