The dead eyes of the red crustacean remain static, so impossibly so for its intact realism, its full body with moving jointed parts, on my plate. The buffet dish is revealing, splayed with the remnants of a culture used to over-consumption: there are still crumbs on the concave surface; my tongue has not grazed the surface to attract every last morsel of nutrients for my starved body. I am, all subconscious guilt aside, quite stuffed, toiling with the tail of the untouched, uneaten crustacean, willfully displaying its gravy crusted scarlet underbelly to Adam, who sits in exaggerated disgust across from me. He is a vegetarian for the most extended reasons. And I am his antithesis, devil’s advocate for fetish’s sake, my own theory that everything is done for some attempt at getting high, a nauseous pursuit for chemicals that induce pleasure, and the most intense pleasure is garnered from the most intense tension or restrain from that pleasure, then its surprise release. Ultimately, this tension and relief defense keeps me from the banality, the disappointment, the meaningless banter of living in a cultural life so removed from its roots as to render the entire system inextricably distorted and irrelevant. Thus, I am at my inter-dependently developed, abstract core inherently rebellous and skeptical of everything that induces meaning or pleasure. It is a vicious cycle, not too far related to the placement and the existence of the uneaten crestacean resting in postmortem upon my up-turned concave, this plate trough I daintly pick from in mock reverence for its violent production processes.
Over-analyzed, overdone, over stimulated always results in eventual boredom and depression in this redundant society, full of endless lines of buffets, Walmarts, shopping lists, and paper drawn pyramid structures of philosphies a hundred years old and still dying to live, still practicing an ingrained disgust for the poor foundation we all walk on. As in, Adam’s cringing of this creepy-real crustacean, his cower from all that it means to the point of asceticism and self-revulsion. I am not so idealistically empathetic anymore, I presume that this is all beautiful anyway, like the rot of the tree, the rust of my car door, the stink of the 2 week old garbage, the day after smell of sex in my bed. Someone was going to pay for the free consciousness of early American Manifest Destiny, and in accordance to the linear thought process of those who believe in Destiny we are the resultant children of a delayed experience … as such we rightly, humanly feel cheated and guilty all at once, for also having the default responsibility of being the future …
But past this, I am finding that Adam is beautiful, too, in all his hopeless hope, in all his thin shouldered, weightless glory, in all his desire to make his weight light as his bones as a bird feather as his stretched, taught skin as a farmer as organic wheat fields he wants to plant in the minds of those who can feed everyone … and multiplied by 6 billion (the estimated human population of the earth) this sounds sound … taken as is, it is melancholic self-destruction I wish I could fall back into … but cannot because I doubt (which means I’m scared) of everything, including my own perception and inefficacy and predictable fallability. I would fuck a war god just to prove a meaningless point of fucking it all.
He believes in fortunes of the subconscious fate, as in when you leave a place serving fortune cookies, you pick up the first cookie as quickly as possible, don’t think of it, don’t pretend to find the right one, just let it be … His was one of “grounded steadfastness and inherited wisdom,” which he clunge to in all its mass-produced, Chinese-mystique flare and his own dose of hopeless hope. Mine was finding peace of mind in an old friend, which Adam smiled a reaffirming grin of theoretical (which means generalized understanding of experience) satisfaction, and taped it confidently on the dash board of my oil-burning, gas-powered, indirect Iraqi civilian asssassin of a car. They call it a Cavalier, which reminds me of cowboys and horses and the old west, of exploited new frontiers and horribly mistaken ideologies. I have refused to take the fortune down even so, even after, and even before I become hopelessly in love with my memory of things I will never be able to grasp, not for lack of physical strength, but for displaced recognition of grasping meaning, the power of being, and the removed enlightenment of just existing. Of knowing someone who believes in everything and while you insist still in the face of loving fate to believe in nothing …