crises of faith

 

prologue

 

It’s one of those days when I wake up at 6 in the morning, look in the mirror and say, “Lord, help me,” before I realize it’s Sunday and I don’t even have to go to work. So I stare at my unshaven face and think, well, Christ, since I hate shaving so much, I oughta just grow a damn beard, but I reconsider once I see all those tiny gray hairs jutting out like monkey grass from my flabby, antiquated jaw.

 

After taking a foaming vanilla honey bath and jerking off to the Czechoslovakian hermaphrodite next door (because sometimes I just can’t help myself), I flop back into bed like a heart-broken penguin unable to find its mate after traveling three months across a frozen landscape and worry that I might be plateauing. Not only because I’m jerking off to Czechoslovakian hermaphrodites, but because in between sips of a dirty but sexy martini the other night at a club I only hang out at when I’m rolling like that, I actually admitted to a friend with only occasional benefits that I often feel like I’m “a ghostly form swaying beneath the gray twilight.”

 

That I even uttered such an emotionally disturbed-fourteen-year-old girl-writing-in-her-diary phrase while I was stone-cold sober is worrisome enough. That I said it while wearing a c**k ring around my tongue just proves what a saggy-breasted, toe-sucking communist pleb I really am.

 

Leave it to my friend with the chip on her shoulder the size of Camille Paglia’s a*s to put it all in perspective for me, though: “Does it not seem rather a waste of valuable energy to invent so many falsehoods?”

 

And she’s absolutely right.

 

This reminds me of the time she had to take a shame shower immediately after I accidentally abused her.

 

So much for falsehoods.

 

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

 

As I enter a less-than-ducky REM sleep (face-down in a pillow that has all the support of a twenty-year-old bed-sheet), I have that ridiculous reoccurring dream of being baptized in a puddle of Zima by a ninety-year-old defrocked priest with goiters and breath that smells like the back room of a gay bar in Budapest. On the Pest side, of course.

 

Mercifully, I’m awakened by the bone-splintering shrieks of the kid next door whose mother is probably breaking down the tragedies of life to him by making him watch a slide show of my love life on his Fisher-Price View-Master.

 

“Now, you see, Timmy, this happens to a man once he has achieved the emotional maturity of a parasitic protozoa.”

 

After staring at the water stain on the ceiling, which looks like an abstract painting by an autistic monkey, I go a few rounds with my psyche until my psyche delivers a left that puts me down and in deep trouble. However, I stay on my feet despite the barrage of the right uppercuts on my cerebrum. But I land a monster right cross and a furious flurry of one-two combinations and counterpunches, and my psyche begins to show the effects of my hard punching. After 2 more grueling rounds, I decide to concede defeat and resign myself to my congenital sadness rather than risk developing dementia from all those blows to the mind. The tragedy of my truth as I know it to be or not to be usually causes me to detach and emotionally escape by ingesting copious amounts of psychotropic substances. I’m getting way too old for those short, familiar trips. So, keeping my eyes off the clock, I drift off to sleep again, hoping that my memory foam pillow that I suddenly remember is underneath my bed will allow me to forget about the last half hour of my life.

 

 

 

epilogue

 

I grew up thinking the hero suffers, travels a path of self-discovery, learns a few lessons, finds redemption, and gets the girl.

 

However, I’ve come to a realization. I’ve realized that the very same atoms that are in you and me are the same atoms that are in all the rest of the universe, and those atoms came from the middle of one star… so that’s really us up there…sort of puts a whole new perspective on this ego thing. What psychologists refer to as our ego. We spend our entire lives trying to convince ourselves that we’re something. That we alone have this unique and transcendent value above all other creatures. God created our souls from nothing, and we’ve been blessed with the spark of divine nature, which guarantees us, alone, among all creatures, a chance for an endless life. In reality, we just might be a big fat zero. But who the hell wants to accept that? That’s why we have an ego, to remind ourselves that we’re not nothing.

 

But I kind of like the idea that we’re nothing. It comforts me. Takes the pressure off of me to be too successful.