You Were Beautiful; Yet So Many Other Things Were As Well.

I was born and this was a fact that I never wanted to be known.

I have spent the better part of my existence trying to sweep the evidence of my being under the carpet. This would somehow provide for me a life that was mine, genuinely and independent of the historic fate of the punctually supplicant and the indecisive.

Can you imagine what it was like to be one of them, to breathe heavy like them, to talk with the complex emptiness like them, to live life only to protect the right of denying inevitability.

I knew from a very early age that if there were ever any possibility of escaping the collective fate of this cabal of moralists I would necessarily be denying the inevitable as well.


I left numerous times, and without ever returning home, I would escape again; always fleeing that lilting, minacious, thread. These are what have come to be known as my hidden years.

As the quote goes, “Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.”
Perhaps these are still the hidden years.

While holding this ignominious pose I have seen and I have learned and I am beginning to think there is no escaping history. My attempts to remain obscure have not served me well.

And how are your teeth today?
Can you afford to fix them?
How high is your rent?

The people with beautiful teeth are not on the streets. They are seen everywhere. The neither hide nor obfuscate themselves. Nothing is hidden, and their inevitability is halted, paused in the hectic circling of cosmetic jubilance…circling like vultures.

Can we really trust shellaced hair-dos; public-square, heavily coded, slickslime vernacular; or those gleaming cosmetic veneers to represent us? What are the clandestine proposals that they have in store for us?

Q: What will we do about this dilemma?
A: Not a god damn thing.

Do we ever?

Isn't the very nature of the veneer to hide the rotted truth? Are we so arrogant as to challenge Nature?

There are commercials promising us the ease to which we can give them our gold. There are programs on throughout the night teaching us how to become wealthy by picking the remaining meat off the bones of the foreclosed; the bones of our neighbors and friends.

I have learned that this culture is not the stuff of civics classes. Do you know what the message of Western Civilization is? It is that we are alone.

The irony of being collectively alone, but that we are willing to change everything about ourselves, willing to consume anything presented to us in the hopes of abating that alienation, if only for a instance.
Am I alone tonight?

I don't think so. Blanchot said that this proposition is not possible.

Am I the only one with bleeding gums tonight?
Am I the only one a hangnail? Am I the only one with greasy skin? Am I alone in my ripe odor? It is only me that feels offended by my own self?
No, in these I am not alone.

Is it merely these aspects of misery and discomfort the manner in which we share our experience of being with others?