The Absolute State Of The World, by Adam Lehrer
Written during an insomniac night...
Every time I try to get off those pills, washing away the deadening abyss of sickness, I do so by introducing new pills. How many foreign agents can contaminate one body in one lifetime? Some make the skin grey, some make the skin glow. Some ease the pain, others once injected make you grow. An adult life is long, too long to bare with an untainted mind. The body is not a temple, it’s a sky scraper under perpetual construction. It needs more chemicals and solvents and tools for more floors, rigid forms abstract all the same. Each client has a different set of tastes and interests. Rape is a line always considered but never crossed. Murderers sleep easier in prison than do the perverts. I was a communist. I was a fascist. Never was I an anarchist. I realize now that there is no “ism” that tells the story, just people doing the same bullshit and inventing the same things over and over but updating them for a larger, ever more brainwashed population. It’s so boring to look into the future, and it’s too melancholic to reminisce upon the past. We’re always between those two polarities, the times move faster than the junkies whores and pimps that line Myrtle Ave and the Haight combined. Shamelessness is the law of the land. You’re not entitled to your secrets and they don’t even understand why you’d want any. Privacy is a demand too great. I remember what it felt like to be behind the curtains, unseen and free to masturbate or indulge in a fantasy dimension that belonged to no one else but me or to simply drift backwards and attempt a stillness. Enslaved now to a portal that magnetizes all the billions of consciousnesses of the universe into a single spectral super max, disintegrating the distinctions that once contributed to the evolution of a species. Everything is a well executed plan but nothing goes accordingly. How I felt when I got stuck underground on a stalled, uptown headed A- train coming down from two grams of coke and having to piss something fierce is how I feel now all the time. But at least when I got home from that train ride, the benzos still worked and I could sleep. They work no more. Thoughts circle, heart races, the mind absorbs but never contextualizes. Watching friends be interpellated over and over in contradictory directions, so many changes of belief that the soul remains locked in a state of infantile stasis. We are like the star man who can’t ascend but instead floats in the endless blackness looking for the light of the nearest star but they are all so far away. If punishment tames us but doesn’t improve us as men, what happens when we are never punished but endlessly validated? We’re tamed ever more, I’d wager, made into zombies frothing at the mouth crawling around in a fugue driven by an unnameable hunger that can’t be satiated because the craving is designed by those who need us to be unfulfilled and wanting more. More and more, we fall. Faster still, it’s exhilarating and thrilling until the exact moment you realize that the fall can’t be met by that climactic thud. The body is weightless but never does it feel the full force of the abuse perpetrated upon it. We’ll never know what “after the fall” would be like because the fall is endless, there is no ground to hit. I’m looking into the mirror to admire the detail, hardness and size of my muscular tissue, only so I don’t have to look contemptuously at the man inside all that meat. If the Greeks invented the concept of barbarousness, who invented the concept of cowardice? Would such a thing even have to be conceived? What would a dignified race of people look like? The Romans? The Feudal Japs? Fuck it. The state of humanity is no more real or solid than the state of my mind. Diagnosing either would be an unforgivable act of arrogance.
Illustration by Adam Lehrer