Struggling for second place

“I have found God, and he is insufficient.” -Henry Miller

Henry, I feel the same way. Earth is just a giant waiting room and I’d feel better as a ball of energy than a meatsack human being. This body is nothing but trouble, a festering cesspool for the ego to roll around in.

The mind is a crumpled paper airplane in a hurricane, but the ego thinks it’s a fighter jet.  The capacity for self-delusion is bottomless.  The mind is its own worst enemy; why it throws fear at itself I understand, it’s a survival mechanism. But why does the mind attack itself with doubt?

Life was brutal for the caveman but far simpler: at any given moment he was either alive and afraid or unaware and eaten. Attempts at poetry or deep thought were ended by saber-toothed tigers.  Now there’s nothing to stop bad poetry.

Sorry God, but I’m ready to go back. I won’t learn anything else here, life is all reruns now. I’m too lazy to meditate, I’d rather sleep.

I’m having trouble remembering why I didn’t commit to suicide when I was an atheist.  If it was all meaningless, why didn’t I end it?  The Satanist proclaims pleasure the greatest virtue.  I couldn’t extract pleasure out of anything except being an observer and surfing over others’ hypocrisy.  Obviously I survived.  But lived?

I was alone then, before then, and now.

My pal Hal swears if he won the lottery he’d build an underground house and never leave it.  Everything would be ordered and brought to his door.  I don’t blame him.  “Hell is other people,” is the greatest line ever written.  Everyone else with a pen or keyboard only struggles for second place while the moon shits cold fire and the women sleep with other men.

Empty spaces fill me up with rage

Hell is other people; never is this more true than at the gym. If there isn’t a flexing jerkoff around, flitting from bench to machine to mirror like a hummingbird on roids, it’s one of the 30 or so idiots that work there, I don’t know how they afford so many employee/trainers.

The other evening a hot girl and I arrived at the same time and shared the same area of the expansive gym floor. (Hotties to me are nothing but commodities to be afforded later in life. Other than ass they have nothing else I need or want except their perpetual absence). Like the other 12 or so hotties that attend the gym, “Tits” either worked there or arrived joined at the hip with some juicehead who had yet to make his appearance.

I got no vibe from her but she was making quite the spectacle of herself, alternating between doing light weight sets then picking up a fucking jump rope. Now jumping rope is a great way to make your heart explode if you don’t have a shotgun, but whipping it around a la Rocky Balboa takes up a lot of space. Why this idiot had to do this in the free weight area…I guess it was just convenient, plus it was just the two of us.

Until her fine young man joined the fray.

When “Crewcut” touched the small of her back in greeting I imagined strangling them both with the jump rope. I’d even have a choice of which rope to use: that’s right, Crewcut brought his own rope and was doing the same irritating routine as Tits: lift, rope, lift, rope. I didn’t like having to walk around the huge whipping spheres of motion they created. They only jumped rope at the same time. How cute!

One of my strategies to reduce contact with the jerks is to select a bench far up the row of free weights lining the mirrored wall. Not many dudes casually pick up any dumbbells over 100. However, Crewcut found a reason to saunter down to my end and pick up the 85s. He then stood in place in front of the rack, dumbbell in each hand, doing a faggoty shoulder-shrug. In doing so he partially blocked my magnificent view of myself in the mirror-wall, where I practiced throwing that same look that Eddie Murphy gives the camera in Trading Places after the “BLT” line. You know the one: the director had Murphy do over 30 takes to get that look just right. It paid off, and I was still practicing mine when Crewcut finally went back to his jump-rope,-baby-dumbbell-titties-spandex-maiden.

Was he fucking with me by coming over to where I was? Trying to be Alpha? The part of me that wanted to kick the shit out of him thought so. Otherwise, to hell with him.

What prompted me to even comment on these two loveturds is that they quit the free weight area at almost the exact same time I did. When I came out of the locker room I found them shooting hoops in the glass fishtank half-court. I felt the urge to kill them both, always do when the timing of life is off. You mean, these two assholes finished their routine at the same time I did, even though Crewcut arrived 10 minutes later than Tits, and now where all 3 of us had been in each others’ way for over 35 minutes there was NO ONE occupying the area?

I felt the same ridiculous paranoid rage I do when waiting in line for something involving a long counter of multiple tellers or clerks and two of them open up at the same time. Not only does this make me mad that I gain no advantage from being one place ahead of the doof behind me, it just seems unlikely that two different people with two different situations ahead of me would finish in perfect synchronization.

The moral of the story is what it will always be on this planet: Hell is other people. If I’m ever a floating soul in front of a judging God or Jesus or 3 Stooges, I’ll tell them the exact same thing, it’s the finest sentence ever written: Hell is other people. I never bothered to make it a quoticle. This sentiment should shine through in all the work I do.