Unease as an operating system

*

*

Look, generally I'll say that I love the human condition. In its specifics, it can be my undoing. All that loving going on. That self-sacrifice. That beautiful longing, that refusal to be cheapened, the willingness to lay down one's one and only life for another. There are books filled with that kind of love, that kind of strength and beauty and willfulness that sends the very devil packing in shame.

We are a beautiful creature.

*

But we testify against our mothers. We steal from our children's piggybanks in the dark of night. We lie to make ourselves seem better than we are. We prevaricate. We betray.

*

I guess we need all of it. 

*

I have never been hospitalized or made to take a medicine to make my brain work better, but there's more than a handful of folks would say I'm pretty crazy. Esp. the better they know me. But I am enamored of the wheezy contraption in all of it's particulars. I love to stand over a dead body. Its part of me love's a murder scene, a terrible car wreck, a weeping woman. A pool of blood and drag marks and a hammer under the floorboards.

I kept a little photo-cube paperweight on my desk of a murder victim got hammered to death until some other victim came in and was talking to me and just about fainted. 

I had to put it away after that.

*

But a big part of me is a pretty sick fuck.

There's no getting around that.

*

I remember my first autopsy. In the academy. There were kids puking left and right, passing out. The M.E. had to push me back a couple of times. I grabbed the brain and was twisting it around, trying to line up the basal skull fracture with the lacerated artery that caused his death.

I got a taste for death.

*

Don't get me wrong, I don't like it. I don't relish it. I just want to figger it out. 

The mechanisms are various and I would know them all.

*

I wrestle with my demons just like you do.

*