<\/p>\n
I wanted to be invisible. Out of nowhere, with, I swear, nothing in my
\nhistory to predict it, I’d done something people regard as sick and
\ndisgusting and I wanted to disappear.I should say that at first I wasn’t so sure what I’d done was all that
\nawful, and I certainly didn’t concur with the character judgment
\nimplicit in such a definition. It didn’t seem in my case to be fair. I
\nfelt this way because I’d always had an exceptionally inquisitive mind,
\na mind that, forever in search of the deepest truths, often compelled
\nme to challenge things (the assumption that boundary lines in nature
\nare fixed and inviolable for example) that others never questioned. And
\nthat was a good thing, right? What’s more\u2014and who would argue with
\nthis?\u2014when you call your dog “Maureen” you’re clearly asking for
\ntrouble. And not only that, hadn’t Larry Flynt confessed to the SERIAL
\nRAPING OF CHICKENS without suffering one iota of damage to his
\nreputation?<\/p>\n
But I stopped protesting pretty quickly. It was impossible for me to
\ndeflect for long the look on the face of Maureen’s owner (and my now
\nerstwhile girlfriend) when, on the evening in question, she came home
\nunexpectedly early.<\/p>\n
Preoccupied, and with the stereo at full volume, I didn’t pick up on
\nthe fact that Annie was home until she was suddenly big in the room.
\nMaureen, I realized afterwards, was aware of Annie’s untimely return
\nbefore I was. I saw one of her ears rise and I saw what I also
\nunderstood later to be a look of apprehensiveness on her face as she
\nturned it towards me. But, her countenance being open to several
\ninterpretations at that moment, her heads up went right by me.<\/p>\n
In any event, I hadn’t seen the expression on Annie’s face since my
\nmother caught me barfing into the family “Important Documents” chest
\nwhen I was five. The horror it conveyed seemed, in its breathtaking
\nproportions, to have issued from the gods themselves. No, try as I
\nmight I couldn’t deny it. Diddling Maureen had been an egregious crime
\nthat was in no way mitigated by the fact that it was unpremeditated
\nand, for me, unprecedented.<\/p>\n
And in the following months (and along with a discombobulated Annie’s
\nexclamation: “My God, she’s just a puppy!” echoing in my head) I was
\nseeing similar expressions everywhere. Were guilt and shame working
\ntheir poisons on my psyche or was no one liking me anymore? I mean no
\none SEEMED to be liking me anymore for shit. Total strangers I passed
\non the street all but recoiled at the sight of me. And dogs too. Dogs
\nhad always been as indifferent to me as I was to them. But now,
\nstraining at their leashes, they growled deep guttural growls when I
\nwalked by. Were dogs\u2014in ways we’ve yet to appreciate\u2014able to
\ncommunicate to one another, and over great distances, the indignities
\nhumans perpetrated on them?<\/p>\n
In all manner of torment and confusion, I spent my days scouring my
\nbrain in a frantic effort to uncover the reason for my…well…BESTIAL
\nbehavior.<\/p>\n
What could possibly have dispatched me to such a forsaken place?<\/p>\n
Had the philosopher in me simply chosen a less than auspicious moment
\nto take the leap from rumination to hands-on investigation?<\/p>\n
Had I been trying to tell Annie something? Our relationship not going
\nso well, had I been saying to her, “See? This is what happens when you
\ndeprive a person of sex.”?<\/p>\n
Had the fact that Maureen had been bathed that morning and that her
\nshimmering coat smelled a lot like Rive Gauche\u2014a fragrance widely known
\nto be irresistibly seductive\u2014maybe been at the bottom of it?<\/p>\n
Was it conceivable that the extra tablespoon of Nyquil I’d taken for a
\nvicious post-nasal drip had caused me to lose my species bearings for a
\nminute?<\/p>\n
But nothing I came up with rang true for me. All I knew for sure was
\nthat I’d become, say it, the definition of “pervert.” I could not have
\ndescended to a much lower depth if I’d done so deliberately.<\/p>\n
As you can see, I very much needed to get out of this dreadful
\nsituation and the first exit I thought of was suicide. But while
\ndestroying my body, which was making me much too noticeable, was
\ncertainly an attractive idea, a large problem that I have with dying
\ndiscouraged me from acting on it. I’m not trying to be funny.
\nTransforming into something comparable to what Maureen might leave on a
\ncurbside is a prospect that weighs very heavily on me\u2014much more heavily
\nthan it seems to on others. In fact, to make it hard for the gods to
\nfind me when my time comes, I’ve endeavored even in normal
\ncircumstances to not stand out too much, to be, you know, as anonymous
\nas possible. (This explains the “C” average that I’ve steadfastly
\nmaintained throughout my life.)<\/p>\n
And if there’s any substance to the reincarnation thing and the
\nimmortality it promises, suicide posed a very serious risk. The gods,
\neveryone knows, tend to frown on people who take their own lives, no
\nmatter how wretched their conditions may be. That made it unlikely\u2014
\nespecially after the way I’d comported myself this time around\u2014that
\nthey’d send me back as anything better than a water bug or dental
\nplaque.<\/p>\n
Passing on suicide, I contemplated surgically altering my appearance or
\nmoving to another city. But these choices were cost prohibitive and the
\nlatter would also have involved a lot of heavy lifting, which I really
\nhate.<\/p>\n
Finally I considered going insane. Well within my budget, what this
\noption offered was the opportunity to stay alive AND lose my body (my
\nunrelenting self-consciousness anyway) at the same time. But to achieve
\na genuine psychosis\u2014to, that is, retreat into the bowels of your brain,
\nlive in a world of your own invention and become completely oblivious
\nto what’s going on outside of it\u2014isn’t so easy.<\/p>\n
I know because I really tried. Thinking that I could maybe connect to
\nmadness by faking some emblematic symptoms (and sufficiently desperate
\nby now to chance still more humiliation) I ran a serious experiment. It
\nwas the middle of August and wearing a tattered overcoat\u2014and with a
\nweek’s growth of beard and my hair wild\u2014I stood on a street corner and
\ncommenced to babble unintelligibly at various decibel levels. After a
\nfew minutes of that I shouted, “Fucking motherfuckers, I’m gonna break
\nyour fucking hearts and shove the fucking bits and pieces up your
\nhungry assholes.” Then I babbled some more and then, kicking and
\nswiping at the air, I snarled, “PILLOWS? What else you asswipes got in
\nstore? The meerkats shat in your cereal shit? THAT crapola again?
\nThat\u2014ha ha\u2014GRANOLA crapola?”<\/p>\n
But my face crimson with embarrassment all the while, my act (with its
\nadmittedly lame material) never stopped being just that and my
\nself-consciousness was only heightened. (If I needed confirmation of my
\nfailure to accomplish my objective it was more than adequately
\nfurnished by a woman who remarked to her companion, “Must be some kind
\nof fraternity initiation.”)<\/p>\n
So it was evident that even the fact that I was doubtless more screwed
\nup than I knew I was when I realized exactly how screwed up I was,
\ndidn’t give me an advantage here. However odd the angle at which I
\nprotruded from it may have been, I was as mired in reality as anyone
\nelse. I mean, despite my preoccupation, I still worried a lot about
\nreal world things. I worried about losing my job. I worried about
\ngetting to the laundry in time to collect my shirts. I worried that I
\nmight have picked up a dose of heartworm from Maureen. And if that
\nwasn’t enough, I couldn’t stop caring about what people thought. It was
\npossible, in fact, that I’d come to care more about what people thought
\nthan Louis Harris and George Gallup put together.<\/p>\n
So I could do no more than envy the real thing\u2014those guys who’ve
\nestablished permanent residence in a fissure between their cerebellums
\nand their medulla oblongata. Yes, I know THEIR weird and terrible
\nutterances can be, in their obvious authenticity, very scary and lead
\nyou to conclude that even in the worst of times only a schmuck would
\nwant to take refuge in the kinds of worlds they inhabit. But long
\nbefore my interest in the subject would become personal I discovered
\nthat if you were willing to pay close attention you could sometimes
\npick up indications that where they live is not without a recreational
\ndimension. On one occasion I was actually able to make out, in the
\nbackground of a nasty mix of epithets, cacophonous outbursts and sundry
\nother emissions, the strains of a tinkling piano and the clinking of
\nglass and ice cubes\u2014persuasive evidence, you’ll agree, of a party in
\nprogress.<\/p>\n
I wanted to find that party guy and see if I could get him to show me
\nthe ropes. But I knew that I had as much chance of prying instructions
\nout of him as I did of getting the name of his caterer.<\/p>\n
So what did I do?<\/p>\n
Well, standing as I was on the corner of “Terror Street and Agony Way”
\n(as the poet described it), what I did then was what you have no choice
\nbut to do in this circumstance.<\/p>\n
I resolved to redeem myself.<\/p>\n
I would try to get the gods to FORGIVE me!<\/p>\n
Now I recognized, of course, that the level of depravity to which I’d
\nsunk made redemption a tall order. The gods would hardly respond to a
\nless than stellar effort. But after thinking long and hard about it, I
\nfinally came up with something I thought was near to perfect in its
\nsymmetry. Something that they’d just have to applaud.<\/p>\n
With the help of donations I opened an animal shelter.<\/p>\n
Forget what you’re thinking. Okay? I never went into the kennels. I
\nfunctioned\u2014it’s the truth\u2014in a strictly administrative capacity.<\/p>\n
Anyway, it turned out that I was nothing short of brilliant in this
\nrole. Under my supervision the shelter quickly became a huge success,
\nand, sure enough\u2014it could not have worked out better\u2014with each rescue
\nand adoption of a mangy dog or one-eyed cat my Maureen burden grew
\nlighter until, just like that, it was gone.<\/p>\n
With that monstrous problem behind me I felt, as you can imagine, more
\nthan very good. But this wasn’t the only reason for my high spirits.
\nThey derived as well from the even greater reward that my act of
\nredemption yielded. In the delirium that develops from the certainty
\nthat you’re pleasing the gods and earning their approval, you get to
\nfeel that you’re atoning not only for the crime at hand but also for
\nwhatever you did to warrant the death sentence you were handed at
\nbirth. In turn you can believe that your atonement actually makes you
\neligible to survive your death\u2014that it’s your ticket to heaven!<\/p>\n
This, you’ll have to concede, is some spectacular shit and it occurred
\nto me one night that it was right here that the answer to the question
\nthat had been eating at me might be found.<\/p>\n
Was it possible that I’d subconsciously set the whole thing up: that my
\nfear of death, maybe even more consuming than I realized, I’d seized on
\nthe happenstance of a random hardon and a bitch in heat to fashion an
\nopportunity for my ultimate redemption?<\/p>\n
That I’d FUCKED A DOG TO GET INTO HEAVEN?<\/p>\n
(I should note that I flashed on that after an evening of heavy
\ndrinking with a bunch of veterinarians. It came to me while I was
\ncrawling on my hands and knees up three flights of stairs, just moments
\nbefore I puked on my welcome mat.)<\/p>\n
Now I don’t want to leave the impression that I was entirely free of
\nissues. Although my guilt and shame had evaporated there was still
\nsomething pertaining to Maureen that bothered me a little. Whenever I
\nthought of her, I would find myself wondering how she’d, you know,
\nrated me. If, you know, she wanted to see me again.<\/p>\n
But male ego aside, I felt in all other ways terrific. And, indeed,
\nwhen I was interviewed on Animal Planet on the occasion of my shelter’s
\nfirst anniversary, I was fully at ease with being visible, more at ease
\nwith it than I’d ever been before.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,352],"tags":[68,353],"class_list":["post-2485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cass","category-gsarchive","tag-cassander","tag-gs-archive-2004-2008"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2485"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2485\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2816,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2485\/revisions\/2816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}