Where to end, where to begin?  Every pseudo-intellectual philosophy I’ve meandered in, every single last bottle of beer, all the hours drowning in novels and stories of other people’s lives so I don’t have to face my own, all the long walks at night staring into space, all the strip bars and girls gone wild, all the faking and acting I did so I would have someone to call my friend, all the volumes of really bad poetry I’ve written, the journals, the trips to Alaska and Mexico and Europe, the dozens of classes and essays, the cathedral visits, all the songs by Radiohead and The Smiths I listened to before I even liked them, all the bad movies and especially the good ones, all the running I did on a treadmill hours on end going nowhere for seven plus years, all of it, has gotten me a pile of shit.  This shit, the substance of my life, doesn’t even contain nutrients necessary to be used as fertilizer, it won’t burn, it’s pale brown, without any interesting folds and it doesn’t even really smell. 

            I’ve heard the devil looks like a red bull with steam rising from his eyes, big flapping tail, ugly as a mother fucker, would make a Yeti piss himself, but I think these descriptions come from overly ambitious mama’s boys who have never seen his mug. They say his touch would eat like acid through your bones, but they’ve never been right there by his side.  I’ll tell you, and it’s the truth, the devil is no bull and he’s got no horns, and he’s not even a he, I’ve seen Satan (or at least his spawn) and she’s an eighteen-year-old blond with teeth whiter than hell, a form like a Greek statue, smells like vanilla, eyes like a Mediterranean sea, and her touch? well it’s finer than the rarest Asian silk, and it’s got crazy Haitian powers and it transforms the lives of relatively decent boys into food that not even worms will eat.

            You know, that felt kind of good, for a second, writing about the devil who fucked me over thoroughly (I mean this only figuratively) and who after walking away from Coco’s that last day (Coco’s for god’s sake!), with no more thought of me than if she had stepped into a piece of bubble gum and rubbed it off carefully on the filthy puke stained curb and got back in her pink Barbie convertible and driven to Malibu where the sidewalks are shiny and the poodles wear little booties to protect them from the cold January concrete that seizes up the joints of those more vulnerable, had the nerve to say hi to me the next Monday at school.

            So the story goes like this, you can guess it I’m sure, fall in love big time, like no one ever, felt her angelic chords resounding through my soul, all that shit, picking her up at night with no place really in mind to go (I know, I know, I was such a fucking teenager), checking the right side mirror all the time as an excuse to get a glimpse of her face, telling ridiculously dumb jokes knowing those would get the biggest laugh, looking briefly at her thigh, regretting it and thinking it would defile our purest union (all the time we were together I jacked off maybe four times), hanging my arm out the window and feeling the bright wind like a river pumping life and vitality into my every neuron, listening to her petite voice, and smiling.  I smiled a lot in those days.  Once in a while we’d park at a restaurant or the beach or at Malibu Grand Prix (I really hate the word Malibu) and race go-carts.  I would at times start talking about big engines and quarter miles so I’d look like a man (do girls like men?), and besides, without the vacuous and space filling chatter every syllable that would escape from my lips would be an iloveyou iloveyou, over and over and I’d end up looking like a real jerk.  Ever since Coco’s (god, why Coco’s?!), I’ve learned to skillfully mask my ihateyou ihateyous into comparable mindless talk.

            You know what she said at Coco’s (!) that really pushed that old arrow right down to the end? it was the –I don’t think I feel the same way about you that you feel about me– (smile a little, not too much, push harder)  –You’re a great guy– (thanks so much, that’s wonderful!)  –but– (hesitation) –well, maybe you need to grow up a bit– (cork your tears, cork your tears, should I stab her?)  –or, maybe we’re just on two different levels– (frozen like an Atlantic snapper)  –and of course (a break here, you know what’s coming, cliché, puke, cliché) we’ll still be friends– (well of course!).

            (Seven damn mother fucking years and all I’m doing is still thinking about that day.  What deviant psychological element creates a man like me?)

            And so on and so on, I go home, step inside my room, feel like the walls are squeezing me, (what (god) the fuck do I do now?)  put on a hooded sweater, walk outside, and the corks they just come popping out, I don’t even realize it until I start tasting my own snot.

            You think I’m a fool deluded and bitter, or that I am still a silly half man?  Well, my thesis stands, that girl deserves a share in the destiny she chose for me.

            So there at Coco’s (I still can’t eat chocolate) I mainly nod my head and tell her I understand (I thought we were just having lunch baby) my glottis clogged with a million one word questions.  I wouldn’t care what her answer was, just to hear that petite voice tackling those million and a billion after that, and to occasionally touch her wrist in the middle of a sentence, I could delude my eyes into seeing a lover, if only a sticky rubber bench and a wanna-be wood table in Coco’s would be our Olympus.  But alas! she pulls away in her shitty pickup, with a troll swinging from the rearview mirror smiling at me, and out out out of my dream forever.

            Okay, time for an obligatory pseudo-philosophical rant.  Do you think maybe she doesn’t deserve eternal fire?  Well, maybe that’s a little extreme (is it?), but don’t you see? it (human pain) isn’t my fault, it can’t be.  I have never worn a virgin face, free of makeup, a nose whose proportion to the eyes and cheek and down to thin pink lips are such that make even sensible men allude to (gulp, squint, (dare I?) flinch, no I will not say angels) something or other.  I’ve never been beautiful enough to scorch a human heart, and it is thus I trumpet my un-guilt (is there such a thing as innocence?).  Only a demon’s tike could elicit rapture yet fail to complete the journey to Elysium.  That day at Coco’s (of all fucking places!) she knew her role as god and she willfully withheld the antidote to a life of futility and disillusionment.  She sat across the table, batted those eyes, and decreed my condemnation (what does all this mean?).  And what (god) was it that cast me like the Morning Star from any hope of happiness? was it the teddy bear I got for her? or the note I gave her (I’ll never divulge it’s contents) along a rose on her doorstep?  I used to believe in Christian karma, but it’s clear we’re in a Bizarro world... authenticity breeds isolation... with reflection comes madness... faith earns a good whipping... and show a little passion? a little honesty? well, you get scraped onto a puke stained curb for seven years.  (for pity allow a little scream?)  Oh, to be a fool, I’d trade up my soul.

            You know there’s times when my demon stops gnawing on my abdomen for a little while, and I think that maybe things (?) will work out all right.  I, after all, have a decent job (it fills some time), nice family (my dad stopped drinking long enough to attend my college graduation) who think I’m a peach, and some other bullshit that (in America’s dream) should satisfy me fine.  And then... I hear a little laugh, or one of a thousand visions, and it pulls me back into a world of whores (too dramatic?) and my fate (must I love it?) is to keep running on a treadmill until another vision knocks me on my ass.

            Here I’ll make a little confession.  I’d gladly lie in rat piss for any one of those visions  (The devil’s poison feels good going down).  There’s the one with the cherry dress she wore her birthday night at some concert, hair pulled back, her neck gloriously bare of any necklace.  She pulls me into a hallway, we’re alone, and she hands me a note and says that I’m not the only one who has trouble expressing himself.  And she gives me a Mediterranean stare, and not able to hold it any longer she pulls me in for a hug.  My hand eases over the little wrinkles in her cherry dress, her warm body is pressing me, and a few stray hairs tickle the tip of my nose.  It’s been seven years, but that Mediterranean eye has lost no heat.  Would you believe there’s a much deadlier arrow than that one?  If I could capture the mixture of hunger and hurt of this one vision in a thousand page novel, I know I’d win a Nobel.  The abridged version: she stands in a doorway, turns her head back as her mother says something to her, nervously holding a red sweatshirt.  I don’t dare elaborate any further.

            Sometimes more than just flashbacks knock me on my ass.  I saw two twentysomethings at the park next to my house kissing the other day.  They genuinely looked happy.  To cope in these situations I often prescribe for myself a dose of some condescending sentiment and walk away telling myself that her grapes were probably sour anyway.

            But in the end, you know, I’ve come to really love my shit.  And the question I guess I’ve never thought to ask... what if at Coco’s we had split a nice club sandwich, walked away hand in hand, and become that kissing couple in the park?  What miserable fool would I have become?  So lost in happiness that I never saw the world for what it was, and missed out on the dark and yet beautiful truths that I’ve come to define myself by?  I’d surely be much sillier than I am now.  And what grand responsibility to the world would I be bypassing, which (confusingly) I am somehow fulfilling right now?

            Could Paul have gotten it all wrong?  Could an eighteen year-old demon be the Savior from a life of absurdity?  That’s what I’ll tell myself anyway.