All my life I have striven to get out of the box—to have one single original thought of my own—but this box is a cardboard prison from which I will never escape. There cannot be a doubt, it is certain: I was born in this box, I was molded by this box, and I will die, alone and pathetic, in this box.
Everything I have ever written or thought is vapid, derivative, and painfully mediocre. This blog is a monument of stupendous stupidity, a living testament to the world’s most loathsome imbecile. Every essay is a humiliation worse than the last. Words have failed me.
I suspect my wife hates me; she hides it well, but beneath the pleasantries and the thin veneer of affection is a seething disdain, almost reptilian in nature, the burning hatred a python feels for a small mammal before choking its life out.
A strange hidden god mocks me. The land is blighted where I walk; crops do not grow, they shrivel and die as if the earth were salted, as if the Romans had vanquished my empire.
My cowardice is phenomenal; my greed, breathtaking. I am an embarrassment to my family and every other collection of people of which I am a part. My parents wish I was never born, but they won’t say it to my face because, like me, they are cowards, as their parents were before them.
I am the fly in every ointment. I am the drop of tar in every jar of honey. I embody the vulgar, senseless absurdity of being; one feels the most profound sense of hopelessness as they gaze into my eyes. My flesh is rotting; my breath reeks of saccharine putrefaction. I am a slack-jawed mongoloid who drools as he talks.
I am the pathetic philosopher. I am the accursed scientist. I am politician; I am tax collector. I am the nadir of the human project. I am starvation and sickliness thrust upon the world; I am the problem of evil distilled into one man. I am all that is contemptuous and I must be destroyed.
Of this deliverance I am unworthy, but nevertheless it is so:
I have gotten out of the box.
Touched by a sacred lightning am I, a phoenix on fire with divine creativity. Every creation is an anomaly that heralds the dawn of a new age. Masterpieces are erupting into reality at a truly terrifying pace. New paradigms of human expression are proposed and then obliterated in an instant. Every thought, every word, every bat of my eye lashes is a magnum opus. Michelangelo, Mozart, Shakespeare: irrelevant, irrelevant, irrelevant. Every work of art ever made has become passé. The entire universe has become passé.
Boxes have been retroactively abolished; they never existed. I have restructured the geometry of the universe; squares or rectangles no longer exist. All polygons have been turned to vapor and smoke save for parallelograms and the subtle form of my almond-shaped face.
Laurels and wreaths upon me, I am the new Dionysus; nymphs and satyrs dance before me as I stroll. All songs are odes to my spirit, all libations are toasts to my beatific existence. I am the bringer of all ecstasies; I am lust. My flesh is sweet and I am pure and I am more.
I suspect I am no longer mortal. Even my wife adores me now.
Mohammed, Buddha, Confucius: charlatan, con man, scam artist. Jesus has been relegated to stepchild; he has been made to live in a cupboard under the stairs like Harry Potter; I am the apple of our father’s eye now. The world would melt but for my being. I alone, like Atlas, hold us from the abyss.
Epiphanies of the most epic proportions have become banal, trite, quaint. Infinity is trivial, a mere pebble in the palm of my hand. The ineffable has become effable. I contain multitudes but they can no longer be contained. Omniscience is not enough; omnipotence is not enough. I have taken on God as my understudy, perhaps with my tutelage he will make something of himself one day.
I am somewhere over the rainbow. I am somewhere that makes Eden seem as a landfill. I am the life that makes all others seem nasty, brutish, and short. My supple body moves with the grace of a Russian ballerina. I am the feral beauty of the asiatic tiger stalking its ungulate prey.
All flowers am I, and the summer rain too.
roger's bacon, the bumbling lunatic, the enlightened sage. the pedestrian bore, the celestial muse. the sacrilegious brute, the benevolent saint. the chosen one. 🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌
I liked this but I didn’t like the stock photos. Would have been stronger as text-only.