THE BOX

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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.

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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.

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