sexual abuse, cats, the cosmos, things of that nature

What Is The Ultimate Nature of Death Lust Among The Living?

“Here we are,” he said as we turned onto his road where he was the only full-time resident.

“How many cats you got now?” I asked him.

“Six. Three indoor and three outdoor.”

“Sweet,” I said.

“The kitchen is mostly just a cat room right now.”

“I’m in favor of cat rooms.”

“You gotta help me fix my house up, I’m ashamed of it and I don’t like anybody knowing how I live.”

“Well you stay clean and respectable at your jobs where you help the old and the infirm and young kids whose families don’t have a lotta money right?”

“Yeah but I wish I could have more friends over. My wife never comes here.” Badger’s wife lived in Greenville, a small city about a half hour from where Badger lived. He went out to see her three or four days a week.

“I’m glad you feel okay about it around me,” I said.

“Yeah well, look at how you live,” he said. We were entering the house now, he unlocked the door and pushed it open. The door didn’t have a knob at the moment, he always just used the deadbolt and key and told me to be sure to use it too.

“Tiger,” (that was one of his cats) “is really smart and strong and he likes to open the door and catch birds and beat up the outdoor cats.”

He shooed Tiger away with his foot and a low yell as he opened the door and then he was petting his big black lab mix Skinny. Skinny was very happy and the radiance of his joy was warm upon me and I felt happy too. Exuberance is beauty as we say.

“Hey wait what did you mean, look at how I live?” I asked him humorously in a Homer Simpson voice.

“Well you’re a bum,” he said. “Clearly.”

“No need to be so honest my friend,” I said.

“You’re even more of a wreck and a lowlife than I am,” he declared triumphantly. “Did you bring the beer?”  Then he yelled at the dog and shooed him away and the dog ran back into the living room but then ran back into the dining room and began to sniff me curiously as I passed Badger the box full of beers that I brought from the truck.

“The greatest of things might come from the least,” I said. “Consider a fertilized egg. Consider the fusion reactions at the hearts of stars. From the meekness of a mere hydrogen atom!”

“Don’t preach!”

“Buddy you gotta drop the attitude and get some beatitude,” I said lovingly.

“I said don’t preach!”

“I spit fire.”

“Hey wait aren’t there more beers?” Badger asked.

“Is there another thing?”

“Yeah I think so.”

“Okay I’ll go get it.”

On the way to the truck and back I had a thought about how sometimes my mind jumps around in ways that might not make sense to others and how sometimes the most important thoughts really seem to come from “out of nowhere” and how the smallest thought, word or phrase might contain something much bigger than we recognize or understand at first, as with an expression as sufficiently dense as e=mc squared for example a formula expressing profound insight into the light of the world. How does that small expression gleam in such a way that we can glean such insights as we have about such things as stellar genesis and nucleosynthesis from it? And from that what of the origin, ecology and history of all life and what about how an idea like this came to me out of nowhere? Maybe I’ve disorderism (and oncology and pisstory of elastic gastric orbits) and/or am in tune with a higher order. By the time I got to the truck I forgot why I’d come and I stopped and looked up at the darkening sky and the stars emerging as the sunlight ebbed and I had a flashback to a traumatic event and I shuddered and forgot where I was and I cried out a little and everything got really quiet and I became fearful and in the still of it all I heard a small clear voice shining from the darkness reassuring me and telling me that I was beautiful and knew how to do good and then I heard Fonzi calling me a pissy little faggot and my father laughing and crying and time kinda flew away from me like birds from a tree at the sound of a gun in the misty American morning and everything around me grew dark. I heard the laughter of Vincent Price from the end of the video for the song Thriller by Michael Jackson where it all goes dark and I wondered about Michael Jackson and little kids and wondered if Michael Jackson was a man or a woman or nonbinary or unitarian or omniscient and omnipotent and I wondered if Michael Jackson was black or white. They called him The King of Pop like they called Elvis The King baby (they say Elvis liked em young too and I kinda think that was true but I do love when Elvis sings that Sinatra song My Way and I hate that Fonzi sang it during that and that my dad laughed) and I felt a spasm in my asshole and I sharted a little and then as if that weren’t enough things grew even more quiet and dark and everything around me seemed infinitely vast and profound and I heard the small clear voice again and it said I love you Piscadoro I love you. And that was like, cosmically groovy. And then the voice said hey buddy you forgot the beer and I experienced something like anagnorisis or a gnosis in remembering to get the beer, like I felt I had discovered gravity, the truth of the situation as best as I can express it, and as I felt the gnosis and I heard the voice I felt reassured and I felt loved and my fear ebbed and I was still looking up and I saw the stars re emerge slightly brighter now in proportion to the darkening of the atmosphere around me which was only a very little but which meant a very lot.

I heard Badger call out to me: “hey buddy don’t forget the beer!” and I thought about that part in the end of Ulysses where she says yes I will yes and then I forgot that that was the end and thought of it as more of a beginning and I realized that I was having an epiphany that might change everything in a miraculous way and might change a man completely like at the end of Pulp Fiction when the light shines on Jules’ face what was the light in the briefcase was it Marcellus’ soul was it the light of the world what happened to Jules and then Jules explained the miracle of what happened during the Royale w/cheese part and his commentary of his own use of a bible verse and then I realized that Golgotha was shaped like a skull but that perhaps the light of the world gleamed from that skull and I wondered what we might glean from that and I thought of how the Grateful Dead used all that skull imagery with the roses and I wondered if Christ was a rose who was put to death on the top of a hill with the name of the skull because Golgotha means skull and he rose up to heaven from there? I wondered what if Michael Jackson had said suffer the children unto me and you must be as a child to enter the kingdom of heaven and then I forgot who I was and as “I” was walking back to the truck “I” wondered if Tarantino really had the right to put the word nigger in all those scripts and then in a brief flicker “I” saw the scene in Pulp Fiction where Marcellus gets raped in that basement and then I heard a voice from somewhere saying I love you very clearly and I didn’t hear the voice as a symptom of a disorder I heard it as a witness to a higher order. I have witnessed miracles like Jules in Pulp Fiction as I walked the earth like Kane from Kung Fu. I wondered what is a word what is a logos was the word really with god in the beginning and was Christ really the word of God and I wondered about Heraclitus and if fire is the logos and about Apocalypse Now with the napalm and the tyger tyger burning bright like a fire in the night oh viet nam and how little things can mean so much and how a small clear voice might say so much and this is not an improperly written sentence it is the truth as I see it and I say it and I’m not exhibiting a symptom of a disorder I’m experiencing a higher order and I felt okay now but I knew I had to change my pants and I thought yes I will yes and didn’t James Joyce model Molly Bloom on the light of his life Nora Barnacle and didn’t he write her section like this in this style I’m using now and wasn’t it based on how she actually wrote in her letters to him yes and when I walked back in the house I wondered how I could’ve thought so much in so little time and I realized that in addition to shitting my pants a little I also had some cum dribbling out of the tip of my penis and I realized Badger had no running water and I had to wash my ass and I thought about how the really big thoughts and feelings might all happen in a flash and then it was over and I felt peaceful and clear and I brought the beer inside and the dog ran into me all warmth and exuberance and William Blake said exuberance is beauty and to see the world in a grain of sand and I always liked that and it was quiet inside and Badger laughed and I kind of snapped out of it and looked at him and his eyes were gleaming and his face was warm and true and he was smiling beatifically at me and I also laughed and then I asked him: “What?”

“What are you thinking about dude where did that smile come from?”

“I’m smiling?” I asked bashfully and blushed and tried to stop smiling but could not. And in his face I saw the light of my experience reflecting, glowing, as the light had reflected from Jules’ face at the end of Pulp fiction and I wondered if it is the light that shines into him through his eyes more important than that light that shines back off of his face onto mine eyes.

He began to laugh loudly and heartily and I began to laugh too. “You look like youre tripping!” he said.

“Well I can’t explain what I was thinking really,” I said. The dog was very warm and affectionate and Badger yelled at him to leave me alone.

“No it’s okay I like it,” I said, laughing. But he walked up to me and pushed the dog away.

“He’s not supposed to do it,” Badger said. Skinny didn’t seem to mind being pushed away and yelled at. He tended to love Badger unconditionally. Badger was close to me now and we looked in each other’s eyes and in a brief flicker I saw god in him and I felt that he was me and that I was him and that we were one and he smiled and said, “What is going on with your eyes?”

“My what?” I asked him as everything began to grow bright in the room and I began to feel lightheaded as it were. Badger had a light glowing around him or from within him. Like an aura.

“Your pupils are huge bro you look like you’re tripping,” he said and he laughed. And in his eyes I saw all the light and the love in the universe and I wondered about the big bang and grew more lightheaded and began to swoon just as he embraced me in an enormous hug and again it felt like we became one and then as he held me there everything grew unbearably bright and I became more lightheaded still and then there was a great flash and a very loud sound but not a noise more like a vast choir of light and then I lost consciousness and when I awoke I was on a couch drenched in sweat and I could smell sausage and peppers cooking and I felt exhausted and weird but somehow washed clean. Inside I felt very calm and still. Badger appeared and looked at me smiling.

“You okay dude?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t know what happened.”

“You don’t have epilepsy do you?”

“Did I have a seizure?”

“Well you didn’t really convulse but like you just… You were kind of glowing and smiling and passed out. Lucky you were in my arms.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know. I mean I don’t recall ever having seizures before though I have passed out from things? I don’t know.”

“Are you okay now?”

“Yeah I feel great,” I said.

“Tired from the long trip,” he suggested.

“Maybe,” I said. “I’m kinda sweaty can I wash off somewhere?”

“Yeah yeah. I’m cooking dinner. Your pupils got really big but your eyes were weirdly bright. Like there was a weird light. They looked like eclipses dude. There was a light around the edge of the dark pupils that got really bright! I felt like I was trippin.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I have a bucket and some soap and water you can use.”

“I think I should change clothes too,” I said.

“I have clean clothes don’t change into dirty clothes.”

“Yeah no new wine in old bottles,” I said.

“What?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t remember.”

“Lemme turn off the stove and I’ll help you dude,” he said. “Don’t get up yet be patient.”

“I’ll be patient you be nurse.”

“Shut up.”

“I’ll tend to the food and get some water and soap and clothes hold on.”

“Can you put on some music?” I asked him?

“Oh okay,” he said. “I was thinking of putting Pulp Fiction on the DVD player.

“Really?” I said. I felt a smile bloom on my face.

He smiled back. He looked radiant. “Yeah,” he said.

I laughed.

“What?” he asked, also laughing.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I can put the Dead back on,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes.” The Dead seemed quite the life affirming choice. Then in a flicker I remembered how James Joyce said in his letters to Nora Barnacle that he loved inhaling her farts. Was that the symptom of a pathology or a sign that he was in tune with a higher order.

“Alright,” Don’t get up.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes.” Then I got nervous about if Badger would see that I shit my pants a little and I could feel my face getting warm as I blushed. I closed my eyes and the darkness constituting my visual field had a faint redness to it and I wondered if it was the light shining through my eyelid and the color of my flesh and my blood glowing just the tiniest bit. There was a little more blood in my face at the moment as a result of my blushing. But that faint redness ebbed out and I saw another darkness but it was like I was seeing the darkness within myself, in my mind and my inner space, and that space was as vast as the night sky and all the universe and then across a great distance of such space that it might be measured in light years or some bigger unit even I saw a tiny tiny little dot of light like a star and then I heard the Grateful Dead come on, it was another bootleg from 1973, the opening to a song called Here Comes Sunshine from the album called Wake of The Flood. That Album also had the song called Let me Sing Your Blues Away and that other song where it goes “wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world,” and I wondered about life in all its brutality beauty and mystery and I opened my eyes and more light came in and I heard Badger moving around and yelling at the dog kind of angrily but more lovingly. And then the dog Skinny came in and started licking my face and I laughed and sat up.

“Skinny you leave him alone!” Badger yelled and I laughed. He was really hollerin.

“It’s okay,” I said, laughing.

“He’s not allowed to do that,” Badger said very masculinely.

“Yes he is,” I said faggily.

“Hey I’m his master,” Badger said.

“He ain’t your slave,” I laughed. “He’s black, dude. Don’t say you’re his master.”

He laughed. Skinny seemed to enjoy it all very much.

“The water bucket and soap are out on the porch and there are some clean shorts and a t shirt out there on the table.”

“Awesome thanks dude,” I said, getting up and dancing to the music a little as I went out to the porch. Outside there were stars again and they somehow surprised me like I’d forgotten they’d be there and I laughed at myself and I wondered what the heck was wrong with me. I made sure to wash my ass after I washed my face. The rhythms of the frogs and insects singing in the night seemed somehow sacred. The shirt Badger had given to me was a t shirt with an eye of Horus on it. That eye drawn in the distinctive manner all those years ago by the Egyptians with the curlicue. Real hieratic like. They used to put it on sarcophagi. A hieroglyphic symbol. I thought about how the Grateful Dead had played a concert at the great Pyramid of Giza in 1978 and how setlist included the songs I Need a Miracle and Eyes of The World. I wondered if I knew something about the relationship of the great pyramids to astronomical things like the positions of the stars and the sun. Orion’s belt, Betelgeuse and the dog star. Some relation to the solstices. I couldn’t remember but I thought I knew but that I’d forgotten and would remember but that if I tried too hard to remember it might not help but that at some point later it would come back to me out of nowhere like the name of Tommy Salami who knew perhaps too much about the last supper.

I suddenly realized that I was very hungry even though before that I hadn’t actually felt hungry. I wondered if I’d been hungry without knowing it or like if I’d forgotten for a second and then remembered. Maybe it was nonlinear. But so then anyway when I opened the door to come back in I didn’t have it open for very long but in that brief time Badger’s cat Tiger slipped out in a flicker and I turned and watched him but could not catch him and within a second or less he had leapt through the air and caught a bird and then things got kind of quiet as the bugs and frogs all seemed to stop singing at the same time and the quiet seemed somehow extra quiet and I shivered briefly but I could not blame Tiger for it is the nature of a cat to kill a bird and then I saw Tiger with a bird in his mouth beating the shit out of one of the outdoor cats while still holding the bird in his mouth.

“God damn it!” Badger yelled. “Did he he open the door? He can do that if you don’t lock it. He’s like an evil genius or something.”

“No he ran out while I had it out.”

“Don’t let him out he’s crazy savage,” Badger said.

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to.”

“He’s like a superpowered mutant cat dude. He’s so fast. But I think he may be evil!”

“I don’t think cats can be evil,” I said.

“Give it a little time,” he said.

“I’m skeptical.”

“Have a beer.”

“Don’t mind if I do!”

“He’s like the ultimate killing machine dude.”

“Cats are very good hunters,” I said. “They kill so many birds that it’s like an ecological issue.”

I’d first met Tiger back when I’d been living with Badger in 2018. That was when the first two outdoor cats, Billy Joe and Bobbie Sue, arrived. The most beautiful things in your life and the world sometimes just appear to you out of nowhere and yours is only to experience them. The worth of birth on earth hey. You will suffer but you will live and you must always remember that beauty can save the world. They’d just come a-crawlin up out of the woods that lay across the cotton fields that lay across the watery ditch that lay across the lawn that lay across the yard that lay across the outdoor porch that lay across the screen porch next to the dining room through the back door where we’d recently entered and where I’d fallen unconscious in Badger’s arms after experiencing some higher consciousness while walking across the indoor porch and the outdoor porch to the truck in the driveway and back not long before and where I stood watching now. People sometimes abandoned animals in that patch of tall pines that was adjacent to the state highway on one edge that ran basically perpendicular to the edge that run roughly in a straight line along the edge of the cotton fields and such. Badger had told me before that those pine woods and some of the other nearby woods were heavily populated by abandoned cats, possibly a few super mutant versions like Tiger. You never know what life will throw at you, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face, I’ve seen space aliens and had mystical religious experiences.

It was Bobbie Sue who was most often targeted by Tiger and who’d been beat up just now. I’d named Billy Joe and Bobbie Sue when they first arrived in the Autumn of 2018. Bobbi Sue is the girl in the song Take The Money and Run by the Steve Miller Band. Billy Joe is the boy who shoots a man while robbin his castle, Bobbie Sue takes the money and runs. It turned out Bobbie Sue was a boy, it can be hard to tell when cats are young. Sex and gender these days eh. They were both unfixed males, kinda runty and stumpy compared to Tiger who was large and sleek and beautifully proportioned, who seemed like a work of art. Statuesque. An absolute savage. A small cruel elegant magnificent beautiful terrible god like humanity itself. Predator unlimited.

Presently it appeared that Tiger had hurt Bobbie Sue with a series of strong swift swats to the head. Bobbie Sue had a big wound at the root of his ear and it looked like the ear might fall off. The wound was red and hung open like a screaming surreal mouth like Francis Bacon (not the esoteric saint Francis Bacon of the Fantomas and the fudge, they are more rumor and innuendo at this point) would paint. Red, shiny, dark, screaming, surreal. Bobbie Sue fled and disappeared among the elephant ear leaves along the edge of the deck and probably hid under the porch as Badger walked briskly over to Tiger and picked him up and Tiger immediately became submissive, dropping the bird from his mouth and letting out a weak and unconvincing mew of protest as Badger kicked the bird off the edge of the porch into the elephant ear leaves shaking his head ruefully. It was interesting seeing the power relations at play. But so he made it back inside with Tiger. Keeping Tiger inside seemed like a kind of metaphor for sin. Badger walked into the living room and tossed Tiger onto the couch and came back and we got some beers from the fridge and made some sausage and pepper sandwiches on long rolls and took some extra beers out onto the deck and listened to Das Efx and Wutang Clan really loud as Badger rapped along with the words. His house was far enough away from all the neighbors that he could put music on really loud without bothering anyone. And what was even better was we could play music loud ourselves on our instruments whenever we wanted. He had a drum kit and electric instruments and amps in the room I’d be sleeping in upstairs.

After eating and drinking a great deal I became very sleepy and got my two bags from the truck and carried them up to the music room, put them down by the desk, quickly passed out on the couch and sank into a deep darkness. I dreamed about a bunch of people I’d known who’d died but were all at a kind of reunion together where I was the last one to arrive because it was some kind of surprise party just for me but then I had to fight a large tiger to save everyone and everyone ran out of the building as I wrestled with the beautiful and terrifying tiger and the tiger pinned me to the ground grabbing my throat in its jaws and my dad was there pointing and laughing and suddenly the walls and ceiling and floor all fell away in a terrible wailing light and the tiger clamped down and growled and chewed upon my neck as I fell up and away from the earth and my carotid arteries burst and my blood began to spray out and my head fell back from my body as if on a hinge at the back of my neck and I tried to cry out as the tiger chewed and my head came apart from my body and I saw the vast void of all space and many many stars and galaxies and my blood spraying out of my body as it slowly rotated and drifted away in the infinite coldness and darkness of that void and I became afraid and my head rotated in such a way that I could no longer see my body and I wept and from a very very great distance I heard a very very quiet small still voice say I love you and then I awoke on the couch to see Tiger down on the armrest of the couch, almost invisible, a silhouette only slightly darker than the greater darkness about, his eyes twinkling briefly cold electric coins and mystery of life and death.

I got spooked at first but then I thought maybe it was good if he watched over me, I could always use more archangels. We all need good watchers for here there is no place that does not see you. I fell back asleep and I dreamed of the Archangel Raphael playing My Funny Valentine on his horn like Miles Davis and of a great green tree overflowing with flowers unfolding unfurling which was very beautiful almost too beautiful overwhelming to the point of terror threatening to drown me in an infinity of leaves and flowers overflowing and I got kind of choked up and I woke up again with a strange guttural cluck and I saw the sky lightening out the window and snuck downstairs to get a beer while Badger was still sleeping and get started on writing the stories of my experiences in the 2020 Spring of Covid.