All the Devils

"Hell is empty, and all the devils are here."— William Shakespeare, The Tempest (Act I, Scene II)

People.

Watch out for them. They'll rob you of everything--everything sacred to you. Everything valuable. They do this because Yahweh God created them to be "higher than the angels, lower than the devils." They're, by and large, a pretty rotten assortment, a cast of characters guaranteed to give you the midnight willies.

They're like walking, talking, fire-breathing browser highjacks. Their empty eyes will follow you, in a predatory manner, sizing you up; waiting, endlessly waiting for the opportunity to strike. Panther-like, they'll leap upon your ideas, your ideals, your loves, wants and desires, and they'll devour them, leaving nothing but bloody bones and charred flesh; or perhaps, the raw, dripping carcass, as testimony to what they have wrought.

Once they've downloaded their reality onto you, you are done for. You'll be moving through their world in their way, at their behest, programmed by their thoughts, their wants, their desires, their politics, their religion; all their banal enthusiasms and thoughts will be thrust up your backside like a kiesterstall of smuggled morphine in a William S. Burroughs routine.

I'm a tolerant person. If I weren't, I'd be doing LWOP at Michigan City. I've had my body scarred by doctors and surgeons, my health decimated by the Big Pharma industry. I've been tossed an insulting pittance for all the damage I've sustained. I've been mocked, ridiculed, slandered, threatened, assaulted, cheated, underpaid, ignored--I've seen people with brains the size of lemon drops attain easily that which seems, for me at least, Tantalus-like, always out of reach. I've been bitten, strangled, sucker punched, kicked, jumped-on, spat on, verbally mutilated, and essentially had my own suffering downplayed by a fraud psychiatrist (redundant?) who basically told me, "Life sucks. Suck it up, buttercup."

I somehow manage to hold it all together. In spite of the diabetes, heart disease, obesity, arthritis, deformities, scars, social alienation and marginalization to the point of being a virtual reclusive exile, I maintain because, largely, I am having so much fun telling fortunes.

Makes me feel like a Gypsy. I love those people. The Romani. We're all just fortune tellers.

The Romani have a saying: "When I die, bury me standing up, because I've been on my knees my entire life." Yeah, the Romani, like the Jews, like the Boers, have been persecuted and sent packing continually. Hitler tried to exterminate them as he did the Jews and killed hundreds of thousands. Yet the Romani survive. Ready for some rom-dukkerin?

This is good. Many millions and millions of people are, conversely, hardwired to self-destruct.

The desperate people. the lonely people, the frightened call me at three o'clock in the morning, hoping that I can give them some wisdom. That I can give them "the Answer." I read the cards. I play the game as I have so many times before. But "the ANSWER"?

The Answer is that: THERE IS NO ANSWER.

You are "born" in darkness. It will end for you just the same. Ultimately, I'll die alone. I have no family, no close friends, and only my elderly mother. Assuming she precedes me in what we call "death," I'll die by myself, with no one but strangers beside me.

But everyone dies alone. And, in the end, who you were, or what you did and who you know, and what you owned? All meaningless. All shadows on the wall of this inscrutable state of beingness. A whole world that you experience only through the mental browser of your five senses--but we know, or at least I know, that there are subtler, finer ways of "knowing."

Whatever you believe (and, if you believe it, nine times out of ten it's something you insist that I and everyone else must swallow as well), may give you comfort, may give you courage in your final moments, may give you hope. More likely, it will give you nothing as you walk across the surface of the floorboards of your presumed physical existence and step out into the void. What of all your fine ideals then?

I never truckled, I never took off the hat to fashion and held it out for pennies. By God, I told them the truth. They liked it or they didn't like it. What had that to do with me? I told them the truth; I knew it for the truth then and I know it for the truth now.

—Frank Norris, quoted from his essay "The True Reward of the Novelist", in a title card at the beginning of Greed (1924).

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