I WAS WALKING DOWN MAIN STREET thinking about Ego Death. My headphones and Tom Perry’s voice weren’t enough. I could still hear the dude’s voice in my head. “Once, I smoked too much weed and forgot who I was. I don’t look at the world like I used to. That’s why I am the way I am: chill, one with the world.”
My classmate’s confession came through breathy words. He stared at me––very intensely––through the gap between his lowered, red sunglasses and his eyebrows. I just wanted to laugh, but he was so serious!
Surely, philosophy was the wrong major to pick if he was my classmate. What a bitch, huh. I figured that if I’m still judging people’s worth so carelessly, then I must need a philosophy major to fully understand human value––or, well, give up on it and judge without guilt. Or even better, have knowledge and quotes and books backing me up so I can judge with style, Flying is falling with style: I fucking love Buzz Lightyear. I FUCKING LOVE HIM, can’t you understand that I haven’t cried as much as I did with Toy Story 3. Andy left, and now I left for college and my toys are dead––and I’m dead too. But, hey, my Ego lies with me in the casket. It is Ego that goes to hell, not the soul. Ego Death is a fucking scam, my dude. Pass the dutchie.
Don’t mind the running water that is my thoughts, though. I don’t mind it anymore.
I WAS WALKING DOWN MAIN STREET, but I kept thinking about Ego Death ever since my classmate’s victorious confession. I think he might have a crush on me. Is this flirting? Because if it is, I have been doing it wrong all along. Next time I’ll remember to say that I have no sense of self and therefore no sense of morality. I’ll cheat on you, honey, no remorse; and while I’m at it, it’ll be in the shape of raw, violent sex because I’m not even a self and I am the world and who wouldn’t want to get pregnant by the world? Birth a tree or something. Get choked by the giant mountains, spanked by the ocean waves. No?
I WAS WALKING DOWN MAIN STREET, and I remembered I had gotten my bellybutton pierced last week for no good reason. Every time I looked at it or thought that I couldn’t go swimming for a year, I lost it. It was the stupidest decision ever. I knew it was stupid from the start because I had no particular drive to get it pierced––it just kind of happened. It was the lack of conviction that convinced me. If I don’t want a hole in my skin to defy authority through self-laceration, then a piercing must not really be that detrimental to my autonomy and adulthood––no reason is the best reason because it doesn’t showcase any deficiencies. (I’m going to pretend that the conversations I have with myself sound like that; I am smart, I study philosophy without being a stoner. I am God.)
The point is, I still did it. I still pierced myself and now I’m not God, I’m not morally superior, and I am a woman, again. I now belong to the crowd of women who automatically get labeled as sexually promiscuous by half-naked, visible-boner men; I now belong to the Das man and my Dasein form has been inhibited by a piece of metal and a glorified open wound.
Don’t mind the running water that is my thoughts, though. I don’t mind it anymore.
I WAS WALKING DOWN MAIN STREET, and I didn’t know the word navel before I fucked it. I felt like a young, drunk rapist. I felt like I semi-non-consensually assaulted a girl whose name I never bothered to learn; I just called her “babe” because it was cute and I had no clue what else to call her. Although it was technically consensual because who would not want me and my deliciously-small penis, it didn’t feel like it because I didn’t love her; and somewhere in my frat-dude-brain my Christian morals shone through, and Jesus personally told me that sex was sinful if I didn’t love her. Love, not pleasure, is the only true way of consenting to sex. Love is only true, however, if you make a legal contract out of it. Justice doesn’t exist in the state of nature, and Love must be just. And so, Love doesn’t exist in the state of nature either. It exists in the state of war where the mountains will prudentially choke you clean.
But who cares about Love! Here’s my real concern: If Jesus really looked anything like Western art portrays him (regardless of skin color––I’m talking about the brows, the navel, the beard), I find it hard to believe that he died a virgin. I find it easier to believe that Mary, the virgin, had a baby than a 30-year-old hot Jesus crucified along with his untouched Jewish penis. Come on! Do you think Jesus had children?
Speaking of kids: oh, the perks of college and youth. I love the feeling of helplessness––I mean, idleness!––and it is here, present, with us. Present in the flesh. I wish I could be an adult without any holes and metal bars crucifying the small navels in my fleshy body. Whatever. “Bellybutton” was not a thing until the 1800s––like many, many things. Like barbed wire. Have you heard that barbed wire inhibits our deep, dark green forest? Maybe the world is fuckable after all.
Don’t mind the running water that is my thoughts, though. I don’t mind it anymore.
I WAS WALKING DOWN MAIN STREET thinking about Ego Death, D.H. Lawrence, and the hole in my navel and how I could never be whole because death was wholeness for a Dasein and––should I just kill myself then, if I can never be whole when alive? And how I was such a common whore now, as opposed to before when I was not a whore at all without the tiny hole in my navel, because that is clearly the difference in the whoreness scale––not the wholeness scale.
Then, as I walked past a parking lot, I saw the parking lot sign graffitied by an angel.
Too pretty PARKING LOT.
Who’s too pretty? The parking lot? Are you too pretty to park in this lot? Is this the lot for people who are too pretty? And why am I concerned? Do I think I’m too pretty? Fuck, do I think I’m pretty and does that make me a wholeless whore? A whole whore? A wholelessnes whore with a hole? Maybe just a hole. A big, black hole.
There was a window next to it, reflecting me.
Don’t mind the running water
that is my thoughts, though.
But it is I who minds them
when they call for me, alone.
Within signs and written notes
by angelic strangers with a cursive thought,
I finally see myself through a window
and I am whole.
My Ego, numb.