With all due respect.
According to the agent, the biggest factor that makes you a saint is the amount of press coverage you get...
The same as if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, you realize, if no one had been there to witness the agony of Christ, would we be saved?
The key to salvation is how much attention you get. How high a profile you get. Your audience share. Your exposure. Your name recognition. Your press following.
The buzz...
You realize that people take drugs because it's the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world.
It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.
You realize that there's no point in doing anything if nobody's watching.
You wonder, if there had been a low turnout at the crucifixion, would they have rescheduled?
You realize the agent was right. You've never seen a crucifix with a
Jesus who wasn't almost naked. You've never seen a fat Jesus. Or Jesus
with body hair. Every crucifix you've ever seen, the Jesus could be shirtless
and modelling designer jeans or men's cologne.
Life is every way the agent said. You realize that if no one's watching,
you might as well stay home. Play with yourself. Watch television...
You realise that if you're not on videotape, or better yet, live on satellite hook-up in front of the whole world watching, you don't exist.
You're that tree falling in the forest that nobody gives a rat's ass about.
It doesn't matter if you do anything. If nobody notices, your life will add up to a big zero. Nada. Cipher.
Fake or not, it's these kinds of big truths that swarm inside you.
You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past. We can't give up our concept of who we were. All those adults playing archaeologist at yard sales, looking for childhood artefacts, board games, CandyLand, Twister, they're terrified. Trash becomes holy relics. Mystery Date. Hula Hoops. Our way of getting nostalgic for what we just threw in the trash, it's all because we're afraid to evolve. Grow, change, lose weight, reinvent ourselves. Adapt...
Since change is constant, you wonder if people crave death, because it's the only way they can get anything really finished.
For tear stains in a pillow case, treat them the same way you would a perspiration stain. Dissolve five aspirin in water and daub the stain until it's gone. Even if there's a mascara stain, the problem's solved.
If you could call it solved.
Whether you clean a stain, a fish, a house, you want to think you're making the world a better place, but really you're just letting things get worse. You think maybe if you just work harder and faster, you can hold off the chaos, but then one day you're changing a patio lightbulb with a five-year life span and you realize how you'll only he changing this light maybe ten more times before you'll be dead.
Time is running out. There isn't the kind of energy you used to have. You start to slow down.
You start to give in.
This year there's hair on my back, and my nose keeps getting bigger. How my face looks every morning is more and more what you'd call a mug.
After working in these rich houses, I know the best way to get blood out of the trunk of a car is not to ask any questions.
When the clean dirt runs out, I push in faded pornography, obscene books with their spines broken, Traci Lords and John Holmes, Kayla Kleevage and Dick Rambone, vibrators with dead batteries, dog-eared playing cards, expired condoms, brittle and fragile but never used.
I know the feeling.
Condoms ribbed for extrasensitivity.
The last thing I need is sensitivity.
Here are condoms lined with a topical anaesthetic for prolonged action. What a paradox. You don't feel a thing, but you can fuck for hours.
This seems to really miss the point.
I want my whole life lined with a topical anaesthetic.