Chapter 12a

Friday, November 15, 2013

The world is not as I had expected it. I have seen this moment coming clearly. The sound roared to a deafening crescendo what seems like decades ago and I have been ready. I expected death and ending and finality but how could I have expected this?

The world is melting away like a Escher painting. Except not quite...right now everything is normal. More normal than I think things have ever been. The sun is high, children are playing in their yards, dogs are barking down the street. The air is cold but crisp. The death of countless leaves has sparked the lust for life everywhere.

So why do I say it's melting away? I'm not really sure. Maybe because I'm melting away? I'm coming to an end now and without me, what use is this world? Is this not my world? Will it not cease with me?

I suppose you are owed some background to my current state of affairs. I feel good now, better than I can remember feeling since I was young, so now might be the best time to try to put everything into perspective. That is, while I still have a hold on any singular perspective.

I have survived five decades on this Earth. I have lived a long time under the tyranny of something I did not and currently still do not fully understand. It began with dreams and a loss of organizational skills in social situations, personal life, everything. The dreams I still have (or did still have, as I've seen my last one recently) and they are always similarly bizarre. I have constructed a world for myself out of these dreams where I live and have lived without change for two and a half decades.

I'm not sure of exactly what triggered these dreams anymore if I ever knew at all. At some point they were maddening. At a later point they were just a fact of life. By then I had other problems. Although I had lived consistently in dreams, my time experiencing that has become shorter and shorter as I've aged. Some nights, here and there, I sleep for a full eight hours and wake up rested (or some facsimile there of). Most nights for years now have maxed out at around four total hours of sleep. For the last couple years that's been more like an hour or two with an occasional surprise micro-nap to refresh me. It's been about a week or so since I last slept. I think I am defying some scientific principle by being even semiconscious now but I honestly can't remember the last time I felt as alive and real as I feel now. The irony is not lost on me.

I decided more than a decade ago to stop driving. I lose tiny bits of time constantly, walking through life barely present, never fully awake. I could easily kill people if I were driving so for the last decade I didn't. I started back up a couple days ago, just for shits and giggles. I said the world was melting away and maybe this is something like what I meant. Ten years ago I thought it mattered if I fell asleep behind the wheel.

I wonder if somehow I am just crazy and all of this is just wrong. If I continue on in life or go to some afterlife and see that everything I knew was wrong then my life has been a terrible mess and my death came too late. If I'm right, and I'm sure I am, sure enough that I can put everything down on paper with no fear of future consequence, then everything should be fine.

I ran over a dog today. I wasn't even asleep. Like I said, I'm awake today. I just wanted to run over a dog. I wanted to laugh along at the joke, I guess. I'm drunk with power and corrupted absolutely and it's beautiful. I considered running down the children but even now I don't have the heart for it so I just chased Fido and crunched him with the bumper.

The children cried, I'm sure somebody called the police, and I went home and ate a stick of butter. If that doesn't make sense and there's a reader to this story, tell those children how sorry I am.

I can hear the threads of fate unraveling. I can taste the scent fading from my eyes. It's more than sensory, it's universal. I do not belong here. I do not belong at all. I am sure of this and, as such, sure of my actions. The dice have tumbled slowly, that single roll taking half of a century to decide my existence was a mistake, but they have only to stop now, the results are plainly clear already.

I don't know what I'm trying to prove lately. There's no benefit to killing a family pet. Last night I emptied my savings and paid a hooker to fuck herself with a baseball bat in a McDonald's. They looked at us funny when we walked in but she just sat down and I ordered and we ate and she found some way to insert that under the table. We left when people started staring and one of the blue shirts picked up the phone. There was no benefit to that and no cost. It was a futile experiment into a mockery of meaning.

Let me paint a picture of something for you. I said this was a fifty year dice roll and I lied. Scientists in my world would say closer to thirteen billion years. The picture I'm going to paint is a giant canvas of birth and death and changing landscapes and evolving life covering the entire history of your life, your world and your universe. This painting is necessarily infinite but for a moment you can see it all, take everything in, and witness the most perfect act of creation since creation itself because it is creation itself. Now look to the corner of the painting, to that one tiny dot. If the painting were no bigger than the Earth then you would be looking for something the size of an electron but you'll have to look closer than that. That tiny black speck there, that insignificant non-item that I can define by its size as being fictional compared to the size of the canvas? That's you. And you are fictional. That is the one mistake I made in this painting and now that you've seen it, watch me tear my painting apart.

Does it make more sense now? The universe is melting. All of it. Not really, not just yet, everything is stable here, the threads haven't unwound quite far enough yet, but soon. Soon I will wake from this horrible dream of feigned existence to the stark reality of...nothing. Of not being. Of I do not think therefore I am not.

My last action on this world short of what I write now has probably already been completed. The last thing I did. . . It's funny, I'm still hesitant to talk about it, even knowing that there are no possible repercussions. I mean, nobody was really hurt in any lasting way because nobody was lasting. I can't hardly imagine even why I should feel bad but somehow I still do.

I'll talk about something less dark. I stole an ice-cream truck. Not ice-cream, exactly, just some kind of slushy thing, and I don't know why there was one out in November anyway, maybe just another mistake of the universe, but there it was so I stole it. The person driving didn't mind too much. I had a good savings. Having his truck stolen paid for more than his job would have if he were going to continue it. It's funny bargaining with people now. I just toss money away and they're all so anxious to snatch it up. Is your money really going to buy your soul a ticket to reality? I doubt it. I spray-painted the word 'free' on the side and for the next hour gave away as many as I could. I dropped random things in each one, sometimes a penny or a screw or a pube, a couple I just spit in, one got my credit card, another had my sock, six got a flavor different from what they asked for because there were six flavors to play with. I made a game of it and it was fun.

After I ran out of slushy gunk or whatever the hell it was I decided to go have fun some other way. I took the truck down the same roads I'd been over, waved to the families and citizens, found a nice ground of kids who had followed me down to ask for seconds, thanking me for putting the plastic super-hero rings in their cups, and tore down the road until I had obliterated their once-cute canine friend then went home whistling a song.

If I am wrong (I am not wrong) then something is very seriously wrong with me. Like I said, though, I'm not wrong. Maybe I still deserve to suffer for my transgressions here, I'll give you that, but what I deserve is not the issue here. I believe that I deserve to live or at the very least to die. But sure, maybe I deserve some penance too. I'll pay that in the only way I can as I rip that painting apart. Fiat iustitia et pereat mundu.

I can feel the Earth shake and the heavens roar now. I can see it all coming. This is my salvation and my damnation. I want to be so enthused by this moment, I want to be rallied in arms and ready to meet my end, but tragically I can do little to even care. There is no end for me, not really, all that remains is a passing what-if from somebody that doesn't even exist alongside me.

When the world is gone there will be nothing to remember. All of these moments, this life, this eternity, have never been. There's neither solace nor pain in that. Only blessed finality. At least from my perspective (or lack thereof) if that counts.

Obtained key 12
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