COMMENTARIUS PERPETUUS/ Delilah...Rotted Teeth... Spite and my fucking coat!

                                      COMMENTARIUS PERPETUUS

You have heard enough of your poor narrator´s babblings and weak apologies. It is my task to tell the story of a man who was neither great and was not an insect. And I fail at that task miserably. It is not a task I sought nor asked for. It was laid upon my lap by merciless destiny, and so please do allow me some meanderings dear reader. I think I will sip this fine wine and draw a puff from this opium I have held on since my stay in Sumatra last fall where I was paid to collect samples of petrified human excrement dating back to the stone age by a firm in London. But again, I digress and shift my focus from the duty that has befallen me, the duty of the telling the story of one man´s uneventful life. Let me close my bloodshot eyes and see what morsel slips from the dusty journal called Commentarius Perpetuus:

The weather here in Seattle is not suitable to my mood as of late. I am dreary and weak. I have some trouble with my neck and teeth. I have abscesses in my teeth, and there is blood all over my tooth brush each day. I took a pin and punctured the abscess and on my right molar and it secreted a foul puss and bile. I have no medical or dental insurance and so what can I do? I went to the public clinic and it was a farce. They gave me an appointment for three weeks in future, and when I missed the appointment from apathy they billed me anyway. The soulless bastards. How dare they bill me, when I am in pain and not in a rational state of mind, and have to wait three weeks for their fucking attention. What the hell do they expect?!!!, Maybe the puss and bile has leaked into my brain and nerve endings and has influenced my ability to make a sound decision.

My God. Why did Daniel not write me? Ask me for help? I am not rich, but I have a sum of money I earned from the series of books I wrote on the mating habits of preteen Japanese schoolgirls. My dear Lord. Let me suck on this pipe and swig on this bottle and see what else I find in the thick and worn volume of despair that will evermore be called Commentarius Perpetuus. Evermore.

I have not had a call from Delilah in months. What am I to deduce from that other than the fact that she hates my guts. Well, I always knew she hated my guts when she lived with me as my wife. The fact she would periodically tell me she hated my guts confirmed my suspicions. I wonder now day and night about why I married such an angry and vindictive female. Was it some masochistic impulse in me? Was it the fact that her angry energy was a fuel that I, a mere squeaky mouse, lacked? Well, in any case... that is all I will ever write or say in this sacred journal about Delilah. As Aleister Crowley said... SO MOTE BE IT.

And that is all I can find in this dusky tome as a comment on the twelve or more years Daniel shared his life with Delilah, whom I never had the pleasure or discomfort to meet. I heard she was bright woman of average beauty with a fiery and angry disposition, and one in conflict with Daniel´s rather withdrawn and lethargic melancholy. My good but reticent friend Daniel never spoke much of his turbulent days with Delilah and how he tried to raise her son Bobby Prometheus. But it was his way, and I never asked much and had he disclosed secrets I would feign share them here of my on accord. I am here to transcribe what is found in the tome known for evermore as Commentarius Perpetuus.

I am sure I have lost my mind. But what the hell does that matter. I have ceased to gulp done the cornucopia of drugs that the doctors say I need to maintain some balance. I can´t piss. I can´t shit. I can´t ejaculate. I sleep 16 hours at a stretch. But I am assured these drugs will make me a happy man. Am I a fool to be dubious? Doctors and analysts. Books and pills. Bottles and Bibles. I ask what do any of they portent when it is three AM and one can not sleep and can barely breathe? They all mean nothing... nothing at all. Maybe I am too bitter, too cynical and if I am so what? Maybe I prefer being a cynical and bitter man. And if anyone thinks the less of me for that then to hell with them. I am a broken and angry man with no compassion left in me.

            Of course, I lie. I do not know why I lie. I am not an angry man, nor broken, nor without compassion, in fact I cry over small things others would not notice. I worry over people and situations beyond my power to control for no other reason than I seem to care. Yet maybe I do not care. Maybe I think I care, pretend to care. Hope to be  a thing that cares and I try to practice what caring might feel like some day when it is really a a part of me. Maybe I am a heartless prick of a thing. But in fact.. I am not. Maybe I want people to think I am. Maybe I do good and decent things I never share.

            If I was to tell you one week ago I gave the coat I was wearing to a poor man in the rain would you believe me or care? No matter, as I had two ore coats at home. I really did not do such a good deed  because I would never give my only coat away. But what if I had three coats and he had not one? Can I not bear the rain until I get back home to my warm bed and wine? Very well... damn it... it did the deed and to hell with your judgments. Maybe you think I should let him freeze and suffer. If I do not give him my coat it will wake him up and he will be in Harvard next year studying law. So... curse me... I held back his career by my selfish deed. Maybe I did the deed only to confess it here and hope someday it will be discovered and someone will say "my, what a good man Daniel was." Well, I do not care one scratch if you think I am a good man or not. And I lied anyway, out of spite. I never gave any coat to anyone ever, and out of spite I made up the whole story and  pretended to reveal the true side of myself which is the one I am doubted of having. So what if I lied and made up a story. So what?. Did anyone reading this ever giver their coat to a cold and wet man? I think not.

            What is wrong with me? My God. Of course I gave my coat to that man. That poor, poor man.

My Buddha. I must rest my head and let the opium run its course. My God Daniel, I am not your keeper but I miss you old chum. And now I know what happened to that coat I loaned you. I must take a repose, and will return dear reader in due time with more from the moribund scroll to be known evermore as... Commentarius Perpetuus.

8:44 PM - 12/15/2005 - comments {1} - post comment

Commentarius Perpetuus Update...the horror, the horror.....

Dear reader, I must apologize from the depths of my alcohol rotted spleen about the long delay in reporting on the journal of my dear yet eccentric friend Daniel Williams. It is unforgivable, but the truth is that I have been chained up in a cellar in Nepal for the last month by Maoist rebels, and while there was beaten roundly on a daily basis and forced to eat rancid yak meat and drink soured goat milk at rifle point. I was sodomized with goat horns routinely and I have no regrets.In fact, I now have a goat, but that is another story. So,  I must again apologize that such a trifling affair would keep me from the responsibilty that has fallen onto my shoulders, and yet it is a responsibility that only I have the perscpetive to meet and convey to you, the curious and riveted reader. Allow me some time to remove some more splinters from inside my ear canal and open a bottle of brandy, and I promise that I will find a passage to make your long and tortured somewhat worth the distress. God help us all.  

12:10 PM - 12/13/2005 - comments {2} - post comment

Lost photo of Daniel Williams twin sister

7:19 PM - 11/16/2005 - comments {0} - post comment

On the finding of the journal

1:26 PM - 10/28/2005 - comments {3} - post comment

My dear but strange friend Daniel Williams... an introduction to a sketch

Concerning the birth and subsequent existence of The Wire Monkey I have much to say and yet I lack now the finesse and passion with which to say those things most detailing and vital. I will be forthright and confess my skill and talent and my own zest for life has been diminished by an ill-spent life of drinking and intoxicants, isolation and poverty. In short, I am not qualified really to tell the tale and yet the task has fallen upon me to do just that. The tale must be told by someone who came to know Daniel Williams as a close friend and confidant. How, you may ask, did I come upon this strange term for him, that of The Wire Monkey.  Well, it is a term I coined from my readings decades ago on what is commonly referred to as The Monkey Love Experiments" by behaviorist psychologist Harry Harlow. Later Harlow´s brilliant studies would come under criticism and scorn by weak willed and Lilly livered animal rights activists who do not have the true depth and breath of humanity to see in the experiments their universal and eternal value. Okay, so a few of the little creatures went insane or died from in the most horrible methods imaginable, but I ask you, what do you have to do, dear reader, to make an omelet? Well, I have here a couple excerpts from a case study on Harlow´s brilliant work that may give you first in an insight into what this genius was investigating, and second, provide you with such a succinct introduction into the nature of my old friend that I would waste pages trying to do the same with my sorry and anemic method:

The textbook Principles of General Psychology (1980 John Wiley and Sons) describes the experiments of Harry Harlow and his associates at the Primate Laboratory of the University of Wisconsin: 

 "In Harlow's initial experiments infant monkeys were separated from their mothers at six to twelve hours after birth and were raised instead with substitute or 'surrogate' mothers made either of heavy wire or of wood covered with soft terry cloth. In one experiment both types of surrogates were present in the cage, but only one was equipped with a nipple from which the infant could nurse. Some infants received nourishment from the wire mother, and others were fed from the cloth mother. Even when the wire mother was the source of nourishment, the infant monkey spent a greater amount of time clinging to the cloth surrogate."

Unfortunately:

"...the actions of surrogate-raised monkeys became bizarre later in life. They engaged in stereotyped behavior patterns such as clutching themselves and rocking constantly back and forth; they exhibited excessive and misdirected aggression..."

 To make matters worse:

"Sex behavior was, for all practical purposes, destroyed; sexual posturing was commonly stereotyped and infantile. Frequently when an isolate [surrogate-raised] female was approached by a normal male, she would sit unmoved, squatting upon the floor -- a posture in which only her heart was in the right place. Contrariwise, an isolate male might approach an in-estrus female, but he might clasp the head instead of the hind legs, and then engage in pelvic thrusts. Other isolate males grasped the female's body laterally, whereby all sexual efforts left them working at cross purposes with reality.

Predictably:

"The behavior of these monkeys as mothers -- the 'motherless mothers' as Harlow called them -- proved to be very inadequate ... These mothers tended to be either indifferent or abusive toward their babies. The indifferent mothers did not nurse, comfort, or protect their young, but they did not harm them. The abusive mothers violently bit or otherwise injured their infants, to the point that many of them died."

With that I will close this introduction into my reflections, called Commentarius Perpetuus on my  dear yet strange friend Daniel Williams.

6:25 PM - 10/26/2005 - comments {0} - post comment