Genesis

I’ve been treading through the corridors of these thoughts for a long time now. The more I walk, the closer the walls get to me, the shorter is the roof. It is about time I say it, without letting the pendulum swing any more. I must not be buried and squashed by the walls. Finally, I must act.

They are thoughts not easily expressed, not easily felt. It looms and controls and drags you through a dilated sense of time which you can never be habituated. They slowly ooze out of you, silently at first, then, like a rash, they start itching you, irritating your skin, staining your reality with their heavy presence. Your whole life, day and night, becomes a swamp for those thoughts that turn your face upside down, all the blood gushing through your eyes and nose and ears. Belligerently you try to reverse it, but it won’t do. These thoughts dress your head with their despotic crown of thorns.

You cannot cry. You cannot laugh. You cannot speak. You cannot look with easy eyes and you can never lavish your saddened heart. You swallow your tongue and stare blankly into the daily events that occur around you. You become a neutral spectator, bound and tied by Thoughts; staring face down into the deep, searching for an end, but there is no end, and there will never be a catharsis.

Every day, the cycle begins again. Dull and dry mornings, dull and dry evenings. Meaningless days and squandered nights. Spirit never free, skin peeling and wrinkling by the hour; hair falling and muscles failing. Reality gilds these thoughts with its fakeness. There is no truth.

The crowd, all as one, pierces every barrier with its feeble laughter and it drives your mind, heart and soul to sin. Anger stays inward to become the fuel of your violent imagination. Violence becomes your deliverance.

In truth, how can anyone live in such a world? I’m not talking about the inequality of opportunities; the pollution; the gravity; the vicious morals from hell; the poverty; the mental, physical and international violence; economical problems; the scarcity of resources; world hunger; AIDS and cancer; pedophilia; homophobia; drugs; taxes; abuses; lousy welfare systems; unemployment; paradoxes; nuclear arms race; racism; secularism; sectarianism; corruption; politics; materialism; extremist spirituality; pornography; tyranny; uncontrolled freedom; gun trade; fanatic Islamist terrorists; fanatic Zionist terrorists; the Israeli-Arab conflict; the oil crisis; consumerism; conformity; decaying music; decaying youthful minds; decaying adult minds; deforestation; psychopaths; narcissistic schizophrenics. I’m talking about the fakeness: the Russian who does not speak Russian; The hobo who owns three villas across town; the indebt wana-be yuppie who drives his new four-door Porsche Panamera; the slut-in-disguise university student searching for her perfect target; the mindless youths who ride the tides and drift without any serious thought of anything; the mindless youths who think they have it all sorted out, who refuse to be politically affiliated, who think everything is a conspiracy, who think that having an empty and unstained paper has the power to change things; the mindless youths who think that by being politically affiliated they can change things but do not realize how impotent their own package of thoughts is because they’re so stoned and high on party slogans and blue skies; mindless youths who think it is cool to be depressed, to be chemically imbalanced, to be mad, to be on the verge of collapse, who feign depression and madness in order to rise up in the social ranks of society; mindless youths who wear Ralph Lauren shirts just because it’s more esteemed than everything else; vegetarians who refuse to eat meat but suck on dick like a it’s their only source of respite. Nearly everyone wants to be the next pathetic fucked-up case. Nearly everyone wants to be involved in a disaster in order to be the one who survived to tell the tale. Nearly everyone clutches every chance to feel down, to feel sympathy, to pity other people. Nearly everyone tries to benefit from the death of a close friend or family member. Nearly everyone wants to be nostalgic. Everyone suffers from fake psychological disorders and traumatic events which they try so hard to forget, but the memory is so light it can be included in a comedy script. Everyone is obsessive compulsive; everyone has attention deficit disorder; everyone is a retard. Everyone is a deviant now: the male who fucks a male, the female who fucks a female, the female who fucks a male while the female fucks a female, the male who fucks a male who fucks a female, the male who fucks a female while fingering a dog etc. Our whole world is a simulation of how life should or shouldn’t be. But you’re not even alive because you are all appendages to the inanimate external. You are all replaceable products! You are all mass produced.

It all angers me. It all triggers violent imaginations in me. These imaginations overflow.

I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore.

My first victim, a teenage girl coming out of school, barely thirteen years old, talking on the phone, talking to, and not with, her boyfriend, talking without worry, talking so merrily on her shiny black six-hundred dollar mobile phone. I followed her as she walked and talked without a care. I waited until she finished talking. I waited until she walked under the dark shadow of a tree and I snatched her. One arm to her mouth, the other to her wait. When I snatched her I got turned on. I did it quickly. No rape, just murder. Behind to a big green dumpster, I knocked her unconscious. I threw her phone and purse in the garbage. I pulled the kukri knife out of its sheath and I started. I killed her quickly death by cutting her throat. The blood poured. I raised my hand and started hitting her neck with the edge of the knife, trying to decapitate her. After three strong hits, her neck was obviously separated from the rest of the body even though they were still connected through rivers of blood. I did the same to all her limbs and then I carved a long line that divided her body in half. I left her bloodied, fragmented and mutilated body in the dumpster and put her head in the hard cover guitar case I had with me. I walked very calmly away. No one had seen me and my raging heart and excited mind assured me that I would do it again. My hand did not even tremble.

I was born again that day. The new genesis of my liberated self and my liberated world. The genesis of Sheriff Jaroudy.

Carnal Vengeance

When they set me free and I walked out of the prison grounds, the first thing I did was eat a Falafel sandwich with lots of tartar sauce. It’s the one thing I loved before jail and the one thing I missed during jail. No mother, no father, no sister, not brother, no friends, no wife, no girlfriend. No one. I’ve always lived unaccompanied like the spirit of the wind. I was not intending on breaking that habit and departing from my nature in jail. I kept to myself. I barely survived but what matters is that I did.

The tartar sauce dripped from the sandwich, splattered on my cheek. I was wiping the off-white creamy tartar sauce when a veiled woman opened a window in the opposite building, saw me and hid herself quickly. It was the woman who planted the memory in my brain, that scornful woman.

I don’t know how I started stealing cars; it just started being the vocation of my life, and slowly my whole reality. It’s not such a respectable vocation in prison, but I didn’t care. The only time people highlighted my mode of living is when a victim of mine saw me in there. He was in prison for killing his wife and father, who he caught in bed together. It’s a fucked up world we live in. He smirked my way and threatened me with gestures. I did not care.

I kept watching the window, that veiled woman I had seen before, the probable taste of my vengeance.

They do not offer therapy in prison. Who needs it? We’re not crazy after all. We’re just society’s rejects, denied for our violent indulgences. We are a different communal society, having a different stratification. The worst murderers occupy the highest rank. Murder your wife and father is top rank. Stealing cars is not. Murdering your wife and father makes you noble. Stealing cars makes you a slave, a bitch, a prag, a fagot, a homo.

He kept his eyes on me, like a hawk for two days, his inmate bitches pushing and shoving me. Finally, in a place I don’t want to be in, in a place I don’t want to be seen in, they create a gap and the noble murderer pushes me in it.

The veiled lady, young and tender and pink gave me the power to climb out of the gap, to cover it, to put her in it.

His bitches followed me, he followed his bitches. They turned on the hot water in the showering room and steam made everything seem Romantic and ideal.

I threw the falafel sandwich in the garbage, wiped the tartar sauce off my cheek and went inside the building. Third floor. I didn’t even have to knock. I only had to wait. She thinks I’m gone. I’m never gone. He thought he ended me, I ended her!

When the steam fogged every spec of my vision, when I started to feel like I was in a black and white movie, I knew that my punishment was due and that somehow I would be released. They pinned me, stomach first, to the wall and started punching me all over my body: the waist, the back, the arms.

Three hours I waited; my veins and stomach hungry for the carnal dose of vengeance. The door opened, a garbage bag in hand being put along the staircase, and she saw me, my whole body glowing in the darkness, aiming at her. I walked silently with a raging desire, my silence forcing her voice to be choked upon. I caught her neck and choked her voice more. I closed the door after we enter.

The fists seemed to enter me, widening holes in my body and then he came. I was powerless, the steam blurring my vision, surrounding me with water dew. Him, somehow so stiff. Me, somehow so tender. He released in sodomy. I can still smell his body and feel his hair on me. I can still feel the thrusts. First thrust. Second thrust. By the third thrust you start to find some sanity in it, some order. This is the way the world spins and it’ll never spin the other way. By the fourth thrust you know you are always going to be the shit of the earth. Fifth thrust…..twentieth thrust and you find sanity in the feces beneath your feet, the dripping blood of your anal hole, and the sticky cum on your butt cheeks.

Any notion of goodness, of the capability of man to change, to straighten life, to get back on the road again is thwarted. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, are things, emotions, that no one really feels anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Holes and surface is all that anyone finds meaning in. No one is safe. Nothing is redeemed.

We entered the bedroom, my hand still on her neck, her face in front of mine, but her eyes closed. Her cheeks became red. I grazed them, soft and tender. On the bed, I fed her all of my pain, as I smelt her breath, her hair, her eyes. I devoured her first through my nose, then through my eyes, then through my vengeance. I twisted her as she whimpered beneath me, begging for someone to come back home, but I know that he won’t. Her mother is dead, her father is in jail. As I possessed her with my vengeance, my eyes were fixated on the picture frames on the walls, the noble murderer smiling, smirking next to his dead wife and his now-violated daughter.

I can still smell her body and her hair. I can still feel the thrusts. First thrust, second thrust. By the third thrust you start to find some pacifying sanity. This is the way the world spins and it will never spin the other way. Twentieth thrust and you find pleasure in the blood on your skin, the explosion of cum and smell of shit in the room. You zip-up, leaving the victim on the bed, still like a cold candle-stick, a monument of your perfect holy act, the performance art museum of your own artistic vision, and you know deep inside that you have reached full circle now.

There is no love in this.

Torn Sanctuary

Something is really wrong that is for sure. She finds herself on the floor in the middle of the room. Her room being a fetal sac, a sanctuary for now. Later, the room will be a cage once again. All the while, doing all the stuff that she wanted to do, that she thought she could not do without, that she thought she could not stop. She stops them and she crumbles to the ground.

Doing them. Blindfolding herself and fondling herself and releasing all the power she can from her body. Hormones and painkillers. She jumps up and down and up and down and moves like a crazy football fanatic around the room, banging her head in the air, her hair whipping the objects around her, them falling as the hair knocks them off the table, the desk, the chair, the bed, the shelf. She jumps, she bangs her head and she releases endorphins. She cries. The estrogen pills are working now. She pops them in with her coffee in the morning, her tea at night. She stumbles to the ground after she stops. She stops and she is dizzy. She is dizzy and she falls, the world spiraling. She closes her eyes and the world keeps on spiraling. Something is wrong that is for sure.

In the middle of the room, the carpet holding her in the darkness, in her room, in her fetal sac. She is still a little girl, inexperienced. She still has a lot to offer. She still needs to shine. She wants her daddy or her mommy. She wants the girl with her in class. She wants the guy she trades shy looks with. She wants someone. Just anyone because all you need is someone to keep you awake and conscious of the fact that you are only human, nothing any bigger. She needs one but she has none. She was fondling herself.

She played tennis. She gave a scream with every hit. In retrospect everything becomes nice. In retrospect, we become nostalgic towards a funeral because even a funeral is a chance for us to be around people. Moments of reprieve. After tennis, in the girls locker room, in the shower room, while blood dripped between her legs, she on the ground again, blood flowing around her everywhere, as if coming from the showerhead, she would spiral in her own mind because the blood is a symbol of tennis’ failure and of her own failure as a human being. The rivers of blood always reached the sea of salty tears.

Her fetal sac: a tinge of protection from the darkness. When she was a kid she wanted to be the wind. Be as free as the wind. She wanted to go anywhere, to roam anywhere and to be everywhere. She wanted her soul and body to go to places her mind could never have imagined. But she bangs her head and she hits the sharp edge and the blood drips down her forehead and she falls to the ground spiraling round and round and round and there is no escape and there is no exit.

Handle with Care is the sign she came with, but her fragile body was broken because everyone let her fall. In the end it only needs one person to be there, one person to push us. One person to tell us that he loves us as he tears us apart. One person to tell us that there is no other way. One person to be so strong and stab us in the center of our hearts. One person close to us to make us feel utter regret for trusting something as vile as a human being. One person to push and shove and push and shove to let us fall in a place we do not want to be or see. One person to do all this and make us push ourselves away the next time we see him. One person. Some ONE! Someone there is no escape from. ONE! Someone who manifests our fear and our regret. ONE! Someone to make us feel so marginal, so redundant that we feel as if we’re going to fade like a sigh if we stay alive, if we breathe another fleeting breath without thinking about it a million times; inhaling and thinking about the next breath, inhaling as much air as we can, thinking about it so intensely, our next breath, our next step, we think about it just so it lasts as long as we hold our breath, and sometimes a little bit longer.

In her fetal sac, trying to get born again in the darkness that feels like freedom because it is all she feels. In her fetal sanctuary feeling warm, feeling secure for a moment, but then the fist knocks on the door, and she remembers the moments that spanned into years when she could not move, could not think straight, could not get up in the morning without a feeling of nausea. The fists tell her that something is definitely wrong. She just needs to feel it, to breathe it so she can know she is alive, but she needs time. The fists knock on the door of her fetal sanctuary. Come out! Come out! They shout at her from the outside. These fists, this reality. Her blood is on the floor, and her fetal sac is now shattered and torn. Prematurely she is forced out to get pushed and shoved, to be in a place she does not want to see, a place she does not want to be in. Her room, her sanctuary, her reality becomes a prison.

But why is she a girl if she is me? A boy. Is it because I feel weak? Or perhaps just slightly thrown back by the massive demands of everything around me? Or maybe, just maybe, it doesn’t matter if I’m a girl or boy or a hermaphrodite. Maybe it doesn’t matter because this is all universal and absolute. Boy or Girl, we’re exposed too early and fucked intensely.

Nothing as it seems

Nothing is as it seems.

I am just an ordinary man. The infant next to me is just an ordinary dead baby. Raped and drugged mother. A hopeless situation. I am just an ordinary doctor. I do not fight for lives because my opponent does not exist. Who am I fighting? The mother had white horns on her forehead. Flowers replaced her genitals and I understood why we bury the dead six feet under.

Everything is a simulation, a bad representation, a murdering image, a very sharp or very blurry mirror of everything else.

Nothing is as I dream.

Feelings, emotions, ecstasy, all end up being twisted by Fate’s irony and I call them my Passion, and they crown me as their king. I reign over them miserably. They are not real.

There was never anything called real.

The individual is a myth.

All parodies lack humor.

All secrets are known.

I am known to all.

No one ever experiences me and I always experience everyone.

No one is as they seem.

Live every moment as if it were your last.

He had a lot to say. He had a lot of nothing to say. We’ll miss him. We are gonna miss him. They all said.

Live every moment as if you were going to live it again and again and again. To begin again and again and again. To end again and again and again. A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.

She told us almost a century ago that Sugar is not a vegetable.

Today I know that we cannot digest fibers. This means that if you swallow corn as they are, they will appear in your shit the same way they entered your mouth. Your mouth is just the other end of your anus. Don’t suck too hard from either end.

The good carpenter suffered for the friend who died after him. The carpenter never finished a table. Two days later I saw horses in the city among cars, blindfolded, shitting. I did not see corn.

Two lovers make one bread. He said that one craves your mouth, your voice, your hair. He said you are the only one that can nourish me. He said that you can show me something real. I saw you, I did not crave your mouth, your voice, your hair and I lost faith in my lover.

She let me watch porn videos so I can do the same for her. I gasped every time I watched. She slept and I was petrified every time I slept with her.

Disney land is full of adults. The ‘real’ world is full of little children. Where would you rather be? Where would you rather live?

What flower? What rock, what smoke showed you were I live? You came and no one will ever love as we did. It’s ancient and it is extinct. Gone and empty. Only a memory. Feels more like an illusion. We Love. We start to love the love. We start to fear the love and love the love. We end up fearing love and its subject.

Did you not sacrifice your son? Why are your hands all bloody? But I forgot that your hands fed the roots, but now I see your fingertips bloom, he said. It is natural peace. The peace which passeth understanding. It is all about the rebirth. When the light was moist, I felt the drop of dew on my tongue and cheek. When it entered my eye I saw your son in fear still alive, and you in love, dead. I bowed down to a statue and your love accused me. Your son’s fear empathized with me. We fear. We start to fear the fear. We start to love the fear and fear the fear. We end up loving fear and its subject

Furious fear and sorrowful love. All passionate, crucifixes. It is not real.

We are all living in one big museum. Buy and sell. Live and act and perform. The world around us is one big Mausoleum.

Nothing is as it seems.

Nothing is as I dream.

Nothing is real.

What Did Not Happen.

Perhaps this story can be said to be similar to a dream. Yes. I think it is similar. But in what way? Let me tell you my opinion on dreams first, just to have a ground basis to work on.

Dreams should be personal, as is my story which I only know how to read, so I ask you to think of a dream. Any majestic dream, but I guess we can all say that a dream should be as distant from reality as possible, unless you want it to be a nightmare.

How long did your dream last?

A night you might say; a night they all might say; I say it lasted for only a moment of vision, a moment of clarity, but because it’s a moment of vision and clarity, it has stretched itself beyond time and hovered for the length of your sleep over your conscious thoughts; a moment of eternity which will eternally recur before our lidless third eye: the artistic reproduction of your imagination. You only awake to blindly plunge and drown in a blurry consciousness again. What is a moment but a gateway facing two streams: the stream of infinite past and infinite future. Eternity’s component is a moment. A moment is not a fleeting ‘now’. In a moment everything recurs, everything matters, all is alike. And yet it is part of eternity: negligible, light, nothing matters, still all is alike.

So how is my story similar?

It has stretched itself beyond time and is always hovering above my conscious thoughts. Moments hover.  It is a bright light that follows your vision when you look at something very luminescent. This radiance glows from every image of a boy smiling, a girl laughing, a mother crying, a father patting his son, a couple holding hands, two people eating together in a sushi bar: joy. The radiance glows from the void that exists between me and all the people around me. Our difference is sourced in the same schism between nothing and everything; nothingness haunts me.

But still it is different from a dream. I told you a dream should be as distant from reality as it can be; my story is real and true. My story is a nightmare.

I can tell you what happened in detailed description, but I do not want to draw that picture again for someone who will never see it as it should be seen. This story is written on my skin: This Boy’s Life, but I am the only one who can read this story, or better yet, I am the only one who understands it.

Let me tell you what didn’t happen because the border of nothingness is everything.

I was eighteen years old. I did not get my driving license. I did not feel legal. I did not feel threatened by responsibility. I did not feel response-able towards my life.

I was seventeen years old. I did not sit for a SAT exam. I did not apply to a university. I did not plan ahead. I did not think of a future. I did not feel the present. I did not cherish the past.

I was sixteen years old. I did not feel the thrill of being punished for staying up on a school night. I did not feel the thrill of smoking, drinking and getting high.

I was fifteen years old. I did not have my first kiss from a girl I liked. I did not try-out for the football team. I did not ennoble any passion with any form of attempt.

I was fourteen years old. I did not watch and share porn videos with a friend or a brother. I did not learn how to play the guitar. I did not spend hours talking nonsense and gossiping on the phone.

I was thirteen years old. I did not go to the arcades with my pals. I did not blush when I talked to girls. I did not feign sickness in order to skip school.

I was twelve years old. I did not laugh or blow out candles on my birthday. I did not share intimate stories about puberty with same-age cousins or boys.

I was eleven years old. I did not play video games or sports or ride bikes. I did not look in front of me or to the sky when I walked.

I was ten years old. I did not celebrate my graduation from primary school. I did not even realize it exists. I did not perceive myself as Infant Joy when I saw a baby picture of me.

I was nine years old. I did not see any family member watch me play the xylophone at the elementary school music concert. I did not see anyone. I did not participate in the concert.

I was eight years old. I did not play with kids in recess on monkey bars. I did not have a lunchbox full of sandwiches and juice and sweets. I did not get in trouble for having bad handwriting.

I was seven years old. I did not buy comic books or Goosebumps books from the Scholastic book fair. I did not play with action figures or remote-controlled cars.

I was six years old. I did not get the chance to wet my pants in front of the whole classroom in utter humiliation. I did not swim with or without inflatable armbands.

I was five years old. I did not have an imaginary friend to play with. I did not hope for anyone. I did not get affected when I watched This Boy’s Life. I did not flinch or shed a tear when Robert De Niro beat the hell out of Leonardo DiCaprio 

I was four years old. I did not squeeze myself between my father and mother at night. I did not enter my house holding a sibling’s hand. I did not return smilingly. I did not leave miserably. I did not return. I climbed higher upon a mountain with a heavy burden on my back. The more I climbed the more I stared down into a deeper abyss. But then the burden fell off and I was light again. I experienced a moment belonging to eternity. A moment: you live it for the first time again and again and again, perpetually.

Can you begin to see clearly what DID happen in all my enduring years?

I am nineteen. I am lost. I am alienated. I am estranged. I am separate. I am experienced. I am aware. Black is all around me and maybe this is what it is like to be free.

The radiance hits my eyes and I see my mother, my father, my brother, my sister: silent, unobserving, victims and fugitives greeting me with a thunderous silence. The burden is put on my back again and its heaviness crushes me. The silence calls my suffering meaningless.

I am still the crying Infant Sorrow trying to find an explanation for what has happened; trying to find meaning for the etched marks on his skin.

Without A Care

I stole my mother’s gold bracelets, gold rings, gold pendants; her diamond earrings and diamond necklaces which I had no idea she had until I opened the safe inside her closet. I snatched my father’s white gold rings, all of which were handed down to him by his father. Kamal took anything he could sell and did away with them: novels, old school books, new university books—he read so much about everything he’d be called a polymath if he cared to give an image of himself to the world—leather wallets, gold-plated Zippo lighters, his father’s Rolex, an original painting by some famous Lebanese abstract painter. I managed to sneak a silver tray out of the house.

We needed the money and there was no other way. You’re just going to have to believe me.

In previous times I used to resort to prostitution, but every time I did, we picked a fight with each other, Kamal and I. They weren’t the usual fights about foreign woodpeckers invading the territory of his woodpecker. Kamal didn’t have these insecurities, he believed in his ability to please me better than anyone—any random stranger I pleased—and he had good reason to believe so. “I know you better than anyone,” he’d say. But even during our first fuck, which was just four hours after we’d met, he blew my inner core out of any conceivable dimension, like I just had an atomic explosion within me. No, Kamal did not mind the woodpeckers, the small, the round, the big, the thin. Kamal was just worried about me catching one of them diseases that just get to you and kill you. “I couldn’t bear losing you,” he’d say, “no I couldn’t bear one hour without you,” so sweet and delightful in his worry. Sometimes he’d be paid to do research essays for spoiled university students, but that was never a guarantee. Prostitution was much more lucrative.

So we had to pay the rent at one point—both of us were unemployed youths, living for no other moment than the moment of unity; that was our sole ambition for that was the only ambition that could be achieved; the only painless passion, and we sacrificed and cut a lot of roots to reach it—we visited our home; home is where the money is and there is no place like home.

After a full day of negotiating and selling—we were so good at it we managed to get three times the amount of the rent—we decided to celebrate. We paid two months worth of rent and bought necessities with part of the money left: Vodka bottles, Whisky Bottles, Plastic cups, Soda bottles, Wine, Potato Chips, nuts, cigarettes, candles, matches, incense, yogurt and most importantly, toilet paper. We lit the candles at night. We liked to think of ourselves as environment friendly people, but if you as much as catch a glimpse of our own space you would see that we were not even close to being environment friendly.

Our place was one level away from attracting the far reaching sensors of radiation detectors. But we loved that little one room-one bathroom-kitchen apartment. It was our Eden—without a parent or a God to plant a serpent in—in which we put a lot of effort into getting together.

We got our first couch before we rented the place. The couch was what pushed us into moving in to that space which would be ours and ours alone, our desires unfolding and displaying themselves for us like censored works of erotic fiction.

We found the couch while we were walking in the streets in the middle of the night. It was stranded next to the green Sukleen dumpsters. We sat on it alone in the middle of the night, as if the whole city belonged to us, as if every whispering word we said to each other could be shouted and still count as a whisper within the enormous vacancy of the night. So we shouted that we were going to live with each other under the same roof, using the same bathroom, cooking for each other and sleeping on the same couch (a bed was not in mind at all).

Each one of us held the brown flower-patterned couch from one side and we kept on dragging it along all throughout the night, searching for a place to rent, a place with a reasonable price. Three hours of serious searching and laborious lifting amounted to nothing, until a taxi driver passed and asked, a bit curiously, a bit sarcastically, why we were dragging the couch with us. We told him and he smiled widely. He had a place for us to rent, for a good price in an okay neighborhood.

So we get the rent and celebrate it together in our small space of privacy drinking shots of vodka in large plastic cups, naked, the candles around us warming our flesh; the smoke of the incense sticks trickling on our bodies lightly, accentuating our sense of smell. We kiss endless kisses that lead us to a hazy tomorrow and away from a perfect past. We connect and form an hourglass with our connected lips, controlling time through our heavy full tight breaths. Without a care. We kiss the night away and a new morning takes sway.

I Can’t Go Down

Do you know who I am?

To know me you’d have to listen to the story behind the words I say. But let me give you a hint. I am the one who always greets you with a smile because any other form of expression will backfire and tumble me down, impel me down while I whimper on every stumble. Down I go, if not a smile on my face, down below the point of no return, in a spiral of melancholy, down so quickly I do not even see or acknowledge your reaction for you are not there, down so deeply just looking upwards, trying to catch a glimpse of the hopeful light is tiring.

Do my words glow in front of your eyes and make you remember that day, when you just got off work, when you just received a phone call, when you just woke up, when you just spilt the coffee on your dress, when you just shat and found no toilet paper and smiled because that was your only viable option?

No. I refuse that. You have no idea how much relief I attain when I sense the smile curve up on my face, as if it’s the first time I do it right, as if I’m still a toddler in front of the ephemeral gaze of your eyes.

But who am I kidding? The smile is just a part of the badly acted façade. Even with the smile I feel like I’m struggling to swim through an invisible mire of shit, trying to get to you, trying to get past the smile and reach for you, like a hapless blind man trying to get out of a choking maze. But what would come after the smile? if when I come to you, when I kiss you, when I fleetingly remember the days when you waited for me outside of school, when you helped me and taught me to be strong when I’m alone and humble when I’m not, when I touch you in certain places, and all the while, I am still much thankful and in debt to my inner emotions, which at the moment would be boiling with the self-containment of my feelings and expressions, all hidden behind a smiling visage, you say I’m being mean, that I’m being cruel, sarcastic, unloving, overly and overtly critical of small unworthy details, and I wonder if you can see through my failing smile, and if you can, why you’re not helping me, why, instead of just touching and poking me with your remark, you’re not hugging me and comforting me. Yet I stay silent as you poke me, as you play with what is wandering about inside of me in the hateful corners of my mind which hold in them the fabricated images of the truth that I know, yet not willing to accept and proclaim as real.

I am writing this for you, although I am sure you will never read it because, out of all the things I know, I know the one thing that will ruin your existence; I know the only thing you do not want anyone to know, not even me; it is the one thing I did not want to know.

But I keep your truth inside of me because I do not want to go down; because you’re the only one I get consolation from. You seem so far away right now it’s not even fair.

And I can’t call you, and I can’t wish you a goodnight, and I can’t see you. Your memory is a dead memory; your absence is my suffrage.

This letter will be smudged, stained, sucked by dirt and clay and ashes and dust.

You did not want to tell me but you did.

And you’ve gone away too soon, and I cannot go down.

Climatic Apocalypse

Would you like to see yourself bald? Unable to look at the sky without feeling the drifting dry winds of heat peel your eye, layer after layer until you go blind. Do you want to die before you reach the age of 30?

Let me just remind you. Your wealth will not matter anymore: your luxury watch nor your fancy car nor your million-dollar home nor your deluxe yacht; neither will your poverty: your poor personality nor your impoverished morals nor your decaying thoughts.

The only thing that will matter now and today is your voice. The only thing that will echo tomorrow is your voice. The only thing that will preserve your existence is your voice sounding harmoniously with ours.

So think about it again. Would you like to have kidney problems because of poor water intake? Do you want to have a frail body, full of sores because of ultraviolet rays? Do you want to have the visage of a seasoned and weathered person when you’re a mere teenager?

Do you want to be responsible? It’s either with or without. Annihilation or Survival. Speak out now and do not let any faltering step impede you.

Join us for the sake of humanity and the sake of the earth.

Visit www.350.org and see what you can do to help.

October 24^th is the international day of action against climate change. Pitch in. We all count. Every voice crying and screaming for survival. Let us mitigate the effects of climate change before it’s too late.

Let us delay our Apocalypse.

www.blogactionday.org

www.blogactionday.org

Nothing But Material

…So I’m sitting in this almost-full low-ceiling coffee shop. It’s the coffee shop that every city has; where all the artsy, pushover, nihilistic people hang out, trying as much as they can to take from a hippie bohemian movement they cannot understand anything of. Each of them thinking their cup of coffee is the best coffee anyone can ever have, desperately hoping for some camera to drive by and shoot them so that their image would be immortalized in a TV special cover story about the coffee shop that harbors much of the youthful talent. All of them wearing sandals, long necklaces, colorful garments: the graphic designer creating the next best selling graphic novel about Lebanese society and the discontents of its youth; the journalist who hopes on exposing the next scandal that may or may not spark a civil war; the countless people reading a book, placing it on their lap, hoping that someone would ask them about the text or just any other question, hoping to get laid tonight; the bearded philosopher with large glasses scribbling sideways on his copybook, writing in a coded language of his own creation to look extra eccentric. And all of them act as if they do not give a shit about money, but what they are all doing is wishing that their work of art would be considered the next can of Campbell soup. They will seize the one chance they will get to turn fleeting thoughts into gold.

I’m just sitting here waiting for him to come, for us to go out and flee whatever reminds us of this fake Lebanese society.

A hand grazes my shoulder and I look sideways. A guy wearing a hat looks at me.

“Hi,” he mumbles, barely articulating his words. A rough beard spreads across his face like a rug. I look away and say hi. On the inside I’m cursing my boyfriend for being so late and allowing that Lebanese cocksucker to talk to me and sit on the chair next to mine.

“My name is AJ.” His lips barely apart from each other, his eyes almost closed. I look at him from top to bottom. Very skinny legs are covered with tight jeans that shape out his balls. A belt with shiny buttons holds his pants to his waist, doing the job instead of his nonexistent ass. He wears a black shirt on his torso, folding its sleeves up to his elbow and undoing the first two buttons.

“AJ?” I ask, “like that Backstreet Boys singer?” Inside I laugh my heart out.

“I don’t know,” he seems a little thrown back, his words suddenly sharp and accentuated. “I’m actually called Sherif Jaroudy.” I laugh more on the inside but keep a blank face on the outside. “Dude, I’m so stoned.” His voice mumbles suddenly and I couldn’t care less. I nod.

“I’m so stoned, like to the point when you feel your eyes are gonna explode.” I nod

“Okay,” I say again. Right now wondering where the fuck my boyfriend is.

“Do you want me to get you anything?” he moves forward and looks me right in the eyes, so close his hat eclipses the light bulbs on the ceiling.

“No, I’m fine.”  I pull away. The Lebanese cocksucker, AJ, Sherif Jaroudy, he goes and orders something. That stoned poser. And finally my boyfriend comes. I don’t let him come inside the coffee shop. I quickly get my bag and leave that stoned cocksucker alone.

“Where were you?” I walk in front of him, expressing my anger.

“I got held up by a parade. They closed off the whole street.”

“Okay, well let’s go.” I wait a second for him to become near me and hold me close to his body.”

People would think that we had an actual place to go. Every time we meet like this, I wear a dress to make things easier. He wears loose baggy cloth pants. We do not really consider it a public act, no one has ever seen us yet, but it is a place where all can see. A veil of night darkness does not qualify as an opaque barrier that stops people from seeing the taboo and profane act we were doing.

We are young and we are in love and we do not give a shit about anything. Both of us. We have only each other because everyone else is turning themselves into an object and trying to turn the objects in their hands into something that speaks for them, like a Campbell soup can. Each one is creating his own gospel. But me and him, no names needed, no AJs, no drugs, barely any food, we only need each other, and we do not use each other as objects but as persons.  We are each other’s ends.

We arrive in that dark alley where a shop is abandoned. An empty shop with a “For Rent or Sale” sign on the outside. We go to the farthest point, stepping over Soda cans, junk food wrappings, soup cans, old worn out shoes and garbage bags. Sometimes we hear the quiet chirping of cockroaches, and nearly all the time, we see a rat-shaped rodent squirming through the debris in the bleak darkness. This barren land became a heaven for us.

We lean on the wall in the darkest corner. He lower his loose pants and I lower my underpants, just enough for him to put it in. I’d always be the one on the wall. I never made a sound, and if I had to, I just bit him on the shoulder. We could never ever be noticed by the few people who passed by the deserted shop uninterested in the trash and darkness inside. Those people had somewhere to go.

And then out of the darkness, we hear the swooshing of old potato chips wrappings against the dusty dirty ground, this time it’s not a rat. I look sideways and see a figure of a guy in a hat. That AJ Sherif Jaroudy, that Lebanese cocksucker. He followed me. Followed us.

He comes forward, getting something out of his pants and points a gun at my boyfriend.

“Don’t say a word or I’ll call the police and have them arrest both of you.”

We don’t say a word. AJ. Sherif. That cocksucker with a name. He comes closer to me, to us, keeping the gun pointed at my boyfriend. I pull my underpants up and try to bury myself in the wall. Trying to run away somehow. My boyfriend tries to cover me with his body. The cocksucker comes towards me. The gun pointed at my boyfriend’s head.

The cocksucker looks at me, at my legs, at my arms shaking holding on to my underwear from above my dress. Holding on, not wanting to let go. He points the gun to my head and tells me stand in the opposite corner of the room.

Still in silence, only the objects moving around our feet making little noise, I walk towards the other corner, leaving the cocksucker and my boyfriend in the pitch black darkness, barely seeing anything. My heart pounds in the darkness and I can hear it thud on my chest. Then suddenly I hear thumping, like thighs banging ass cheeks one time after the other in a patterned manner. Slowly I come closer. The shape of the thin cocksucker appearing better from the darkness. I start hearing a weeping whimper overdubbing the thigh thumps.

The image leaks into my brain, disturbing the very core of my existence. My boyfriend crying on the ground as the Lebanese Cocksucker rapes him from behind, penetrating him like a drill gun. Forcing his way through his asshole like a nail gun. For a whole minute and a half I stand transfixed like a baby holding her doll watching the boogeyman take her little brother away. I don’t dare to scream.

Finally the cocksucker sighs deeply and retreats backwards, then grazes my boyfriend’s anus with his tongue and licks it, tasting his cum like Campbell Soup. He buckles his pants and goes away.

I look at my boyfriend, humiliated below me, no warmth emanating from his helplessness, like a big particle of dust on the ground to get thrown around by the wind in any given direction. My boyfriend with no name reduced to nothing but material. A plaything. A statue. An example. Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup painting. A person turned into an object.

Exordium

There I was, paying my respects.

In the name of God, the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful

Then here I came, having a blast, drinking Brain damage shots, tequila shots, vodka cocktails and endless bottles of beers. Music playing in the background. People’s voices overcoming the music. sticky tables full of dried spilt beer harness everyone’s elbows. The bartender looks weary as he tries to gather whatever number of shot glasses he still has. Smoke clouds spread the pub, rising up to the ceiling, evaporating in the air, being inhaled by many.

There I was. Tens of cigarette packs in the middle of the room; a kid wearing black pants and a white shirt walking around with a tray full of coffee cups with a bowl of sugar; a sheikh reciting over and over again various verses from a vast Quran, each verse he repeats loses its meaning, each sentence becoming just another echo, triggering the mourners to recite in response to the verse.

Praise be to God, the Lord of all that exists. The Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful.

Here I was, toasting a beer with my friend Omar. The malted drink foaming, running out of the bottle and into my mouth, me chugging it, almost choking, everyone around me shouting, CHUG CHUG CHUG.

There I was. I can hear the women, all dressed in black, from top to bottom, crying their eyes off. The one who’s dead, he doesn’t give a shit anymore. He is not out there watching you, crying with you, praying for you from heaven or from hell. The dead person, now only a corpse, not talking, not breathing, nothing, an object, tired of trying to become something more than material, than dust and ashes; the dead person is waist, just like the blue bag of garbage full of watermelons, potatoes, junk food wrappings, used condoms, empty bottles of milk, empty cereal boxes, empty tuna or bean cans. All garbage is disposed the same way: buried underground, and we think that our dead uncle or grandfather or mother or sister or child is somewhere eating peanuts and drinking orange juice or Dutch cow milk with God. We just transform to nothing. The women screaming and wailing, in truth, they’re just crying for one of two reasons. They’re either crying because someone next to them is crying, or because they are sorry for themselves, not for the deceased.

Master of the Day of Judgment. You alone do we worship, and You alone do we ask for help.

Here I was, spilling my tequila shot as I swayed the glass to my mouth inches apart from my lips. The lemon strip does not go to waste though; I suck it dry. The lady I’ve been talking to all night, she laughs at me and kisses me. The lady that I’ve just known for less than an hour, who I saw walking in with her tight leggings and tube top, her hair gently curling down her back, her lips smoothly curving as she smiled, her dimples seductively appearing as she smiled, her smile enchantingly luring me, that girl kisses me.

There I was, a congregation of men, all religious, all reciting memorized words as the corpse was put underground, now nothing, like empty cans of deodorant, like shredded paper, like toilet paper, like an old building being buried. I moved my lips, uttering syncopated sounds that joined all the other S-sounding echoes.

Guide us on the straight path;

Here I was, the girl who kissed me, with the skinny legs and thin lips, in the guys bathroom, me pulling down her black tube top, pulling down her bra, pinching her nipple, her moaning as she separates her lips for only a second, moaning, making my erection seem worth it. I start kissing her neck, moving my way down to her breasts, and all the while, my hand heads downwards too. Pretty soon I’m pawing her cunt while she grazes my dick from the outside. You always have to make sure the toilet lid is closed, just in case you lose your balance, there is something decent to sit on. The girl with the skinny legs, perfect nose and soft voice, she moans as I place my fingers inside of her. People outside knock on the door after they fail at opening it. “Occupied,” I shout over the girl’s silent moans.

There I was watching the soil being dumped on the body of the deceased, some men crying, and other men holding each other; me, just watching it, no feelings, just thinking about the pub later that night, being very uncompassionate and cold. Not a speck of sorrow creeps in me. Not a tear. For me, we are all just disposable product being used with an expiry date, just like everything else. We are all a can of soup, a bottle of orange juice, skimmed milk, fresh fruit, bottled water. We are the earth’s consciousness trapped in an expendable, easily dispensable, and yet self-destructive layer of skin. We are only good conscious in our wake. In eternal sleep, we are just like the inedible milk, overly ripe fruit and seasoned bread covered in mold: we are no good. The only difference is that we are production being aware of itself, life being its own creator. We are the pack of cheese breeding the next cheese. It is not a question of ‘To Be Or Not To Be?’ It’s a question of ‘When to be and when not to be?’

The path of those on whom You have bestowed Your favor, not of those who have earned Your anger, nor of those who go astray.

Here I was, my pants down and my body warm; me inside of the girl who is still moaning. The knocks on the door still ring through the toilet booth. Against the wall, I push further into her and she still moans very quietly in my ear, just for me to hear. Her moans are my exordium to the world. Then she stops moaning because I’m done. She smiles at me and she kisses me again. It all ends the way it started. The ending juxtaposed with the beginning, nothing separating them. From ashes to ashes and dust to dust. We open the door and unashamed we walk out of the toilet. I let her walk in front of me, watching her ass. That girl with the skinny legs, tight pussy, seductive dimples, perfect nose, who less than five hours ago was screaming, shouting, weeping, wailing in her father’s funeral, has moaned more passionately in my ear for me to hear.