I am walking around Wrigleyville feeling like a piece of shit.
There are a lot of people out.
I pass an older homeless man and he is dressed a lot like me.
I want to stop him and say, “So I make it passed 30 then?”
He walks by me.
I don’t make eye contact with any girls because I don’t want to ruin their night.
I make eyecontact with some guys because I want them to feel small.
At a stoplight, I wait to cross and there are two guys next to me.
I imagine myself as them, standing next to a dipshit with an ugly face.
Later on, will one say to the other, “Hey did you see that asshole at the stoplight, why does he live on the same earth as us.”
At the stoplight I can hear Christmas music coming out of someone’s car.
Will I get run over tonight.
I always think about getting randomly hurt and how awesome it would be to just be immediately changed and removed from my situation.
When the stoplight tells us to cross I wait to take a step and the men walk away, now knowing that in infinite space, there is a pure negative shaped exactly like me with no intentions of making friends.
There is ice on the sidewalk.
Will I fall.
If I fell, and just stayed there, would someone eventually help me.
Would a policeman walk by and say, “Stay there.”
I don’t know where I am walking.
There are a lot of bars and people yelling.
I walk by a group of people standing outside a bar and someone almost bumps into me.
I imagine myself capable of pulling this person apart with my hands, just pulling pieces of face and neck off.
I walk by them and smell perfume and I am no different.
I concentrate on my heartbeat and worry it is not going to stop ever.
I worry that I will have a heartattack and it will hurt.
I walk past an outdoor icerink and there are people skating.
I reassess being a piece of shit and decide instead I am a shitstreak.
I am the area the shit passes over and leaves behind part of itself.
I hear my cat meowing and it sounds like he is in my coat somewhere.
He is not there.
I see a billboard with a child on it, all her hair gone.
It is for cancer research.
I feel bad about people with cancer.
I think to myself that if I discovered I had cancer I would immediately say the word, “phew”
I see the word “phew” in my head in big block letters.
It seems like everyone I see has a haircut.
I see a bookstore.
I think that maybe I have read for people there before.
Will they remember me there.
They will not.
I realize it is not the same bookstore.
I go into the bookstore.
Inside the bookstore there is a girl walking around.
I wonder if she is thinking about having sex with me.
Am I standing naked before her in her thoughts.
What do I look like to her.
Do I have coins taped to my stomach.
Why would I have coins taped to my stomach.
I check my stomach with my hand and there is nothing there but some hair.
I say nothing to the girl.
I buy an inexpensive book by Karl Jaspers and leave the store.
I act like I am looking at something as I leave the store and I don’t know why.
There is an ad for clothing on the building outside.
I think, “so what.”
I see a candybar wrapper on the ground.
I think, “so what.”
I walk in the same direction as before.
I think about the moment of my birth.
I imagine my mom seeing me come out and then saying, “Can we try this over.”
I imagine myself looking at her and saying the same thing.
I make a face by clamping my teeth together to keep from crying.
I only cry like once a year.
Walking, I realize everything I worry about is nothing compared to the main worry I have which never has a object.
I realize there is nothing to worry about without first wanting to be alive a certain way.
It occurs to me I might never laugh again.
I imagine a man coming out of an alley and stabbing me a number of times until I die.
I see him being given a wreath and a box of candy by the mayor of Chicago at some kind of ceremony for killing me.
I pass more people.
I feel like my eyes look really wild.
There is a cop wagon parked on the street and two cops are inside.
I barely resist an urge to jump and scream at the window, and resisting the urge I feel something like a rush of energy in my heart area.
I contemplate walking to Lake Michigan and taking my clothes off and getting in until I die.
I don’t think that would be a bad way to die.
There are usually a lot of ducks or geese by lake Michigan and I think it would be nice to slowly lose consciousness while they stared at me.
I think about people I used to know and I wonder if they are thinking about me.
I see myself before all the people I used to know, them forming a line.
I see myself greeting them each, one by one, and saying, “I really am a good person.”
I see Wrigley park and I look at the l/e/d sign out front and imagine it reading, “nobody likes you and you don’t have a home, people just tolerate you.”
for some reason I then imagine an old newbroadcaster in front of a big microphone going, “this just in, nobody likes you, they just tolerate you.”
I pass by a girl and I think about an agent from new york who contacted me about my writing.
She stopped contacting me after I sent her THE SELF ESTEEM HOLOCAUST COMES HOME
I think that maybe the girl I just passed is the agent.
Maybe I should ask her to be my agent and to pay me in sugar.
I feel hunger.
A weird noise happens in my stomach and I feel bad.
I consider starving to death on purpose.
Starving to death on purpose seems awesome to do in North America.
It would be something that people would remember.
I would be remembered as the man who purposely starved to death in North America.
I pass by a liquor store and go inside and ask a man if they sell pens.
He is confused.
Then I make a motion with my hand like I am writing and I say, “pens, pencils.”
He says no.
I walk more and come to a 7-11.
I go inside and ask the man if they have pens or pencils.
He says some things I don’t understand and points to an aisle.
I go to walk down an aisle and he yells at me and motions a different way.
There are a lot of people at the register and he keeps yelling at me to go different ways.
I smile for some reason and I feel awesome for three seconds.
I find the pencils.
There are people by the drink-area and one of them goes, “yeah the fucking juice is fucking awesome man it fucks you up.”
I take the pencil to the register and wait in line.
When the woman in front of me is paying, the man at the register holds up a thing of juice she is buying and he says, “go get another,” and then when the woman just stands there, he says it again, really angrily.
The woman goes and gets another and she says, “is it buy one get one.”
The man at the register says yes.
The woman just blankly did what an angry man working a register told her to do.
I pay for my pencil and he tells me to have a good night.
I walk nextdoor to the Subway restaurant and then when I see some people in there who were just in the 7-11 with me, I walk away and get food at a Mexican restaurant.
I order food and eat it, keeping my hoodie and coat on.
I get worried that a worker will walk up to me and say, “why don’t you take your coat off” and then I decide I would say, “I am undercover” if that happens.
It doesn’t happen.
I eat my food without looking up and I write all this down in the white space inside my Karl Jaspers book.
I walk home and think paranoid thoughts about how people are trying to fuck with me somehow and I haven’t figured it out yet.
September 2010: You thought it was over. You thought you'd never pay 18 dollars for a book written by a marginally-talented, incredibly-handsome writer. You were right. This internet classic, a series of plays originally released by Six Gallery Press, finds new light this September. This September 11th, there will be a new holocaust. More reasonably priced and more widely available, this lost classic will reign supreme like Lord Satan pissing butterflies into the mouth of a broken legged Virgin Mary. Newly edited, newly right-justified, The Self-Esteem Holocaust Comes Home is sure to perform a psychic vasectomy. In Holocaust, we meet three violent policemen on the search for The Greatest Dad in the World. But why does one of the policemen have a ripped open face? And why is there a bus full of people heading towards an earth consuming fire? More importantly, why are two young men at a fast food restaurant talking about freezing bees? And good god, why are there two young ladies in the backyard during a halloween party, shaving each others' legs with a piece of a broken jaw bone? A looped video of a man with Down's Syndrome getting murdered with a baseball bat. A dead raccoon thrown into a tree. A pedophile waiting in the woods for his young boyfriend. A man alone in his apartment watching the people next door have a birthday party. An intact deer-spine for sale. Say what? What will become of the old woman who slits her young boyfriend's throat? And why does she call her boyfriend a name that is not his? And why does she give him a calculator for his birthday? Will anyone survive? Will this book fare well on goodreads? And when will the policemen be happy? Not until each suicides himself. This fall, the holocaust comes home. This fall, a scarcely reviewed book without a discernible genre becomes real, becomes paper, becomes something people are embarrassed to read. Where will you be when the self-esteem holocaust comes home?
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