Bad Thoughts for Bad People (a sampling) by Gordon Theisen Every success, however large, is temporary, and a lie. Every failure, however small, suggests the underlying truth, and partakes of the eternal. We would set up oppositions, between sex and violence, peace and misunderstanding, life and death, love and hate, good and evil, sin and virtue. Such oppositions, so blatantly simplistic and artificial, so simperingly idealistic, and so dogmatically expressed and adhered to, cause untold suffering in the form of isolation, since we are all, each of us, painfully aware of how little they explain our own motivations. "We follow the path to perfection," they say. They claim health, advanced ideas, clean teeth. They do no wrong, harbor no vice, exercise, bathe daily. But the gods shall not visit them for fear of boredom. "The future is ours," they say. "We own it," they say. The gods shall not visit them for fear of being mistaken for furniture. Consider the following. Wealth will not save you. Sex will not save you. Power will not save you. Politics will not save you. The past will not save you. The future will not save you. Love will not save you. Spiffy clothes will not save you, nor hard work. Jogging will not save you. Your progeny will not save you. Your beliefs will not save you. Art will not save you. Drugs will not save you, nor philosophy, nor your analyst. You will not "become lucky." You will not "figure it out." You will not be saved. The sadness you feel is real! Peace and love and happiness and unity and the rest, worthy goals, certainly, and unavoidable, as goals, though their realization, in fact or fantasy, results in zombification. Indeed, the relationship is mathematical: the more peace and love and happiness and the rest, the more like zombies we think and behave, the duller our brains, the less likely a sly glint to show in our eyes. First rule of learning how to think: disagree. Intellectual exercise: imagine yourself as the person you hate most, behaving exactly as they behave. Fashion is the wonderfully amoral drive toward an absolute freedom from judgment wherein any act or thought or utterance, whatever mayhem one might perpetrate, is subordinate to how well (elegant, sexy, refined) one looks at the time. Hope, that plastic carrot replete with synthetic scent hung before the nostrils of an ass to be led up a mountain and off a cliff! Where does it come from? The sudden, intoxicating awareness that life has no more justification, is no more sensible or explicable or logical than a dream, the haunting possibility that one might wake up from reality... The sudden, anxious awareness that after all this is real, this slow dying with momentary glimpses into a horror too full to bear, this inability to live a day or a year over, to be thirty, thirty-five, forty-five, once again... What's most shocking about such awareness is how wrong it feels, as if it resulted from a mental disorder. There is a fire, like a candle lit and visible through the eye sockets of a skull. This candle is forever on the verge of sputtering out, but no, it burns yet! Their visions are aberrations traceable to a misdistribution of brain chemicals, their dreams contain the sometimes amusing but insignificant refuse of the previous day's conscientious considerations. Their sex drive is a mechanism based in instinct, so their worldly ambitions. Their brain is an organ used for thinking, inadequate but greatly improved by the use of computers, their heart a valve for pumping blood, their character and appearance the external signs of their genetic makeup. They are animals, basically, most closely related to the ape. Love, for them, is "what makes life worth living," jokes are a way to relieve tension, vitamins useful for health maintenance, depression a sickness they treat by ingesting blue pills, alien life forms a "distinct possibility," the earth a big spinning ball of dirt, water, rock, and salt. Art, for them, is "expressive," appliances "highly convenient," other people's suffering "a shame." Intellectual exercise: give up. Give up your emotional claim on everything you own, everything you want to own, every friend, every sex partner, every business interest. Give up your schemes, your dreams, your pleasures, your sins, your virtues, the witticism you were planning to employ at lunch tomorrow. Okay. Now: does the world in all its frenzied splendor not reappear at this, your darkest moment, prancing like a stripper, not even expecting you to slip a bill into her garter? Let us meditate for a minute on the incalculable value of the out of tune, the raucous, the misshapen, the grotesque, the incorrect, the deranged, the dirty, the sickly, the scruffy, the rough-hewn, the ill-mannered, the ramshackle, the broken, the bent and dented, the motley, the scarred, the damaged, the besmirched, the sullied, the addicted, the confused, and the insane. Let us make stained teeth, messy morning hair, tattered T-shirts, and a slouch staples of a new style and rummage without reason through the pile of garbage where lives a three-legged, one-eyed tom cat with a scratchy howl for a voice and half its tail missing. Let us now and ever after acknowledge that the crooked path may be the one which affords the greatest entertainment as well as the most significant insights. Let us go further and insist that there must be at least a warp in the floorboards if we are to have even a chance of the divine entering our lives. Let us be willing to point not only to the unknown as to a wild landscape to be trodden, tamed, parceled, and sold at auction, but to the finally unknowable, the untamable, and unsellable, both without us and within the wild landscapes of our own minds. You are certain you'd rather live without the threat of death, that you consider such a possibility not only good but feasible, if only theoretically. But only theoretically: if it were more than theory your view on the matter would doubtless change. What can be said of happiness? But of unhappiness, where can one stop? The one is vague, generic, superlative, what comes after the end of a story. It is very, very, very... The other involves details, causes, hopes, schemes, friends, enemies, betrayals, mistakes, twists and turns, and the danger, always the danger, that it may get worse, that it may cross over into something beyond even unhappiness. Gordon Theisen lives in Carrboro, North Carolina. He is the author of Devil Sack, a collection of poems.