Everyone is Always wrong about Everything

What is the nature of your pain? You do not ‘fit in,’ it seems. Does this upset you? You say you want ‘a revolution,’ yet you despise the sight of blood. How can this possibly make sense?

I thought it was just a Life thing, you know, a matter of determine, fit to scale. The wall of human separates. Desire from Achieve and all that…

Faith propels Forever beyond the blasted years of ones such as yourself, toward some Someday, the Past and all the rest to be flotsam-jetsammed overboard.

I am a deliberate animal, struggling, perturbed. Yes I am mindful of the great ‘as if,’ as if Possible floats on lifeless, sexless diseased ‘what is.’ Striving adrift. The sea of course.

Think: mind over matter. Meditate upon it and think hard.

Matter doesn’t matter anymore.

Well, really, that’s relative.

Relative to what?

Your miserable lump of human be.

So, what then?

How should I know? I’m not ‘god.’ I’m just a voice from the depths, of you, no less. In other words, not all that deep.

How deep? How Me? More of Me or less of Me than what I am? What I believe I am.

DNA-deep. What is language, after all, but an abstraction of your DNA?

What about my thoughts? I mean My thoughts?

‘In the beginning was the word.’ Language is thought, idiot. You think your ‘ideas,’ so-called are your own?

My thoughts, my mind.

Don’t tell me you fell for that old line. Didn’t they use that one, or some such ‘freedom to be original’ nonsense, to sell computers back in the 90s?

Whose, then, if not mine.

Think of how many minds, how many centuries ‘your’ words passed through in their evolution before passing, briefly no doubt, through yours over the course of Human Be. Not all that long, but thousands of times the sum-total of your You.

I still have time.

Not much. That’s part of the gag. A human life-time is never long enough to develop an actual ‘character’ beyond whatever experiences one or another individual choses, among all that he/she has experiences, according to one’s inherited predilction for this or that ‘personality’ type.

But there is a Me, that is, the essence of me, the —

“Soul?”

Well, no. But who or whatever decides which experiences I choose to define as me. That’s Me.

Nope. That’s not you, that’s Me.

Well that is a gag. Playing practically a joke. What’s the other part? Of the gag, I mean.

You’ll find out.

I’m impatient. I don’t like surprises.

Nobody does. That’s why you’re all a bunch of control freaks and religious zealots and ‘litigators’ and what not.

Give me a hint.

I’ll do one better. I’ll give you a quote: “One life is but a fart tossed about the winds of existence. Briefly.”

Lovely. Who the hell said that?

You did. Or maybe it was Me. I can’t recall. No matter, it’s nothing new or original. It can’t be. It cannot possibly be.

What is this ‘nothing new under the sun’ type crap you’re feeding me? Talk about cliches. You’re telling me no one ever has any original ideas?

I didn’t say that. At best it’s a collaboration.

Alright, how about this? “Occasionally some one is right about some thing, but Everyone is Always wrong about Everything.”

Cute, but no cigar. Your ‘some one’ usually just says what Everyone already knows, or has at least pondered close enough to reach a possible, but most unwelcome, conclusion. Hence, they back away.

Goddam it. Look at me: I’m haunted.

Yeah, so?

So, do something. Don’t tell me all this crap is ‘in the DNA.’

Why not? You think Nature never fucks up? Why do you think so many species go extinct — not counting the ones humanity knocked-off?

Okay okay okay okay. Yeah, yeah. Sure, sure. I’m not gonna just sit here like a duck and wait. I mean, every problem has a solution, right?

Yeah. Sure. Have Faith, as I said. Whatever. Hopeless.

Come on, man. For a Voice from the Depths you’re pretty shallow. Faith in what? Human ingenuity? Good sense? This is ridiculous. Absurd. That’s all you got stored in that double-helix alphabet it took god or the cosmos or nature or whatever to construct? You gotta give me something.

You are in fact way more Me than you are You, so there’s not much more I can say regarding what everyone’s favorite southern flim-flam man refered to as “what the definition of ‘is’ is.

Do me a solid, will ya?

I’ll do unto you what you tried to pull over on me. I’ll give you a quote.

Eager to hear it. My ears are open, and my mouth is shut.

Huh. For a change. Okay, here goes: “As the billy-goat dashed madly through the streets, bleeting to be killed…”

As the billy-goat dashed and bleeted what? What?

Figure it out. Caio.

Adam Engel lived for your sins -- and he lived well! -- in Fear-and-Trembling, Brooklyn, one of the last gangrenous toes of NYC not yet severed and replaced with a prosthetic gentrification device. Engel has traveled the farthest regions of cyberspace, where Dark-matter meets Doesn't-matter; and Anti-matter, despite its negative connotation and dour point-of-view, excercises rights of expression protected by Richard Stallman's GNU/Free Software Foundation and CopyLeft agreement, if nobody and nothing else. Having spent many years studying Boobus Americanus (Summum Ignoramus), allegedly the most intelligent mammal on earth -- after its distant relative, Homo Sapiens -- in various natural habitats (couch, cubicle, bar-stool, ball-game -- televised or 'real-time') -- Engel has thus far related his observations of and experiences with this most dangerous of predators in three books -- Topiary, Cella Fantastik, and I Hope My Corpse Gives You the Plague (the combined international sales of which have reached literally dozens, perhaps as many as seventy, with projected revenue to top three digits by decade's end! Truly a publishing phenomenon). Engel is Associate Editor of Time Capsule Books, a division of Oliver Arts & Open Press, published in limited editions for a tiny, highly specified, though eclectic, target-audience: people who actually read books. He can be reached at adam@new.dissidentvoice.org Read other articles by Adam, or visit Adam's website.