Tiberius Lonewolf
December 22nd, 2022
A cement block obstructs the natural order of things, and a dented metal door is held open, rattling in the winter wind as if to tell the world how flimsy it is. This is the fourth building I have tried; the rest proved their summits inaccessible, fake heavens and locked pearly white gates. There is a woman, oldish, smoking a real cigarette, a rarity in modern times, when sucking a robotic dick is the favoured alternative. Maybe it’s all the steam they blow out, like an epiphenomenalist-simulacra hybrid, but I should not flatter them, such steam would require a bounty of thought. She glances at me, uninterested, continuing to torture her lungs, I almost admire it. Such an image of anarchistic beauty is only witnessed in the older ones, the young favour their vapes. Or if they do smoke, they barely inhale it! Instead, opting to fetishize the aesthetic romanticism of a cigarette betwixt the fingers without the consequences of cancer. I look over the edge and I plan on jumping, or should I say I intend to, the planning has been festering for 5 months and now there is only one cure. Little biological blobs hustle and bustle below, flying around in their mechanical boxes and changing its gears with a phallic symbol that would make even Freud blush. In a way I feel it’s indicative of reality, if you want to get from A to B, handling the genitals of technology is inevitable. I want my body to make a mess, ruin someone’s day, traumatize age and gender alike. I spent months of preparation leading up to this, watching fatal car accidents online, bodies flailed and remodelled against the asphalt. If capitalism is to force me to consume, then I will consume death, for that is the only worthwhile event a human can achieve. I am an ugly man, both inside and out, harrowingly gaunt because my anxieties refuse to let me feast. My emaciated figure, thin hair, bad teeth, dark eyebags, overly sharp chin and large ears make for all the ingredients to a life of involuntary celibacy. In my younger years I would viciously hate women, revelling in my misogyny like a cat in catnip. To be rejected in the prime of your life because your prime is as appealing as licking the walls of Auschwitz. Oh, the tragedy! Poor me! I am hideous, a veritable eye sore, and may I add that all the women who taste the fate of my fowl appearance are heralded as a second coming of Christ. Nothing for me though, no army of loyalists lying to me as if I were the king of a fascist regime that demanded nationalistic displays of deception.
As I grow older, passing my thirties and nearing now my forties, my mental health chemically castrated me, and my anti-psychotics buried the remains. I no longer hate women for their lack of sexual interest, I just hate them for their audacity to exist, the same goes for men, children, and whatever else postmodernism defines as a human. Antinatalism, the belief that to exist is inherently harmful, should be taught to the masses on an endless loop. Instead, videos of plastic people doing plastic things parade our screens. The sociology of the cyborg, an exploration of humans both substituting and gaining abilities through technology, was thought to increase humanities potential. The machine we are becoming is not like the cyborg philosophers had wetly dreamed of, hyper-consuming morons addicted to pointless media wait like a porn star ready for a fresh dose of ejaculate. Except for the cum that hits their eyes is formed of redundant imagery and not salty tadpoles eager to race one another. If I stopped any person on the street and asked them to name five celebrities, they would laugh at such an easy question. If I asked them to name five scientists, Nobel prize winners, physicists, philosophers, or even authors, then they would anxiously fail to answer me, annoyed that I had dared to highlight their lack of knowledge. The priority of the modern person is clear, stay comfortable and reject the stairs, for it’s the elevator or I am not going!
“You look deep in thought, thinking of jumping?”
Shit, I forgot she was there, lost in a fever dream of my own rant, investing my rage into my own ontological flagellation.
“I am going to jump; I was distracted by myself.”
She sucks and blows, arching her painted eyebrows and looking me up and down.
“Like what you see?” Nothing can stop me from being an asshole.
Her painted thumb flicks the ash away with the competency of a seasoned smoker, she lifts the filter to her lips but instead second guesses and moves the stick away.
“Unusual to see a sense of humour considering the circumstances.”
She rewards herself with tobacco and tar, and I become somewhat irritated that she has held my witticism against me. I decide I will not plummet until I have left a lasting impression on this woman, and in as such my death will have to wait until she has gone.
“You’re killing yourself too old lady, rinsing the filth out of that thing, bathing your lungs in ungodly chemicals.”
She nods acceptingly and drags again to show me how little she cares.
“What’s life if you can’t enjoy small pleasures, everything is gonna kill us anywho!”
She is right, we are all dying, alas, not fast enough for my liking.
“My pleasure remains on the pavement, amongst the horrified faces of the civilized, face to face with all they are.”
She finishes the cigarette and tosses it over the edge, there is some kind of metaphor buried within that, a symbolism that Jung would adjust his pipe and lament over vigorously. However, I am not in the state of mind to give a shit about symbolism, so Jung will have to wait.
“Miserable bugger, aren’t you?” She quips lighting another cigarette as if it was going out of fashion.
I turn my body so that it completely faces her and not the wall, hopefully, this act of physical adjustment really drives in what I am about to say.
“I am literally about to KILL myself.”
She ignores my over-enunciation, my tone, my posture, and my position, and merely revels in her guilty pleasure.
“I heard that the victims of September 11, when they jumped, like, they said time slowed down. They said as they were falling, time went real slow, like a scene in an action movie or something.”
I stand there in silence; moments pass in pure disbelief of the misguided ambition behind such a string of coordinated noise that had been aimed in my direction. My ears screaming, begging for mercy, my brain evoking the sensations of a hysterical madman undergoing electrotherapy in the nut house. If I ever doubted my decision to kill myself, she, like a harbinger of influence, or the devil at the crossroads, has ended all doubt and signed my fate.
“What you just said, makes absolutely, zero, sense.” I calmly tell her.
She purses her lips so that they look even more wrinkled and unappealing, nodding to herself in acknowledgement.
“Crazy ain’ it.” She proudly reposts.
We both stand in silence again, staring at one another for entirely different reasons, I turn back to the wall in defeat. What possible impression could I leave on this woman? What phenomenological victory is there to be garnered? My last scream at the void and this is who bears witness, no. No! I will unload myself onto her, not sexually of course, moreover, why did I feel the need to reassure myself of that? I will, shit, I have lost my train of thought, the euphemism distracting me entirely.
“What do you do? Or did you do?”
I turn back around, swiveling almost ballerina-like on my heels.
“In what sense are you asking me?” I probe.
She drags, it’s all she seems to do, drag and say moronic things. If it was not for her gall, I would be ethereal now, submitted to the eternal stretch that ties the binaries of life and death. Socrates comes to mind in such thought, to walk one must have crawled, to sleep one must have been awake, to die one must have lived, to live one must ha…
“You didn’t like molest someone did you?”
I walk over to her and lift out my hand.
“Hand me a cigarette old woman.”
“Nuh-uh, need to know who you molested.”
I grit my teeth in near-insatiable rage, swallowing the wrath of Old Testament God himself.
“I did not, nor have I EVER, molested someone.”
She clicks her tongue in realisation, looking at me with immense sympathy.
“Ah yeah, I see, poor thing. I had a friend who was molested, and she tried to kill herself too.”
My seething escapes me and I reply with the unthinkable.
“Maybe you should not have molested her then.”
We both stand facing one another in silence, she slowly hands over the cigarette and the lighter. It has been a while since I last smoked, but after the second drag, my throat embraces its familiar toxic friend as if they had never been parted.
“You always been like this? So angry and controversial?”
I walk back to my squat of land, the segment of the edge that I feel will best serve me in my taboo conquest of collateral damage. I too drag, we both drag, she drags, and I follow suit, drag after drag, sometimes in unison, other times at odds.
“Yes, maybe not so much, it has got worse, and so has my mental health, but yes, I have always been disgusted by humanity and feel as if I were a phantom limb on the body of the Sapiens.”
“Why though? Seems like a lot of wasted energy! What’s your name? Let me address you more personally, like an email or something.”
A rush of anxiety gallops up my spine, I recoil at the idea of glibly throwing out personal information. I remind myself of why I am standing on this rooftop, and briefly worry that my conversation with her is making me stupider.
“Tiberius, what is your name?” Like I even care.
She smiles and somehow offends my eyes even more than before. Two hideous hairless apes ugga bugga on a rooftop, while the more attractive hairless apes underneath our feet watch other hairless apes ugga bugga on their ugga bugga machine made by ugga buggas from other hairless apes.
“Dorothy, but my friends call me Dotty, ‘cause I’m a bit mad!” she says proudly, giggling to herself in momentary reminiscence.
I am disgusted, a bunch of old wrinkly leather handbags making up silly names, no doubt her friends are from a kind of bingo gathering, or maybe hallucinations trying to nudge her into self-awareness.
“Well, Dorothy.” Before I can finish my sentence, she interrupts me.
“So, tell me Tayborious, what’s got your panties in such a big old bunch?”
My wrath is triggered once more, and what follows can only be described as the etchings of my soul purging itself in spoken word.
“Life you fool, it is a drum! We beat the drum and our bodies decay; we beat the drum and our arms tire, and we beat and beat until our venom leaves the fangs and slowly infects the bitten! The drum is loud! The voices are louder! All yammering and gnashing their teeth as if entrenched inside hellfire and brimstone. There is NO torturer, NO antithesis of duality, we are not prodded by pitchforks, but by ideology! Sinking deep like the venom from the fangs of a snake, no cure for it, we all must perish. Feed the Earth with our disgusting souls, and like the tapeworm infest its guts even in the ethereal. It would be too good to be true, that death is the final solution, the hush before the sleep like a drowsy newborn experiencing its first slumber! We have no choice in the matter, we never did, I did not exercise the free will that society, God, man, primordial soups, and the sniggering stars stamped me with. I was raped into it! Raped by existence and forced into the position of life, my being fetishized by the existential dread, I call it the ontological layers of seduction! I wanted none of this, but existence like all childhood abusers makes you reliant on their company, their approval as if it were against the instinct to reject! The dirtiest trick of all is that we are MADE for it, seduced to reproduce, evolved with all the right numbers to make the perverted equation with the only solution our own misguided pleasure. At the dawn of individual existence, we infest the internal womb of our own mother, if we are born naturally, we repay her by tearing through her genitals covered in muck and mire. From then on, the Stockholm syndrome drunk masses will do existences bidding for it, trained like Pavlov’s dog to salivate over self-awareness, dribbling over the very thought of being ‘alive’. Biological abominations, writhing in microscopic germs, flaking your dying skin, and sucking the atmosphere for nourishment. Disgusting mass of hardened calcium and the flesh and veins that spiral and cling to them like bark to a tree, waddling through a deforming abstract! All of you disgust me, content in the knowledge stored in your fragile little head organs, maybe some want more, more technology, faster internet, social validation. Sex-obsessed minds hide the perverted sublimation in muddy waters of content and value. You all crave sex because all you know is a phenomenological penetration deeper than anything biology can urge. I feel sick, sick at the sight of you, of me, of US. The drum beats and beats and never ceases, the rest of you whores can dance, civilised and uncivilised alike, and you will ALL disintegrate in time. I hope to scream an orgasm of my own from my seat in the void, watching your forms melt to fowl by the warmth of your own dirty palms!”
Her eyes widen and the cigarette drops from her mouth and onto the floor, cindering like the rage left inside of me after such a rant. My throat is horse, my hands trembling as I peer at her through dishevelled strands of wispy hair.
“Jeeze,” She remarks. “Say it don’t spray it.”
AMKent books 
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