by Neil Stott
Not many people know that. With the ten-yard stare of an academic who had delivered the same material to an MBA class since 1922 he yelled; “hamsters to the Southwest, thousands of em!”
Some people just want to watch the world burn. Or blow the bloody doors off. I am not sure why they would want to eat Myron. A hamster who ran and ran, got out and had gone nowhere. Nowhere.
But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself and, by heavens I tell you, it had gone mad. The horror. The horror. Sunk into his beanbag muttering; “Shadows? On me soul? I’ve been eaten away. This is the end of me! Oh, God in heaven help me.” I felt like an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill.
I put him on double secret probation and told him that thin, sober, and clever was no way to go through life. Knowledge is not always good. One must put up with the good, the bad and the ugly. “I am beyond their Timid Lying Morality, so beyond caring” he replied.
I rang 111. I reported an ontological drama. Listen I said he is playing all the notes but not necessarily in the right order. He is unstuck in time. He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the events in between. He says. But the computer said no.
“Choice. The problem is choice. Too deny our own impulses is to deny the very thing that makes us human.” he said. “Has anybody ever told you you have a serious impulse-control problem?” I replied. “Hey, Neil. Isn’t it great being next door to someone who’s recklessly impulsive?” Me: “Actually, it’s aged me horribly.”
“I should be loyal to my nightmares of my choice,” he says “I don’t like work–no one does-but I like what is in the work-the chance to find yourself. Your own reality-for yourself not for others-what no other person can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.”
We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of his darkness. Trouble is, I’d been back there, and I knew that it just didn’t exist anymore. “Do you know why you can never step into the same river twice?
“Never get out of the fucking boat,” he replies.