08 III 2002 - 00:26 - prex1

maybe you're right, tiff. maybe i don't care about anything or anyone that isn't me, that isn't bound directly to me. maybe i am a callous unfeeling bastard.

maybe. i have it within me.

but maybe it is a failure of expression and how do i burn myself out of that? what amount of penitence will get me out of that?

oh god if it please you if it harm no one else please burn this out of me please make me a better person consume me that i may be renewed. i believe desperately in my own base nature and yet i lift no finger to change it. burn me out because i cannot bear to be called callous and feel as if i want to care. this is an aut/aut situation, either have me be callous and simply not care or, infinitely preferrable, allow me to show that i care.

right now what others call pretense is killing me and they call it pretense so i'm not fooling anybody.

so there's a place for me in hell and i am good and i am just but i am not any of those things. lust greed sloth envy burn fierce in anger and resignation, for i am after all only human. i deny my essential good nature and that hurts, too. so what's to be done about this?

take it from the start: i am a callous unfeeling bastard, and run from there. don't stop running or what pursues will catch up with you. perhaps a trial by fire will save me; perhaps it will only fix me among the ranks of the damned.

there is no room for grey in the cosmology of my afterlife. begin a prayer 'o pudor' and realize that's a joke, i don't know where shame has gone.

so maybe you're right, tiff. maybe the thing for me to do is not to listen, ever, to my friends or to those i dislike, lest i should expose myself as the unfeeling bastard that i am. except, no, that doesn't work, either. i can't win. (is this to be won?)

am i old enough to have so little faith in myself? answer to come when i am sixty and dead or bitter and grey and bent over. rosy future, yes.

cold. unfeeling. bastard. i deserve whatever i get.