The Broken Bugs in the Palms of My Hands

Part 1: Are you all serious?

I played no part in my being born, besides taking those first breaths when I came into this world. I was told not to cross my legs as a young boy, a rule I played no part in conceiving. I was told to complete my assignments on topics I told were important to me. I spoke and dressed in a way that made others find me likable or, at the very least, tolerable.

I never really dreamed of any career. I never really wanted to take vacations to Cancun or the Italian hill country. Never saw the purpose in hitching myself to a woman and having kids for the sake of it. I never felt like there was any me in all this life stuff. Life was something you abided by, not something you experienced. Life was defined by neuroticism. People were motivated by a compulsion to reach a next stage which represented some personal development on their behalf.

I resented the politeness, the formality of it all. For instance, I hate bars, and I could never figure out if people went just to feel like they did something that night. What did they really want to do? I couldn’t tell if it was really what they found to be fun or whether they didn’t care enough to think of figuring anything else out. And it was at this stage of my life, the going to bars stage, that my resentment and alienation grew. The tragedy had sunk in that even in young adulthood people chose to relinquish the freedom and independence they had been granted. They instead chose to keep doing the right thing.

And it was in my young adulthood, when I had moved to Austin, when it was made clear what was so grating to me about civil society. I would walk along West Campus and see massive plantation buildings with walls constructed around them and with security guards to man them. I would walk a little further and see a man in a sleeping bag, lying under the overhang of some business or parking garage. There is an entire section on east sixth street, by the methadone clinic, where almost a hundred, mostly black, homeless people camp out, cook, and hang out together.

I remember two conversations that stuck with me when I was a freshman at UT Austin. One of my roommates came up to me complaining about a new city ordinance that would allow homeless people to sleep on the street. He claimed that it would encourage more people to choose to become homeless. In another conversation, my friend from my hometown of McAllen, was talking to me about how she’d be liking Austin. She said she thought it was a fun enough city, but she wished they would “get rid” of the homeless. They were like cysts defiling Austin’s visage. She hated the sight of them; she hated the danger they posed to her.

Part 2: Economics midterm

I bought some adderall from some guy that sold adderall, and I took that adderall to study for my economics midterms. The adderall was meth pressed with orange filler, and it made me feel a sense of tranquility I had never experienced before. I no longer felt dissociated. My vision felt sharper. My thoughts felt intentional and fluid. I felt fully connected to myself, like a fog had been lifted. I bought the pressed pills for a couple of months until I decided to just buy the straight up crystal since it was cheaper. I was living in a co-op apartment, and I would smoke incessantly.

A lot of addicts will say that they felt human the first time they used. That they felt something was wrong with them and that their drug of choice allowed them to overcome their fear of people and feel more “normal”. I would use meth so consistently, without any sleep or food, that I developed strange delusions such as that I had leprosy or the feelings that my organs had withered in some way and were freely floating in my body. I would close my eyes and see images that were not of my own mind's creation. They were pornographic and violent and so I would keep my eyes open so as to elude the images being projected onto the back of my eyelids. At times, I would be convinced that I had died and was actively rotting, yet somehow still conscious and moving. I thought others knew of this; I thought their wide eyed stares were indicative of their horror. I felt like a cockroach suddenly put under a lamplight. They saw my hollow eyes, my matted hair, the thin layer of grease on my skin, the yellow of my teeth, and I could feel their judgment.

Part 3 The World of Authenticity

It would appear as though I gained nothing from my meth use. But I thought it was the truth. The dark underbelly of the world, of American society, was fully revealed to me. Two girls I had befriended had died of an overdose, and I had been the one to find them. My friend and dealer was shot and killed directly in front of a house we were hanging in. And there was simply no sense to it. I could go to brunch and have a day at the lake, but it would all be an illusion. It’s all violence, all the way through. There are girls who drink twisted teas on a boat in lake Austin, and there are girls who lay still for hours, their lips and eyes a dark purplish blue. It is all violence.

The same venom that exists in these outcasts, who might stab, pistol whip you and take everything you got cause you looked at them funny or caught them at a bad time, exist in these more, what you might call, civilized classes of people. Engineers at Lockheed Martin. Black rock realtors. Health insurance executives. The people designing tech startups that surveil us, or, at the very least, collect and sell our data so that we have an endless stream of products to justify us giving risky subprime loans to borrowers with low credit. There's almost a pleasure to the weight that the suffering their work causes. They know they’re pushing themselves further from the bottom. They get to sit around an artisanal coffee table sipping wine, talking about what should be done about the homeless. Kill them all, someone says, and they all chuckle at the extreme nature of the suggestion and a voice of reason suggests instead to put them in prison. Well, we should at least get rid of all the Arabs someone mentions, and again there are half- hearted abstentions that insist that some must be good, but that it’s such a travesty that the “radicals” give the American people no choice but to carpet bomb them into submission.

These people are the heart of violence, but they are absolved of having to ever engage in it themselves because they align with power. They have decided they are of a breed of person whose responsibility it is to weigh the cost and contemplate the nature of war, wealth inequality, racism, drug addiction, homelessness and so on. The superstructure is a mere thought experiment to them.

Part 4: And so I crush bugs

The worst part is, the suffering that is ingrained structurally at every level of human organization, is an abstraction to most. It was other people like me, defectives, whose houses I stormed into with a gun drawn, shouting for them to lay down and stay laying down until I could stuff my backpack with as much of their jewelry, cash, and drugs as I could. In a way, I thought I was splitting the corporate class by embracing the reality of America, of the American Dream. I was exposing them, I thought. I was meaner than them; they could not survive in my world. But of course, they didn’t understand my thesis, and it wouldn’t matter if they did. The bottom was the bottom. They don’t care if they could survive it or not because they will never be there.

And so sometimes I would go down town at night and find some nicely dressed types and tell them to give me any cash they had, using the same method I did when raiding drug dealers' houses. It felt nice seeing the fear in them. They would be talking and laughing, planning how they were going to get home, and then they’d see me and then they’d hear what I said. They were looking me in the eye; I was no longer an abstraction. They never looked me in the eye when I was sick in the street, disheveled and afraid. But now they had no choice but to confront the type of creature this world creates in the flesh.

But, they would surely get whatever money that had been taken back the next day. They’d buy new jewelry and be back out the next night. They’d have an interesting story to tell, even more of a reason to justify their arguments for euthanasia programs or whatever. And I, too, would spend their money and sell their jewelry and be back alone in my room getting spun out.

I’d lay on the mattress I packed into the corner of my room at the co-op and stare at the ceiling. A cloud of gnats would obstruct my view; my room was littered with trash and half eaten meals that maggots made homes of. Oftentimes, I would suddenly clap my hands together, crushing dozens of gnats at once. My hands would be smeared with the liquidated bodies of the nats. I’d look down at my palms and see all the broken wings of those I killed. I would curse them for invading my space. They had put their lives in my hands, and they lived based on my discretion. I derived satisfaction in knowing that I was king of the trash heap.

I was like the corporatists pricing families out of their communities. I was the trigger happy general razing Rafah. I didn’t embrace the drug underworld because it was less cynical and cruel, but because it did not pretend to be anything otherwise. However, does liberation come from holding someone at gun point for 40 grams of speed. I chose the life that would let me confront the cruelty of the world, but I initially sought this confrontation because of my hatred of it. I knew I was unhappy, I was in hell, but I thought that that was merely the price of confronting reality.

I thought I was wise, but I made the mistake of assuming reality could so easily be defined by a singular aspect. The world did not feel cruel when I was having cookouts with my friends. The world didn’t feel cruel when I was moshing at DIY shows. I loved reading Blood Meridian and watching Stalker with my friends. I love dancing and singing and I love windy days the most. I appreciate stepping out to smoke cigarettes with my buddies.

I want to be good. I care about things, you know. Another mistake I had in my understanding of reality is that it is immutable. I never had to crush those gnats. I created a slum and reveled in the fact that I was its architect. I’d created a structure that was designed to rot and decay, and it didn’t matter to me because I was at the top. So, one night I decided to clean my room. The gnats went away, and so did the broken wings which used to stain my palms.

The conditions of life can be subverted. The architects of the real slums, the men with broken wings on their palms, won’t ever wake up one day and decide to clean things up. My story is only meant to serve as an example that the state of things can change. It will be us, the gnats, who turn the slum into something new. We will confront the cruelty that we call order and subvert the very principles that underlie it and create something new.

We will create something where there aren’t so many of us out there who bear the anger and despair that grows when our lives are dictated by apathetic opportunists. We will shed the insecurity of our own powerlessness. We will lose our desire to abuse and exploit our fellow man, to assert dominance over others. We will show those who have been shielded from alienation, who have turned lives into profit margins, the despair they sow.