Don’t laugh at this, goddamnit. The pain and misery of our fellow humans is, ultimately, not something anyone should be laughing at. I am fully aware of the hypocrisy of that statement. Maybe you all think that I’m good for nothing but tossing out an endless stream of incoherent nonsense and non sequiturs. And perhaps I deserve such a reputation. But please, just for a moment, listen to what I have to say with an open mind. Pretend, even, that I am not the person telling you the story. It is the story of your brother or sister, your friend, your special someone; it is not the story of a human being so decrepit, so degraded, so inconceivably cruel and self-centered as me. For to even imagine such a thing so reprehensibly vile would cause the universe to implode in on itself.
I am not a particularly handsome man. Perhaps at one time my abs did not resemble a sack of corn, my eyes not droopier than a Dali painting. That is no longer me, to say the least. Nor am I a particularly kind man. Some might even call me downright insesitive, cruel, forlornly abject. I am not a rich man. I teach some kids at a kindergarten in China. The money gets me by. I have an ipod, an lcd monitor, a bunch of homosexual looking fish in a shiny tank. I’m not left wanting of frivolous possessions. This is certainly not to say I am right, though. If you can’t afford to wipe your ass with the face of Mao, you aren’t rich in China. I am, if anything, an intelligent man, but Einstein certainly never had a harem of beautiful women wiping his ass with the face of Mao.
She, on the other hand, was a pretty girl. An exceptionally pretty girl. The kind of girl that makes you glad you bought the stain-free kind of Dockers. Tall, leggy, that long, black, shiny Chinese hair. Chinese men would threaten to cut out my intenstines and feed them to their dogs merely upon seeing me with her. And they eat the fucking dogs here. She was so beautiful, it didn’t matter whether or not she was rich, intelligent, or even kind. But oh, she was kind. Kind, loving, compassionate, and decidedly monogamous. I could have peed on her while she was wearing her favorite dress and she’d still cook me dumplings for dinner. I, of course, never did anything to physically abuse her, but there are worse things a man can do. There is a strange sort of mindset here whereby a beautiful woman such as herself could still define herself by the purest kind of love rather than a quantitative measurement of conquests. I believe that, perhaps, I held the most beautiful thing in the world in my hands, and upon recognizing it was filled purely by the desire to suffocate it, debase it, drain it of every last ounce of energy leaving a dead, rotting cocoon. I am a sick and twisted man.
I remember thinking, while watching her cry, that she was at her most beautiful when crying. Not tears of joy, but that other nasty kind. The kind of tears that can only flow when a nasty boy says something heartless. I always forget to call her. I show up an hour or two late. I just want to sleep. I never say anything nice. The accusations are all true, of course, but I can only think about how she’d look naked right now. I kicked her out of my apartment in front of all my friends. I threatened to sell her computer on ebay in 48 hours if she didn’t come and pick it up. I said I wanted to see other people. I said I never loved her, that she was a bad girlfriend. She begged me to give her another chance. She actually got done on her knees and begged me, a man not so handsome, not so rich, downright cruel, to give her another chance. And all I could think was, apart from her naked flesh, was that if she couldn’t recognize the kind of man I was, she deserved every second of sorrow she would have. Then I walked her to a cab and paid for a ride home. A true gentleman.
I’m afraid there will be no more saving the world, for me at least. It is the end of an era, an epic saga not lacking in drama, suspense, comedy, horror. The power to save the world is in your hands now. You have seen the consequences a man faces when he does not embrace the beauty he sees in the world, what happens to a man when he sucks the box of beauty dry, still trying to get the last drop through the straw, the sound of the box collapsing in under the weightlessness of the newly created vaccuum. Do not be this man. Be the strong, be the man who says “I do not drink juice from a goddamn box!”, be the man who doesn’t crack stupid jokes in his hour of repentance. Honestly, there isn’t any room left for more of me.