THE MARK OF CAIN

I have a strange outlook on the world around me.

There are times when I am full of tearful compassion for no good reason other than I feel I have born witness to another's pain, the turmoil etched on their face like a lithograph, the eyebrows bent downward with the corners pointing up, the furrowing of the brow as tribulation washes over them like baptismal waters, these things being evident in an old woman's walk, arms loaded with groceries; a child who is outcast from her peers by issues of weight or race or beauty, solitary in a corner of the bus, isolated mentally and physically; a man who works hard doing manual labor to support his family, a stupid man with a big heart who knows nothing except that he must continue to be exploited so that his loved ones can flourish in poverty's potting soil; a woman, alone, on her own, unable to accept kindness and love, prone only to cruelty and vice, blind to blessings and used to undressing herself, liking the squalor that she has had her face pushed into, thriving on the slime at the bottom of the riverbed...

And then there's the opposite of this, the times when I pass by people on the street, or drive by them in my car, or see them out of the corner of my eye, and I want to see them buried, the incompetent, the foolhardy, the blissfully dumb and the elegantly ignorant, pawns all of them, tools and losers, bringing about their own private miseries, victims of their own devices, far from redemption and graceless in defeat, the ones that I wish to see burn in hell, buring in front of me like the memory of that man who burned in the backseat of a car on my grandfather's street; I want to see them crushed like the skull of a baby duckling under the weight of a plastic wading pool; I want to put them out of their misery, exterminate them with extreme prejudice, draw the line and end their existences so that they burden no one any longer, so that I don't have to be in this pain of seeing them and wanting to cry or help them, so I don't have to feel compassion or mercy or any of those things that feed off of my blood and sink their incisors into my flesh...

This is what is wrong with me. This is my major malfunction.

It is also what separates me from the pack, and at the same time enables me to slip unnoticed through the crowds. There is a power in my eyes-- I've always known this, but sometimes I can disguise it, in order to get through a conversation without going from one extreme to the next...

This look in my eye acts as a defense mechanism. Like a porcupine's quills, it is a warning to other animals not to come near. Like a peacock's plumage, it can be an invitation to women, asking them to approach me even as I stand by myself against the wall, looking at nothing in particular.

It is the ability to see right through people, to size them up without any effort, to know what makes their hearts beat fast without having to ask many questions. To look at them as if they were vapor, intangible, immaterial... that is a blessing, and a curse.

Some have called me psychic, but really it is what Roger Waters referred to in Pink Floyd: The Wall as "amazing powers of observation"... Before you've laid your rap on me, I've already got your number, and everything after that is a sick form of foreplay for me, an exercise in smugness and arrogance, a way for me to feel superior to the likes of you, having to scramble for your words, trying vainly to appeal to my intellect, desperately wanting to make an impression on me, but I am not soft sand nor am I gentle snow-- I am compacted, solid, immovable, and nothing fazes me in person because I have mastered the art of the Internal Struggle, to the point where I can have a complete mental breakdown in your prescence and you would never even know it, you would never have any idea of how psychotic I truly am, of what kinds of thoughts race throughout my brain in just one millisecond of waking life...

I walk the halls of my work, and everyone seems to like me. Even my bosses, who only days ago were chewing me out, are coming up to me and shaking my hand, telling me that it's "business, not personal"... and I wonder about that look in my eye: does it scare them into being nice to me? Or does it appear differently to them? Does it appear as something benign? I have been told that I possess an "aura", a light around me, Buddha grace and all that, but when I look in the mirror I see only emptiness and devastation, scars from traumas that have gone unhealed, a petrified bird of prey flapping with bruised wings, a wounded predator with a taste for blood...

I am a monster.

Maybe that's why, as I read Red Dragon for the very first time, I find myself admiring the character of Hannibal Lecter. I picked up the book at the Goodwill the other day, when I had the day off, for a dollar. I'd seen the movie that Michael Mann filmed in the '80's, Manhunter, and I've seen the remake with Anthony Hopkins (Eve, incidentally, had a small role as a cop in that one) and of course I've seen Silence Of The Lambs and Hannibal, and even read both of those books... but I never got around to Red Dragon.

I though the book version of Hannibal was an incredible read, far better than the movie that was eventually released. Thomas Harris is a macabre writer, deliriously homicidal, and at the same time he is as detached from his content as his fictional Feds and cops are from their cases.

And Hannibal Lecter is such a heroic character.

He is heroic because his needs are pure, his ideas unclouded, his mania focused and rigid. Obviously he is not a hero in the Apollonian sense-- he possesses heroic virtues but the viciousness of his negative traits almost cancels out our sympathy for him.

And yet, we do end up sympathizing with him-- at least, I do.

In comparison with the ultra-violent antiheroes of recent comic-book series such as Spawn and Constantine, going back past The Punisher and Wolverine, Hannibal is no different: they are villains with a code of personal ethics, outlaws who have fashioned their own Hammurabi Codes from the personal wreckage of their lives, supermen with no tolerance for the decadent and debased factions of this present world.

I bring up the comic-book comparison because it is an adolescent view of the world, to perceive it as basically so evil and corrupt that even its heroes have been tainted with the Mark of Cain. But ever since I saw Mad Max as a kid, my heroes have always been the weary survivors of subjective Holocausts, the kind of heroes Frederick Nietzche might have scoffed at even as he extolled the qualities of the Ubermensch, those men who were made stronger by circumstances that did not kill them outright.

I know that there's something horribly wrong with me. That's why I write.

I don't write for money. I don't write for fame. I don't write for praise.

I write because it's all I can do to keep the demons at bay.

I write for survival.

And when lesser folk come after me, looking to disrupt my sanctuary, they get dealt with in the coldest fashion.

Last night, at The Garage, Captain Capsule was trying to make the others laugh. I never laugh at his jokes, even though he can sometimes be funny.

The reason why I never laugh is because he tries too hard to be funny. Everyone else is laughing anyway, so what does one more signify in the long run?

At one point Paulie asked Capsule to perform one of his sight gags for me, but Capsule hesitated.

"James is never impressed," he said.

I looked at him, unsmiling, and I said, "That's right."

I got a big laugh out of everyone. They all thought I was kidding.

I wasn't kidding.

And that's how it goes with me-- nervous laughter, people thinking that I'm witty when I'm dead serious, and vice versa...

Maybe they see the Mark, above my forehead. Maybe it's not in my eyes. Maybe it's right above them, some kind of designation from God that warns others not to take my life, lest they feel the wrath of The Lord.

God is saying, "Leave him alone-- he's mine to deal with..."

That is, if you believe in God...

I believe there is a God. I believe I have a lot to answer for when I reach the Pearly Gates. I believe that he has something waiting for me at the end of this ride, and it may not be good.

Do I care? No, I don't. God and I, we have this... arrangement, I guess you could call it.

In the meantime, while I'm waiting to die, I will do whatever I want to do.

And no one can stop me.

Luckily, all I want to do is have a good time before I die. So you don't have to worry about me.

Just stay out of my way when I'm pissed, and you'll live to be old, like me.

Time to take a break and read some more Red Dragon.

HAVE A NICE WEEKEND, FOLKS!!