Vivisection

What does the mortician feel, in that moment?

The body lying cold on the slab, the soul long departed. What does he feel, as the blood flows away, flows downstream, into the drain. As the color drains away, the cheeks no longer flush. As the physicality of the body reflects the knowledge of the mind: that life, like every other fluid, only flows down hill, and can never be recovered.

Does he feel, as I would, the pang of his own mortality? Does he wonder if underneath those heavy eyelids his own empty eyes may soon be hidden away? Does he embrace life all the more as he watches it, every day, drain away?

I wonder just how powerfully he feels himself in that moment. I wonder what comes alive in him. I wonder if that moment engulfs him in its throes and when he emerges, he is momentarily made again.

I wonder if he feels profoundly alive, surrounded by the dead.

---

I don’t cohabit with the dead – not, at least the kind of dead bound for the morgues and funeral homes; rather I watch the transformation occur in vivisection. I watch not the draining of blood, drawn for those who no longer need it, who will not miss it, but rather the draining of youth, drained away willingly, poured out and spilled with fervor, with delight even. I see the floor slick with it, I see the color draining from ten thousand graven faces, and I cannot but think that all too soon we will need it, all too soon they will miss it. But youth, just like life, just like all fluids, only flows downhill, and will never return.

Do they not feel it too? Do they not feel with every pull of the bottle, with every head back swallow, the ethanol solvate their source of energy, their very spring of life? Do they not feel it drain away, drain out with every sip, expelled out with every heave, every wretch of the diaphragm as the body helplessly rejects the poison out inside it?

Do they not see what could be built? Do they not see what the world could be made into? There are great works in the world to perform, great stories to tell, but they’ll not be found in the dank corners of a college town bar.

If only I saw, if only they saw, if only we all saw that what we’re looking for cannot be found in the bottom of a bottle. It must be found within us, and brought into the light, for everyone to see: our greatest failures, and hidden beneath them our even greater successes, unlocked by the hard work of youthfulness.

This is what I see in the blank stares of a Saturday night escapade. This is what I feel, far worse than any hangover, in the heartache, two rounds deep: that we go not out of enjoyment, but instead we go to forget all the good we could do.

We go to forget ourselves.

---

I wake up every morning and avoid the mirror for as long as I can, because what stares back forever haunts me, my own vivisection, laid bare. I watch the color drain, day after day, not given willingly, but rather squandered, as payment for sloth and recreation. And every day I grow more resentful, more wistful that I could have back the day. But youth, just like life, just like all fluids, only flows downhill, and will never return.

If, when I grow old, I look back and regret that I had spent more time in recreation, I shall live with it, content that what I did instead will be made worthwhile. But I cannot bear to think that instead in many years’ time, that I will look back and wish that I had spent more time in meaning, and not lived a life of leisure.

And what then will I do, but wait for my eyelids to grow heavy, and my body to fail, as my will did so many years before. As my youth did so many years before.

Letter to the Editor

Well, I botched it up. That's not an uncommon thing, of course, so let me elaborate. The direction of Belligerent Mars that I've been meandering along of late is to thought-provoke, to leave something to the imagination. To leave it up for interpretation. Unfortunately, the other end of the vague spectrum is communicating another idea entirely. Unfortunately, in writing, you only get credit for what you say, not what you mean.

(Just in case it wasn't clear by this point, this is your beloved author speaking, not the character he plays on the site).

With "Settlers", the intention was to describe how the dreams and aspirations we once had don't depart because we realize they are improbable, implausible, or impossible. Rather, they depart because every moment we are surrounded by signals that tell us that even having these dreams – let alone the dreams themselves – is unreasonable. In American culture especially, there is an omnipresent haze of expectation about the life you are supposed to be living. I call it checklist capitalism – what don't you have and why don't you have it yet.

From discussions I've had with readers, I think I failed in describing it properly, describing it in full. Of course, "Settlers" wasn't – or rather, isn't – meant to be the denouement. It posed a question, and I dropped the ball in answering it properly.

Rather than mope about my failings as a writer and internet citizen any further, I'll do my best to answer some issues one of my very intelligent readers sent in:

I think that each and every day we're all just doing mini-analyses on what it is that we want our goals to be --redefining them partially- and whether it's worth pursuing them in their original form.

Absolutely – especially in the post-college wasteland of the early and mid twenties, I find myself constantly redefining what's important, what I want to pursue, what I value. But I'd argue that it isn't just an internal process – our environment is shaping us, influencing us, suggesting to us. There's interplay of course, back and forth between what our environment allows us to accomplish. But it's also immersive, wouldn't you agree? And that immersion, when it's so constant and embedded into our culture, can – and I think is – a damning influence.


I guess my point is is that people don't just wake up one day in a position where they aren't at their "goal" when they should be. They make distinct, discrete decisions that either cause them to stay the path to the "goal" or veer from it, based on their wants and wishes at that particular time. It is not a blind process.

No, it's not a blind process, in that we don't in the blink of an eye go from a twenty-something hipster with radical ideas and the thought that, like, we're gonna change the world, man, to a thirty-four year-old mustachioed man in dad jeans picking up his kid from daycare in the corporate stooge job that he hates (there I go with the hyperbole – this is what got me into trouble in the first place). But we are blind in the sense that we don't have a grasp of how our environment is leading us in one direction or another.

As an example, consider two classrooms filled with an assortment of more or less identical first-graders. Tell one class that they are math whizzes, algebraic rock stars, and give them encouragement; tell the other class that math is really difficult, that it takes a lot of work to be good at it, and reinforce the complexity of it all. I bet you can guess how this turns out. Is it because one set of kids chose to be bad at math, and another chose to be good? In a sense, absolutely –they either made decisions which led them to get better, or worse, at the additions and subtractions and all the other mathematics I've long since forgotten. But what they didn't have control over was the environment they were in. They made choices, but those choices were not wholly their own.

[T]here is something wrong with people who look back on the whole entire picture and are just regretful and confused as to why they aren't in the ideal position that they had imagined and are sad about it.

There is something wrong with people who chose not to look forward toward where they were heading and see it coming and not try to do something, however desperate it may be, about it. (One such person is doing one such something by devoting an entire week writing on that very topic, out of terrible fear he'll become that regretful, confused, sad person.)

[Y]ou are cognizant of the motivations that lead you to make the decisions that you do and you should be happy with the decisions you make according to those motivating factors –why else would you make them? You graduate college. You get your first job. You get your own place, your first real place. You get a car. You get a girlfriend. You get married. You get a house. You get a dog. You get a kid or two. Maybe you get divorced. Maybe you just get a mistress. You get old. And then, you get a grave and a headstone.

Why did you do what you do? Because it's the thing to do. It's what everyone asks you at Christmas, at dinner parties, at all the horrible, soul-crushing gatherings where other people have something you don't, and they wonder why you wouldn't want it, and when the hell you're going to get it. Call it peer pressure, sure – but I think it's more than that. It's expectational debt. There's no real question of if, and there's certainly no question of why. The if is irrelevant. The why has already been answered by the millions of "happy" people who came before you and checked off the same boxes. The only questions is when.

When, when, when?

And the people who find themselves exactly where they wanted to be and still unhappy...fuck them.

Fuck them, indeed.

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This is exactly the kind of feedback I love. Belligerent Mars was never intended to be some classical piece, played once, recorded on a wax cylinder, and cherished for eternity by frumpy men in thick spectacles. It's a living breathing work. Like tennis, like jazz, like great sex – it's made good with any sort of partner, and made unforgettable with a great one. If you have something to say, do get in touch.