It takes two words to define life: Organized Metabolism. We are structured; We eat, and then shit. Our digestive tracts, our little arrows are the kind that point us forward in time by pointing to our next meal or source of the energy we need to move forward. Our digestive tract drags our bodies through time by using food as a rope. Our bodies are partly just a location we’ve been dragged to and adaptations are the specialized rope pullers our new environments beat into us because we needed to climb new ropes and end up in new bodies and new places with new things so we could throw it all down the shoot that turns environment into ATP and poop.
Give a digestive tract enough time rope and it can beat itself into wielding some clever genitalia and use that to create even more digestive tracts, little baby digestive tracts, time-worms. All thoughts, memories and traits of personality, which, mistakenly are accepted as what defines us as individuals, are just appendages developed by a sophisticated yet simple feeding tube to more efficiently and abundantly harvest resources from its environment.
IQ is an arm that pulls and crawls filling its fingernails with dirt. Conscientiousness is a leg doing squat after squat day after day, growing, succeeding, sending its tube to a place other tubes can’t always reach. Agreeableness can be a fist like an anchor pulling you to the bottom of an abyss. Openness is a pair of eyes that can navigate you to other worlds. Extraversion is a shoulder to be cried on, a hand to shake, high five or pat on the back with; It’s a way to get a meal from inside a man’s heart.
Even when you’re looking one right in the face and you realize that the poor bastard experiences it all just like you do, solving little problems here and there, trying to make its situation easier, more rewarding, better, eventually you see its social position and career as something like a guaranteed place holder in the feeding line. Imagine social digestive tracts: feeding tubes with so-called egos, faces and familiar voices inside them that can only they can hear. That’s what there is to see in ants, dogs, plants and it’s what there is to see in the human.
Eaters, spermers, and incubators; The dorm-aged people around me all look alike under the same objective light. All shitters.
“I’ll scrape by,” I say into a payphone to my brother who was listening more than speaking. “I’ll be literally scraping by, scraping chicken entrails on a factory floor, scraping garbage at a construction site and eventually scraping snow off the sidewalk. All the jobs at this temp agency are about scraping up shit.”
In the kitchen behind the payphones a plush little, white woman with her glowing red hair in a white towel was audibly chewing a chocolate ball cereal out of a white bowl on a white table in white sandals like she’s part of a lab experiment for General Mills. She’d pop brown sugar balls into her charm of a mouth and thumb through her phone with her palm over her jaw as she chewed in a circular motion like a toy washing machine or the box they spin blood with to separate plasma from red blood cells. “Whatever I have to do to never do plasma, again”
“Good.” Says my brother as if he’s certain I’m above it. When it’s a matter of survival what’s to be above? “I could hand-scrape out some sperm into cash every three days. A hundred and twenty a week, a few bonuses at the end, giving sperm wouldn’t be a bad gig.” There’s a sigh over the phone just as a young girl, Brazilian, possibly Puerto Rican—I don’t know—maybe Libyan or some shit, opens the front door to the hostel and the sun-baked salt in the air whips at my skin, tugging at my hangover and twisting my insides, reminding me that I’m still poisoned, that I’m still not worthy of the in-your-face-hospitableness of the Barcelona climate. I’m a worn out bag of soiled tissue around a half-poisoned feeding tube that needed time, water and something greasy or pharmaceutical to recover.
“You do something like that and you’ll spend the whole rest of your life wondering if you have kids out there.” The feeding tube developed a head a whiles back and filled it with brain, that pile of stuff that throws out loud solutions when the feeding tube is having a problem unsolvable by normal instinctive means. Some think their head-voices’ loud solutions are some kind of truth so they amble around sharing about their nonsense like headless chickens share blood. I only trust those who hear every voice, including the one inside them, as a possible tyrant’s. Those are the ones who question. The other’s just drink the blood.
“Fuck ‘em” Another sigh spills out of the phone and the thought of my brother’s breath makes me want to feel that bright, cold kiss of foot fungus on brittle stone as I sprawl out across the white tile. Up close it probably looks more like a cream and up closer it would look like V.D. en masse, loud incestuous colonies, just wiggling around proliferating and getting a bite to eat before the next pine-scented, chemical holocaust turns the terrain into vast empty wastes.
“Who get’s the sperm?” I ask my sigh of a brother from two thousand miles away and the girl eating cocoa balls looks me right in the eye. I read somewhere to never look away so I never did. When the eyes of predators meet, their separate streams of gaze compete for some grin or aversion, any sign of submission, respect or hostility. She almost looked to be blushing into her phone, but it could’ve been that she was one of those red-all-over types the kind that blushed through every inch of their skin, pink everywhere, some places more than others.
“I’ll tell you who gets the sperm,” I announce to the cafeteria. “The people who want it. The people who plan, then try and try and try and try some more and it doesn’t work so they see a specialist and the specialist changes their diet, gives them new positions, new angles, new time windows and so work schedules get rearranged and they try some more and the girl has to read all her make up labels and eat salmon roe and the guy can’t jerk off without feeling like a monkey-coward and the specialist reminds them how significant the next full moon will be and the sex becomes plain, genitals become wet machinery. Like old joints feelings eventually wear away and it gets duller and number until one day it’s a chore and chores aren’t what drives you to come home. They aren’t even the things we think of when we think of a home. ” A man whose shoulders crawled with dreadlocks touches the beautiful lab mouse of a woman on her far shoulder. She takes the bait and turns back around as he spoons some of her chocolate cornballs into his mouth. Her eyes grow. Her phone doesn’t exist. Two predators bask in each other’s gaze. Two feeding tubes purr and play over a bowl of chocolate balls.
“Then one day there’s some results and they aren’t good, there’s some crying, and maybe a little relief, there’s a period of loneliness, some scattered talks, a fight, maybe someone stays at their sister’s for a couple weeks or a drunken bar fuck is buried deep into their memory so that it’s nearly forgotten enough to stay on track, then something comes together because someone says something true and ugly to get the ball rolling. There might be more of that too but then someone compromises and gives up their bullshit. Being all-in is a big realization. One day one of them says something else true and a dream is swallowed to make room for the next step. Then they do the shit they’re good at. They research the spermbank, the process, the big-named gyno with the perfect track record and pictures of seashells all over his office. They make phone calls and write emails. They end up in a white room reading my profile: White, six foot two, blue eyes, a nonsmoker at the pinnacle of his health. Grade A sperm and, guess what? They’re happy to have it.” The hangover made my blood unbalanced. A prickly roll of heat flushed into my skin and darkness tunneled my eyesight. In a faint spell I found myself kneeled at the payphone holding my head as low as the phone cord would allow me. The coolness of the tile was soothing like water. I made a mental note to wash my knees the moment I finished shitting out this night garbage tied up in my guts.
“What if you do have kids some day? What if they find out that you have strays out there? Jesus, what if one of them starts dating someone and they find out it’s their goddamned brother?” Like a baby trapped in a balloon full of ketchup something in my gut struggled and kicked. For thirty seconds or more I had to clench with all my strength to keep my asshole from dilating until something in me, something like a lava lamp bubble rushed upward and the pressure subsided.
“And what? My long lost children fuck and they make some kind of retarded deformity? Is the worse case scenario always your first instinct? I guess they’d get some sort of blood work done and find out that they’re siblings and one would go purchase a good, thick rope and hang themselves while the other flees to hedonist Thailand, meanwhile, gramps here has to take little Lenny, the shit-smearing miracle, on walks or frisbee or to some facility where I can just forget about it? Yeah, of course that would be awful.” My whole body is a ketchup bottle with two openings left out in the sun, it’s contents separating and now some wet or cold apparition probed like a dull butter knife at the bottom opening, demanding it’s way in or, maybe, out. “That’s fucked.”
“Of course it’s fucked, but it’s never going to happen.”
“Never say never.”
“Oh, what a clever saying. Is that your next tattoo?”
“It could happen.”
“I’ll tell my kids never to go to Denver. I’ll lay down a kibosh or whatever, and then they’ll never go there and that should put the odds in my favor even more than they already would be. Kapeesh? Also, what are the fucking chances, man? If that’s where your mind jumps it must be fucking impossible to be you! Every time you eat a meal you must be worried that this is the time you’re gonna choke or get E. Coli and shit yourself to death while begging for water? Every time your wife’s sucking your dick are you crippled by the fear that she might have a seizure and bite an inch or two off the top? There are seven billion people in the world, like 300 million in the United States. So what? What’s the math? What’s the piddly-shit chance that your paranoid bullshit hypothetical situation comes true?”
“There’s still a chance.”
“That’s bullshit. That’s mom’s particular species of bullshit speaking through you. She filled us up with that shit and you’re the only one that can scrape that shit out of your brain. Follow the evidence. Be a fucking scientist and believe in objectivity, not your useless fearful fantasies.”
“You’re not a scientist.”
I knew the words should hurt or at the very least stir up some sort of emotion, but all I could feel was the swollen liquid palm of chaos applying firm and steady pressure to my asshole. I couldn’t see my brother’s point. All I could see was myself shitting all over my ankles on the cold tile while three young Japanese girls ate cocoa balls in the white kitchen that looks like a lab one minute when a lone little white girl eats from a moderately portioned bowl in a sterilized outfit and then more like a frozen yogurt shop the next minute when three big-eyed and black-haired Japanese girls, all skirts, bangs, and giggles fill the hot air with quiet close-lipped chatter and the zipping and rustling of their lunchbox-sized backpacks. They could very well be about to lose their appetite as they watch me faint and go limp in a pile of my own soft serve.
“I gotta go.” The ketchup bottle was opening.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine. I’m just hungover. I need to shit. Like now.”
“Take care, brother.”
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