Opening from Apology July 8, 1994

July 8, 1994

Zero. It is down to this. God forbid one can exist in the minus. Zero is nothing enough. I am living in a rundown Mercury Topaz in a small town outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I am a stranger here and all I view is strange to me. I came here to be a scab worker during a factory strike at a company that makes construction machinery.

Living in a car makes you feel degraded to the level of an animal. No shower. No way to store or prepare food. Even brushing your teeth or finding a bathroom is a major task. Every day I ask myself, 'how did I come to this?'

not long ago I had a long term relationship with a beautiful woman, a home, a rental property, a fifty percent share in a small business, and was well on the way to a college degree. Now all that is gone. The cruel course of fate took the net of material security I had so laboriously created and revealed it to be a crepe paper illusion.

a few years ago at this time I was struggling to find money to eat. I vowed I would escape poverty forever. I worked, conned, connived, committed felonies to climb my way into the middle class. But once again I am reduced to the life of a peasant. Worse than this. The life of a vagabond.

The situation is exacerbated by the gnawing irony that for the first time all my hopes and dreams are a realistic possibility. Yet they lay right outside my grasp and I am unable to even enter the arena wherein I can begin the struggle to make those dreams a reality. And the truth be known it is not really money and wealth which I truly seek. Money is only a means to an end, and even then, what I desire cannot be bought.

Despite my circumstances, I feel clear sighted. The chaos of my life suddenly makes sense. I see that it was also ten years ago that I began a journey. A journey set sail with a momentary flash of light within my mind, and which is ending only now after a Homeric cycle of creation and destruction. I have nearly come full circle. Only time will tell whether this journey's end will bring a complete end to hope, or a beginning to the life I have always felt would start on some distant tomorrow.

From the beginning I already had a sense of what life had in store for me and what was existent within myself. Although unrealized, I already carried an understanding of the impenetrability of life's underlying mysteries, the goal of my desires, and that my destiny offered the extraordinary.

At the same time I also carried a sickness. An all-pervading bitterness for an evolution's worth of unfulfilled human potential. A bitterness for the unfulfilled potential in my own life which only the most naively idealistic and childlike mind could formulate.

Immediately I held the view that all of life was a game. Yet I played that game more seriously than any of those around me. The doctrine of inaction was apparent to me from the first breath. Yet I acted with more volition than all others. Even now I am often told that people feel uneasy when first meeting me because they can see 'something in my eyes.'

This bitterness soon grew into a murderous feeling of rage. Rage against God, country, human values, the cruelty of life, and most of all, myself.

I became a conundrum of the jive soul in search of perpetual resurrection. I was greedy to savor every drop of life's essence yet I constantly ignored life in hope of finding that day when I could begin living. I reach out, yet am described as unapproachable.

And it is the doctrine of inaction, the ever present awareness of futility, which fuels my self-hatred. Because this rage, at this very moment, mocks every word I place on paper. I accept that these words are purposeless, pointless, absurd, ridiculous and grossly egotistical. I continue because not to continue would be to lay down and die for all the sorrow and hopelessness that seems apparent in all I perceive.

And 'egotistic?' I am acutely aware that self-hatred is the highest form of egotism. It is this dilemma which is the final barrier for those seeking the zero. For those seeking annihilation of the self.