Self-Preservation: The Cafone

Pride gets a bad rep. Sure, there are instances where we need to set aside our pride, but pride is a healthy means of self-preservation. To some, the pride is easily bruised, while others take pride in the fact that they can laugh at themselves. Pride is a good way to gauge your sense of identity; take pride in your uniqueness, your strength, your experiences, and your positivity. When we sense our pride being threatened or offended, that is a good opportunity to step back and evaluate the situation. What has caused this sense to arise? Is my sense of self under fire or am I merely taking myself too seriously? It is a delicate balance that takes skill and confidence to consider. 

In certain instances, however, when the pride calls for your aid or recognition, your sense of self may be threatened by the situation at hand. In such situations, we need to make a choice: Preserve the self (ala pride) or modify the self. Such situations often represent moral dilemmas or call our values into question. Through it all, we must remember that the self - a self that is loved, above all else, - must be kept in a constant state of becoming. It is a perpetual fixer-upper. When such situations assert themselves, we must ask: What is right for me? What do i stand to lose? Never ignore the call of your pride and never throw your sense of identity under the bus.        

The Cafone

He served me a generous platter of oily pigs’ feet. The garcon was adorned in a glaucous vest with vertical gray lines, a cerulean bowtie, pleated pants, and a button up, starched and bleached, long sleeved dress shirt with silver cuff links. There was an orange grease stain on his wrist.

The man across from me was dredging his dirty fingers in a mound of pig appendages he too had been awarded, piling them without hesitation into his snapping jaws. Transfixed by the popping suction sound of his chewing, with wide, oscillating jowls as the meat was imbedded deep between his uneven, gnashing teeth, I watched his thick eyebrows thrash with jubilation. The mixture of liquefied fat and saliva dribbled down each of his multiple chins and seeped into the napkin he had pinched between his thick neck and taught collar. He laughed maniacally.

I watched a piece of meat, formerly perched on the back of his tongue, fly across the table and land beside the saltshaker. Droplets splattered all across the tablecloth. He undid his tie and frustratingly flung it onto the tabletop, while loosening the jacket of his $2,000 suit. As he did, his elbow grazed a pile of naked knucklebones in a hors d’oeuvre plate beside the dwindling entre, fossils left in the wake of his gluttony. One of them rolled off like a die and approached the edge of the table, tumbling off and onto the toe of his polished leather shoe with a tap. He inhaled sharply. Choking, he coughed up still more particulates to span the space between us.

“Enjoy!” he said, gargling protein and gesturing with his pruned hand toward my untouched plate.

I swallowed loudly against the clatter of colliding dishes and glasses in the half-empty bistro, the sound of its closing creeping in from all directions. I wondered then, wallowing in my disgust and eating only doubt, just how much I was willing to sacrifice at the expense of my ambitions. 

   

Far Afield and SBU Poetry Slam

Tonight, I had the wonderful opportunity to perform with fellow poets at the second-annual Stony Brook University Slam Poetry. I was unable to attend the past two semesters and nearly missed out this semester. The coordinators were kind enough to allow me to perform, even though I did not attend rehearsal. I performed "Early Girl" and got a really nice response from the rest of the performers. I want to thank them for the support. I handed out some fliers, so hopefully some of you will be stopping in.

Anyhow, I have included with this post an excerpt from a rather extensive short story I wrote that has been received wholesomely by those I have shown it to. It's called "Far Afield", and concerns a gentleman named Elmer and his interactions with a young girl named Amber. The best way to describe the story is the juxtaposition of an older man who has reached the end of his journey, while a young girl has only just begun hers. It is a woeful, sobering examination into the nature of human existence and how two people, in hopeless circumstances, regain control of their lives in the midst of giving up on it. I implore you to contact me if you feel compelled to read the rest. Enjoy!

Far Afield

"I’d partaken of it all, every backwater pastime imaginable and every festive, edacious celebration under the sun. I made moonshine, saw auroras, climbed mountains and started bar fights. I’d scaled redwoods, sailed gulfs, attended raves and churned butter. Rendezvoused the whores of Vegas, stood in the shadows of the monuments at D.C., traded with the dealers of Hollywood and trekked the scenery at Yellowstone. But for what? What’d it all amounted to? Emptiness – a deepening gorge in my spirit that consumes every attempt at filling it. After all the experiences, the motel rooms, the bars, the nightclubs, the cabins, and the convention centers, I would always walk away with a sense of unfulfilled desire, not anything sullied sex or controlled substances could satiate, but a longing to finish something I never started. Perhaps it was life itself. Ha! I couldn’t stop myself from laughing, laughing at this scene, this endgame. Standing smack-dab in the middle of some boilerplate nowhere, laughing myself near to tears. It made the firearm feel warmer in my hands.

Yet I could not stop my heart from racing. As welcoming as the solution once seemed, an anticlimactic, romanticized conclusion to a no doubt disappointing double feature, the stigma of my stubborn neuroses still prevented me from surmounting that omnipresent instinct they call life, a restraint I’d underestimated. That distant glory they call happiness had long ago abandoned me to fend for myself out there, dashed away when hallow love was hollowed out and left a crust for me to dine upon eternally. Perhaps that was its last spiteful aggrandizement – leaving me to seek nourishment from those things I once held dear, never allowing me to walk away, always tarring at its coattails for a scrap of that which I once cherished. Yet I still held on tactlessly."

Ermeneglossia

"Ermeneglossia" is defined as "the interpretation of tongues" by American anthropologist L. Carlyle May in his 1956 essay, A Survey of Glossolalia and Related Phenomena in None-Christian Religions. It entails the deciphering of jumbled, incoherent, cryptic annunciations emitted by an individual in an induced state by a religious layperson (a sorcerer, a shaman, a priest, etc.). It is presently the title of a short story I had written quite some years ago.

It is written from the first person perspective and concerns the misfortune of a man who awakes to find himself trapped in an incredibly small stone space with no recollection of who he is, where he is, and how he got there. His voice-box has been removed and he suckles from a drizzle of water as it runs down the wall from a crack in the ceiling for sustenance. After several days of examination, finding only petty artifacts, he retreats into wallowing as he contemplates his plight. To his relief, however, he hears a faint rapping coming from the wall of his confinements. In excitement, he attempts to contact the faceless entity through a small hole in the wall by his feet, only to be met with a greater horror.

Please enjoy the excerpt and let me know if you care to read the rest.

Ermeneglossia

Excruciated, trying still desperately to call out, to convene with the stranger, I could only make out one feature of him at a time: a nostril, an eyebrow, a lip. I whispered, but all I could make out from the thumper were muffled groans and grunts. I put my mouth directly in front of the hole, but received the same reply.

   It hurt too much to continue, so I stopped and swallowed a chunk of what I assumed to be my own tissue. I could hear the stranger on the other side continue to murmur and garble. Inquiring, I pressed my eye to the opening again and saw blackness, then I felt a moist, hot, foul-smelling gust lollop over my cornea and cause me to shut my eye swiftly to tear, and back away.

   Rubbing it and opening it again, I looked through and saw the beam of light once more on the other side of the gap. I saw the gentleman lean back and throw his opened mouth into the light as I continued to hear him gargling. The beam shot through his missing and broken teeth, and into the cavity, allowing effortless view to his tonsils. But where I expected to find a flicking, anxious tongue, as a line of drool rolled down his unshaven chin and neck, I saw only a bloody, knotted mass, sown up tight with blackish string, encrusted in a thick coating of uncontrollable mucus, a stale wound where his tongue used to be. It filled my gullet with contortions, shooting pains up my back and over my shoulders that bleated from my spine.

   I was overcome with coughing, the most painful, harshest coughing fit I had ever known, and I couldn’t stop because of the pain, but I pleaded for it to for the very same reason. Horrified, I began to whimper once more.

 
  

A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea

Today we have an excerpt from a short story I finished not too long ago. I actually began writing it back in 11th grade, but left it alone for a few years before coming back to finish it. The end result is pretty much what I had intended to write. It is entitles "A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea", taking inspiration from the old children's sing-song, albeit with a different interpretation. It tells the story of a sailing ship lost at sea after escaping a harbor city gripped by a pandemic plague in search of new settlement. The crew has found themselves adrift in an unnaturally calm stretch of water where neither their compasses nor the stars in the sky can be relied upon to guide them. As hysteria begins to grip them, revelations of their fellow crewmen begin to tare them asunder.

"A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea" by The Sven-Bo! excerpt: 

After a few moments of hesitation, marked by foreboding and careful consideration of what should be done, I stepped forward into the violent corona the man had created around himself. He turned speedily toward me in resistance, pointing the gun directly at my person. I gasped, but it was muffled beneath my beard. The rest of the men hushed and awaited my response. I could not show weakness; I had to conquer this boy.

“Scud,” I beckoned with a gentle voice. “That is your name, isn’t it?”

“It was,” he replied erratically, the gun vibrating in his nervous hand. “I’m not quite sure it will be after tonight,” he warned.

“Scud, give me the pistol,” I requested. “I don’t want to see anyone else die tonight.” 

“Why should you care?” he argued.  

“Because I am the Captain and it is my responsibility to care for my crew.”

“Don’t lie to me! I’m sick of lies! This ship is built of lies! It’s manned by liars!” I watched the veins on his forehead and neck come alive as he stamped childishly upon the floor, his hair flung in his clammy face. “I want to go home,” he wept, tears welling in his eyes.

“I know, Scud. We all do. But we can’t if we’re all dead!”

“Maybe we can,” he objected. “Maybe we already are.”

I retracted a bit, giving him room to calm down.

“I had a family, you know,” he deviated. “I had a mother and a father. They loved me. They… they died.” He repeated the words back to himself in a whisper, as if ensuring they were true. I watched as the heavy weapon in his hand fell limp, loosening ever so slightly as to allow his arm to sulk, though still dangerously suspended. I saw one of the men behind him gesture that he was going to pounce, but I gestured back to him to retreat, lest he cause another death.      

“I had a family too,” I responded. “I had a wife and a son.” Pronouncing their names caused me to fall into a muse, spurred on by Scud’s caustic emotions and my own nostalgic reflection. My strength in authority folded as I gave into the very same sentiments that had conquered the weak-willed Scud.

“You liar!” he screamed.

“I had a family too, Scud. We all did.” My voice had risen slightly, so I eased it back into a quieter tone. “None of this is our fault.” I tried to comfort him.    

“I didn’t want to be here,” he admitted, weeping further as his face bunched up into a dirty frown. 

“Neither did I,” I solemnly agreed, half conscious of what I was saying, too focused on the images flashing through my mind.

Scud abandoned his sorrow immediately after I pronounced the words. He looked at me fiercely, his eyes prying in confusion, as if the words that had left my mouth were somehow deceitful. He stared at me for several moments while I tried to uncover what the source of his glare was, awakening from my reckless trance. He seemed to have discovered something, though I was unsure exactly of what.

The pistol in his hand suddenly sprang back up in excitement. His muscles tensed as his arm straightened, the barrel of the flintlock aimed squarely at my chest as the entire scene had once again given in to anarchy.

“Who are you?” Scud ordered in a monstrous voice. “Who are you, Sir? Tell me!”

“I…” I stuttered, my arms flailing wildly as the rest of the men pleaded with the man to desist. “I am Octavius Celeste, Captain of the Ex Nahilo. I have manned this vessel for thirty years.” All the while as I spoke, Scud continued to demand who I was.

Before I could finish, he grabbed me about the collar and swiftly drew me near, thrusting the jittering gun into my left nostril. The last of my confidence and clout succumbed to fear of my own demise, my heart beating with a furry incalculable.

“Oh, God!” I exclaimed, my eyes meeting his as I watched rage enrapture his brow. “I was impressed upon her!” I clamored.  

Once the words had escaped my lips a mounting silence began to fill the deck as each man, those who begged and the one holding the gun to my face, began to listen intently. I myself was doused in horror; I had admitted a fathomless wrong. I could feel the eyes of the company fall upon me in shock. I continued as not to disappoint, for I feared it would only damage the circumstances further, admitting the truth in its entirety, while the pistol remained tightly pressed to my wrinkled nose.