I just turned thirty-three and I’m anxiously waiting for my crucifixion.

Bureaucracy in Heaven is slowing things down. What’s different in Heaven? People have halos and wings but that’s about it. Bureaucracy is a necessary stain in this Universe. The Milky Way is spilling, and the insects are getting hungry. They’re attracted to failure, of those that get close, so close, so damn close, but no cigar! No sir! Then the insects come, galactic insects as big as Lexx, floating in the vacuum of space, attracted to the scent, affecting your mind.

You lie there in spoiled Milk and Honey waiting for the worms, for the Old Ones, for the Lovecraft nightmare to digest you… and you finally look through the cracked looking-glass of a servant.

You were never a God. You were never a blip. You were a servant the whole time and you didn’t even know it.

Know your place. Stasis. Enoch says it isn’t time yet. 33 and it seems like light-years away. Forever stasis. Forever dependent. Control is an Illusion. Control is a psychotic break. Control is a Soul Mate in her tailormade prison. She followed the blueprints to a T. Signed on the dotted line. And Fate sped that result.

People talk but no one engages. Must be a computing error. Brains are similar to computers that way. Tech has made people socially impotent. Very little exchange. The self important ones drone on and on. I find it pathetic. Don’t they know how they look for fuck’s sake? How they sound? How embarrassing they are? Even if they’re doing important things? I hate them so much, yet they surround me, smelling the lies and the stink of failure.

And I serve them. Always serving them.

They smoke me out, give me free drinks, and of course try to teach a thing or two. The horrible realization is I need them in my life. Why? Without them, loneliness would kill me where I stand. Without them I fade away to nothing.

I meet better types but they usually end up ditching me. They are right to leave me behind. I would leave me behind. For the first time in my life, I’m getting used to the notion. Know your place and so I do. I will submerge myself in liquid nitrogen and wait for the tech to catch up; revive my downtrodden brain. Maybe I’ll be better then. Maybe I won’t be what I am now. Maybe I can be something I can respect and love. But how do you love an epic failure? How can you embrace a Supernova? Kiss a Black Hole Sun? You wait until the ice melts. You give up the ghost.

That’s what I have done now. Whatever I am, I will be. And whatever I will be, will be Power. I know my place at this moment but I never lost my power-lust. I have a world to save. But I’ll keep my head down. I’ll serve. I’ll take the hints and passive aggressive words. I’ll rub their backs and wash their feet. Never send a Cat to do a Dog’s job. But that’s the best they got. So I go and do as best I can, which isn’t very good. I am trying god help me. But it isn’t very good.

It’s hard to keep your head down when you’re so exposed though. People are curious about me. Prying eyes. I feel them. I meet them. I alienate them. Pitying eyes. I might be frozen in Amber but I want dignity. Is that too much to ask for? Keep low. Exposed and in the open. Opportunities flower, blossom, then turn to glass and shatter. Expect the unexpected! How do you stay positive? Is being positive another trick the devil pulled?

Evil is attracted to a broken heart. It’s not fair. Are atheists right? Are the nihilists right? Before, I thought it was a way to avoid thinking about the unexplained, about the undiscovered country, about a future with too much progress and too little wisdom to handle it. Even THINKING is filing for divorce.

Let the computers worry about our minds. Let the pills worry about our emotions.

I am the Voyeur Absolute. I live outside the world. A slow-going Pornhub ecological disaster plays and replays. Dissolution is the only solution. But this goddamn EGO! How can I kill my nurturer? Why would I break free from my only freedom?

Had a seizure moment last night. Programming error. My legs gave way underneath me, but all I saw was a still image of the hostel lobby in front of me.

“Dude are you alright?”

I look up and see the young guy at the front desk looking so worried I’m nearly touched. State of confusion. What happened? Why does my body hurt? Mr Robot shit. And it happens again in the bathroom, twice. Second time, I bang my head so hard, half the hostel is at the bathroom door. I had tried taking a piss, and blip! I’m on the floor with a howling pain in my head. My junk was out for the whole world to see. Look at the drunken buffoon at 33 years old. Look at the very personification of failure. I was scared of getting kicked out. But the kindness of strangers is something that I’ve always been able to rely on in the wicked Miami Beach. One silver lightning.

Two picked me up off the floor and took me into the stall. Asked me all the usual talk to the wasted: “ Do you need to puke?” “Are you bleeding?”

The genuine concern swelled my heart. I wanted to be pulverized by the Sirens of Titan. I wanted to be a satellite. Forever stasis. Swallowed by shame and regret. I was an apologizing machine, but they gave love in return. Is there a lesson here?

“You have nothing to be ashamed about bro. It happens to the best of us. We’ve all been there yo,” That’s the hostel manager. Salt of the earth no bullshit homo sapien. Gives as good as he gets. A man of his word. Never a shamer.

“It’s ok man.” That’s the Dominican New Yorker. Another genuine soul; a vegan with the ambition of a meat-eater. Very smart and really into theology. “Nothing to feel bad for.”

Maybe there ARE good people in this world. Have I not been looking hard enough?

Skip to the future. I’m making deals with these men. I’m shaking hands. We’re signing Contracts together. The stasis ceases. But for now, they’re picking me up from the literal floor.

The New Yorker insists he saw me hit my head against the floor with brutal force. I believe him but he doesn’t know how hard my skull is. I’ve fractured it on many occasions. Just a bump remains, to remind me that I have to take care of my brain; that it doesn’t work the way it should; that it’s compromised. To remind myself that age makes it harder to live with epilepsy.

I am not afraid. No doom and gloom. I take things as they come. Easy come, easy go. Go forth into the great unknown, with or without your consent. Better with. I am a breadcrumb of identity in an endless sea of identities, bigger than Andromeda. Everything is alive, more alive than the living, more human than human, more awesome and terrifying than we could ever conceive in our feeble inept 3 dimensional brains. You know that feeling when you see a horror-creature for the first time? A spider? A snake? A jellyfish touching your skin? That’s what I mean. We are constantly being dominated by the unseen knitting hands. Little monsters no bigger than our hands can determine our fate. Do we really have control in this life? Or are we being slowly digested, like Lovecraft believed?

In my case the literal truth is in the facts: A stacked deck. Not even a pair of twos. All I have is my bluff, which is the worst bluff in history. No one buys what I’m selling. No one ever does. Some come close, but when other people come into the mix, they toss my hand away in shame. What’s the use of a vexed hand? I was born with a deformity called poverty, from a deformity called bureaucracy, from tension between two nations that I had nothing to do with. Fate decided my path before I was born; when an ancient black woman stared at the fire Prometheus gave, and saw the face of a curious blinking boy thousands of years in the future, staring back.

Some have the life of choice, everything choice. But I wasn’t in that category. No matter what choice I made, no matter where I went, the weavers of life had different plans. Enoch laughs, arms folded, sitting on a bench of toothache.

But not all is lost. I seem to be upgrading. The level of people surrounding me aren’t all shit anymore. For example, look at the guy coming in to check on me in the bathroom.

That’s Terrell, the nice kid from Trinidad. He stays in my room and shows me all the music that the Caribbean and Indians offer. We laugh at how promiscuous they are. He takes to me easily. He’s repairs air conditioners and freezers, an engineer who never finished school. Tyrell is in pain. I can tell. His eyes are trying not to hate the cruelty of the world and the fate weavers. He is an anomaly in Trinidad. I can tell. His parents were able to provide a better life for him than many of his friends. And the shame is there. I can’t blame anyone. But his father is dead, and his girlfriend and mother want him to stop chasing these silly dreams of being his own businessman, of being his own boss, of providing a better life to his country. He came on a 2 week Visa and found a job in 5 days. I love pumping him up. He was scared of not getting the job. I told him not to be too grateful, to prove his skills and be confident, to play the game without shame. He laughs and laughs with a giddiness only people from the Caribbean have. His one flaw is the flaw many Caribbean people have: worry about gays.

“Emulate the worst motherfuckers at the top, wear a suit, BE a suit, and that’s how you take that power for yourself. Take that power back from those greedy money makers.” I tell him. Words from a bum.

Whether true or not, this gives him confidence, a second wind he was losing when we met.

“I got the job man!” My heart is filled with relief and happiness for him. It’s rare when good people win. You have to celebrate that when it happens. We wax nostalgic about an unwritten future where we are running the world amid clinking glasses aboard planes and yachts. He wants to study to be a pilot but he doesn’t have the money.

“I’ll buy the plane and you can drive us around.”

Tyrell laughs with a grin bigger than Cheshire Cat and fist-pumps me with Caribbean enthusiasm. Days later I seem him hovering over me looking slightly disappointed but I don’t mind. He cares about me a lot. How strange.

“You’re wasting your life with drink man.” His accent pleasantly tickles my ears. His concern is real, not like my fake friends. That’s why it doesn’t piss me off like usual. He cares about me so it isn’t sanctimonious. I try to explain to him that I don’t always drink, that I’m epileptic and I haven’t treated it at all. He believes my words. How strange. What is this feeling? Of people caring about me? Are the times finally a-changing? Bob Dylan’s net worth is 200 million but he’s the voice of the voiceless. More computing errors. Life is a missing file; something deleted and only half recovered. Fate is shaped by sins of another life.

“Why do you drink the way you do? Why do you do this to yourself?”

I want to scream how much I hate myself, my situation, my so-called partner and friends and family. I want to wage war in heaven and carve pentagrams on the foreheads of Michael, Uriel, Raphael and Gabriel. Lucifer was right to be so fucking pissed off. And I’m there with him (or am I really him??) filled with rage, storming the Pearly Gates, calling for the spilled blood of the worthless angels. I will tear the bureaucracy down, brick by brick, bit by bit, ripping my hands open and not caring about the pain. Helter Skelter on the face of God, on the atrocities committed in his Name, on the chest of Hernan Cortes, on the Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria, on monarchy and country and good morals and bad sense, on the history of the world, on Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, on the Romans that killed the Gnostics, on the scientists that split the atom, on the addiction of opioids and social media and the doctors that write the prescriptions.

Depression: the ultimate pre-existing condition. Sorrow is the links of a never-ending chain that wraps around our throats and hearts, that binds our wrists as we are herded to the New World like cattle. And here I am, pulling with desperation, slamming my blade against the chain as the ocean slams the slave ship, threatening to swallow me up. If I die tonight, my vengeance will bring me back. Spin the cruel wheel of karma! Break it off its hinges!

Tyrell goes back to Trinidad, decides to get the appropriate paperwork to work legally. He has to sell his pickup and refrigerating equipment but doesn’t want to. I wish him well and promise to keep in touch and for the first time I mean it. His road and mine are the same. Fly-by-wire in space. Good luck Tyrell. I’m rooting for you.

“Peace my bredrin.” He texts me when he gets to Trinidad. Shows me a pic of his truck and a video on FB of his house flooded by the unforgiving Tropical weather. Hang in there bro. Jah love.

It’s only appropriate coming back to Miami the second time, that all the people I hang with are foreigners and transients. A surprising number of them are running away from something; unrelenting responsibilities, exes, failed familial relationships, shattered hopes, frustrated sex…

Have I found my tribe?

CONTACT INFO: carvallodan@gmail.com