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Nutshell Kingdom: Failure
2005
Imagine thinking that you're a failure. That's right. No self-pity. Just cold, hard, parentally-enforced, backed with an abundance of evidence, objective truth.
Imagine sitting on the floor of the shower, bottom of the tub, your belly almost doubled over in a mockery of your own self-indulgences, water running through your pubic hairs, looseneing a small clump of goo (it's just shower gel, accidentally unrinsed!) near your embarrassingly useless genitalia. Imagine your wet bangs in your eyes, warm water in your mouth; the shower stream is a cascade of noise like a cocoon from which you are unsuccessfully attempting to use as an escape from a world that you had just recently concluded could not help but concur in your estimation, NO, realization of your own past, present, and future status as a failure. You are a broken vessel, a disasterous battle plan, an heirloom garden planted under the wrong moon. Potential comes off you like, all but that small droplet of, soap in a lonely shower stall. Your gifts to the world are spent away in dazzling combinations of fear, laziness, convention, pride and a compulsive need not to succeed. At anything.
Imagine what that thought requires. You, who know yourself entirely. You, who are an omniscient God on the subject; who have witnessed every incident, felt every pain and every exhaltation, every tear that was really a declaration of love for the world as a whole. You, who eavesdropped on every thought, can list every good intention, every small charity, every unwitting smile. What does it take for you, who have seen all this, to sit on the floor of a shower and judge it a failure, call it a hopeless case, a lost cause?
When you imagine you have this thought, I want you to smile. I want to smile that inner smile that knows the world is a lot more complicated than this, that there is no failure but the failure to look harder and to really see. This is your talent and it remains unspent. You, my friend, are no failure.
And then I want you take all the razorblades you have in the house and throw them away. No, not in your own trash can. The neighbor's. The one those kids play in all the time. And I want you stop shaving. Or eating anything that doesn't have a lot aof Vitamin A. And when your beard is long enough to be really scary-looking, I want you to go to the police and confess to killing a bunch of teenage girls and burying them in your backyard. They'll dig and dig and never find a thing. Right? It'll be funny. You will soon be a sort of celebrity and occasionally interviewed on TV. Proving that you are not a failure after all, because once you are a celebrity, the world is your oyster, ripe for the shucking. you can even write a book about how you fooled an entire big city police department and make a lot of money. Money is further proof that you are not a failure.
Have fun with it. You deserve it.
