the devil and god are raging inside me

"And over the sea in a warm sunny place 
men and women sit watching TV 
they say, ‘it’s a shame anyone has to die
but it was either them or me’ 
all safe and snug, tucked away in our mansions 
we smile feeling comfortably safe 
and over the sea there’s a dark cold place 
out of sight, out of mind, out of reach, washed away…"
-Showbread, Escape from Planet Cancer

"The death, the rape, the tragedy
the world is an ugly place
what’s capable inside of me
is going to rear its ugly face…"
–DIES, Aesthetics of Violence 
 

"And in my best behavior 
I am really just like him 
look beneath the floorboards
for the secrets I have hid…"
-Sufjan Stevens, John Wayne Gacy, Jr.

Several years ago at my former job, I sat down at my makeshift desk, which was really just a folding table propped up against a wall.  I was a temp, hired on to help the company catch up on their paperwork and they had no proper office to give me.  So they made due and assembled a desk from extra parts they had in storage.

As I sorted through the stack of files, I noticed the room grow dim on my right side.  I looked up and saw the florescent light on the ceiling had gone out.  I looked at the wall three feet in from my face and saw the light and the dark encompassing the same portion of polystyrene.  To me, it felt like the technological equivalent of the angel and devil on my shoulder.

When I was a child, as I came to understand myself and the world and people around me, I realized I wanted to help people.  I lived in a small town with small minds.  Religion reigned over everything.  God was not at the center of people’s hearts but at the center of social normalcy.  And with that warped sense of religion came a warped sense of right and wrong.  They did not look to the Bible but to their biased pastor to see who should be shunned or celebrated and a mess was made of everyone.
 
Fortunately, I was able to avoid such brainwashing.  I did not grow up in the church and it spared me from being taught to discriminate (disclaimer: not all churches teach hate, just all the ones I attended).  I wasn’t told to hate the gays or keep my distance from the blacks and shun the atheists and fornicators and underage drinkers.  In fact, all these "bad" people comprised the majority of my friends.  I liked them and I was a good judge of character.  How could they be bad?  And how were they any worse, open with their vices, than those who hid their sins on Sunday and resumed their wicked ways the rest of the week?
 
Although this "Christian" behavior was hypocritical, it didn’t anger me at the time.  It only inspired me.
 
I realized I wanted to help people. I wanted people to love each other, to realize we are all the same underneath our skin and sexuality. I wanted people to know we all have the same desires and defects. I wanted to use my art to inspire and incite revolution. All I really wanted to do was open people’s eyes.  I just didn’t think I was good enough at the time. I wasn’t quite ready yet.
 
I was a child, still developing my skills and message. What did I want to say? How was I going to change the world? I had lofty ambitions and I didn’t want my life to go to waste. I grew up deformed in several ways and I felt so much pain inside because of my feelings and fears. I didn’t want anyone else to go through that. I didn’t want anyone to feel as alone as I did. Despite my personal demons, I thought people were basically good. The world was bad and we would get corrupted but we could be saved. We were worth saving.

And then I started working in retail.  My view on people quickly changed. I keep saying how silly it seems to form such an extreme opinion on humanity based on customer service but there is some validity to the judgment. If you want to get a quick and dirty look at how people really treat each other, get a job in a restaurant or clothing store.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying working with the public gives you the most accurate portrayal of the pain people can inflict on each other or the kind of demented souls you’ll find out there. Somewhere in the world, right now, as you read this, a man is raping a baby and a woman is engaging in coitus with a corpse and a teenager is lighting a bag of puppies on fire and you typically don’t find those demographics at your local Kohl’s. But you get what I mean.  Those in customer service are treated like crap. And I just think if customers can’t even extend common courtesy to those who are serving them, what other selfish acts will they be willing to commit later on? That kind of behavior escalates, you know.

And then there was my college experience. I thought it would be good because I’d be able to meet a variety of different people but I only ended up meeting a variety of different douche bags. My roommate was a heartless hipster. My professors were pricks. The other students were either savage or snotty. I will admit I did meet some decent people but the majority were monsters. And being on the other side of customer service for a change, I saw how people in the service industry didn’t care about trying to help others. I wasn’t greeted or given respect. Half the time I was ignored as the woman or man behind the counter punched in my order, took my money, and sent me on my way.

And I couldn’t ignore world events. The poverty and genocide. The torture and hunger.  The burning buildings and corruption.  The insatiable greed.  And on the other side we had people getting millions of dollars in endorsement deals and raking in more cash than they’d ever be able to spend. Why didn’t they help out? Couldn’t a fraction of their fortune save the lives of millions of people? To be fair, maybe they did donate but obviously their donations were not enough because people still died in destitution.  Would their charity ever be enough? Would anything ever be enough?

There’s an anger that bubbles up inside me when I think of the atrocities we’ve committed against each other or the wrath of nature that we ignore in favor of publicizing divorce and celebrity scandals. It makes me sick to see starving animals thrown away like trash and children reduced to literally barely more than skin and bones. I hate that it feels like no one lends a helping hand anymore. I hate that I can’t do more to help. I hate that all the money and power seem to fall into the wrong hands. Or is it that the money and the power corrupt those hands and turn them into vacuums?  They suck up more and more each day and never feel the satisfaction of silver and gold, gripping tight and tearing down anything that gets in the way of their palms and the paper that pacifies them.

War is sensationalized. Murder is glamorous. Death is the new black and everyone wants their own slice of the macabre. And I’m just a guilty as the next one. Life has become trivial in my eyes, like it has become to millions of others. I do not value life like I used to when I was younger and didn’t know any better because I see now that life is too hard and too brief and a lot of the time it feels pointless.  I’ve seen too much evidence to tell me it’s not and there is a part of me that shuts down when I see death.  I compartmentalize the pain and suffering and tuck it neatly away for future angst.
 
Sometimes it feels like the only way to deal. Sometimes it feels like the only way to make it through the news or make it through the day. I can’t think about humanity’s selfishness, or my own selfishness, for too long because it’s too real. We don’t face our own internal evil because we don’t want to feel like bad people. We aren’t the ones drowning children and selling sex slaves so we can’t be bad.  We are not evil.  We just condone it.  We let it happen.  We close our eyes and eat our meals, wash our faces, put on our clothing, drive our cars and we don’t think of the animals and people tortured and abused to give us what we take for granted.  We don’t want to ignore the realities of wrongdoings but we also don’t do anything to stop it.

But I think about stopping it. And for the longest time, I thought I could stop it with my art.  I thought I’d be able to create an animated television show that taught lessons while it entertained.  I thought about writing books that improved people’s minds and behaviors.  People would read my words and get it like I get it.  I know I’m not the only one who gives a damn!  Other people do too and they just have to see it.  
 
But a lot of people don’t see it and though the years I’ve started not to see it either.  I realized when I was younger, I idealized everything.  I idealized celebrities and superheroes.  I idealized my talents and roommates and my sister.  I thought I’d be able to make a difference but when I entered my own moral decline, I wondered if I could really save people because I couldn’t even save myself.

And then shortly after college, I died.  My faith in God and people died shortly afterward.  That’s about the time when all those feelings that had once pushed against the surface of my skin popped out of my pores and became more palpable: the burning rage and regret, the seething jealousy, the hopeless desperation.
 
And that left me empty and confused.  My life’s purpose was to help others but no one helped me.  I felt betrayed.  I felt ignored by God.  I felt beaten down by the world.  Where was I?  What was left for me?  My plans had derailed into death and I didn’t know where to go from there.  
 
And now, instead of working with hope and positivity to create change, my tools have changed into ropes and revolvers.  My mind is filled with visions of evisceration. People make me angry and I think about how easy it would be if they just died. If a customer gets cranky with me, I tell myself it would be easier if they got into a car accident or contracted cancer just so the world could be rid of such rudeness. Earth doesn’t need people like that living and polluting the planet with their pestilence of mouth and mind. I don’t always actively wish for them to die but think it would be best if they did. I don’t call upon cancer but there are days when I wouldn’t wish it away for certain people.

And that makes me feel horrible. That deeply embedded Christian guilt comes stabbing through, no matter how hard I try to push it away. And maybe it’s normal to feel hatred toward people. Maybe we’ve all wished for a wayward bus to come along and do some spring cleaning to the caustic troublemakers in our lives. But that doesn’t make it okay, especially depending on the severity and sincerity of our fantasies.  It’s one thing to to joke, it’s one thing to even have a naughty fantasy every once in a while.  It’s a whole other situation when you want it to happen.

I imagine killing people sometimes. I think about smashing people’s faces in or blowing their heads off with a shotgun. Sometimes I think about putting my hands on someone directly and not just killing them but hurting them, hurting them as badly as I can. Torturing them. Making them suffer.  Inflicting as much pain as I can, all in this twisted attempt to get them to feel the kind of pain they’ve inflicted on others. With each crushing blow to the face, I want them to hurt like they’ve hurt others. I want them to feel remorse, to feel guilty, to feel apologetic. And I want them to die so the world will have one less asshole to deal with.

I don’t want to kill everyone. Just bad people. And annoying people. I often think that little girl screaming in the store would be quiet if someone tore her head off, and even more, tore the head off the mom who let her wail. I often think people would stop causing trouble if they were gutted. I often think people would just leave me the hell alone if I came at them with a butcher knife.

A lot of the time I hate people. I can’t get over the total lack of manners and even something as simple as that makes me murderous. Sometimes someone can do something as small as not giving a thank you when I open the door for them and I want to take that door and bash their face in and scream "You’re welcome, you piece of garbage!  You’re welcome!"

But that’s not right.  I would be the only one to get something out of it, a certain satisfaction at ending one more rude person’s miserable life. But that kind of thinking is selfish, going back to that animalistic need to satisfy one’s own cravings, causing pain to please one’s self. I wouldn’t be any better than the bad people I rail against.

I know your Googling the number to my local police department right now so let me just say I would never actually hurt anyone. I never have and never intend to.  I’ve never taken a swing at anyone and the phrase "he wouldn’t hurt a fly" applies to me.  I don’t even kill bugs.  It’s just thoughts.  And they satisfy me for now. But they also instill a monstrous guilt that eats away at me.

I try to be good. I try to be honest. I try to be fair. And I’ve only gotten pain in return. It makes me want to be bad, to be cruel and rude, to lash out because everyone else does. People hurt others. Assholes come out on top. Some say they eventually fall but not all do. Some stay on top. At the very least, they’ve gotten much farther than I have.

I want to call people out on their rudeness, to say "you’re welcome" to that guy at the door, to tell the mother to get her child to shut the hell up, to tell people they are stupid when they are being stupid because how else are they going to learn? Why do I have to constantly internalize their bad behavior and stress because of it? How is it fair that my heart is left aching when they are the ones who act so cruelly toward their fellow human beings?

Maybe I should be a little more selfish. Maybe I should be a little less fair. Maybe I should hurt those smaller than me to make myself feel better because that’s what humans do. It’s what we are taught or maybe it’s always been inside us, waiting to come out. Is it nature or nurture that delegates our dark direction? When I try to use myself as an example, I’m not so sure.

I think I started out a good kid and the world warped me into the apathetic creature I am now. I see pain in others and it doesn’t sting as bad as it used to. I see the hurt in the eyes of the neglected and I don’t care as much as I used to. I’m witness to it all and each time I become a little less affected. My compassion is being whittled away, shout by shout, tear by tear.

I get immersed in the evil that seems so vast and penetrative and forget there’s something else on the other side of the screaming. There are good people out there. There are good works. There are those trying to make a difference. They are the ones who have not let the world infect their desires to help others or have decided to press on in spite of it. They brave the cruelty and the pain and press on.

And they do save lives and ease the hurt but it often feels like such tiny victories that they don’t matter as much. One saved life is great but millions of lives are ideal. But that goes back to the idea of the concept of life being diminished. Each life is an immeasurable gift, a potential to create more good, to cure an illness, to stop a war, and each life saved should be celebrated. But with so much death, so much life thrown away so easily, it’s hard to remember that. It’s hard to realize we all matter, especially when you hear about newborn babies being bludgeoned to death by killers or flushed by their mothers because they were unwanted. What did their life mean to anyone? How was it special? How was it an immeasurable gift? 
 
What about the children living on the other side of the sun, those who are born and starve and die?  What do their lives contribute to the world?  Are they a gift?  Are they precious?  Are they a miracle?  They could be, if anyone cared, if someone would put down their diamonds and donate their dollars, not only to feed, but to educate and enlighten, to not only save but secure a solution for future children so they won’t be born to just starve and die.

Despite the small numbers of good people in the world, all I can see are dead bodies. The shudder of final exhalation. The process of decay. Of a shell. Of a vessel. Of a spark inside, withered. Extinguished all alone and no one cares. My eyes have been opened to the lack of justice and the lack of caring.  And I don’t know how much longer I can hold on to the shred of humanity I’ve been clinging to for the past two years because being exposed to the evils of the world, even getting a glimpse of it, can change you in irreparable ways.

Even so, there’s still a part of me that wants to be good, to do good.  The pre-death Brannon still finds a way to whimper into my awareness occasionally.  But there’s another part of me that fights the do-gooder, that tells me to give up because it’s not worth it.  People are selfish and they do not care what I think or how I want to solve suicide or teach tolerance.  My voice is weak, small, and my thoughts and actions directly contradict my hopes and dreams.  How can I preach patience when I want to pummel everyone?  The good inside me, the small part that shrinks with each passing day, even when it was at its largest, cannot compare to the piles of the dead.  I can’t break through the barricade of bodies. 

There is good in the world and maybe there is far more good than I can realize.  But good news doesn’t sell and we are not subjected to the good as much as we are the bad.  But even getting away from whether or not the world is good, I don’t know if I am.  There’s a war going on inside me, some kind of post-graduation, post-identity, post-mortem mania that attacks my senses and dulls my desires.  I try to bypass these bizarre thoughts and attempts to asphyxiate the good that’s left within me but it’s too hard and I am too broken and I often come up short and am left short of breath.

Maybe the attempts to save myself are in vain.  Most people naturally progress or regress or generally change to some degree as they grow older.  And most of us don’t end up as innocent as we were when we first started out.  And I wonder if I’m simply trying to hold onto my innocence, the bright-eyed boy who knew nothing about racism and sexism and puppy mills.  I’m trying to rail against the apathy and anger that floods my system but I am but a man not yet grown.  I am plagued by doubts and insecurities and I have made so many poor choices that I believe I’ll never be able to recover from them.  I tried to rail against the world, the cold machine of malnutrition and excess.  But I have been hit in the face with the bolts and strangled with the wires, sucked in and shaped into another cog, put in place to do my part to partake in and eventually purge pestilence until I petrify and flake off and fall to the ground.

I still want to do good.  But more and more, I also want to do bad.  A lot of bad.  I look at the world and can see the physical rot of the planet and the decay of humanity.  I look back over my life and realize the anger has outweighed the achievements.  I look inside myself and see that same dimming again, just like when I sat at my desk all those years ago.  Except it’s not coming from a the ceiling above.  It’s coming from within, a bleak black hole inside, sucking in dirt and destroying my path.

I never wanted to be a casualty of the cold machine.  I never wanted to be a statistic.  But I am.  Giving up.  Going down.  Getting ground up in the gears and coming out the other side a little more sadistic.