Last night I wrote a bleary-eyed and ridiculous rant about my need to cast off the White Man’s Burden and run free, and while it was all true & good & deliciously said it is not what I intended it to be. What I had in mind was a tremendous vitrolic rant against my own race in a much more inclusive way; what I said, basically, was Self-Centered as hell, for this is my basic nature. But the Fear & Loathing of my youth & culture extends far beyond myself, indeed the most dastardly and vicious of its effects are not felt by me or those within it at all. It is all the poor cats whom I have come to know & love in the past year of my love affair with intoxicants, beaten down & miserable, the huge and violent disconnect between the Upper and Lower Classes, the pain & anguish I feel at their predicaments and the knowledge of the fear-hatred-envy-contempt they feel for me and Mine. So there’s Fear & Loathing on both sides, but on their side it is more justified.
I was at my friend Christina’s house a few days ago. She was until recently homeless and just now moved into a house up Wilhelmina Rise and she has a little room indoors and also the run of the Outside, a weird covered patio location with a door that leads back into the crawlspace below the house—and it is an almighty place. O ye sons & daughters of nobody, I tell you now that I truly would love to live there, but then I look around at my own house and think What The Hell Is Wrong With Me, I’ve got a fine house and half the basement all to my own, a wide-screen high-definition TV, and I listen to ‘God Bless Our Dead Marines’ on my laptop—everything, every moment, every stinking breath with which I waste some mighty soul’s oxygen—it is all infused with Hypocrisy.
“Lost a friend to cocaine, couple friends to smack”—what do I know of this? These are the woes of the Real, of the horses whom we race round the track for our amusement and bet on this Mexican or that Jap while we sip mint juleps and pat each other on the back for whipping our niggers especially hard. I could never understand the utter disgust directed at the White Man in rap music & in Hunter S. Thompson’s own book Hey Rube—certainly there was cause for anger, envy, hatred, whatnot, but not this absolute scorching fire of it—but now I get it. Now I get it. I AM THE DEVIL, and there’s nothing really I can do about it—by virtue of my relatives, whose hearts & minds I uplift by my very existence, I sin mortally. The only hope of Redemption is the kind of absolute disconnect from all that I have known & loved in my past life and the soul murder of Henry A. Thornhill, the body of whom is to be subsumed into the wild transient entity of Madison Young St. Jamirez who, though I love him dearly, I have never been able to properly let out of the box. Madison gets it, in slow stages; he understands the screaming woe of the Poor for whom every moment is an unendurable torment—those poor starving cats in Africa whose genitals we scratch raw with diamonds and whose blood is thick with napalm—and, closer to home, the crackheads and sublime poets who sit around in parks playing guitars not because they want to but because they have to—they have no MySpace to break their spirits on. They are forced to Live, and Live as I have described Previously. It is the nature of the Rich to destroy passion and suppress all truth, because it all goes against them—this is the same reason they detest Marijuana, because when you smoke marijuana you begin to think more and more to the left. On New Year’s Eve last I smoked too much marijuana and sat in a trippy black-light room with violent nausea and the disquieting sensation that whatever position I was in was the most uncomfortable position I could possibly assume—and, most overwhelmingly, stinging waves of self-loathing coursed through my body and I came closer to Suicide than I ever have before. This is because I began to realize the holy weight of everything I have been supporting—not outright, you understand, but completely passively—simply by being friendly with Devil Whitey and upholding some of his values. And I’m getting it now, still. Six months later, I’m still getting it.
Although Madison’s name appears on all my works of art and other places too, I have always taken it as a given that Henry’s will always be my legal name, the name of my true self, and Madison Young St. Jamirez is only a mask that I put on to let out the art and madness that courses below my skin. But now I think that someday, when I truly deserve the name, I’ll change it. It’s a freedom thing. But it’s also a Political Statement, to cast my lot with the Poor & Downtrodden and all those others that the Statue of Liberty supposedly welcomes. I don’t really know what else to say, I have nothing Concrete to offer.....but I’m finally realizing, I guess, that you can’t play the Middle Ground—you’re either the Oppressor or the Oppressed. I’ll never be the Oppressed, but I’ll try like hell not to be the Oppressor either—so maybe that’s the wrong terminology. You’re either In or Out, I guess, of mainstream American society, and I’d much rather be Out, for that’s where the passion & madness is, and it’s also the constituency that’s not based completely on subjugating other constituencies. There I go with the big words again. Time to go.
less fiery stuff here; the morning-after reconstruction of the true legacy of the White Man.
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