6

the future

Being wet and dark with someone.

Being touched and being able to know the person will touch you again. Being in a cave you don’t want to leave and don’t have to leave. Being in a place in which you’re able to be open and stupid and boring.

You’re open and wet and your edges are rough and hurt. You remember that you’ve always been this: totally vulnerable. You don’t want to forget who you are. Being with someone has made you remember that you’re totally vulnerable.

Marcia and Scott now always felt these ways. Being out of control and not knowing it. Being in total danger and believing that you’re safer than you’ve ever been in your life, you’re inside and so you can open yourself and make yourself raw to the other person.

Suddenly seeing something you’ve never seen before. You’re willing to compromise yourself for this person. Forget what you’ve just thought. You don’t have any more thoughts of yourself. You want to know everything about the other person:

What was your childhood like?

What do you like to do the most?

Have you ever fucked any weirdos?

When did you start being an adult?

You think you are the other person. You begin to forget what you feel.

Scott and Marcia now were living on the street cause they didn’t have any money. Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea: The other person’s frightened of you. He’s scared if he lets you into his wetness and heat, you’ll disrupt everything. You want him wet and hot so badly, you act so heavy, he gets more scared, you put him out of your head. You want nothing to do with him. Finally you can think one thought which isn’t about him. The second you see him again and his hand barely grazes your hand, your heart flops over, you almost faint, you feel like you’re turning inside out. When he holds you, you forget the room exists. You can’t act like he’s the most casual fuck in the world. You can’t tell him you’re madly in love with him cause then he’ll never see you again. You’re screwed.

Marcia and Scott didn’t even notice they didn’t have any money. You’re a man. You’re not going to take anything from anyone cause you’re a man. When you see her, your mouth dries up and your eyes can’t leave her face. You want her so much you can’t handle it. You flee. You tell her you don’t want her warmth. You tell her to go fuck herself. You can’t let her go because you and she are, at one point, one. The more she wants you, the crazier you get. You have to let her go and you want to sink into her body.

You tell her you’re in love with other women. When you wake up in the morning, holding her warm sleeping body in the curve of your body, you tell her you want to fall in love with someone.

Marcia and Scott hardly had enough money to eat and they were sleeping on the streets. They’d lie on top of one blue blanket and place newspapers over their huddling bodies. Being at ease and in paradise. Every person you see looks proud and interesting. Every person you meet gives you information you want to hear. Every object in the store windows looks beautiful and yet doesn’t drive you crazy with desire. Doesn’t torment you with the knowledge of how poor you are. Every new street, every alleyway you see is a new stage of the voodoo ritual you’re part of: A series of rooms. In each room a new magic event which changes you takes place. You’re fascinated and scared. One room contains swamps and alligators and floating moss and voodoo doctors. In another room your sex is cut open and you become a third weird sex. You feel freaked. In another room, a little table, covered with a white cloth, serves as an altar upon which offerings are placed, and a candle burns on the dirt floor as its base, where the vevers are drawn. For the greater part of the time, Ogoun, and then Ghede mount the houngenikon. You place your hand on the heads of lions and wolves whom you’re now equal to and who stand next to you. You find yourself outside: in a green green grassy world, outside the wooden building.

Marcia and Scott knew that if the cops ever noticed they were people and not pieces of garbage strewn on the street, the cops would beat them up and put them in jail. The cops would forcibly separate them. Being so happy that you forget everything. You don’t know whether you love or don’t love. Forget you ever felt anything. Forget you can feel anything. You sleep cause you have to sleep and you piss in the streets. You’re learning to know everything a new way.

Marcia and Scott now lived off Marcia’s scant earnings as a street chanteuse. Feeling so strongly you’re at the edge of a cyclone or huge hurricane. You’re about to go over, if you don’t constantly fight, into some new territory where the winds are whirling madly and there’s no stability and your head bursts open. You still can’t contain yourself, the feeling’s so strong, your heart’s pumping too fast and your flesh is burning: your only sense of yourself is that the world’s sky has turned over inside you and that churning air is rushing out in every direction into the rest of the world and you can’t fight it and the churning air becomes a force, a demonic force that exists outside of you as do all the forces of the world. All you can do is learn. Maybe, gradually, you can learn to control this force: to keep it open so that you don’t destroy the other person and/or the other person doesn’t destroy you which is how most love affairs end. But all you do is stupidly and obviously unsuccessfully fight the force that is tearing all of you apart.

Capitalism as a world system had its origins in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries when Europeans, mastering the art of long-distance navigation, broke out of their little corner of the globe and roamed the seven seas, conquering, plundering, and trading. Ever since then capitalism has consisted of two sharply contrasting parts: on the one hand a handful of dominant exploiting countries and on the other hand a much larger number of dominated and exploited countries.

In the beginning the relations between the developed and underdeveloped parts of the world capitalist system were based on force. The stronger conquered the weaker, plundered their resources, subjected them to unequal trading relations, and reorganized their economic structures (e.g., by introducing slavery) to serve the needs of the Europeans. In the course of these predatory operations vast colonial empires were built up and fought over by the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British; and the wealth transferred from the colonies to the metropolises was an important factor in the economic development of the latter.

Gradually the element of force receded into the background to be replaced by “normal” economic relations of trade and investment—without, however, in any way weakening the basic development/underdevelopment pattern, or stopping the transfer of wealth from the periphery to the center. Adam Smith was one of the first economists who tried to describe, order, and further this new society of trade, this society in which, for the first time in the world, all men could attempt to determine their own economies without the regulations of kings or traditions.

After its victory in the Napoleonic Wars and the related dissolution of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the Americas, Britain—which was already industrially far ahead of the other developed countries—moved into a position of virtual monopoly of world trade in manufactured goods. The simple laissez-faire capitalism had developed, seemingly from necessity for competition causes expansion, into imperialism.

Around 1885, A. F. Mummery, a successful British businessman, was speculating as to the cause of those periodic slumps in trade which had worried the business community as far back as the early eighteenth century. He decided that the cause of depression lay in the fact of excessive saving, in the chronic inability of the business system to distribute enough purchasing power to buy its own products back.

A shy and retiring economist named John A. Hobson agreed with Mummery. Together the two men wrote The Physiology of Industry, setting forth their heretical notion that savings might undermine prosperity.

Hobson continued to worry about the problems of capitalism, and in 1902, he wrote Imperialism which is a critique of the profit system. In Imperialism Hobson claimed that capitalism faced an internal and insoluble difficulty and that it was forced to turn to imperialism, not out of pure lust for conquest, but as a means of ensuring its own economic survival.

The inequality of incomes, the rich and the poor, the developed and the underdeveloped countries, said Hobson, led to the strangest of dilemmas: a paradoxical situation in which neither rich nor poor could consume enough goods. The poor don’t have any money. The rich lack the physical capacity for that much consumption.

So, as a consequence of an inequitable division of wealth, the rich—both individuals and corporations—are forced to save.

This savings leads to trouble. The automatic savings of the rich strata of society had to be put to use, unless the economy was to suffer from the disastrous effects of a steady withdrawal of purchasing power. The question was how to put the savings to work. The classical answer was to invest them in even more factories and more production and thus to ascend to an even higher level of output and productivity.

But, said Hobson, if the mass of people were already having trouble buying all the goods thrown on the market because their incomes were too small, how could the capitalists sell their new products?

Overseas. Imperialism is “the endeavor of the great controllers of industry to broaden the channel for the flow of their surplus wealth by seeking foreign markets and foreign investments to take off the goods and capital they cannot use at home.”

All the developed nations are in the same boat. They all need new markets. Imperialism necessarily becomes the road to war.

Out of this situation arose the First World War (1914–1918) which had as major consequences for the global capitalist system: (a) extensive reshuffling of colonies and dependencies in favor of the victorious countries; (b) emergence of the United States as economically the strongest capitalist country; (c) socialist revolution in Tsarist Russia, the weakest of the imperialist powers; (d) birth and/or vigorous growth of national liberation movements in many underdeveloped countries, for the most part strongly influenced by the Russian Revolution. Thenceforth the dominant capitalist powers had to cope not only with their own internecine struggles but also with challenges from the rival socialist system and from increasingly militant liberation movements in their dependencies.

The Second World War and its outcome faithfully reflected these realities. Started as a war by the “have-not” imperialist powers (Germany, Japan, Italy) to redivide the world, it soon acquired, with the Nazi invasion of the USSR, a capitalism-versus-socialism character as well. For reasons of survival the threatened capitalist powers and the invaded Soviet Union made common cause, defeating the Axis challenge. But there was not and could not be a return to the status quo ante bellum. America, enriched by the war while all the other imperialist powers were severely damaged, became the undisputed leader of world capitalism.

At this point many of the largest American corporations are located, at least in part, outside the USA. By 1970, more than 25% of all these corporations’ workers lived outside the USA. By 1970, according to Commerce Department statistics, foreign sales accounted for almost 13 % of the total sales of all US manufacturing corporations. By 1971, the American global giants, determined to avoid the high American taxes and make higher profits, were diverting a quarter out of every dollar of new investment to foreign expansion.

More specifically, what does it mean for Americans and for the American federal regulatory process when the economic environment created by America’s largest companies is increasingly beyond the control of the American government?

The more the corporate giants locate their production centers outside the USA, the more unemployment in the USA increases. Money becomes tighter. When money is tight and there’s an intense competition for funds to lend, big banks obtain such funds when small banks cannot. Thus in 1973, according to the Federal Reserve, nine New York City banks, six of which belonged to the Rockefeller-Morgan group, accounted for more than 26% of all commercial and industrial lending by banks in the US. About half of all the money lent by these New York superbanks goes to global corporations—with the result, as George Budzeika of the New York Federal Reserve Bank has noted, that about 90% of the entire indebtedness in the United States petroleum and natural gas industry, two-thirds in the machinery and metal-products industry, and three-fourths in the chemical and rubber industries are held by these same nine New York banks.

It is the big banks, the very ones whose lending policies must be controlled if the government is to manage the economy successfully, that have the resources to escape control. Because large banks can evade mild credit restrictions, serious efforts to cool the economy by means of monetary policy must be so Draconian as to create even higher unemployment and idle factories. Heavy unemployment is not politically desirable.

For Americans, this situation means inflation because the corporations’ current borrowings are permanently accelerating much faster than the corporations’ increase in current holdings. Given the international status of the multinational corporations, the American government has no way to control the increasing inflation.

We’re being crunched between rising unemployment and increasing inflation.

If employment possibilities increase, so will wages—not only because there are more jobs for more people to fill but also because employers in a time of labor scarcity must pay more. So we’re experiencing increasing inflation, increasing unemployment, and decreasing wages.

Meanwhile there’s less and less chance for the American worker or the American bum to get a share of the wealth that exists. Because the industrial giants such as I.T.T. have absorbed thousands of smaller companies in the last generation, a share of stock in these corporations represented a much larger portion of America’s productive wealth in 1970 than it did in 1950—and a significant part of the stock of the largest corporations is going to their own top managers. The managers are becoming owners, deriving an ever-larger proportion of their income not from their managerial skills but from the stock they own in their own corporations.

You don’t give a damn if he never comes around. Your never want to see him again. Fuck his round face and his blonde hair and his five feet ten inches lean body. Fuck him in shit. Fuck his screwed-up mouth and his skinny legs. Fuck him in piss. Fuck his broad shoulders fuck his “good-guy” manner fuck his 155 pounds fuck him with a needle fuck his filthy toes and his feet and his red nose fuck his hicksville manner and fuck that lousy cynicism that covers his naiveté that’s totally fake fuck his sexual uptightness fuck his scaredness fuck his egotism fuck everything he’s ever done fuck everything he’s ever said everything he’s ever said is false stick it in a barrel and send it to me. I’ll stick dynamite in it and up his ass and light ‘em all. KERPOW! Fuck him in my blood.

Marcia woke up one morning and realized that Scott no longer loved her. I’m free. Singing and dancing on the streets in the bars they don’t make me pay to get into, get as drunk as I want whenever I want. If I pass out someone will pick me up, or I’ll just lay there I won’t know the difference. Fuck everyone alive cause I’m so high: I’m zooming with the winds. Do ya’ see me? I’m the wind cause I just go by what I feel. That’s all I care about. And what other people feel. I can sense their feelings more and more strongly it’s like my skin touches different kinds of air and knows what these kinds of air are. I’m always sensing and shaking and shivering and knowing the future. Long as I don’t get too near anyone. I want to get too close

She realized that Scott was no longer satisfied with a bum’s life. What I wanna do is fuck every man in sight. Fuck every man who comes near me and fuck every man who looks at me like he wants to fuck me. Go into some bar, fuck three men in the bathroom, then lie down on the dance floor and wiggle out of my rags. Let every man do to me what he wants. Men will spit on me and piss on me. Women will shoot liquids up my cunt. People become shadows. Then I’ll stand up and walk over to these famous businessmen, the Duponts, and put my arms around one of their necks. He’ll lift me up and fuck me while I’m naked on the street. Someone else will take me home. I won’t even look to see his face. I’ll walk into a bums’ bar, slowly take off my clothes. Slowly they’ll notice me. They won’t believe what’s happening. I’ll love watching the drool and vomit dribble out of their mouths. I turn on watching them remember they have cocks. Their hands slowly reach into their bums’ clothing. Their hands are shaking so hard they can’t even get it together to touch themselves. As soon as I see this happening, I’ll begin to moan. I’ll sleep with some bum, with some bum who graduated from the Sorbonne and who made $700,000 a week as a Marseilles gigolo, just to find out how it feels.

Scott wanted to get his own work known. Turn your head toward me gently. That’s right. I’m looking at your face. It’s almost touching mine. It’s right next to me on the pillow. I feel very soft. As if something’s just touching me, beginning to smooth away the rough edges and granite boulders in my skin. Do you want to touch me? I’m always amazed anyone wants to touch me cause I’m always feeling these granite blocks and roughness and my ugliness. I have to be able to touch you and keep my distance from you. You’re lying partly on top of me and you’re falling asleep in my arms. You must’ve come. I feel you like me and I like you. I’m not thinking about Scott now. For the first time I’ve calmed down cause I know what to expect with you.

Scott wanted fame and fortune. I live totally by my emotions. That’s who I am. Today someone told me I move like a little animal. She doesn’t know how I survive. Yesterday someone told me I’m conventionally moral because I’m not fucking three guys at the same time. The same person who told me I’m conventionally moral told me I need endless shots of valium. Today this old lady told my closest friend that I’m getting more and more violent. She’s worried about my work. I don’t know what my work is. All this stuff passes over my head. I feel a lot of pain most of the time because I act on my feelings and I barge into other people’s feelings, opinions, beliefs, whatever they act on, and I scare and hurt them.

Scott wanted beautiful Parisian women to drool over him because he was the guy who was making the most powerful architecture in Paris. If someone doesn’t kiss me goodbye, I think the person hates me. If someone I’m fucking doesn’t tell me he loves me, I’m sure he hates me. If someone I want doesn’t show me constant physical affection, I’m sure that person wants nothing to do with me. If I’m living with someone and he goes away, I refuse to speak to him when he returns. If he goes away again and again, I leave him. Once a man’s fallen in love with me, I tell him I don’t want to fuck him anymore. I insult my friends to their faces and to other friends. Sometimes I refuse to see the people I’m closest to and I feel I hate them.

Marcia realized she was a bum and didn’t belong in this picture of Scott’s success. Please tell me whether you love me or not. WHY DO YOU WANT TO KNOW? I can’t fuck anyone else cause I’m always thinking about you and I’m getting too horny. I’M NOT IN LOVE WITH YOU AND I DON’T WANT A HEAVY RELATIONSHIP. I’M MORE OFF THAN ON. I understand what’s going on. THIS IS CRAZY. WHY SHOULD I DEFINE MY FEELINGS FOR YOU? I DON’T HAVE TO TELL YOU WHAT I FEEL. YOU’RE SO CONVENTIONALLY MORAL: YOU CAN ONLY FUCK ONE GUY AT A TIME. All I said was that I was stuck on you. HOW CAN YOU BE IN LOVE WITH ME? YOU’VE ONLY KNOWN ME FOR A FEW MONTHS AND YOU’RE JUST A KID. I DON’T BELIEVE YOU WHEN YOU TELL ME YOU LOVE ME.

She began to go crazy. A glance at the annual earnings of 220 men in charge of some of America’s largest corporations (there are no women) shows them to be at the very top of the income pyramid.

Even though we no longer experience a laissez-faire, or even a free market, economy, the multinational conglomerate corporations that control the world’s wealth need, as did the capitalists of nineteenth-century Britain, markets for their products. Due to increasing inflation unemployment and tightening of money, even the corporations are experiencing increasing stagnation. The state can counteract stagnation by suitably large expenditures on welfare and/or warfare, both of which are indispensable to monopoly capitalism for other reasons: welfare as a way of placating the masses and dissuading them from turning to revolutionary politics, and warfare as a means used by each leading capitalist power to maximize its economic “living space” and to control undeveloped and potentially rebellious dependent countries.

Since ours isn’t a welfare economy, America is not going socialist god forbid, it has become a war economy. The military market supports the largest single industry in the country today, providing more than 40 billion dollars in sales each year and involving in total over 20,000 firms. The industry is remarkably concentrated, with the 100 largest contractors receiving two-thirds of the total contract funds, and the top 25 receiving half these funds.

Negotiated contracts are the rule rather than the exception in the defense industry, accounting for 58% of all military prime contracts in 1968, with advertised competitive bidding accounting for only 11.5% of the total procurement dollars. This industry is one of our least competitive. Firms seldom if ever suffer a financial loss in their defense business. The Defense Department acts to insure that the firms which do business with it remain financially healthy. In fact, the large defense firms often win and/or maintain government contracts by suggesting new systems and new systems improvements and establishing in the minds of the government the special competence of their firms to carry out the job. Peter Schenck, an official of the Raytheon Corporation and former president of the Air Force Corporation, put it in this way: “Today it is more likely that the military requirement is the result of joint participation of military and industrial personnel, and it is not unusual for industry’s contribution to be the key factor. Indeed, there are highly-placed military men who sincerely feel that industry is currently setting the pace in the research and development of new weapons systems.”

What are the economic results of this dependence upon arms production and maintenance? That wars are engines of inflation is well known: in fact, every substantial war in U.S. history has been accompanied by inflation. And the wildest inflationary periods in other countries have been associated with wars. For 30 years the United States has had a permanently militarized economy. The same applies, in a lesser degree, to other major capitalist powers and, to an even greater degree, to certain small capitalist states.

Militarization provides corporations with a cushion of high-profit business, enabling them to set and maintain higher profit margins in civilian markets. Fantastic markups of four or five times factory cost are applied to the sale of products originally developed for military use, for example, electronics. Efficiency in production for the military is a fraction of that in civilian production, and the corresponding multiplication of costs inevitably is transmitted, at least in part, to civilian sales of armament manufacturers.

How does the rising inflation affect the large American, if they can still be called American, corporations and the United States government?

The multinational corporations are more and more, as has been said, depending upon bank loans. The U.S. is the Debt Economy without peer. One trillion dollars in corporate debt. Six hundred billion dollars in mortgage debt. Five hundred billion in U.S. government debt. Two hundred billion in state and local government debt. Two hundred billion in consumer debt. To fuel nearly three decades of postwar economic boom at home and export it abroad, this nation has borrowed an average net two hundred million dollars a day, each and every day, since the close of World War II.

The American government and the huge corporations took on their enormous burden of debt with the expectation that personal income (buying power) and corporate profits would continue to grow year after year and that government economic policy would remain essentially expansionary. But inflation, while adding greatly to the need to borrow, has slashed the share of income—corporate and personal—available to pay off debts, and an expansionary government economic policy would only add to the inflationary pressures.

So now the nation’s burden of debt is like a string drawn very taut: 2.5 trillion dollars in debt outstanding and more money needed to keep the economy growing, while the ability of borrowers to repay what they owe and to find more money is very much in question. The string has not broken, and it may not. The energies of every economist, of every government official, of every lender and borrower will be directed in the weeks and months ahead to keeping that string from breaking. Yet no one knows the precise breaking point and, while there are schemes and theories galore, no one really knows how to ease the tension either.

As unwilling as economists are to admit it, the string has to break.

Keynesian economics, as a system of pushbutton monetary and fiscal policies designed to finely tune the economy and create full or near-full employment with zero or mild inflation, has seen its day (if it ever had a day). Economists can no longer describe what’s happening. Economically we’re going through a period of transformation.

So what are we to expect?

Capitalism has always been based on a certain relation between two living entities. There are the dominant exploiting countries and a much larger number of dominated and exploited countries. These two groups are indissolubly linked together, and nothing that happens in either part can be understood if it is considered in abstraction from the system as a whole. The principal contradiction in the system, at least in the present historical period, is not within the developed part but between the developed and the underdeveloped parts. The relations of the one to the other (and the policies which grow out of these relations) are fundamentally exploitative: they perpetuate and deepen the development/underdevelopment pattern. Keynesian economics has failed because of its politics and not its techniques—in broadest terms, because it attempted to paper over the class conflicts present in a capitalist society.

The transformation of American capitalism is now becoming manifest. The reversal in the historical (Keynesian) belief that profits are the outcome of high volume or mass production spells disruption for the ordinary processes of production and consumption. There will be frequent manipulated shortages of almost everything that is bought and sold. The notion that inflation can be stemmed by government action has one central defect: the government is subject to the political domination of the large corporations. The penetration by corporations of government agencies charged with regulating business activity vitiates the idea that the state is separate from the marketplace and independent of ruling class control.

There are no effective mechanisms for controlling inflation within a highly centralized and monopolistic economy. Corporate and government decision makers will be constrained to find some solution to the crisis. The chance of stemming inflation depends on finding ways to expand war industries and other forms of public expenditures. The worsening economic situation within the U.S. will probably result in the widening of military influence.

There are substantial problems in implementing this option. First, the United States lacks an available external enemy. Second, the outcome of the Vietnam War has certainly dampened popular enthusiasm for military action.

Which raises the distinct probability of the emergence of new forms of authoritarian rule at home. We are on the road to what Bertram Gross has called “friendly fascism.” Unlike its European predecessors, American fascism may not be marked by an “open terroristic dictatorship.” The foundation of fascism has already been laid in the consolidation of political and economic power in incredibly few hands.

One night, as she was lying on the street, Marcia dreamt that she returned home. It seemed to her she stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while she couldn’t enter for the way was barred to her. There was a padlock and a chain upon the gate. She called in her dream to her parents, and had no answer, and peering closer through the rusted spokes of the gate, she saw that the house seemed uninhabited.

No smoke came from the chimney, and the little lattice windows gaped forlorn. Then, like all dreamers, she was suddenly possessed with supernatural powers and passed like a spirit through the barrier before her. The drive wound around in front of her, twisting and turning as it had always done, but as she advanced she was aware that a change had come upon it: it was narrow and unkempt, not the drive that she had known. At first she was puzzled and did not understand, and it was only when she bent her head to avoid the low swinging branch of a tree that she realized what had happened. Nature had come into her own again and, little by little, in her stealthy, insidious way had encroached upon the drive with long tenacious fingers. The woods, always a menace even in the past, had triumphed in the end. They crowded, dark and uncontrolled, to the borders of the drive. The beeches with white, naked limbs leant close to one another, their branches intermingled in a strange embrace, making a vault above her head like the archway of a church. And there were other trees as well, trees that she did not recognize, squat oaks and tortured elms that straggled cheek by jowl with the beeches, and had thrust themselves out of the quiet earth, along with monster shrubs and plants, none of which she remembered.

The drive was a ribbon now, a thread of its former self, with gravel surface gone, and choked with grass and moss. The trees had thrown out low branches, making an impediment to progress; the gnarled roots looked like skeleton claws. Scattered here and again amongst this jungle growth she could recognize shrubs that had been landmarks of her childhood, hydrangeas she had touched and seen as her friends. No hand had checked their progress, and they had gone native now, rearing to monster height without a bloom, black and ugly as the nameless parasites that grew besides them.

On and on, now east now west, would the poor thread that had once been the drive. Sometimes she thought it lost, but it appeared again, beneath a fallen tree perhaps, or struggling on the other side of a muddied ditch created by the winter rains. She hadn’t thought the way home was so long. Surely the miles had multiplied, even as the trees had done, and this path led but to a labyrinth, some choked wilderness, and not to the house at all. She came upon it suddenly; the approach masked by the unnatural growth of a vast shrub that spread in all directions, and she stood, her heart thumping in her breast, tears behind her eyes.

This was her home, secretive and silent as it had always been, the grey stone shining in the moonlight of her dream, the mullioned windows reflecting the green lawns and the terrace.

Feeling lonely. Feeling lonely, and crazy all the time cause so lonely. Always wanting and wanting and the wanting’s never satisfied. Hate myself for wanting so much and for feeling lonely cause it’s disgusting and lowering to need someone else and to feel lonely. Hate everyone in the world cause they’re all potential lovers and they don’t love me. I hate them cause they hate me. Feeling envy and resentment and fear.

If no one bothers me I’ll be O.K. As long as I don’t have to see anyone and deal with their feelings. Walk the streets alone. Don’t let anyone touch me, cause if someone touches me I might want him or her to touch me again.

Don’t want anything to do with anyone anymore. Them coming too close to me, wanting to touch me, my skin’s gone, wanting something from me, can’t figure out what they want. They want me to smile and touch them, but not to smile and touch them too hard. Can’t do that cause want affection so desperately. Am not in control.

Feeling almost cut to the bone. Part of me hates, snaps, wants to destroy, wants to cut out the part of other people that hurts me. This part’s out of control. This part frightens me. Hurt other people and quiver and shake cause hurt them and run away. Two parts running away from each other. The string has to break. Feeling gentle and soft (the second part). Feeling incapable of doing anything except reaching in this totally soft way. Feeling big large eyes opening wider and wider. This part is all defense. Feeling can have power over my life. Can prevent myself from being hurt by snapping and by being defensive. Feeling I’m so special if I’m hurt I should stop being hurt.

Feeling like a thing rather than living. Knowing that wanting a lover, wanting Scott back, is wanting to be dead again, wanting one feeling so much that feeling becomes a thing, my possession. Knowing this but not feeling it all throughout my body.