by Eric William Farris ||

I was in the drivers seat of my car next to the McDonald’s on campus, parked: and I guess in my right hand there was the McDonald’s burger that I refuse to name as I feel giving it a name, language, would weigh down on my soul in ways I do not wish to get into here. In my left hand there was a cigarette. I smoked a cigarette.

My friend sat in the passenger seat.

My friend—bless her heart—held up my MacBook.

The webcam counted down by three, action:

I took a drag and bit into my McDonald’s burger. I could feel the juices of my meal drip down my chin: I felt sadness like a zonked out kinda nothing, nothing that is not a bottom but rather the lack of a bottom. And did I mention that I wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember?

I came to literature because I could not figure out what to do with my arms as a teenager. I was often found walking down any hallway with my posture like a t-rex. I came to literature because I liked how on one side you could hold a book while the other you could just left dangle.

As to what was actually inside these books — that only came much later.

I read at lunch. I read in the back of the class. I read on the school bus ride home, windows down.

It had taken out half our class.

My reputation was that of a dweeby smartass who knew more than the teacher. And why wouldn’t he? There was a book always next to his binder: this gave an impression of knowledge that I could at will bludgeon others with.

It was my social strategy, how I placed myself with others. It all but worked until college when I could not keep up the charade any longer.

I think with every word I grew that more detached from beauty such that by the time I was nineteen I believed that the world was made up of commas and semicolons. I saw words not as a placeholder for reality but rather its replacement.

I had—excuse the melodrama—a breakdown.

This came to a peak in the McDonald’s parking lot. I made my friend film it. I wanted something which was real. I wanted to humiliate myself and then upload the video online. The masochism of my plan would transcend me over into a state of beingness that was without name or description: I would finally escape the mind that sought only to label.

Of course that didn’t happen. And of course I only sunk deeper into depression. Of course, of course; I began my search in an other direction.

This other direction lead me to become thirty pounds lighter. I started to fast as a lifestyle with the same goal that I had with cigarettes and fast food: I wanted to step outside of language and—by extension—myself. This time, though, my method was not excess but a strict asceticism; I kept up a rigorous workout routine and also stole food from my vegan roommate.

I think it was a day when I had been fasting for a particularly long time that my lightheadedness had evolved into a mystic clarity and I was stumbling though Hermann Park as a gospel choir rehearsed on the outdoor stage. I sat down a bench to rest and looked up to a bird perched on a tree and knew that it was a mirror. No boundary, one; the feeling spread all around me and I kept trying, trying to define it as it became only more massive: infinite.

The choir continued their rehearsal. I cried.

The problem with writers is that they often confuse their craft with the absolute when this could not be any further from the case: whereas in other mediums like the visuals arts or music it is a given that each work is an expression of a subjective truth, literature (less so poetry) is often used to synthethize the world in a way that often leads to neuroses and existential hearbreak. Writers become so absorbed in the act of observation and projecting their reality outward that they often never go inward and analyze the mechanics of their belief. Bascially, the lack self awareness; this leads to the meme of the alcholoc or slobbish writer who does not know how to take care of him or herself. It is because they have severed their connection to beauty, have lost the reason why they wanted to express themselves in the first place. It it only through reconnecting to this source that any real work can be produced.