Heat Seeker

I helped someone move yesterday, a brutal misadventure concerning ice and snow and a dank, dog shit infested basement filled with angry Rottweiler and those unhappy fecal and ammonia-piss smells. There's a fellow named Willie the Disk who occupies a space near the beginning of Naked Lunch. He's a heroin addict, has blinded himself by shooting up in the eyes, the stuff has eaten his nose and he has reduced himself to nothing more than a twisted mouth, hungry for heroin. He's a single-minded, single-product consumer, with no humanity left. He can only feed.

The house I moved this fellow into was full of Willies. Me, I was doing a favor for my friend Shawn D, and this was his uncle we were moving. I can't say no to Shawn D, especially considering that he helped me with my last move. It's never pleasant. His uncle was a squatter, basically homeless, who has done nothing but take his whole life. So in an effort to get rid of him for good, Shawn D and his mother and myself joined forces to move him out of the house where he was squatting, once Shawn D's home, and into this new situation. A new situation indeed - it's pretty much a flophouse for crackheads and heroin addicts and all the iterations of Willie the Disk. All family, a motley crew of aunts and cousins and the matriarch, none of them acknowledging the presence of myself or Shawn D, or anything else that can't be ingested to satisfy the nucleus accumbens.

These people fit a strict definition of human, but appear to be soulless shells who can only feed. What religion would save them? There's a good line spoken by the character Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men: "If the rule you followed led you to this, of what use was the rule?" The man he was addressing was at the business end of a powerful gun, and soon the violent death he would suffer brought full meaning to the aforementioned quote. So if drug addled losers such as those I encountered yesterday are following any rule, it's a rule of self-satisfaction through drug use, at any cost, financed by visits to the pawn shop after petty theft of another's possessions or the marketing of the body. The scavengers are doubtlessly diving into the newly found items I hauled through the ice and snow and into the environment that consisted of the fumes of waste, and the utter waste of humanity presented upstairs.

I wonder if it's possible for any one of them to be saved? What is the point of no return regarding the complete wasting of one's life? Of course we see people wasting their lives all of the time, but is it useful to us to have a grim example of what not to do regarding the conduct of life? I wonder if many people have given up themselves after seeing others throw it all away, and know that this rock which orbits a shining star is a hard place indeed. Thus hopelessness.

I refuse to do that. Feeding is easy, meaninglessness is easy, giving up is easy. The hard part is to save yourself, the harder part is to save anyone else, or at least help them to do that. Many of an officially licensed, biblical salvation mindset believe that everyone can be saved. A noble idea, but one that in its consideration can't overcome the dark truth, witnessed by one's own two eyes, that some people you just can't reach. There is no saving some people.

It's hard to write off another human and then feel that the human experience is wholly positive, or at least has the potential to be. But we know that it isn't anyway the moment a child dies in a war zone. And if someone has written themselves off, they have taken themselves out of the game, and the game is the noble continuance of our lot, imperfect as it is, but special like no other form of existence we know of. I choose to experience it as fully as I can, well aware of the limitations of time and death. Those I can't control, but how I live within those boundaries I can. Therefore Willie the Disk can be educational, a pioneer into the dim frontier of wasted life, an example of one tragic outcome of singular self-fulfillment. We can learn from this and, if we're lucky, pull a few others along with us on this journey of unknown and unspecified purpose.

Thus meaning.