The More You Ignore Me (6 page)

I will not go quietly nor gently!

I will rage!

I will not roll over and let his filthy fingers worm their way into my rectum in an obscene bid to give sick pleasure.

It's only he who enjoys such vices—not I!

And surely not you, my sweet ones!

You wouldn't (and surely haven't!) knowingly rolled over for him, though I know young women in our horrid cities feel the need to do awful things to validate themselves from time to time because of our diseased culture.

A girl doesn't seem to feel any sense of self-worth unless some man is making a film of her with a miniature baseball bat crammed halfway up her vaginal cavity.

It's awful.

She might even give it a little flex so the knob of the bat wiggles in the putrid air of her bedroom and think such a thing is somehow appealing, or that it is a point of pride to be able to do such a thing with a vulgar pornographer.

But my dears, any reasonable man will just feel contempt for you.

Trust me.

No man wants to follow a baseball bat.

Even a miniature one!

Though I daresay it might be preferable to following that sewer of a moderator.

But what am I saying!?

I would forgive you!

A drunken night can lead a girl to think it necessary to allow the fingers of a man to enter her as she lies nearly passed out . . . you're impressionable, I know, but I promise I won't take advantage that way.

Hear me out.

I merely want justice served.

The wedding plans proceed, and the procession grates against my sensibility, but action is still possible!

I know Chris feels my presence.

I nag at his conscience.

How do I know?

Because I analyze data.

I know where to get information.

I will soon have a site of my own, and then I will see when he checks up on me, on what I've been saying and doing.

He will soon be watching
my
every move!

He won't miss a day!

He won't be able to help himself.

Perhaps he's even here now, having followed me to this very recipe site tonight.

Hello!

Smile for the birdie!

I
dare
you to do something!

The comments are open, are they not?

Scum!

What's that?

Nothing?

No response?

You cheap tyrants are all the same.

You can't stand any voice of reason intruding on your fantasies of power and domination.

Say something, Ayatollah!

I dare you!

Come into this world and see how it feels to be treated as I've been treated by you, like an invisible!

I exist!

I will prove it to you!

Oh you won't be so jolly then!

I admit I'm not one of those men who understand things immediately.

I'm not a man who, for example, learns to speak Spanish just so he can order the proper chimichanga at the Taco Teca.

No, knowledge comes to me slowly, but I believe this “slow uptake” and inability to “take the hint” allows true knowledge—gnosis—to eventually infiltrate my being.

It is knowledge beyond my admittedly rather pitiful striving to “understand.”

In
NOT
understanding the Spanish language, for example, I have come to a greater appreciation for Latin culture.

I have forced myself to learn how to decipher supralinguistic cultural clues in order to place my “order” with aplomb and style.

We'll go someday, you and I, to the Taco Teca and I will show you.

You'll see.

In the same way, when I tried/was forced to explain myself to my court-ordered therapist, she, with her beady eyes and piercing beak, asked, after much hemming and hawing, “Did that man touch your penis?”

I laughed.

“Did he?”

For you see, this therapist was such an idiot she needed a direct answer to a direct question, as if that would solve anything!

“Oh yeah,” I said then, waving a hand dismissively, because the penis-touching was all so long ago, and I could see the therapist wanted to
DEFINE
me by this one act, going on and on about “trespass” and “incest,” and so on.

Who cares?

Couldn't she see that
NOT
uncovering the memory, not examining it for clues, leaving it alone in the past, made it all the more interesting?

She wanted to neutralize it!

But why?

Such “traumas” have made me who I am, and I long ago stopped apologizing for who I am.

I don't speak Spanish.

Deal with it.

Bring me a chimichanga!

But my case?

Let's not be distracted by these trifles, and let us concentrate on what does indeed matter.

And what matters?

Truth, my dears; justice, unions, reunions, the coupling of man and woman, boy and girl, father and son, myself and Charli, marriage.

“Marriage,” in this case, meaning a “whimsical” “event,” developed, it seems, for mere entertainment or, worse, photo opportunities.

Beyond what we both now know to be the true nature of this wedding (a point through which Chris Novtalis will stick his own penis), it makes me sad.

It's as if it's just a party thrown by the couple for their friends and family, marking no real occasion but itself.

A wedding should be a societal ceremony of some kind, not simply a drunken game with a free chicken dinner.

I have been to a similar wedding to what Charli has planned—I have, readers, a nephew.

At his shabby nuptial event, it seemed there was a veritable ocean of twenty-five-year-olds, all dressed “fashionably,” sizing one another up, preening.

I am aware that fashion, by its very nature, calls untoward attention to its deviation from normative style, but every single article of clothing worn by these young men and women seemed to either have invisible quotation marks hovering above it or some ridiculous lighted arrow signs mocking the very idea of clothing.

Can no one under thirty simply wear a suit or a dress, get a haircut, or sport a pair of shoes without screaming, “Notice above all that I am special!”?

Don't bother answering.

The question is obviously rhetorical.

And the drinks!

I simply wanted a Michelob Ultra and was told (quite rudely) that there was only a “signature cocktail” made with rum, or a “shandy” made from light beer and lemonade.

A shandy!

Can you believe it?

I nearly came to blows with the bewhiskered bartender, and for what?

My date was not a suitable life-mate anyway, and so I withdrew, taking the Greyhound bus home shortly thereafter.

To see my homely nephew mark the occasion this way was unfortunate, but to see a jewel of femininity like Charli planning such a fête is appalling.

And what, finally, does she have planned?

A reckoning:

 
1.
  
Nico Novtalis and Charli Vistons are to be consecrated in marriage at the Clark House Inn on June 10, 2009 (the day after tomorrow!).

 
2.
  
Chris Novtalis, Nico's “brother,” the immoderate moderator who has caused trouble from the very start, will (shockingly!) be the best man.

 
3.
  
The day before the wedding a “family luncheon” will be held, followed by an invitation-only “bachelor/ette party” at this same Clark House Inn.

 
4.
  
The “family luncheon” and “bachelor/ette party” will feature sushi bars and many liquor “stations,” as well as (I can barely type this without vomiting) a 5
K
run and a “scavenger hunt.”

 
5.
  
Chris Novtalis clearly desires to steal Charli Vistons from Nico.

 
6.
  
Chris Novtalis is both a morally bankrupt snake and weak-willed dullard who has unjustly exercised his power as moderator of the blog.

 
7.
  
We know, therefore, that Chris Novtalis desires the marriage in order to secretly and continually violate the bride's sanctity in a fever of filth and oppression while never having to take on any of the responsibilities of a husband or community member.

 
8.
  
She will simply be in his “harem.”

 
9.
  
Chris Novtalis must be stopped!!!

10.
 
Pitiable Nico will not himself be able to stop this usurpation, and so I, estranged stranger, find myself duty-bound to block the degradation in the only manner still available to me, namely, point X.

11.
 
I will succeed.

Do you doubt these facts?

Are your sweet brains so sodden with the sentimentality of the occasion that you cannot process what sits in front of you?

Don't be a pack of fools!!!

Shall we revisit the wedding blog's comments to examine how I have seen this particular “occasion” unfolding if I am excluded from saving my Charli from irreparable taint?

In the face of “moderation” I admit I grew more strident in my commentary, for I knew that the sands of the hourglass were thinning, that I only had so much time left to reeducate the masses, so I brought out a bit of the heavy artillery of my imagination.

To wit:

May 15, 2009 5:32PM

NICO
!: You're going to pick me up from Mom's to take me to the Clark, right?

May 15, 2009 6:27PM

Chris: Yep.

May 15, 2009 6:43PM

NICO
!: Awesome. Can't wait to see you, bro! Less than a month!

May 16, 2009 1:17AM

Bob_A: Community!!!!! Can't you see what is happening?!? Can't you see what will most certainly occur if Chris is allowed to continue? To not only attend the wedding, but chauffeur the very groom to the site?! Disaster awaits, I assure you
because I have a gift—sometimes a curse!—and I can see events so clearly in my mind's eye (so, so clearly) . . .

May 16, 2009 1:25AM

Cousin_Kevin: Your “mind's eye” seems like it might be pretty cashed, bud. Why don't you call it a night? Or, better yet, a life?

May 16, 2009 1:26AM

Bob_A: Cashed? As in, “the state of a marijuana receptacle whose contents have been thoroughly exhausted”? Not even close, you wretch! Community! Ignore this “cousin” (who is clearly a “sock puppet” of the abusive and cowardly “moderator” whose threats I have on file, rest assured)! Could a “cashed” eye see this scene play out so clearly? (Here, I'd like you to imagine me poised over my keyboard, knuckles acrack, shoulders thrust back, and then, with gusto, as if I were a Barnum of the Information Age, I pull back the curtain in front of my forehead to reveal my vision):

After checking to make sure the oven is off, the toaster unplugged, and the back door to his “stylish” apartment locked (for you see his mania for control extends to the smallest detail!), Chris Novtalis will, on June 9, 2009, at 8:07AM, drive out to the suburbs to pick Nico up from their mother's drab den of routine conformity.

Together, then, they will start out for the country wedding.

Nico will sleep in the backseat, snoring lightly, waking every hour or so to change the
CD
on the scuffed purple Discman his father gave him for his fifteenth birthday (choice detail!). Chris will have unrolled the windows as they drift outside of the city, letting the air wash over him. (We know that even in early June, the city still feels as if it could collapse under a
freak snow, because everything there in that city, even the smell of the air, seems tentative, overly cautious, politically correct, does it not? Down here, in the country, everything feels as if it has been in bloom for months, yes? Confident! The air sashays! Let's take a breath and fill our lungs with this purity before we continue.

(
     
)

Nico's mop of dark curly hair will emerge from the comically filthy backseat of Chris's Honda “Civic.”

“I've been getting into Mingus lately,” Nico will say (see him clicking a new compact disc in place, snapping the lid shut!). “But you have to have generous ears to really, you know, get it.”

(Of course we respect Nico for his interest in jazz, but we can only cringe at his manner of speaking about it—“you know,” “like,” “kind of,” and so forth. Oh, how his commentary clangs against my refined sensibility! Does it surprise you, community, that I would call my sensibility refined? Surely it does not, for my sentences contain musical phrases, my paragraphs obbligatos, my arguments tone poems! Do you doubt me? As I sit here typing, I hum and sway. Certainly you too, by your own will or no, hum and sway along with me? Cashed?!?!? never!!!!!)