genome suicide

I made a conscious decision when I was sixteen years old that I would never in my life have children.

It was one of those adolescent promises, like this: "I'll never eat anything that had eyes", or "I'll never be a Republican". But it was a little different than the other ones into which I was shoehorning the rest of my corporal state. I had a really good reason to never reproduce. It's my genes, see. I have a strong suspicion that they're really bad news.

If we accept that:

1. What we know about human reproduction, biologically, is scientifically sound and factually true
2. That Jesus was a real person, and that Jesus' biological mother was a virgin when he was conceived

then we must also accept that:

3. Jesus was a clone of her mother

I was thinking about it the other night, up on the roof, which is where I do all of my thinking these days. It's a place where at 4am you can be in the middle of New York City while at the same time being utterly alone. Sometimes I think about bringing some binoculars up there and peering into people's apartments all over the neighborhood and a good chunk of the East Village, but somehow it feels like it would ruin my feeling of solitude. I think I prefer it when even just for a brief moment at 4am on most weekday mornings, I can easily imagine myself as the only person alive in the entire city.

I like imagining that. The feeling of absolute solitude, to be perfectly alone is a pleasure of the highest order for me. That's because even when I'm alone I'm not really alone. My ego-states appear to be so well designed as to be nearly capable of making a pot of coffee on their own, leaving what amounts to the rest of me free, for example, to misplace my keys twice while waiting for the rest of them to finish up with that coffee.

I made the decision to never have children when I was 16, and it was at a point in my life before I knew what an ego-state was. I didn't know a lot at the time, but I was fresh with the knowledge that sometimes space-shuttles blow up in midair, and that boobs feel nice when you squeeze them. I also knew... or I thought I knew... or I was just very keenly aware... that I was working with a mind that wasn't very stable. I would occasionally find it leaking, or drifting into semi-human ontological constructs which included lots of room for things like The Dilution of Murder with Recursive Morality and Diapers for Dixie: The Southeastern United States as the Wayward Brat, two expositions I wrote in 10th grade, both failed for plagiarism.

I still deny it, Mister Sobrinski. I'll never forget you or your flaccid red pen. You were a monument to lowered expectations, your giant, clay head and little eye slits, swollen with I suppose whatever it was that made the rest of you swollen, your fingers always fat and twitchy and uncomfortable looking, pointing impotently at the pointless scrivenings of the children of government farmers, trying to teach them that two 'very's is one too many but finally settling on nine being just enough to describe how much they hated your class, as we all did nine verys worth, even you. Most of all you, come to think of it. Your derision for your own classroom and everything in it made a mark in me that I have no business forgetting.

I call that one "Claxis".



I don't remember when or how I came up with that name, except I do know that a later moniker of mine, "abraxas" was a variant of it as far as I was concerned. Claxis is not a name of something like a person or a character, but more like the name of a certain kind of sorting of things, like "wooden" or "laborious" or "sticky", only for a kind of collective sort, like "cold, dewey leaves with little points on them". It's also as far as I'm concerned, the name of a state of mind. If I am in "Claxis", I have a very specific set of responses to stimuli, and a very specific set of patterns of thinking about stimuli. Here's the erroneously short version: I name my ego-states.

I name them things that you don't name something that's alive, because although it might be arguably useful to consider some of these ego-states as semi-independent entities from time to time, it's also patently false. Doing so would imply a plurality of autonomies, which I tend to prefer to rationalize beyond in my experience, always remembering what Mister Rogers told me when I was little:

...you know, the angry you is still you inside...

And the Claxis is the part of me which desperately needs to expose the lies of those in the role of "authority", particularly when humbled by someone "lesser".

It has a named counterpart, which is in all ways its complement. The counterpart is subtle and passive, and is the part of me which desperately needs to blend-in, to remain hidden and unexposed, quiet and undisturbed.

I call that one "Lliddu", and ultimately it is because of Lliddu that I decided to end my genetic line.