2005-10-27 - 8:18 p.m.

This Is My Resume

I am disappearing and disappearing all the time. I am unhealthy but happy. I am dirty but I clean up my act. I am learning but I forget. I lose myself between paradox and paradise.

Where do I go? When I fade from existence, am I still this pallid long-haired skeptic?

In the opera Madama Butterfly, the eponymous lady loves her Pinkerton and is willfully blind to his disappearance. But his is the vanishing of cowardice. No one honours her and she dies for honour. He lives to disappear and disappear again.

In the movie Back To The Future, Marty McFly zips into an incestuous past in plutonium-fueled, gull-winged, steel grace. He disappears and disappears. His mother lusts after Marty's violence instead of his father's and so Marty disappears and disappears.

When I was a scrawny freckle-sprayed boy, a bubble on the crashing ocean of a big family, I used to disappear in self-imposed loneliness. My voice became small, my dreams were "writ large." It seemed better to be invisible than to be ignored. And I disappeared and disappeared.

Now I am an old fat man, lines between my eyes, voice hoarse from repeated jokes. I walk like a dancing elephant, dangerously misguided. I sing like a dying fawn, scary for its unfamiliarity. I write like a troop of monkeys chained to typewriters, requiring infinite time to repeat the feats of others. I dress like a motherless child, all backwards shirts and shoes on wrong feet. I look in the mirror and there is no one there.

I disappear.