The Return of the Native
So. The vacation. I won’t bore you with pictures or descriptions or—God forbid—video, but I do want to say that it was beyond relaxing, and not just because of the whole sex tourism aspect. I swear, by the time I got back into town I was more calm than I’ve been in years; serene, even. My hands were unclenched from their usual crippled grip. The blinding pain that shoots up and down my arm each day had completely disappeared. I was actually able to sleep through the night! No waking up at 4 in the morning with bile in my throat and a deep constriction in my chest. No need to writhe around the floor in agony until the anti-inflammatories kick in. Also? I became a much nicer person.
Now, I’ve always been kind of a dick, but over the last two or so years I’ve somehow stripped myself down to the essence of dickitude. It’s way beyond an “ever-loosening grip on the commonest courtesies,” although that was the first to go. No, so deeply did I fall into a state of dickois that every action and interaction I’ve had has been characterized by curtness, distemper, and disdain. The dickotomy between Niceish Alex, who at least pretended to care, and Lord High Dick Balk, who will tell you to your face that he’s not going to waste time feigning compassion or even interest in whatever you’re going on about, is stunning, now that I can see it from the vantage point of someone who is a week or so removed from it.
Was it the Internet that did it? The insane hours I’ve been working? The constant pressure to churn out content, to jack up pageviews, to inculcate a sense of urgency and focus among my co-workers? Was it the massive amount of amphetamines and other stimulants with which I doped myself to the gills in order to keep it going? The brutal quantities of alcohol I drowned myself with in order to counteract the effects of the uppers? The general stress, lack of sleep or exercise, the poor diet?
No.
It’s New York.
Within hours of my return to the city I felt my brow begin to furrow, my fists begin to tighten, my lip begin to curl up in disgust. Where, just days earlier, I would have waited patiently in line behind someone attempting to negotiate the intricacies of an automatic teller machine, now I’m already cursing the epidemic of idiocy that seems to have our whole obese stupid country in its jackassifying grip. WHAT THE FUCK, YOU MORON? LEARN TO USE AN ATM! A FIVE-YEAR-OLD COULD DO IT! I REALIZE THAT YOUR FINGERS ARE TOO FUCKING FAT TO PUSH THE RIGHT BUTTONS, BUT BECAUSE YOU CAN’T STAY AWAY FROM THE GODDAMN CORN DOGS I SHOULD SOMEHOW BE FORCED TO WAIT ANOTHER TWO MINUTES BEFORE I CAN GET MY CASH? I HOPE YOU HAVE A MASSIVE CORONARY RIGHT HERE AND NOW. I WILL HAPPILY STAND ON YOUR PRE-BLOATED CORPSE WHILE I MAKE MY WITHDRAWL.
And so on. There’s just something about the city that brings it all out in me; some battery buried below the ground that recharges my dickosity. I feel it coursing through me even as I’m typing this. I’m like Charly near the end of Flowers for Algernon, knowing that I’ve only got a few moments left before I turn back into a retard. I was once almost nice! And soon, very very soon, I will be a dick again. And not just any kind of dick. I will be the Dick to End All Dicks, because my recent deviation from the Path of Dickishness will go so heavily with my dicksposition that I will need to overcompensate by dicking it up a notch. Niceish Me apologizes in advance to those of you to whom I will once again resume being brusque and unconcerned about. Real Me—the Dick into whom I’m about to revert—actually couldn’t give a shit. Because, frankly, he wouldn’t have it any other way. So suck it, bitches: Balk is back.
