From Peter Trachtenberg's book, 7 Tattoos: A Memoir in the Flesh (parentheticals mine):
"Here are the benefits of being alone and celibate:
"You can read all night long and no one will nag you to turn off the light. (This one is particularly handy when your loneliness generates a savage bout with insomnia.)
"You can go off to Borneo on the spur of the moment without anyone wanting to know when you'll be back. (...assuming you have buttloads of superfluous income and a job that does not require your actual, physical presence.)
"You can prepare meals so disgusting you'd be ashamed to eat them in company: grill a slice of bologna till it curls up at the edges; fill the cup with baked beans; then top with a slice of Kraft American cheese and broil till melted. Serve with dill pickle and sliced tomato. (Or, eat nothing but lentils, raw, unsalted cashews and whole cartons of cherry tomatoes for a week at a time, if that bologna thing makes your nose wrinkle a little.)
"You can fart to your heart's content without having to say 'Excuse me,' though you may grow so accustomed to this that you find yourself doing it in public places -- on the line at your savings bank, for instance -- and getting nasty looks from strangers. (This one must be a guy thing. I'm not knocking farting... I just don't think it's a reason to be glad you're lonely and celibate. Nor is it something I really spend time considering one way or the other.)
"You can entertain religious delusions. (I'm pretty sure I can tell the future now via tarot cards and my pendulum.)
"You can spend your fury at the world by playing Einsturzende Neubauten and Nine Inch Nails at bone-splintering volumes and dancing along, vaulting and twitching and torquing as though electrocuted while shouting the lyrics you've improvised because you can't make out the real ones: 'I gave you no permission!/I give you no remission!/Newt Gingrich, burn in Hell!/Jesse Helms, burn in Hell!/Larry Wildmon, burn in Hell!/I'll know where to find you when I come callin'/In the row next to Hitler and old Joe Stalin.' (Yeah, I don't do this either. Though, Nina Simone winding up on my iPod's shuffle mix with the same damn song -- "The Other Woman," of course!-- twice in one day was enough to make me feel fairly dismayed with ol' Nina for a while.)
"You can fall asleep with a stack of books next to you on the bed, and if you're a heavy sleeper, you won't even wake up when you knock them to the floor. (I'm not a heavy sleeper. As much as I think books make reasonable bedfellows, that slushy paper crush in the middle of the night does nothing to help the insomnia issues. It only makes you feel guilty that you've injured your only friends.)
"You may come to know freedom from the tyranny of your penis, which thus dethroned becomes only a benign little tube for the expulsion of urine. (OK, I really can't relate here. Not on any level. Not with any analogous body parts. The ache in the throat. The ache in the heart. The ache behind the eyes. The ache in the lady parts. It all becomes one big seeping blister. One that even your sheets abrade. One that incites not a small measure of panic when you think you see the little red halo of infection developing around its outskirts. If crazy was infectious, that is.)
"In time you will know yourself so thoroughly that you finally realize what all those people had against you. (Yep. Yep. Pretty damn sick of what the inside of my head sounds like. This rather reminds me of how sick of myself I got when I was trying to write my grad school manuscript. God, I'm insufferable.)
"You will pray wholeheartedly to be changed. 'Make me good,' you'll call at night, down on your knees in a bedroom that is used only for sleeping, that smells of nothing but your cigarettes and the dust baking beneath the radiator. 'Please, God, just make me good.' (When you decide that being good is a lost cause, you just pray to be less stupid. Please, God. I like brains. I thought I had one. Maybe you can help me locate it? It appears misplaced!)
"On bad nights you can scoop up your cats and cuddle them shamelessly, even kissing them on the nose, though they usually dislike this and will try to shove you away with their paws. If worse comes to worst, you can press your face against their bodies and weep copiously into their fur." (I might consider it. If I had a cat. Wonder if my stuffed wombats would be amenable to becoming cat substitutes?)
Thank you, Mr. Trachtenberg.
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