An Inspection into the Dangers of Society

R. Fuko

September 20, 2010

An Inspection into the Dangers of Society

An Introduction to Fuko

Feel it. The air, because that’s where it is. The water mixes with it spectacularly. It scatters itself across my face and body warmly like a mother’s embrace. For as long as I can remember the shower has been a source of comfort in my life: it’s a unique place and time for introspection and self-expression. You won’t hear my singing much anywhere else. I love my shower.

For those of you who are late in knowing me, here is what you need to know.

- My name is Regimund Fuko.

- I am a critically-acclaimed and successful writer, having six books available to purchase at your local Borders or Barnes & Noble. I honestly don’t care between the two. For convenience I go with Amazon.

- My wife died a few years ago. I loved her. I don’t think there’s going to be another woman for me and honestly I’m not looking. She is my muse for writing. Before, when she was alive, she gave me peace and inspiration. Now her memory disperses my sentiments among nostalgia, anger and maybe ultimately a little feeling of redemption.

- Two years ago I was diagnosed as going through a terrible Major Depressive episode in which I drowned myself in alcohol, cigarettes and writing. After self-diagnosing and getting my life together, I began practicing healthier habits and taking anti-depressants.

- My most recent book is about a Space Cowboy named Dream. It was published about a year and a half ago. I got a lot of inspiration from the anime series “Cowboy Bebop,” and even stole one of their taglines. They didn’t like it at first, but it ended up bolstering their sales anyway.

Every morning I wake up and shower. It’s my routine and it lets me decant, depressurize and begin my day with resolve and pleasance. The shower is the good part, and it used to be the only good part because it is there that I lose myself in nature. Some of my friends call that ironic. I tell them to fuck off. But I have things to enjoy and ways to enjoy things that may not have been as pleasant before. There’s a degree of autonomy the sun allows that helps facilitate my day: it’s a communicable notion of existence that ingratiates itself upon my mental faculties. Or so I’m led to believe. But the weather demonstrates a lot of properties that can be applied to reasons to wake up and sometimes the weather is all I need.

When I get out of my shower I always brush myself off with a towel. There was a song that came out about 8 years ago about getting dirt off of one’s shoulder and sometimes I think that the young African-American who sang it was talking about showering. Of course I’m kidding. That would not be politically correct. The point being that I take a shower to get literal dirt off of my shoulders and then use a towel to brush that off, like the song, which is of course not what the young African-American is not denoting. Rather, for him, it is both a statement of one’s position in life as well as a snazzy dance move. I think it used to be all the rage with the youth of this generation. Now it has descended into my own private joke.

When I look in the mirror I make sure that my teeth are clean in all aspects of the word, especially looking for stains on the back sides of my lower teeth. Sometimes I look into the mouths of people when they talk and they have terrible stains and it’s really bothersome. Earwax too. I really dislike earwax for some reason: it just seems like people really have no hygiene these days. The mirror generally shows a body that could be better and a face that could use shaving. Honestly, shaving is completely overrated. Today, however, I have to shave. I am, after all, a representative of myself and thus have to construe a level of professionalism when I am attending to people. I run my own publication house that makes all of its money off of my books, because those are the only books that it sells. I created it a long while ago, after my first novel. If you don’t remember, it got glowing reviews and was a national bestseller. Yes, of course. The Taoist Chainsaw. That one. I’ll admit, 1995 was a good year for me, at least in terms of my commercial success. God, the New York Times loved me.

Shaving doesn’t take that long, but it is annoying. It takes just enough time to be inconvenient. God, I’m White. I stumbled onto this blog called white whines that has a different whine from a White person each day and realized how many of those I had fallen into. “Oh wow, another ‘Wonderwall’ cover. Never heard that one before.” Insignificant, but still. I’ve already heard the Oasis version enough. And shaving is just another whine from a white person. The electric razor slides across my face like a lawn mower. That’s a rather apt metaphor. I leave half of my face unshaven and look in the mirror. My brown eyes gaze back and I start to smile and then I start to chuckle and before I know it I’m howling from my stomach because of this funny man staring with half a beard on his face. And so I compose myself and finish the job.

My lexapro sits on my sink. I take 5 mg in the morning and 5 at night, just to balance out when the effect really hits. I pull out the mirror from the wall (I have one of those mirrors that rests on a hinge and you can pull it out from the wall) and take my deodorant from its insides and apply it viciously to my underarms, pulling my lips together and making a quick inhaling noise as if I were undergoing a surgical procedure awake, maybe even mummification. I appreciate the small things in life.

From there I walk out of the bathroom and pick out a shirt and a pair of jeans. Can’t look too good for people. Have to retain some angst-ridden artistic visual from my tormented past. God, I’m funny. The shirt is red. The jeans are blue. I choose my checkered-vans for shoes. Hey even a middle-aged man can have some style, right? I hope I’m right.

I pick up my wallet and keys and phone and make my way out of the apartment. I’m still on the thirty-second floor. I’ve really adapted to it to tell you the truth because I’ve made a friend. His name is John Pinkerton and he lives in 1403. When he first introduced me to himself I thought he was odd, but he really is one of the nicest people I know and really exceedingly genuine, which is something that I don’t think is too prevalent nowadays. We grab a beer once a week and will go do things together just for shits and giggles. He’s a bit younger than me, but is very intelligent and for some reason unmarried. I’ll never really understand it. I mean, he’s not gay, but he just doesn’t really show any interest towards women. One of those people who just gets a lot of pleasure out of life. He actually really opened my eyes up to possibility. Him and Maria of course.

Honestly, I can get to work whenever I want. That means I can walk to work, which is something I usually do. It, like my shower, is an instance of my taking some solace and feeling the particles of nature move around me. Some days I take public transport all through the city just to feel it beat around me: there’s a BlackStar song called respiration and it starts out saying “Escuchela, la ciudad respirando,” meaning “Listen to her, the city breathing.” On public transportation you hear the echoing of the tracks reverberating off of the metal carcass of the urban serpent. That noise colors your perception of the city that passes you by. Or are you passing it by? I still haven’t made up my mind. The phenomenon isn’t the same when you walk. You can feel the city of course, but I think you get to feel the humans that make it up better and the construction around. Impatient cars scream to each other and humans walk and run and the crazies on the corner play drum patterns on buckets. When you walk you see all of this. That’s why I do it. To feel right about where I’m living.

A long time ago I ran away and no one really knew where I went. And to tell you the truth, I’d rather leave my whereabouts unexplained. I might explain it later, but you should know that I now understand that the American dream has been perverted and it’s not just American anymore: it’s” A Mexican” dream. Notice how there is only one letter of difference between the two? Like all things, it’s been outsourced.

The reason I bring this up is in relation to the paragraph before. You see, I could have stayed off and lived on my own away from society, but I thought I had some things to say and apparently the world thought so too when it finished listening to what I said in my books. But that’s a lousy excuse for a reason to stay away from the people you’ve grown up with and the people who really made a difference in your life. And when I look closer into the reasons behind everything, I don’t know why I came back. Recognition? I don’t think I’m that simple.

I used to look down on my employees because I thought they were all a bunch of money-grabbing two-faced professionals. Ivy-league or some top 100 school that gives them a license to wear their britches too tightly for the rest of their lives. Now I think the same thing, but I find it way funnier now that I think about how they latch onto me. Needless to say, I don’t have a huge publishing business or anything. It’s really only for my books, so we really only take up a few offices. There are currently seven people who work for me, not including the interns. And the interns liven up the place so much. Endless entertainment I swear to God. I have them do menial things for the majority, but you definitely get gems every once in a while.

There was one guy who always wore vests, and don’t get me wrong, I think vest day is the best day, but it never seemed to go along with the jacket that he wore, or it just somehow managed to look awkward. I didn’t point it out, but eventually one of the full-time staff members did and he got flustered and so he just stuck to common clothes. You see, I don’t require people to dress a certain way. I take the Google model. I never told him that I missed his vests, though, and sometimes I regret that. I thought they were great.

The reason I bring this up is to give you a better idea of how my office works. It’s a pretty free environment. I worked pretty hard to open up our company to innovation and to give us the best results, at least in the past few years. I have people who work for a purpose and I believe that people should be peers in any sort of company in order to do the best work. People can approach me with anything and likewise I can approach them. They, of course, still see me as a boss since I hand them their paycheck, but it’s different in that I expect them to tell me if I’m doing anything wrong. I have the ability to veto their suggestion, but that’s about it in all seriousness. So we only have a few offices. I made sure to station the company in a nice area so that my employees would enjoy going to work and now I’ve perfected that pretty well I think.

I spend my time there doing PR a lot or working on my new novel. I treat writing like a job because it is that. The best writers spend a certain amount of time writing every day and I try to do the same. I used to fuel my writing with alcohol and cigarettes and tears over my dead wife, but now I fuel it in better, more healthy and constructive ways. I spend my lunch hour in the gym on the first floor running or lifting. I always seem to do my best thinking when I run. It’s all clear, you know? Anyway, the different machines help me work off my nervous energy from my work.

And thus, my day goes by. Today, however, as I said earlier in my excuse for shaving, I am meeting an old acquaintance of mine. A lady by the name of Rose Li. We shared a time together, but it didn’t work out. Basically that is the story. This is before my wife, much before her. Maria obviously knew about Rose, and really had no issue with our being friends, but I had really lost touch with her in recent years. She always had a way about her. Her beauty being the thing that really ingratiates itself upon people, but it’s also a lot more than that because she had ability to morph into the person she thought best for the situation. I always found her really fascinating. She’s really intelligent but rather chameleon-like.

We meet at the old café, a place that breeds memory and desire. We used to come here and as usual, she’s early. Her comfortable demeanor, the well-positioned book on her table and the gravitated rim of her glasses rest a little lower on her nose so that she can read more comfortably. She is wearing a sundress that generously shows the best curves on her body. She looks up and smiles. “Hey Redgy.” Not even Maria called me that. It makes Rose unique.

“Evening. What are you reading?” I ask

“House of Mirth” she replies, smiling.

“Edith Wharton.”

“I haven’t yet finished it, but I looked up the synopsis on Wikipedia. I don’t know if I like how it’s going to end.”

“Goddammit Rose, the ending is always the best part. I don’t get how you can live with yourself. It ruins the thing if you do that.”

“Meh,” she offhanded. “It’s interesting because the main character is created tragically. Like her beauty is the thing that allows her into high society. And she wants it so bad, but she’s predisposed to fail. The book and story line. They seem like they are just there to exploit her.”

“Isn’t everything though? You put enough things that work together that they make things blatantly obvious. It’s what you do to get your point across. Just little things that may clue your reader into what you’re doing or even bold statements.”

“Yeah.” She pauses. “It’s just that it seems so cheap. Like Wharton crafts a character that is just made to demonstrate the failings of society, the weak points and the beliefs Lily has that really don’t let her have an escape.”

“Lily is the main character?”

“Yeah.”

We pause for a while. Rose flips the book to its back and looks at it for a second. And I find myself becoming infatuated with her. Just like always. Just all the little things she does that make herself excruciatingly desirable. And I wonder if I could invite her back to my place, for just a second, before I mentally castigate myself for even letting the thought slip into my head.

“I am her.” She says, insightfully.

“No you aren’t.” I say defensively. “Mind you, I haven’t read the book in an exceedingly long time, but regardless, I mean, you’ve done very well for yourself. You’re independent. You don’t rely on anyone. I mean, okay, you know I consider you a very elegant and beautiful specimen of a woman, but I mean, you think for yourself.”

She chuckled. “Redgy the charmer.” I had to laugh at that one too. “You are missing something. Different beliefs. Us women are raised differently now. I could have been her in that situation. You see the book only works because it is crafted as such.”

I cut in. “Yeah, fucking books. They’re so calculated. I should know.” Calculate, you bastard.

“At any rate, I like the book, I definitely do, but sometimes I just want it to stop. It is doing too much to Lily. It’s almost unbelievable.”

“Did you read my book about the space cowboy?”I say, changing the subject.

“I loved that book. Redgy, it’s true, you become more of a person with each book. I mean, it might be that I know you so well, but I could see your thought process in the book. The way you ended it. It was liberating for you, wasn’t it? It was you.”

It takes me a little while to answer because she’s right. When I was writing it, I had two options. The main character could have died, and it would have ended a better story, or the character could survive. And looking back on it, I made the right choice for myself. You see, I was the space cowboy. And I made him survive. And it was later that I realized what I had done. He saved me. It takes me a long time to respond to Rose. She’s always been so perceptive.

“Anyway, I brought it up because from the way you describe House of Mirth, I think my book was similar. You know, you create a story in order to demonstrate what you think about yourself and the things that affect you. And you want to shed light on the things around you so that’s what I think Wharton was doing. It’s what I did in my book. I wanted to show the ability to be able to survive. It’s an innately human thing that even with our technological advances and our medicine and everything else, we have it. And we’ll give up anything for it. And that’s why Jack survives at the end of Heaven.”

Rose looked down and then drew her attention back to me. “Because we persevere.”

“Yes! That’s it. Because the antiquated notion of Darwinism doesn’t apply anymore and we create our own natural selection with technology and advances and everything. That’s why. Because we don’t need science of biology, but merely a will.”

“And what about your trip?”

“What about it?”

“How does that fit in? You tried leave society, Redge. We all know it. You had your perseverance and your survival. What happened?”

“You know I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I know you don’t want to talk about it.”

Afterwards the café was filled with an ambiguous sentiment of nostalgia and that feeling you get when you read the last page of The Great Gatsby, with tides and boats and the past and how it catches up to you. The smell of coffee lingered in the air and the music played up and coming artists. Rose and I talked and caught up and of course, she was doing fine. I never doubted her.

When we said our goodbyes, I walked down the street and looked up. The sky had darkened since we entered the café. In the city you can’t see stars. You can’t see the universe existing beyond the gaze of your eyes. And it puts everything in perspective. That there’s absurdity and fiction and a whole lot of other stuff you’ll never know. So you make the best you can with what you’re given and sometimes it takes adventures, literal and figurative, and you curse everything and praise what’s left. And you find some truth that you hold onto, that you may or may not like, but it’s there. So you make due.

The truth is I was scared.