Pillow Talk

"I know the devices of a demon. I was taught as a child about the demon lover. I was told about a beautiful temptress who came to a young man's room. And he, if he were wise, would demand that she turn around, because demons and witches have no backs, only what they wish to present to you. What had I done? What animal had I delivered into her? I had been speaking to her I think for over an hour. Had I been her demon lover?"

-- The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje

I used to share what I think of as my strange thoughts with the woman I was engaged to. I had never had someone to talk about them with. I hadn't trusted many people before.

She was the sort of woman who is constantly surrounded by suitors disguised as shining knights. She knew the gnawing pain that comes with the constant discovery and rediscovery of her friends as mere competitors in what could be considered a game for her romantic affection; of catching nearly all she knew in lie after desperate lie. Many women lead such lives -- some crave the attention, others may be oblivious to it, and many more, I suspect despise it.

I don't know if I was really any different from the suitors at my core, but she chose me, surprising myself and others; perhaps even surprising herself. As an oddity among my peers, I appeal to a certain type of mind. I was also prudish, tended towards blunt honesty, and was perhaps a touch more naive than the average 20-year-old, which some may consider charming. I accidentally met a criteria she had independently developed for the perfect mate -- he had to possess musical ability, speak three languages, and to look dignified while brushing his teeth (she called it 'looking sexy' but it's hard to believe someone could ascribe that to me).

I loved her because of her flaws. She seemed more human than human to me. She had a very ungraceful gait due to over-sized feet, and was easy to talk to. She was not afraid to shave her head -- to cast off the traditional gender logic. She appreciated art and music as voraciously as I, although our tastes were markedly different -- that was okay. Such subtle differences serve to broaden horizons. It is good to spend time with people who are not like yourself. Better still to fall in love with such people. At least, that's the way I used to see it.

She also said the damnedest things. The damnedest things any woman had ever told me before.

She said that when she imagined her guy friends jerking off to pictures of her that she felt disgusted, but not when she imagined me doing it. That was her way of letting me know she was interested in me.

She invited me to watch animal sex specials on television when we were alone in our hotel room, which, back then, merely served to make me blush and unable to speak.

She said once that Wayne Coyne's beard reminded her of ass-hair.

She was incredibly candid -- which was alluring to me. She was ridiculous as she was flattering. New and refreshing. Her attitude made my negative self-perception melt away. She was also funny, smart, and thoughtful. And despite her awkwardness, very pretty.

As is traditional with an isolated Christian upbringing, I had denied my sexuality pretty thoroughly, with but a handful of lapses, and it had never even occurred to me that women could enjoy sex until my conversations with her seemed to indicate otherwise. I had that Victorian, or perhaps, neo-puritan notion of sex as some kind of chore -- one which women begrudgingly obliged their lovers for the sake of a relationship or to produce children. It's an old notion; an oft-harmful one, but it is ingrained into thousands of minds every day. Loneliness produced a false confirmation bias in myself. I suppose I thought that women would be more overt if they actually enjoyed male (re: my) company, and since they weren't, it seemed to me they didn't.

It's embarrassing to admit, but I have often resorted to faith in order to reverse this Victorian conditioning. It is hypocritical -- for an atheist to deny his nagging suspicion that he is a hideous unlovable creature merely because people say he is not -- to pretend to believe that his loneliness is somehow his own fault. That he sabotages his own life and doesn't realize it -- a self-fulfilling prophesy; a demon all over again; hideous and unlovable -- apparently only to himself. And yet he does love himself. It is the others who give him a wide berth. Why?

We shared many places, her and I. It was a long-distance relationship. She lived successively in Wisconsin, China & Chicago; I, in California, Texas & Hawaii. We talked on the phone, we IM'ed, wrote thousands of emails, texted, and planned romantic liaisons around my leave times and long weekends. We never had a house or apartment of our own. Instead, we had hotel rooms; guest bedrooms; diners in towns neither of us knew. Rented or borrowed cars. Our entire relationship had the auspice of impermanence. It loomed on the horizon as a raincloud does. We clutched together for as long as we could bear the pain of the distance. Being less skilled in the art of loneliness, she couldn't last as long as I. It is not an intentionally practiced skill. Not typically. Particularly among the young.

But I especially appreciated how readily she accepted and respected my mind. My thoughts. In hindsight I realize she regarded me as something like a work of art. My friends and family have said that she would constantly steal glances at me when I wasn't looking, as if to confirm that I was really there. She told me that I became more and more beautiful to her. She had an overwhelmingly positive effect on me. She quelled the hatred I felt as a teenager. Snuffed it right out like a candle. She knew just what to do -- as if to arrive and simply ask, "no one's done anything about this burning fire here?" And then swallowed it whole. She softened me forever, an effect which lasted even after we stopped communicating. I would probably have not become a Pacifist if it weren't for her influence -- ironic because she did not believe in Pacifism herself. Her influence on me may have even made us less compatible in the long run. I believe she liked the angry me.

Regardless, we were engaged. When she returned from China she brought me two gifts -- a tiny jade mouse and a wedding band. Since we didn't know my size I sent her a piece of string that I had tied around my ring finger. She, then, stuck a rolled piece of paper through the hoop of string and used it as a guide for the jeweler.

And I used to share my strange thoughts with her.

Spending listless hours together, as I believe most couples do, we bathed in each other's warmth against the night air, sharing quirks or personal revelations, nude or near nude, half in dream. We helped one another understand those threads of humanity; how they interweave, unravel, or sometimes cut and fray. We laughed. We enjoyed each other's company. Inspired one another. Critiqued one another's work, ideas, and philosophies.

She once told me about a theory she developed, wherein the sum of one's personality could be described in terms of three colors; no more, no less. I was blue, green and brown -- the colors of a forest meadow; she, yellow, white and green -- perhaps with some red, but that would have violated the 'three' rule. I had a similar habit of assigning colors to people but I usually just chose one per person. I have found that some of my friends do the same. Do you, reader?

I described to her a feeling I would sometimes get whenever a stranger flashed me a knowing smile. I tended (or perhaps, pretended) to wonder if the person was really a time-traveler from the future, desirous of catching a glimpse of me from the era before I became...whatever it is I thought I would become. A rock star, I suppose. I suppressed such thoughts, meaning that I did not act on them or acknowledge them publicly when they arose, but they arose. A kind of delusion of grandeur -- as if I thought I were a temporal tourist destination.

I described how it was becoming harder and harder for me to believe in free will. I didn't understand how a future could exist without the present - its past -- being as unchangeable as our own past. I often felt distracted by how each of my actions were limited by their preceding moments and constricted to their future ones; how everything I did was already being done as I was doing it. My prophetic deja vus complicated this; when I tried to change the events of my dreams as I re-lived them I found myself merely confirming the dream-wherein-I-tried-to-change-the-dream, remembering the attempt itself, feeling tricked by my apparently (and uselessly) psychic subconscious, not quite believing what I was experiencing.

I described how I sometimes pretended that eye-contact caused people to suddenly and instantly switch souls.

Strolling down a corridor at work, I might accidentally catch someone's eye. I might wonder to myself what their life might be like compared to mine, and I'd pretend our eye-contact provided an answer. I used to avoid unnecessary eye-contact. I still avoid smelling people I don't enjoy talking to.

"Wouldn't you remember if you switched bodies with people all the time?" she asked. Everyone asks. Her smile and her eyes suggested the words, 'you silly, silly man.' I loved that expression of hers.

But see, my crazy hat is just as smart as the rest of me; it knows that memories are stored in the body, not the soul. The switch is so instantaneous and complete that you do not even notice. At most you feel a slight rush of excitement, of fear, or anxiety. Eye contact can cause funny behavior in people. Why should that be so? Some people are a joy to make eye contact with; others, not so much. Friends and lovers, making eye-contact often, feel intimate and at home with one another. Some people never make eye-contact with you. You can tell from a distance that you do not want them to.

Such thoughts led to others.

Considering the atrocities in Rwanda I had heard about -- was it Rwanda? I cannot remember. Abstracting the concept of the soul. I didn't know if I believed in heaven or hell anymore. My Christianity was a tattered rag, though the phrase 'God is dead and no one cares' could still make my stomach turn, depending on my mood (or how 'screwed' I was feeling). I was specifically concerned with hell. I hadn't pondered eternity often, but I couldn't believe that any punishment could deservingly last forever. If Hitler, to beat a dead metaphor, suffered 15 million lifetimes of torment for his crimes, that would not have put a dent on eternity, and I could not believe in a God that would condemn any thinking entity to such a place. It was literally the most brutal act I could imagine. I would have rather gone to hell myself than exist in heaven with such a monster.

But did that make me more forgiving than God? Me, the lethargic wraith? The demon in human clothing? The man whose brain chemistry locked him in Dante's outermost layer of sombre, tranquil hell? The one reserved for philosophers? Diet hell? Hell lite?

I couldn't get a certain image out of my mind.

I'm beginning to realize that we -- humans that is -- tend to use self-delusion to reconcile our ideals to the apparent reality of our world. I, for instance (and I suspect that I'm not alone in this) hold an ideal that most people are gentle-natured, fair, rational in their own way, and diplomatic. Even people who espouse violence as a solution to their lives' problems are violent only seldomly. When exceptions arise, they are punished with zeal. When they can't be, it seems people hope that someone, or something else, will do it for them.

Being no exception then, I taxed my mind in the following way: I wanted to rationalize my desire for an alternative to hell as a means for 'cosmic justice' while at the same time accounting for the brutal stories one inevitably hears of -- of genocide, of serial murder, of mass rape; forms of coercion -- or in the cases I'd been hearing about, all of the above -- of guerrilla soldiers descending upon villages in the night and mutilating those they find, stripping them of the flesh in their breast; cutting their faces, genitals, I mean, what was the point? They were irrevocably disturbed! Such soldiers are often drugged against their will and conscripted into military service as children. Did they believe they were punishing these innocents for the crime of escaping guerrilla servitude? Where do the madmen come from who create such armies, and what made them mad?

Why did I find it necessary to create a concept of cosmic justice? To cope with feelings of powerlessness, perhaps? Impotence to rid the world of wrong? Of unnecessary suffering? I don't know. I still felt that no one deserved hell, not even the very worst of us. Hitler, Stalin, Bin Laden, etc. Charles Manson.

You get the idea.

But what could people accept in hell's place? What could I accept in hell's place? These paragraphs crossed my mind one spent night.

I considered reincarnation. In the past I had pondered reincarnation as a possible explanation for my sadness. I wondered if I were being punished for a forgotten misdeed from a past life, or, perhaps, an accumulation of past lives. I often asked myself what sort of action would deserve such an all-pervading malaise. I really had no gauge for comparison. A recollection of the misdeed may have helped but I considered that part of the 'punishment', may in fact have been an oblivious nature to the scope of my deeds in the first place.

I also considered my confusion about time and free will. It is widely accepted, for instance, that time is non-linear. Past doesn't necessarily come before present, which doesn't necessarily come before future. Could reincarnations also be non-linear, I wondered? Could a person live a life into the future, then the past, then the present -- or for that matter, multiple lives at the same time?

My thoughts were still with the village women; the maimed victims left for dead, and of their mind-altered attackers. And of non-linear reincarnation. I thought, in that instance, that a fair justice would be for the attacker to reincarnate as his own victim -- or victims, one at a time -- after his death. And after that thought, it was only a small stretch to consider another and ancient thought; a vastly popular thought, but as alien a one to me at the time: What if there was only one consciousness? What if this consciousness lived every single life that has ever lived? Experienced every pain, every sorrow; perpetuated every crime and suffered as every victim? But more than that -- experienced every joy, wrote every song, sang it, sold it, bought it, experienced it anew time and time again (perhaps even remembering, in some mysterious way) -- and every book, every painting, every meal, every conversation, every single idea -- buildings, humans, animals, insects, rocks, gems, dirt, trees, water, air -- every aspect of the cosmos -- everything would be accounted for by such experience.

It was God's own worldview.

Was that what the soul truly was? God's direct experience of human life? Of any life? Fractions of God's awareness? Now there was a heretical idea. It reminded me of what I had heard about Eastern religion -- not that I had heard much -- and the doors to my mind felt blown right off their hinges.

It was different from any religious idea I'd ever encountered. It made the whole concept of heaven and hell seem like a children's game. For a few moments I didn't quite realize what I was suggesting to myself. A kind of justice that wasn't just balanced, but which had a kind of beauty. It had always seemed somewhat aloof to me that God would make all of these creatures and allow such strange and horrible things to happen to them -- then blame it on ancestral sin, greater purposes; what have you.

But if the 'witness' -- the me that experiences myself, the you that experiences yourself -- was not really "us" at all; but something altogether different...if God himself personally witnessed and experienced every life that ever happened, he'd be paying for his own mistakes, so to speak. That was much more sacrificial than anything Jesus purportedly did -- or was it the same story? The same ideology?

And as an omniscient mind, he would necessarily know what he was getting into. Did that void the sacrificial aspect? Perhaps the victim reincarnated as her attacker -- was that how God learned to forgive...himself? I liked that idea. Did he intentionally forget in order to re-learn? Did the joy of discovery serve a greater function than the discovery itself? Was that part of the mystery of life?

I conceived an entirely different mental image of God from the one I had always known. I saw a vast intelligence - unmatched, unparallelled - and completely alone. I could see him traveling backwards, forwards, even 'sideways' in time in order to interact with himself. Could he cut himself into pieces? Divide infinity in half and you have two measures of infinity. Could he do that infinite times? Would he wipe his own memory, reprogram himself -- what would such a thing even spend its time doing?

Would he spend an eternity in hell to prove a point? Would he role-play as the devil to give himself something to do? I shared these ideas with her as well.

It's sort of sad -- I really liked those ideas of mine, but eventually I decided they were mad. Christians don't want to hear them, atheists didn't want to hear them, and agnostics liked them but could only shrug their shoulders at them. And that was it. Life moved on. I had more pressing concerns.

I considered that I might have the sort of mind that could start a cult -- and I feared myself. Cult leaders have always been madmen. Horrible, corrupted, manipulators of the lost. A part of me felt like it could be easy to do. Somehow this shifted my perspective on religion. I felt like I had gained a profound insight into what God might really be -- and I could see pieces of it in other religions. These are the aspects which coerce people into behaving in ways they might never otherwise behave. The corrupted aspects, the hypocritical aspects. The power-hungry aspects.

And I learned to hate power. To hate coercion. To hate deception.

I thought, perhaps, that this inner voice of mine was a shadow of my paternal grandmother's schizophrenia. It was a relief to feel like I could brush it aside. Dismiss it. Keep from publicly acknowledging it.

Lava cools and creates a surface shell. It is safe to touch. Inside is another story.

Thought - Spirit of Nonconvention

A year and a month (and a day and an hour) before I was sentenced, the fates, as I have termed them, told me that I was a spirit of nonconvention. They gave my life a grade: C+. Sometime later that night, I died in my car. Later still, a convulsion revived me. I could tell by Orion's new position in the sky that between 2 and 3 hours had passed since I'd last closed my eyes.

Two Creatives

Sometime last year I sat down for breakfast at an empty table. Although I usually sit with friends or with my cellmate. I tend to be impatient when it comes to meals. I often end up near the front of the chow-line, having sped ahead of everyone, and will sit at the first empty table I find. Usually my friends catch up to me. Sometimes they don't.

When they don't it's anyone's bet as to who will end up sitting next to me. There are over a dozen pods in my facility and each pod houses just over a hundred inmates (which is actually pretty small for a prison). I've sat next to and across from all kinds of people; murderers, thieves, druggies, the rich, the poor, and of course, the occasional sex offender. Many inmates become extremely anxious sitting next to people they don't know. I used to feel the same anxiety, but nervousness just seems to draw attention, and it's actually something of a waste of an emotional state. I haven't found a real benefit to it yet.

What the inmates worry about is being perceived as hanging with the wrong crowd, though said crowd's composition will vary depending on which inmate you ask. Personally, I stopped giving a shit. The only people I tend to avoid are the white-power types. I suppose I'm trying to live up to the personal expectation that I live in a post-racial society. I feel a bit at odds with myself because I'm trying to expand my compassion to include those who are easily vilified, including skinheads. I play most situations by ear. The result is that I have friends all over and zero problems.

On this particular morning an incredibly ugly man sat down at an empty seat across from me. I'm trying not to understate; he was really, truly, the ugliest, most hideous, most trollish creature I had ever laid eyes on. I had to consciously avert my eyes to keep from staring; he was that unfortunate. I had never seen him before. He elicited a strong aversion in me. I couldn't even bring myself to say hello at first.

And then he started eating. I had no idea teeth could grow so crookedly. Climbing at awkward angles, as if to escape his ragged, voracious maw, they revealed shades of black and brown seldom seen with the lights on. Truly despicable. I almost lost my appetite. Almost.

But I also became somewhat disgusted with myself. I knew in the instant it took to gather all of this information that the man before me had been thoroughly dehumanized all of his life. He was born for prison. No one talks to such a being unless forced to. This man had never known true friendship, love, kindness, favors, or sacrifice. They are just empty words to him. It never mattered what his crime was, he was doomed the instant his father's crooked sperm mingled with his mother's haggard ovum.

So I forced myself to say hello. I thought that if his mind might have somehow survived his life intact, I might have been able to redeem humanity somewhat by offering him a small kindness, even friendship. But his mind was gone. He was as ugly and useless on the inside as he was on the outside, which isn't to say he was completely useless, just mostly so. The rest of us have some pretense of a claim to humanity; this man's existence dispelled all such lies. His very presence taught a lesson that went miles over his own gnarled head and stunted spine.

What can be done for such cases? Society didn't even have the decency to chew before swallowing him.

It was too much for me. I would have had to spend years bringing that man to some semblance of dignity. But supposed he already felt dignified. What then? Would I have been the creature then?

We did trade small talk at least. He was a very depressed, bitter man, and he hid his sadness behind a thick veil of anger. I never saw him again. That's not very plausible in an environment like mine. Could this have been one of those situations where the protagonist was actually sitting at the table by himself all along?

Probably not. But I don't care much about objectivity anymore. I sort of tried.

Demons

The various lores and myths surrounding demons were a crude forerunner to the spiritual amalgamation I perceived in 2008. Demon lore, unfortunately, is rather synonymous with Christianity, and since I was raised a Christian, I was quite naturally receptive to its ideas as a young child and adolescent. It is a source of extreme shame and embarrassment for me -- or at least, it was at one point. It feels much less so now. It was when I started writing this entry back in November. I haven't looked at it for a few months now. I'm not sure I was ready to share this then. I am now.

I have already spent some time rambling to the reader about demons, angels, and gods. Some religions use these terms interchangeably; others, to convey extremely specific ideas. I use them figuratively and interchangeably. They may correspond to something real or they may not. I'll say this; while I don't believe in sin or that there was ever a fall of man, I do believe that there are benevolent and malevolent people and ideas in the universe. To wrestle one's demons seems to me as the same process whether said demons are perceived as agents of Satan or aspects of one's consciousness, and while most point to a distinction between matters of evidence-based fact and those of faith, there seems to be some wiggle room left for interpretation, speculation, and intuition. Despite my best efforts, childhood ideas have often resurfaced in new and surprising ways. I think it would be nice if people dispelled with the notion of childhood innocence and just taught their offspring the truth to the best of their knowledge, no matter how complicated.

When I was a Christian, I tended to use hell's "traditional" demons to represent my spiritual ideas. I knew that it was strange. I realize now that I felt some sympathy for demons, due, in part, to my self-identification as a wraith or a monster, and to my depression. Hell, as a state of mind, was something I experienced for long stretches at at time. Interpersonal gaps kept me from forming friendships with my peers, and I perceived that I was being ostracized for some reason. I perceived myself as ugly, both externally and internally, and became drawn to ugly things. I identified very strongly with outcasts.

Another reason I tended to think of demons when pondering spiritual matters is that I used to "feel" demonic presences from time to time. I chalk it up to superstition now, but I'm sure many people can relate to the experience. Somehow I perceived an evil, malevolent spirit focusing its attention on me. It used to make me feel terribly afraid. It was that "haunted house" feeling. I still grimace and curse through scary movies because they remind me of it. I wish I could say that I rationalized these feelings away, but I merely learned to endure them as an adult. They transformed somewhat in 2005, but I'll get to that.

Finally, and this really is one of the more embarrassing aspects of my past, I was drawn to demons for one other reason. Very few people know that while I was in middle school, bullies often followed me home while throwing rocks and yelling insults. I hated walking to and from school. I began taking longer and more elaborate routes just to avoid those assholes, but if they spotted me it didn't matter what route I took. Three at a time, they'd follow, staying safely at a throwing distance. If I slowed down, they slowed down; it I walked faster, they walked faster; hurling pebbles and cans and whatever else might be laying around. I wished for no small amount of violence to visit upon those children. Perhaps this admission will prove to be my catharsis: I sincerely wished that I could have had a demonic companion all my own for the purpose of wreaking havoc on the lives of my tormentors. I really hated them. I was a wrathful little thing. So I had a secret desire for a "pet demon" as a youth. Hence my fascination with them, even if I didn't always believe in them. It's worth noting that my haunted house feelings occured well before this wish, so they may have emboldened it somewhat; despite my fear, I was never physically harmed, so I began to doubt the validity of the claim that devils were inherently harmful, though they were scary.

I don't remember the first time I heard about demons, but I learned about the devil at an early age. I do remember wanting to draw him at one point; he was purported to be the most beautiful angel, and the duplicitous nature of such a subject appealed to me. Besides, God can't be drawn. Try it.

I didn't take the devil very seriously as a child. One day in Sunday School -- yes, I was one of those -- I made the mistake of making fun of him. I thought everyone would join in and we'd all laugh and make fun of the devil together, or something like that. What a grand old time we all would have had, secure in our relationship with God, able to mock the devil at our whim and fancy. Haha, what a cad, that devilish old nelly! I really don't remember what I said, but I have a long history of saying exactly the wrong thing in a crowd. My opinion was sharply rebuked by everyone in the room. And then the teacher told me something that made me feel afraid! That the devil was smart and powerful (this part I already knew), but also that he was easy to provoke and enrage. He was dangerous. To mock him was to willingly invite hardship into one's life. My head reeled with potential ramifications. Could I personally piss off the devil? Was that possible? I hadn't previously considered such an idea plausible.

In my mind it's a bit unfair to make a child understand such ideas mere moments after singing, "If the devil doesn't like it he can sit on a tack," but what confused me more was the unanimous consensus of the Sunday School students. Had I missed some key information? As these were some of my only interactions with other English-speakers, I valued their input pretty heavily. In return, I was blessed with all the subtle arts of neurosis. The idea that Satan's wrath could be invoked, whether by accident, by taunting, or by harmless fun, made him seem much more real to me. It tapped into that superstitious realm of my mind and set up a nice foundation for the other demon mythologies that followed over the years.

In time I was introduced to the concept of spiritual warfare as it is understood by many Western Christians. I may as well attempt to acquaint the unfamiliar reader: the belief is that a human mind is like a battlefield; a literal one, on which hosts of angels and demons battle for supremacy unseen. The details are all speculative, with no shortage of spiritual authorities. I suppose, in my own way, I am included in this punditry; but my intent here is merely to explain some of the framework that helped me lose my mind.

There are no causes or effects that a sufficiently paranoid mind cannot attribute to demonic activity. demons can't be seen, heard, felt, smelled or tasted objectively and directly. Rather, they exist on a "spiritual plane," residing behind-the-scenes the same way God does. They are occupied with misery and torment. I've read that their actual survival depends on negative emotions; that such things as rage, sadness, or tension are like sustenance to them. I've also read that demons eat human souls (and one another); that hell is something like an eternal digestion process. Demons are also said to relish in human excesses, exhibiting greed, envy, lust, and so on. Some ideas, particularly older ones, envision demons as personifications of the vices themselves.

I was twelve or thirteen when first introduced to the idea that demons could plant thoughts into a person's mind. That resonated with me. I though about it ad nauseam. Were thoughts beaming across the universe? Could my mind be read by any being who happened to take interest in me? Did I have an intimate, one-sided relationship with demons whether I wanted one or not? What could I hide from beings who didn't sleep and wanted to feed on my existence? Could they see me? Did they watch me eat? Sleep? Masturbate? Did they prompt any of my behaviors? Which of my thoughts were really mine? How many of life's disappointments were due to demonic subversion? Were there things beneath a demon's time or dignity? What were the limits? How tiny a happiness was worthy of sabotage?

I tried not to think about it. I knew thoughts like that were a little out there. But depression and isolation reinforced them. It really felt like an external force was weighing me down. It was easy to feel as if demons were ruining my life. I was lonely and sad. I did my best to hide it. My heart ached with adrenaline when I thought about interacting with people -- I don't know why. It was strange to grow up with.

Other people became quite mysterious to me, as they so clearly lacked the problems I didn't. They had happiness; they had friendship; they had relationships, community, interdependency. They had a human quality that confounded and eluded me -- hence my self-identification as something only nigh-human. I felt like the grinch. It was as if God existed for others but not for me. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I had always felt that way. It was hell as I had often heard it described by Christians -- as a total separation from God.

But how could someone be alive and in hell at the same time? And how had I stumbled into it? What had I done? Had I died and forgotten? It didn't make sense to me.

I began to develop what I suppose other people would consider odd social habits, because I grew seriously afraid that other people could perceive my inhumanity. This probably started a kind of self-fulfilling chain reaction -- I acted more and more suspiciously while people treated me with increasing suspicion. My personality came to revolve around concealment and hiding and people eventually stopped taking notice of me, or at least stopped interacting with me. I grew to be tall, silent, dark, stiff, brooding, sinewy, standoffish, intimidating; creepy even. It's a mold I've been trying to break since becoming an atheist. I've actually been having some pretty tremendous success lately.

Long story short, demons are a crazy person's wet dream. If they exist, I think the lore surrounding them poses a greater threat to humanity than they ever could themselves. And if they exist, maybe that's the point. Isn't fear strange?