Survival is a tricky thing for ugly men, isn't it? Every single person harbors a visceral hatred of you; your mere existence is an offense against the inborn love of beauty and the attendant hatred of deformity and illness. They feel the gorge rise in their throats each and every time they have to endure being subjected to your face because Nature has instructed them from the womb itself that the best thing would be to vomit you up and away. Your existence is a burden they have to endure that they would, given the first opportunity, relieve themselves of. Now, were they successful you would find yourself penniless, destitute and starving. You have to find some way of tricking them into suppressing that need to void you, of puking you out like any healthy body does when its been subjected to poison or disease.
In my experience, the only way of accomplishing this exceptionally difficult task is to make one's coworker's dependent upon you. You have to solve the problems they can't, of becoming the repository of knowledge that, in the case of your funeral, would become lost to them. It's certainly not a nice life by any sane stretch of the imagination, but it gives you license to feed yourself just one more day despite the fact you belong to the tribe of repulsive things that the vast majority would rejoice in seeing starve. You play Mephistopheles in a sense; Faustus hates you but needs you because the Spirit of Nature left him lacking. If they were just a little bit more clever they wouldn't need to rely upon the counsel of some disgusting old devil, but Nature provided them beauty and withheld the requisite wit. Tragedy, isn't it? Which is, I suppose, the only reason one signs even a portion of his soul away to something that never had the slightest hope of a soul in the first place.
It's not a pleasant thing to play familiar to the happy and lovely who are ashamed of the fact they have to call upon something sick because they have no other recourse. Funny thing. This past Monday my office was abuzz with a whole host of rumors. Apparently there had been some party thrown in anticipation of Halloween where people engaged in all sort of naughty behavior: drinking, dancing and fucking had been indulged in by all. Now, the stories reached my ears as the faintest whispers because no one wanted me to hear because, wonder of wonders, I was the only one who hadn't been invited. The people who participated in this little bacchanal weren't children; they were all my age or older; bear in mind I took my first breath nearly forty years ago. But for one night they were given license to revisit the joys of youth, just a little bit of morphia to soften the sound of the ticking clock. It would have been nice to have been invited to have indulged in a couple of those moments but, well, let's be honest: the devil has no place in the Garden, even when its once green leaves have shriveled and fallen to the Earth to rot.
A monster survives among men by serving as evil genius, a thing real people invoke in extremis to work a little bit of magic only to banish it a moment later in a fit of shame. We djinn will eat bones and shit for the sake of living long enough to snatch that brief little glimpse of Heaven before Allah notices our odious presence and casts us down to our proper place in the burning grounds because even a dreamy flicker of impossible Paradise is preferable to oblivion.
It would've been better had we never been born. Sadly, in a fit of delirium, God spoke both men and monsters into being, and the members of each tribe have no choice but to find some place to live until Death liberates both: reconciling them with his scythe and at long last making them brothers again as they rot beside each other in the ground.
