Strengthen What Remains

I had just gotten in trouble for the -nth time for something kid-stupid, the same thing I'd been scolded for previously, like pissing outside or something. I don't know, it was silly, but Mom wouldn't have it. She said to me, "Brian," she said, "you have an angel on one shoulder, and the devil on the other." I immediately thought of a Looney Tunes cartoon. "The angel is your conscience, and the devil is the enemy. And they are always talking to you, Brian, telling you which choice to make." She then cited Pinocchio, and the cricket Jiminy, and began singing that silly song about letting your conscience be your guide. "You need to always listen to that angel, Brian, to that conscience, and do what he tells you." "But mom," I've been told I said in response, because this part I don't remember. "The devil speaks louder." In my later years Dad would cite my coinage frequently, say, when Mom bought chocolate against her diet, "Did the devil speak louder, Catherine?" It became our admonition; our subliminal reproof; our collective, off-handed "verba-de-futuro." But it took for me a flush through the sewer to fully understand its application. For me, the devil's persistence was like the dripping faucet in a silent house, trying to sleep while waiting for the next ping! It was that chirping cricket, keeping you awake, the one you'd never find. It was the butterfly wings of chaos theory, producing the tiniest of change in the state of my atmosphere which, in perhaps a month's time, would develop into the tornado that would hurdle me to the land of make-believe as it reduced to rubble every structure I had erected, or had been granted. In prison, I was sold on Sartre and existentialism because I was sold on my Self: I was fine with defining my own attributes because I did not agree with the job God had done thus far, and I was fine with defining prison as "God-less" because deviance was the norm. And it was damned contagious. However, the "essence" my existence became upon my release was not created by me. I had degenerated into something netherworldly, sculpted by talons while under the needle. Perhaps that was the devil's sale, weakening my spiritual defense; because upon my release, He pounced on my vulnerability like a Tom on a mouseling, molesting my attempted stasis with incessant whisperings of a better existence. I was lonely and scared as hell, of everything and nothing: something bad was going to happen, it was obvious and imminent, so denying all offered consultation I punched the devil's ticket to ride because that was the easier, softer escape. It is simpler not to make the bed, to wash the dishes, to dust the windowsills or to clean your room. Chaos is the natural order of things; defying it takes disciplined work. But I had become a weary individual, for the devil had spoken.