The only reason I exist is because someone like me must exist at least hypothetically given my circumstances. That I happen to exist figuratively speaking precludes my actual arrest and prosecution for womanslaughter, the accidental killing on purpose of two little old ladies since I immigrated to New York City from Moscow, including my puritanical grandmother and my adopted grandmother, a horror story writer,.

No prosecutor who enjoys a license to practice law would dare to bring charges against an invisible, underground man, a culprit whose crimes depend on his figures of speech, without his consent beforehand. And even given that consent the prosecutor might be deemed mad for pressing the case, and the defendant deemed not guilty by reason of insanity, for such a perpetrator could hardly be whole or in sound mind without a substantial body, not to mention the substantial jurisprudential need for other corpus delicti.

Now a scholastically minded man might say that I am an abstract being rather than a concrete universal or individual existence; but I prefer to say that I exist because I exist, at large and at the very least, in your mind, sir, for you are really the man who shoved my grandmother in front of the train in Brighton Beach, the very man who hurled that poor little old horror-story writer down the steps in the theatre, just as, pursuant to her adapted plot, a man was decapitated on the movie screen with a chain saw.

So I am by no means to blame for your crimes, or for the compulsive masturbation with which you defend yourself against your guilty conscience. As a matter of fact, after you killed the writer, I celebrated the occasion with Laura at the little whorehouse off Riverside Drive and Edgar Allen Poe Street, and was duly relieved of my swelling need for self-abuse. Laura is my one and only love, and I love her even the more given her innocence – she is retarded, and enjoys her job very much. I would have liked the full “Around the World” treatment from her, but my income as a clerk precludes extravagance – I was satisfied with a blow job.

That is not to say that I am entirely without anxiety, for everyone who lives in the city is anxious to a degree. It’s just that I am not anxious over your slaughtered little old ladies in particular, the killings that you and I know were really murders, the first in the first degree and the second in the third. And unlike you, I am no longer compelled to waste myself on myself, at least not on paydays, when I have funds to purchase Laura’s favors and shoot my wad instead of going to a movie. No, I have no guilty conscience over your murders, although I attribute them to myself from time to time so the stories may be told and my sources ethically protected.

Although I do not fear arrest, I admit that I suffer a general sort of anxiety. We are all connected, so to speak, and sometimes I intuit that I am the sum of the anxiety of all New Yorkers, or at least New York’s Jewish population, especially those nice Jewish boys who would enjoy sex with their mothers if only G-d would let them get away with it.

As for my anxiety, it is as if I am to be crucified at any moment for the crimes of my kind. I barely notice it as long as I am at work in the archives, in the bowels of that beast called Headquarters, retrieving and scanning old documents before running them through the Super Shredder. The deep, orgasmic undertone of the shredder comforts me. At times I feel like praying to it in spite of my atheism. As for the scanner, it gives me cause to reflect on the fact that history is a mistake; the scanner is good for nothing but the replication of sin. If only the Super Shredder were allowed to bring an end to history, to rid the world of the evidence of our mistakes.

Ideally, history should not be, it should have no beginning, and then we could live naturally, instinctively alarmed by immediate threats, but devoid of free-floating anger and nonspecific anxiety, or so say deluded romantics. People sometimes mistake me for a hapless romantic because of my painting, ‘A Snot’s View of World Trade Center collapsing on Crystal Palace.’ In truth I am sick and tired of the drivel about the mysteries of being and the depth of the human soul, which presumed to be some sort of absolutely free or completely wild animus.

I took an art therapy class in the East Village last winter to relieve me of the depression I suffered from reading bad translations of Russian novels and obscure German philosophy. We were taught to cough up phlegm and spit it onto the canvas, or to blow snot onto the canvas, and then to stare at the body fluid – our instructor had the best results with semen – until self-hypnotized. We would then paint whatever came to mind, as if we were automatons.

Sometimes I use that technique, metaphysically, to concentrate on the drivel about the mysteries of the human being – one might better say the absurdities of being human. What most often comes to mind is an image of a delirious bum. There is a slobbering bum at the bottom of human being. He does not have a pot to piss in and depends on handouts until he can get on his feet and make love and war. That is what Love and Strife are for.

The problem with the depth of the human soul is that it is shallow, superficial. The soul of the wild animal has greater depth, but I certainly would not return to nature as a wild animal. A drooling dog’s life is better. A dog needs no reason for leading a dog-eat-dog existence – human flesh will do nicely in a pinch. What a pleasure it must be to run into a room and forget why one entered; or to be kicked and not know why, and to remain man’s best friend despite his depravity. Why, a dog might even have the glory of being tortured and murdered by a football star.

No, I would not be an dog. I would rather exist completely in the now, as a carefree tomato, than to be a dog. But I am what I am and must be what I am because the circumstances are such as they are.