|
If you reach the tenth year anniversary of anything -- your marriage, your job, your prescription Ritalin habit -- then you know what dying is. Gone is the sense of hope and possibility and passion. To put it in biochemical terms, gone is the phenylethy-lamine. Literally: Scientists have discovered that the feelings of love and passion you feel for your wife or husband are just a neurochemical called phenylethylamine (PEA) that's squirted into a region of your brain called the "hypothalamus." At most, you've got a five-year supply of PEA allocated to each lover, or each hope. But like Cinderella's carriage, there's no getting around the time limit. Once your five-year supply of PEA is gone, flat reality takes over. Suddenly the woman you loved and who made your heart beat yesterday only inspires thoughts of beatings today, tomorrow, and forever more. Everything about her or about your job, or your prescription drugs, which no longer work fills you with revulsion and disappointment. That's what happens at the five-year mark. But if you make it to a tenth anniversary granted, you won't make it to the tenth year, because we're biochemically hardwired to lose interest long before that but let's assume you're one of the "lucky" ones who made it to your tenth year anniversary of your marriage, your job, or your SSRI anti-depressant drug habit. If you've made it to 10 years, then you know what dying is. It is dull, flat, uneventful. It is a time to look back and to think, in vague despair, "I don't remember much. I didn't accomplish anything I'd hoped to. I'm tired, I'm going to lie down for awhile." Fortunately for us, we at The eXile opted out of this paradigm long ago. Not because we've spent the last ten years wasted get it? Get the frat-boy double-entendre we're using? "Wasted"? Like, either we "wasted" those years, or we were "wasted," but not in the frat-boy "dude-I'm-so-wasted-after-emptying-that-pony-kegger" sense of wasted, but rather, in the "I've-blown-through-so-many-kilos-of-poor-quality-meth-and-toxic-smack" type of wasted. So much wastedness that it simply doesn't work anymore. We used up all of the neurochemistry that Darwin's trust fund set us up with: all the dopamine, PEA and endorphins are gone. The memory is so ravaged it looks like Berlin, 1945. Sexual desire long ago gave way to impotence, which also stopped being fun around 2003.
But this doesn't mean that The eXile's Xth Anniversary is an occasion to greet with a goblet of hemlock. Quite the opposite. In the paradigm that we inhabit, well outside of your strictly-defined lives, the tenth anniversary is just the beginning. Now comes the real action and the real pain. Yes, for us, and for you the eXile readership, our Xth anniversary is more like what a girl in Lower Guinea's tenth anniversary of her birth is like. It's a time to celebrate, with the most important and unforgettable ritual of her entire life. Yes, it's the day when they hack off her clitoris: Here is a description: "The girl is placed nude in a sitting position on a stool. Three or four village women tie the girl's hands behind her. Then, one woman holds the girl by placing her arms around the girl's waist. Two other women hold the girls thighs apart, thus opening the vagina. Other women help. The operator cuts the skin and flesh with a sharp knife or razor blade, first lacerating the skin beginning above the clitoris, and extending the cut down to the small lip of the labia minora. Then, the clitoris is summarily cut away. The gash bleeds profusely. The child screams and twists and struggles in pain. But, the cries are not considered at all by those who perform the mutilation. It's as if no pain existed. The cutters sometimes claim that the children do not suffer before, during or after the operation. "Next, the inside lips and flesh of the labia majora are scraped with a sharp tool. An antiseptic paste is spread over the scrapped lips. After this, the larger lips are forced together and held there by several thorns, followed by stitching the lips together with thread-sometimes with horsehair." Some people might read that and recoil in horror. We at The eXile read it and think, "Bring it on, baby!"
Pages:
Previous 1 234567 Next
Print Share article
|
