Bastard Freedom: Chapter 1

"When two writers get together...", Joseph thought. Finish that sentence,  you motherfucker, his brain, bored with the ride on the tram, lazily said. He couldn't even be bothered to write this thought on his notebook, which he always carries with him for times such as this, but the thought wasn't robust enough to be put on paper. It goes, "When two writers get together, a crime on art is committed." 

God, it sounds so trite and so deserving of his Czech-Irish heritage: it's a bastard of a sentence. It's got all the right measure of pretentiousness, impotence, cowardice, and barren beauty all in one, like America. It was actually a test for a woman he was wanting to bed, who he met only a few days ago. He and Barry were interviewing all sorts of people for the purpose of what can pass as the desire for posterity between them, and this woman was among them. She was a metaphysics scholar and taught at the local university, although she came from the East. She was doing a stint of PhD courses as well, and was offered a part-time position to teach Derridean metaphysics. Joseph, abhorring metaphysics, naturally wanted to interview her. 

Okay, and maybe fuck her. Well, definitely fuck her, especially when she said, "Two writers together would be the most alienated relationship in the world: each a plethora of words thrown to the audience of the other; the other a phantasm of an ideal character; and each alone with their own tragedies, cannibalizing themselves too much to notice that there is in fact an other." Shit, he was getting hard, just remembering all the nonsense coming out of her mouth. He wanted to be home, instead.

However, he was on his way to karaoke. Barry was waiting; whereas he was late. Barry wouldn't mind, though, as Joseph was sure there were plenty of things to be entertained by, with, or under, at the bar: the Swedish chicks, the arcade games, the steadily-getting expensive beer, (for fuck's sake!) and Peter. 

Oh, Peter. Joseph's mind gave a little jolt of.. what is it? Endearment? Fear? Of the man. You see, the neurodivergent interests him, and therefore scares him. Having been in war made him witness the madness of the Western generals and therefore of the world, collective in their delusions of power and markets and religion and science. The world has gone mad since the time of St. Augustine, he decided. We are reaping the fruits of his death, this madness.

The neurodivergent, however, were mad in a special sense to him. It doesn't matter what madness the neurodivergence took: be it wanting to lick the walls of the house or count the number of slats in the fence, or having the attention span of a gnat but the parallel processing of a server farm. Their madness, not like the modern world's madness, is beautiful, and beatific: it truly does not care about social convention, propriety, or even underwear. The mad are always individual, marching to the sound of Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima.

"No wonder they shoot their own countrymen," Joseph thought, hurrying out of the tram, shocked that he put the Polish composer within the realm of the land of school shootings. Sloppy, he thought. He was getting intellectually sloppy. Marie wouldn't like that at all, thinking about the metaphysics scholar. But wait, did he care? There are rituals to this sort of thing, he knew, like all men knew. First you bed them, then you ask if they had their sandwich, and then and only then would you decide whether or not you care enough to even have intellectual rigor.