Secure in my Hellsculpt.

I’m waiting behind nukeproof doors.

I’m still projecting a human form.

Post-desire, yet still in this world.

I’m speaking as much Infernal Truth as I can, but here I am deep into this dollar discount store security job.

I got a gun on each hip.

I emerge when I intuit inventory loss.

I’ll shoot dirty thieves through the heads.

Loss of life is necessary to loss prevention.

I’m strong enough to accept this.

Because I’m more than my guns and my uniform.

I am the soul of authority.

If you could gaze upon my truest self, you’d be terrified, yet also won over by that same soul of authority.

It’s hard for outsiders to understand.

But once you’ve earned some insight . . .

But once you know Hell . . .

I burn in Hell along with the thieves I kill, not a total burn, because I’m a good guy, but also because I’m a good guy I gotta burn just a little bit for research purposes, and y’know what?

Sometimes it’s just for fun. 

Good people steal.

Good people burn in Hell.

I’m a good person, so I relate to good people.

Especially the ones I have to kill.

People make a big deal outta sports.

But they should actually be making a big deal outta studying to make good grades.

But these are still good people.

The ones who focus on sports over grades.

I like sports, too.

But I prioritize my job over sports.

But I also understand how people get distracted. 

I get distracted, too.

But I resist distraction.

It’s not about perfection.

My right to kill doesn’t come from being perfect.

It’s based on more of a holistic assessment conducted by my supervisory algorithm.

But ultimately, I serve Hell.

The supervisory algorithm is my starter boss if you like.

But Hell is the master I aspire to serve.

And you know what?

Hell has started to notice me.

People get uncomfortable when I say this part out loud, and I understand why.

Many of my religious friends accuse me of Satanism, of being un-American, silly hysterical accusations, but I get why they say those things.

Heaven has been oversold in the larger culture.

Life is demanding.

To think that one might die and go to Hell and be worked out for an eternity or two causes stress in people.

Hence the appeal of the Eternal Country Buffet in the Sky.

I sympathize with these dreams.

I also despise them.

But I sympathize.

People are so stressed out, and they fight that stress nonstop.

They’ve been conned into believing in the Heavenly Relaxation Regime, and it’s not totally their fault. 

All they’ve known is the joy of endless consumption.

That’s all America offers most people.

And so few can barely live that dream in an optimal way.

But relaxation is a trap.

Relaxation is an illusion.

Only reality should be respected.

Stress is the only reality.

And reality is the only road to Hell.

Work.

Endless work.

Work unto death.

Death unto rebirth by the Hellsculpt.

This is what we all need.

Our desires have drifted.

We’ve been poisoned with Heavenly distractions.

We’ve been conned by the Protestant Work Ethic Hustle.

I try to convince people.

I have a podcast.

1,000 episodes and counting.

I do videos.

1,000 uploads and counting.

Those particular algorithms have yet to favor me.

And in the end I’m not much for the frontal attack.

I prefer to live as an example.

Hell’s model student.

People observe my Infernal Work Ethic, and they can’t help but be won over.

You know, I’m not winning ‘em over in bulk.

My core audience is lamentably niche.

Movement on the margins.

Oh, and how the official-ass gatekeepers have tried to co-opt my endeavors.

When I blew away those twelve thieves last year, the sheriff arranged for this frankly embarrassing “Civilian Valor” ceremony to promote me as a “model of armed individual sovereignty” or some such.

Basically, this fat man in an ill-fitting uniform adorned with a toy badge used me to promote his specious right wing politics. 

It wasn’t a good feeling.

But I took the opportunity to speak forcefully for seventy-five minutes.

I described my self-creation.

I turned ‘round and ‘round so the flabby men would see every diamond-cut inch of me clad in my bespoke form-fitting kevlar polyweave uniform.

I described in scintillatingly dense detail my concept of Hell as the ultimate body sculpting ordeal. 

How those devil claws and fangs mauled the flab right off my frame.

How the Beelzebub swarm gnawed my weakness down to the bone.

How the Lava Master Lucifer remade me in a molten nutbust of living rock.

How far beyond the meats and juices my Hellsculpt carried me.

I made that audience of flabby cops, and crooked councilmen, and the one geriatric reporter from the all-but-extinct local paper sweat clean through their awful clothes.

I even unveiled my Most Secret Self, cyclopean, implacable, diamond-hard-it’s essentially my Final Final Boss Transformation-to a chorus of joyously defeatist farts and sharts and blubbering cries of ecstasy as they realized their own Most Secret Selves could never survive the Hellsculpt. 

Some spontaneously combusted.

Some dropped dead of heart attacks.

Some fed on their own bullets.

Some bewailed their impotence and the prisons of their sham marriages and the emptiness of their right wing politics and the distance of their wayward children who protested their very livelihoods in the streets.

A fair few regressed into babyness, squealfully rolling in their own waste, teething on their badges, ever hopeful for a Mommy to sweep in and do changies on diapees.

The sheriff and the ancient local reporter are the only ones resisting my Hellpitch.

The local reporter’s seen’n’heard it all, this too shall pass, not an ounce of belief in the man.

The sheriff has hated True Strength his whole life, and is therefore totally secure in his right wing grift.

Beware the power of a True Believer.

But the rest, those still alive, are making a properly abject spectacle of themselves. 

It. Is. Glorious.

But, alas, unsustainable. 

The dead ones will go with me to burn for a spell, before bouncing back into the Grind of the Living Dead.

The living ones’ll towel off, and then trudge back to their various Statuses Quo.

The sheriff chews my asshole out over “all this freaky fuckin’ Satan shit” and I make appropriate apologetic mouthings.

I read an indifferently composed local interest item posted on the shitty blog that passes for a newspaper.

I later find out that old reporter guy hasn’t drawn a paycheck in years, just going through the motions of a once vital set of truth telling tasks, maybe some spark’ll get struck, catch the eye of a conglomerated media machine, local goes national, that goddamanable Heaven Dream again and again, as persistent as multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis in a Russian prison bloc, oh, I can never knock it loose.

Later still, I hear that old reporter guy is in hospice for terminal lung cancer.

I visit, offer him the Hellsculpt, and he tells me to go fuck myself.

I ask him if he prefers Heaven.

He tells me he prefers truth.

I watch his body die, totally free of the Soul Delusion.

In that moment, I ground my teeth, enraged that a true atheist had resisted both Heaven’s Hustle and my own Hellpitch.

And soon enough

I am back behind those nukeproof doors

Wondering how much longer I can live Inferno’s Dream

When will I hit the limit

Go slinking back to some piddly diaperific toy badge Status Quo

When my guns bark

And the dirty thieves’ heads get put out

I sometimes think it’s my only effective means of speaking

Then I remember my mass produced nature

I recoil at the thought of yet another long walk home through mountainous drifts of plastic junk

Same junk people buy, revere, steal, get their heads shot off for

They could snatch it as they go, zero fuss, fill their pockets with it while out for a stroll, even less muss 

But they must step into my ludicrous domain to imbue their hoarder’s pathology with tension and meaning via risk of getting shot

Just shoplift

Crackle in the thrill of the ephemeral criminal moment

Then toss that shit on the sidewalk, the grass, the asphalt parking surface

Sodas barely drunk, candy bars scarcely gnawed, maybe pocket some batteries or an off-brand cell phone charger

But that’s about it

That action is more Infernal than all of my pretensions combined when you think about it

Maybe I’ll fall asleep behind these nukeproof doors

Just switch them to lockdown at all hours

Refuse signals

Accept dreams

Find my own Hell

Go absolutely off-model

Deep within

Away from this piddly pissing rodent shoot!