How to Do Good Works

If sins, like marriages, cannot be annulled but only atoned for, put that autostereogrammatic blockchain baloney behind you and get down to the filthy honest work of serving somebody.

One: Grow hunched like an old char-woman from diarrhea and vomitus scrubbing. Rub the diarrheal’s shoulders, comforting them maternally as you can, e.g. “There you go. Get it all out. You’ll feel better, ” even if their Cheboyganstrain of the Ebola Manistique variant is of the undying variety, meaning they’ll never feel better, meaning their suffering, like most suffering, is without purpose or cessation.

Two: If Mother Theresa found it in her lepers, seek divinity in even the most purposeless BPD-Ebola morbidities. Often fail. Often see the sufferers as entitled jerks with low pain thresholds and poor vomitus etiquette. Work past and through these feelings until you have achieved radical acceptance and equanimity, there in The Serpent River Penitentiary no less.

Three: If Bubonic and Pneumonic plague enter the mix, serve on the front lines of those battles too. Suppurate a bubo or two. Chop off a black thumb or toe here and there.

Four: If 14th century superstitions return, i.e. ‘None of the toilet cleaners have the Black Death yet, perchance I mightn’t inhale from the shitter? ’ then walk a fine line. Humour the stark-raving rationalist. Humour the faith-based latrine community.

Five: If a latrine-inhaler glances up at you from his foul observances, i.e. ‘Don’t judge. This is the last thing I want to be doing, ’ offer him an acceptant shrug, i.e. ‘You do you, Julio.’

Six: If a skeptic scoffs, “You believe these conspiracy nuts huff shit all day scared of a little boo-boo, ” offer a whimsical headshake augmented by a half smile, i.e. ‘People are crazy and times are strange, ’93 but to each his own therapeutic, kinsman.”

Seven: If BPD-afflicted Warden Jöns Fermat notices your good works, become his favourite person. Appreciate accolades, e.g. “Rest of you bums could try caring for your fellow man as exemplified by excellent David here. Scrubbing up blood and puke. Making up cool nicknames for his buddies like ‘Cannabilizin’ Terry Stripes. ’ Sure would make the C.O. ’s lives easier, whose lives are no motherfuckin’ picnic given they didn’t commit crimes and all either have Ebola or BPD and still they’re here twelve hours daily, half-prisoners themselves aren’t they, not on any kind of picnic, nobody giving them cool nicknames. ” 93 (Dylan, Things Have Changed, 2000)

Eight: If the Sudbury Examiner profile “A Light in a Dark Place” agitates for your early parole, consider refusing, knowing the only way up and out of Majthenyi’s manifested world is to dig down into the diarrheal darkness, fundamentally mired in good works.

Nine: Eventually accept parole in hopes of reconciling with the first and last person to imprison you, Catherine. Hope she’s incapable of contempt for you, even if you have Ebola again, no few buboes of your own necessitating nightly suppuration, a few necrotic fingertips to clip off during the morning toilette, flesh so dead it can be removed with a standard-issue nail clipper, all of which in conjunction with BPD have made you moodier than ever.

Ten: If a Toyota Tundra replaces the driveway’s matrimonial Corvette, knock and learn from the stereotypical Tundra man that she is gone, but has left you a note, which contains only a quotation from The Red Book: Which fire has not been put out and which embers are still ablaze? […] What is this crazy desire craving satisfaction? Whose mad cries are these? Who among the dead suffers thus? Come here and drink blood, so that you can speak. Why do you reject the blood? Would you like milk? Or the red juice of the vine? Perhaps you would rather have love? Love for the dead? Being in love with the dead? Are you perhaps demanding the seeds of life for the faded thousand-year-old body of the underworld? An unchaste incestuous lust for the dead? Something that makes the blood run cold. Are you demanding a lusty commingling with corpses? I spoke of “acceptance” but you demand

“to seize, embrace, copulate?” Are you demanding the desecration of the dead? then try not to weep at the Tundra man’s sandals, buboed as you are, merely Borderline Personality Disordered as he is. Crawl pitifully towards the curb. Leave a bloody trail sniffed after by the Tundra family’s Chihuahua dog. If the Chihuahua knows not what the Depths demand, and wants to give you a funny kiss, and then jumps on your head and hits you with his wiry little tail, speak a prayer of thanks to St. Hilarious for what natural good remains.