Castaneiceps: An Interview, or: Paulie Walnuts was Right!

I find myself attempting to stymie my emetic muscles for the fifth time this week. This, along with the constant incontinence and sudden increase of large clumps of white mucus in my bowel movements, is likely as little cause for alarm as the overwhelming jealousy I feel at odd times and towards people I’ve never met before. Here, at last, in the absence of a medical professional’s opinion, is some introspection.

Thank you for taking the time to answer a few questions today.

Thank you.

How am I doing today?

There is a hole that needs to be filled. There was some backfill close by but it’s gone now. There is still a hole and it really needs to be filled. Otherwise there will be a hole there, and who knows how long it’ll take to fill.

What is my life like?

My life is like a dream. My life opens and closes its eyes and finds a blurry patch wobbling dimly just off center. I rub at my glasses with my shirt just in case I let the lenses get a little too dirty again. One lens pops out, no sound, just like that. My life two years ago would have seen me sweating and cursing trying to fit the lens back in the frame. The lens is always popping out of the frame. I don’t even hit myself. The air conditioning starts roaring.

Describe a typical day for me.

Sleep lasts anywhere from four to six hours. Much of the time that should be spent sleeping is sucked into YouTube Shorts. Some people make videos of recipes or crafts or other various hobbies and interests. The majority of the videos I watch are movie clips. Thirty seconds to a minute of a movie, bit by bit, autocaptioned, cut down to size even within the confines of the short itself. Two days out of the week it’s Shawshank Redemption. Today it’s the Punisher TV show. Right now the Punisher is screaming at a girl and shooting his big gun next to her head to scare her. I scroll down. Now Whip Whitaker from the movie Flight is crashing his plane because he’s drunk. I scroll down. John Krasinski from The Office is narrating the lives of some monkeys in a snowy forest. I enjoy the monkeys. If the short reaches its end it replays, always seeming to get stuck somewhere in the middle. I scroll down.

What do I like to do for fun?

The nail of my right index finger rubs against the skin of my right thumb. The topmost sublayer of epidermis peels right off. Beneath is ruby tenderness. A sting sings to me. I don’t have to look down to know a tiny strip of dying skin is flagging, standing tall like a sail, cutting through the ocean of this smallest of wounds. It’s enough. I take in my teeth and unzip myself just a little. My thumb is bleeding, oozing, pulsing. I suck my thumb and tongue where the blood is.

Where do I see myself in ten years?

Nearly a decade of hormone replacement therapy has created new erogenous zones on my body. Before, when I was in high school and into my first two years of college, I could just tug on my dick a little and not have to worry about anything. Now touch is out of the question. Touch is a myth the infinitesimal paleolithic societies inhabiting my body tell each other to get riled up around the fire, under the swarming constellations, between the unceasing chorus of hungry howls in the woods all around them. Touch is like lightning. I can imagine touch: a light caress down my flank, assessed like meat; a gentle palm on my chest, nowhere near my nipples, the sensitivity of which has been dialed down, way down, likely because what’s-his-name used to twist them until they bled before cross country meets; nails, not even that long, scratching my scalp like an old housewife comforting the older family dog, two bitches understanding one another under a popcorn ceiling. Here’s the good stuff: I imagine a bite where my neck and shoulder meet. A warm jitter is born in my chest. Not a butterfly, not even close. Butterflies lift with their wings and carry you elsewhere. This skitters. It burrows and scents in the leaf litter. It trails its legs across damp detritus. A typical specimen of Scolopendra heros only has twenty pairs of legs–the misnomer centipede, I suppose, rolls off the tongue better than quadragintapede–but reaches close to a foot in length. Segmented black body, yellow legs, flailing scissor tail, and an angry red head, shaped like a chestnut. It curls up around my heart like so many squirming young. Its venom is far from deadly but, like all venom, it really, really hurts.

Do I want kids?

My earliest memories are tinged with fear. Something is fundamentally wrong with the structure of the family. Something is broken inside of fathers. Everyone writes because of how their father treated them, or makes movies about their father abusing them, or does drugs because their father was lousy or absent in some way. There’s nothing special about fathers except that they have a preternatural ability to fuse themselves to your intestinal lining like a tiny male anglerfish with its mate, a talent so inhuman it demands a special, scientific, medical attention. Fathers must be quarantined and studied. They become appendicular, an appendage of you that spasms and clenches, ripping a hot needle right through your asshole to the top of your skull. In a way it feels good. Being impaled must feel amazing; everything is filled. It must be what an orgy is like. There is a hole that needs to be filled.

What is my greatest accomplishment?

Besides daydreaming about touching I often fantasize about righteous, cosmic violence, which is basically just touching but narcissistic. Instead of getting off with someone else you could just get yourself off and get in big trouble for it. Violence is scary.

Do I have any goals this year?

I want to watch five new movies every month. That means movies that are new to me, that I’ve never seen before, not necessarily movies that have just come out. YouTube Shorts don’t count.

What’s the best movie I’ve seen this year?

I really liked Challengers.

Do I have any regrets?

It’s easy to get lost in the mire of what needs to happen, what should already have taken place, what will never transpire, what was lost, what is being forgotten, right now, in this very instant, forget it. There are worlds beyond this. I’m in the pool and my friend, my dear friend, picks me up in the pool, she princess carries me, and she’s helped by the water in doing this, but she spins me around smiling and I blush and I laugh. I’m walking down the street with my brother and I run a movie scene by him, just for shits and giggles, I pretend to read him his stage directions, and he screams, screams like maybe Nic Cage would in some serious action movie where his daughter is in danger, and I laugh so hard I almost give myself an asthma attack. I live in a house and my partner touches me, he smiles, he holds me, he guides me, we dance, or we pretend to dance, our feet touch on the couch, our feet touch in bed, his forehead touches mine, every day he looks different but the same. I think a different artist renders him moment to moment, all for me, and not only do I get to watch, I get to ask, “Hey, hot stuff,” and see him smile. My cat wakes me up with her sonorous fish breath. Someone sends me a song and I actually listen to it. A blue jay screams. The sun and the wind fuck my face for a few seconds in the afternoon. Someone almost gets in a car accident. I can see them in the driver’s seat, face blank, just blank, like it didn’t even happen, like I imagined it. “Buddy,” I say to myself, and I think I sound like my mom a little bit. “It happened!”

Is there anything I need?

I believe a giant monster will emerge from the ocean on a bright morning, between 10:15 and 11:05, walking out of the Gulf of Mexico almost silently, the sky and the sea and the clouds and the light just a painting behind it. I believe the asteroid is circling back around for another go. I believe it’s coming. When it gets here everyone in the whole world will turn to me and in one beautiful collective scream apologize because I’ve known all along and they wish they had just believed me. Too late now, suckers!

Is there anything I can do for you?

One time at a baseball game my dad got upset with me because I was tired and trying to lay down across multiple seats. He yanked me away from the rest of the family and took me up to the concourse. “Let’s find another family for you,” he said. “Let’s find a family that wants you. Since you don’t want to be part of our family, I’m going to find someone else to take you.”

Do I have any predictions for the rest of the year?

Today, while taking my bike out of the garage, I stepped on a cockroach. She was about three inches long. Her milky guts burst out of her posterior. A tiny red egg like a purse slipped out along with the viscera. I knelt down and apologized over and over. With a stick I gingerly moved her to a big pile of wet black leaves. Chuckypigs clambered blindly over the mass. She stopped moving after about a minute. The next time I went into the garage I saw no cockroaches. Everything was silent. I imagined a council of them approaching me, taking no comfort in my consolations. To be a bug meant to be squashed eventually. If I were truly repentant, however, they would require a sacrifice that meant as much to me as this expectant mother did to my local roach colony. They demanded I give them my cat. I imagined neither relenting nor resisting; just crying.

Thank you for your time.

I've run out of people to talk to about this.