My Name is Raymond Barry

by Happas

Posted to Stories on 2002-04-07 16:18:00




My name is Raymond Barry. I’m an ugly man with a stupid name and I’m about to do something, really, really crazy. Something that will probably involve pain or death, something that’s gonna be big, something you may even here about on your ever-precious TVs something that will probably make you shake your heads in dismay or wonder and think ’ why in gods name would anyone do such a thing’. Well, this is just a little note of explanation as to why I’m going to do whatever it is that I’m about to do. I guess, kind of a justification, not that I need a justification, not that anyone is going to really care unless it involves their own diabolical selves. Yes, that’s right, diabolical; you’re all completely diabolical. Everyone is and I hate, them, you, all. But the worse part is, so am I, and I just can’t live with it.
I haven’t always had feelings quite this intense, well, my feelings have always been emotionally intense but they just haven’t really manifested themselves like this before. I guess your wondering how I came to feel this way, it’ll probably surprise you that its nothing really huge, just a lot of little things in a stupid little world devastating my little, little mind and even littler soul if there truly exists something so supercilious as a soul.
I think I’m sounding angrier than I really am here. You wouldn’t guess it to look at me, that I have these thoughts; I’m calm, shy even, silently depressed always. When I said I was ugly I meant it, I mean I’m not really hideous or anything but something about my features is just wrong. I look kinda like one of those bizarre ancient Egyptian hydrographical drawings; my face is long, elongated, my eyes strangely curved, my lips; protruding. I have long sinister looking fingers and toes. My course skin is littered with moles. This ugliness has been a constant burden through my life, but ugly people make ugly friends and learn to cope. Christ I still can’t stand it when I see a supposedly attractive, not that I think their really are any attractive people at all, I mean, humans aren’t attractive, anyway someone who, who thinks they are attractive and who walks around with an air of superiority because of their supposed attractiveness and who even acts in a condescending manner to people who aren’t attractive. But then, I also hate the really ugly and usually fat people who moan about how unfair it is that they are such hideous creatures.
Goddamn everyone is so stupid. Now you may be reading this and thinking god this guy is just a severely on himself pretentious arsehole, well that’s not true, I know I’m just as bad as all of you. I just have a kind of innate vision into the actual disgusting nature of humanity, fuck, I’m gifted…I’m special…. Sorry, I’ll stop crapping on and talking so angrily, really I don’t mean it, I just get worked up and kind of carried away. I’m just basically full of hate, love and an ever-increasing well of despair.
I’m a clerk that’s my job, a stinking court clerk. I have a law degree, I just don’t practice law, I’m a fucking clerk can you believe it? I did practise law for a while, about two years of my miserable life was spent running around in a state of constant stress as a lawyer – when I was first on work-experience as a lawyer the fat aging yuppie that I was stuck with told me the most important thing was not to take it personal. He was right, but I just thought he was a fat aging yuppie whose principal interests were money, cheap hookers and justifying his own sad, sad pathetic ways to himself by utilising his mediocre intellect and making a stack of cash by representing complete arseholes in a slimy underhanded manner. Of course all that was, hell probably still is true, but he was right about not taking it personal.
If you take it personal I guarantee you’ll be burnt out within two years, a wreck, ready to join your local commies and bring ruin to this dastardly society. The thing is, I had a policy, or rather it was just in my nature, to take everything personal. And so I burnt out, I was sick of it all. I wanted to get as far away from lawyers as possible; trouble was; there was nothing else I bloody well could do. So I became a clerk, it’s certainly a lot less stressful. I was a pretty good lawyer, my decision to become a clerk shocked and bemused a hell of a lot of people, but I just shrugged off their questions with a smirk and a few pathetic lines about how I’m going to be more content. Content! Ha! What an absolute bullshit dream that all you chumps strive for but never quite make, which is good for you cause I can tell you now it’s over-rated, or rather it doesn’t even exist, but hey, I guess its that striving that keeps you from becoming me.
I couldn’t just live happily as a clerk, the massive gulf in my life that was left from where I used to be stressing out about the scaly hands of the law was filled by alcohol, lots and lots of alcohol. Ever since college I’d had a bit of a party-animal streak in me but I never really let it get out of hand and interfere with my looming doomed future as a lawyer. But with that future obliterated I was free to ruin myself. Its escapism and all, but if it was just escaping this horrible reality that I wanted then I’d just rent a lot of videos and read a lot of books, which incidentally, I do…but no, drinking is really fun and exciting. Whenever I drink I don’t stop until I’m unconscious. People have been more insistent lately with their pleas for me to slow down, but I really, really don’t care at all. Life is nothing and drinking myself into a blind stupor is a beautiful abstractive thing to do. It’s amazing the things that happen and the places I end up on these binges. I wouldn’t call myself an alcoholic, just a prolific binge drinker, I never drink during the week or in small instilments at all and I don’t have a desire to either, I just drink recklessly come weekend.
Of course, during the week I smoke a lot of opium. Christ, life is so boring and pointless; I don’t have any moral constraints, what the hell else is worth doing? Nothing. I smoke a lot of opium that I extract from poppies that grow in my backyard. I’m probably addicted to it but I much prefer the stupefied elation of alcohol than the subdued stupefaction I get from opium.
Anyway, by now you probably think I’m pretty crazy, completely misguided and insane even, the type of person you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of, less I, with my complete lack of morals, direction or care, decide to something heinous and cruel to you. The truth is though; I’m not like that at all. I say a lot of things; I make myself sound mean and uncaring but the truth is I can’t help but care. I care far too much about everything and I really just can’t help it. For two years labouring as a lawyer I saw honest people get screwed and rich barstards profit time and time again – it began to kill me. I really wish I didn’t have this hatred for humanity, I see in it, the same sort of thing that fuelled someone like Thomas Aquinas- that ever-ready Christian disdain for the passions. Or even someone like Hitler, clearly a man disgusted with a lot of things. Sincerely though, I just don’t know why I can’t just live normally, peaceably. I just get really irritated. Even though I explicitly refrain from judging people, that is, I don’t believe in the existence of good or evil, only filthy rotten humanness.
Other things have happened in my life that may have caused me to reach this decision, this decision to succumb to madness that has been ostensibly guided by my own sane, sane reason. I’ve never had much of a violent nature, so I’m not really a threat to civilization or anything. Violence bores and disgusts me, and so for that matter does sex.
This wasn’t always the case; I used to be your average horny teenager. Until that is, I actually made it with a girl. I was repulsed by her, I don’t know why, I mean its not like I hated the idea of desire. I have no problems with people fucking their brains out all day long, in fact I encourage them to do it if it gives them happiness, but I don’t know, I just woke up the next morning repulsed and sickened. I had no hatred for the girl, just a strong want to never ever see her again. Maybe I was just sickened by the idea of being dictated by my own energies…hmmm, but anyway. Before that incident I jacked off fairly regularly, at least, you know, once every day or two, but after this incident I never jacked off again, I still haven’t, I haven’t ejaculated since I was a teenager. Like Blake said, you restrain desire and it becomes but a shadow of desire, I have no sexual urges whatsoever, the weird thing with me though is that I didn’t have to make a conscious effort to restrain this desire, it just somehow, naturally disgusted me. I could of made a great Catholic priest if I wasn’t aware of what a colossal load of shit the Christian denominations are.
Perhaps that’s my problem, I’m just to acutely aware of what bullshit everything is and I can’t get over it. Nothing interests me and I know nothing of love. The people I should love, family, friends, whatever, I can’t stand to be around them for to long because they just start annoying the shit out of me, they really do, and I know that’s a horrible thing to say but its just the truth. I still think that I love them, I mean; I feel a powerful non-hate emotion directed towards them. Yes: I do love them, intensely, but I hate them as well.
Shit, I think I realise it now. I’m just some kind of emotional phenom, a freak of nature, moulded by whatever external and internal forces into a towering mass of conflicting feelings. I don’t know what it was that made me this way, some external force, if I didn’t know better I would swear this is some God-given shit I have here. Everything in me seems to point to the existence of a godly force of some kind. There are things in me that I know have not been moulded by environment, hell, nothing that major has ever happened to me. But hey, we all have a subconscious; all humans have things inside of them that are unexplainable. Just because we can’t explain it doesn’t mean there is a god does it?
The issue of religion, the issue of uncertainty is one that has prevented me from ever really achieving any believable happiness. It’s ripped me violently in two, I used to when I was a child be devoutly Christian, unnaturally devout for a child almost. But then, as I grew older I began to read, you know, Sartre, Descartes, Nietzsche, Russel and they sort of skewed my belief but didn’t break it. Then gradually as I listened to the sermons and observed the nature of the practisers of this religion that I was a part of, I became disgusted with it. It got to the point where I could no longer attend a mass of any kind it angered me so. I could see the fear.
Yet even now I refuse to deny the existence of a god, or gods or spirits or whatever, I also refuse to pay any god or spirit or whatever homage. In uni I actually, kind of created a polytheist religion of my own, doing what the Greeks did and giving all the powerful dictates their own Gods, to which I actually paid homage with a series of comforting rituals stolen from all the major religions. But seriously, there has always been an omniscient inkling inside of me that all religion is a powerful illusion and all we really have is our selves, our mad, mad selves. I do believe that all humans are inherently mad, Otto Rank the little known German psychologist believed that this was the answer that Freud denied himself and I’m inclined to agree with him. We’re all mad and it’s all stupid….
I’ve always been depressed, all my life I’ve been depressed, but I’ve always felt, what with the state of the world and the nonsense of the world this depression was more than justified. In fact I’ve always thought people who aren’t depressed to be both cruel and insane, or rather, blind and scared. And me, and me to be just be a very brave guy who has had the courage to see the truth and do with the truth what the truth tells him, that is, absolutely nothing.
The happiest period of my life was probably at uni, not because of the people, I lived off campus and had no friends at all through the entire five years that I was there. Yet I was happy, that religion I told you I invented, well, that lasted all of about two months. I came up with another theory, a theory of artistic existence, you know, Keats, beauty is truth yadda yadda, life is short, and art is long, glorious poetic experience. This actually kind of worked, it gave me escape from that all pervading notion of vanitum vanis – that nothing is worth doing. The trouble was I wasn’t that good at art, I couldn’t paint for shit and I could barely write a poem. I didn’t really realize this till the day after I graduated when the spell was shattered. I came home to my tiny apartment, saw all my work and it revolted me. I immediately burnt it all, my paintings, my poems, everything. I was caught up in hate as I was doing this and as soon as I was finished I had the most awful profound feeling of regret that I have ever experienced. I was so depressed that for days I could barley bring myself to walk, the effort of putting one foot in front of the other was simply to great.
I Still think it abominable that I burned my work and I still shed a tear every time I happen to glance upon the Grecian urn that holds their ashes, its located on a shelf above my toilet, for some reason that seems the perfect place for it. These things, my art, they are very hard for me to think about without feeling a nauseous pain. Maybe I wasn’t that bad of an artist after all, even if I was, I definitely was a true one.
But still, that to me is the inherent flaw of the artistic existence. So many people are seemingly incapable of art. For some reason this strikes me as important, despite my supposed hate for a lot of people. Yep; it’s all worthless.
By now I gather that you have got some kind of appreciation for my decision to do something. I still don’t know what though. Actually to tell you the truth, writing this has somehow abated my crazy desires, my desires which, in the end are probably only for recognition, for the attention that the ashes of my art can’t give me. The attention my dazzling courtroom harangues can no longer give me. But…writing this has renewed my strength and it matters not if it remains unread, it matters not if it is read and hated. I’m pretty sure that I will quit my job as a court clerk. I have strength now; I have a strong conviction to nothingness. I think I will travel, Darlberg said that when man realises his life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels. Well I’ve been splashing in a puddle of worthlessness for about four years but I’ve lacked the courage to do anything about it. That’s it, I’ve lacked courage and my despair has ravaged me like a disease. No…. no, come to think of it my despair has saved me…it was that dirty never-dying phosphorescent of bleak conventional hope that ravaged me with its impurity. Horrible hope!
Now though: now I’m ready, writing this has prepared me for whatever doomed path awaits. Yes! I’m really getting genuinely excited now, I’m about to become free, actually free, or at least as free as a creature can possibly be, and it’s going to be tremendous. I can see death lurking too, I can actually see it, I mean when I shut me eyes…. but I’m not scared, I’m neither scared nor looking forward to it. Oh, fantastic equilibrium!
Yes! Yes indeed! I have been infused with courage, the loss of my art doesn’t matter, art doesn’t matter, oh, how could I have dallied so long and grieved so much over such pathetic desires for immortality. The truth is, I can’t create art, because I”AM ART! I’m running toward the excitement of whatever life and death twisted fate has in store for me with fire in my soul… I have a strange feeling now… I think…I think it is happiness!




By Josh O’Rourke