The Purpose of an Author in Society

By Nicholas Vergara

Eden is very gray in a way that stays the mind into such a fervor it stumbles into abysmal thoughts; no, no coherence, just what one might opine is emotion or some other internal manifestation of the great farce known as human nature. It slithers and coils and does unsightly things.

It wasn’t always so gray, but then again, graying is such an ungodly process that when Eve took a bite out of destiny, Eden’s fate was sealed in a bittersweet kiss. Eve sodomized Adam, and the deed was done; Eden festered in nakedness, stark nakedness, its trees and water droplets shivering. Unrelenting, God expelled life out of Eden, and the flaming cherubim lit the whole forest on fire when the First Couple was a safe distance away. The charred landscape is now gray. Rather ugly.

I bore of Eden. I walked over the beast’s burnt remains, and kicked a rock—it was satisfying. There’s nothing there anymore, and it caused something that everyone sees but nobody knows. But now I’m being cryptic.

I bore of the cryptic.

Next to Eden is a gas station owned by Dan, and a little farther down is a plastic ghost town, with a little saloon that once played a semi-pivotal role in a spaghetti western nobody’s heard of. The drinks there are terrible; I once bought a lighter from the aforementioned gas station and spent a good two hours flicking it on and off in front of a crowd of drunken onlookers. I was Prometheus, until functionalism became historicized.

Now I wander, wander past the plastic ghost town down to Ecstasy, in the process of being disturbed by scientists raping the natural world—if you can even call it that. When one thinks about it, the concept of wilderness is even more artificial than the plastic ghost town. Another farce.

Society seems to operate on a patchwork of farces, afraid to expose its neck and let the dew distill on the jugular in a way high-schoolers would perceive as oddly sexual. Human nature is a farce. So too is wilderness. Now, a semi-logical train of thought would dictate that, naturally, I must draw this point back to Eden, and harangue to wit’s end on the falsity of Paradise. I could, but Eden once existed, even in one’s own mind. It’s difficult to disprove things when eyes have seen them nonconsensual. I’m sure this bothers you, but you’re you, and I’m sure you have a whole list of things that bother you: traffic; lack of independency; me addressing you so casually yet so directly that it grates irate. One could argue that’s the purpose of an author in society as a whole. Or not.

We just void through Eden, that scorched old place.

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