I am bad. Actually bad. There are days when nothing gives me more pleasure than being bad. This is not a case of “I do what I do not want to do.” I want to do evil: it makes me feel good. What am I talking about? “There are days”? I can’t think of a day when I haven’t wanted to do something vicious or mean or ugly, because it would have made me feel good.

When I wake up in the morning, and hear my alarm going off, I scrunch into the covers in a perfect knot of worthlessness, laziness. Let responsibility go to Hell. Not the metaphorical variety either, no, a place of weeping and gnashing of someone else’s teeth. That idiot who set the alarm last night has settled like sediment and this person has taken his place. Maybe I’m tired, but that doesn’t make a difference; in the end, I hate the alarm clock because I am bad. I would like someone else to be cold and do work and cook and everything else for me. Would I tie up a kitten in a sack and shoot it in the head? Given the choice, right then? I don’t know. That ignorance is not a mark toward my goodness.

“You’re just tired,” you say. “You can’t judge yourself based on drowsy emotions.” The trouble is, this badness consists over time, after I wake up; for instance, if I am at home, someone may knock on the door to alert me to breakfast. They’re family – I know just how to snarl so that they’ll feel guilty for having woken the exhausted laborer on vacation. As I waddle downstairs, wrapped stiffly in a bathrobe, I keep my voice low, enough to croak if I have to talk at a stretch, and I sit down slowly, and chew slowly, and oh can I be clever at playing the suffering sloucher. Whether or not I inspire guilt isn’t at issue. Somewhere I am hanging to the hope of doing so like a dog biting into a stick.

Why stop there? The whole day is ahead! – a whole orchard of ripe fruit to be cut off and rotted and squashed. My car fails and I curse it. The sound is vile and I like it vile, it’s the only way it adequately corresponds to the injustice done me by this piece of machinery. I wish it were a person so I could see it hurt. And someone cuts me off at the stoplight. I don’t wish anything physically violent, usually, just a long, slow process of trial and agony, until that last humiliating moment, where they crumple in front of my door and admit what a mean action it was, and how ineffable my forgiveness of it is. I am disgusting.

A woman passes me in the street. My imagination fires like a hot-water heater, ready to dowse my mind for as long as I can go without shriveling. Hell, why am I particularizing it? I don’t need the woman to pass me! I could cook eggs and fantasize. I remember, I think, when I first hit puberty, having visions of abstract romance on park benches in front of lakes at twilight; that’s the prelude these days, unless I’m lucky enough to jam the valve on the heater in a moment of uncharacteristic temperance. “Lucky” is right – I fantasize about not fantasizing, in which case I am the abused hero enduring temptations that would have thrown St. Anthony into orgiastic violence, and in the end am rewarded by, you guessed it, something lovely. Something – someones don’t exist in bad imagination. And my imagination can be very bad indeed – if that sounds sly and lecherous, it is misrepresenting my fantasies by being, I think, far too clean.

Sex is an easy one, you say. You’re a male, it’s natural. If only it were only that! I go to church to assuage my guilt over this violence, this lust and greediness – and then church becomes a stage for my religious thespian to command with short, pious murmurs, slow steps to the communion table, brightness and cheeriness at coffee downstairs. It doesn’t matter whether this is Anglican or Pentecostal. Here I shroud myself in reverence; there I might intoxicate myself with grace. No matter – somewhere, I will find a way to make these people feel sorry that they are not me. I don’t just envy, I want to inspire it in others: this is a sewer of badness.

I have no love for people. What would that get me? Christ can prattle all he wants about “loving with expectation of reward” but I had that one figured out before middle school. As long as you redefine the “reward” to match the goals of orthodoxy, you can love all you want and tally up what you expect to receive at the pearly gates. Will I stay up with someone to cheer them through an hour of shadow, or to sober them in a period of folly? Certainly, Jesus, and I’ll take my reward in crowns. Also, while I’m soldiering through here, having to listen to this person’s drivel, I’d like something here, too. Now.

This badness isn’t an exhibitionist. Oh no. I am carefully bad. I wouldn’t blatantly think something like I’ve just written. Only once I am in bed, or eating a good meal elsewhere, do I realize that this has been throbbing at the base of my motivations, fueling and supporting them at once. Freud was too kind in attributing man’s best achievements to a sublimation of merely physical urges. My best moments have been sublimations of my most criminal bestiality. My flowers have fed on a crust of manure.

I don’t have friends, many days. Assaulted by the fear that I am not recognized for my charm, my compassion, my intellect, my sufferings (note: not the fear that I am unlovable or cruel), I “get in touch” with my friends, which is a euphemism for seizing them by the nape of the neck and smashing their head before me, breaking their skull at the nose, pounding blood and flesh and cartilage into a thick sap over and over until they have assured me, by their getting “back in touch,” that I am worth the time of other human beings. After this has been accomplished, I kick them away, as I might kick myself away from a table – they’ve satisfied me, and after all, as they’ve demonstrated, I’m too much good to submit myself to engage their stupid lives.

This blog has been a prime place for me to exercise my badness. I check regularly, to make sure people are reading me. If they are not – if I slip to the bottom of a schedule without comment or criticism – I, of course, don’t imagine that this means the article needed work. It means, of course, that these people are warmongers who only read blogs to argue, or philistines who don’t know a good thing when they see it, or some shallow friends to read my excellence and not soothe me with praise for it. Someone reveals to me that someone else (rumor!) refuses to write for the blog, because we are not orthodox enough. My badness raids the armory of Heaven, and in short order my imagination swells with a combination of famous third acts, Dead Poets’ Society plus A Few Good Men plus Cinderella Man, and the offending party lies bloodied, crawls away ashamed, cursing himself for his so obvious insipidity. I could not care less about the ideals of the blog: it’s my superiority that’s in question.

What a heartfelt confessional, you think. How free and open he is with his faults! This is the plan. If I costume the bad, I am rewarded for a virtue I do not have; if I strip it bare and reveal it, I am rewarded for appearing to discredit what vice I do have. Whatever I do, if I play it right, I will come out on top. I can rape or crush at my convenience, if I feel like it, and if I have to “admit” it all to get there, that’s fine – the badness knows nice as an instrument, not an attitude. And I am revealing the plan! This is all part of the same. Every floor caves way to my badness. John Calvin treated the subject far too modestly – I do not have hellishness inside of me, but Hell itself, the raving maw, the pit unending.

So you see, this is why I can say, “God, be merciful to me, the sinner!” That’s the sinner, for the record. Have you ever smiled at this thing calling itself a human being, or considered it your friend? You have been friends with Jesus, and whatever He is making out of the badness. The original is dead, I suppose, like old flesh; but in my secret desires, my subtle masquerades, and my confessions, it lives on, a horror of necromancy, to be burned away by fire outside power and time. It is such a statement that makes me understand, that this, this is how bad I was and am: only the death of God and the death of the world can set me back to goodness.

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