My Asinine Life: The Metaphysics of Snot

Gabriel Boyer

You know it might seem kind of trite considering how everything’s being exploded all over the place by the authoritarians among us, but—I woke up one day without a brain. The other morning I woke up and thought, Gee. Where’d my brain go, only to then have realized that—gosh. Someone’s going to be so upset with me. I should be out parading in front of the fascists and screaming in their faces in a tight-fisted squadron—but I got no brain.

What I mean by this is—wow. I actually just said that. I can say anything and act like it’s actually true. Wow.

But there are fascists, and persons do need to scream back at them while twisting in and out of these aforementioned fascists’ innards with the playful twists of persons who also could be likened to things always forgetting their thingness and places got their doors shut to themselves as if perhaps there is no place living behind my eyes. These are the people of the world walking, and what are they walking to? Is up really a direction? Have you ever tried to angle yourself straight up?

While these days, I scream either through the muted colors of the internet, or I am screaming at the universe itself as I struggle through a bitter wind with bags of groceries hung like ornaments from either hand, and the tip of my middle finger’s still numb. Because there’s a score, and we got to keep track. How do the words keep getting out of our faces? This is what the fascists want to know. This is the activity they want to stop. Everything else exists in service of this one activity. To shut the whiners up, they say.

I can whine in many keys. Some of my whines are like low growls that tickle at the toes of our peace officers as they beat me about the head and breast. Or perhaps my whine might turn into a squeal as I am being projected over a precipice. I have many whines, and none of them come about as a result of a world moving along as it should. But there is that special kind of whining that comes from a person who very much needs to be totally and completely removed from all persons suffering everywhere because of how deeply he is wounded by the merest hint of unpleasantness. And I say we give this particular type of unfortunate some wings. This type of whiner truly does need to fly.

And I am all these whiners and whining all about how we all got to just start over in the hearts and souls of a new breed of animal with eyes in every orifice and a smile for every passing cop, but this isn’t the way of things. You can’t just manufacture species, unless of course you’re referring to manufacturing the woolly mammoth back into existence here. This is something that is supposedly very close to being done.

So, we sit around tasting our pastries and with the tears and snot catching onto the corners of our lips as we stare out at the street and think of days when these streets had a wholly other ideology attached to them.

We are made of various humours, the medieval clinicians were right in this. Our bad blood does indeed rise to the surface. And our phlegm contains a unique idealized form. It comes slipping out of us when we’re incensed. At the irritations of the wind. At the corner of the eyeball. Spat from the mouth in our rage. Dribbled out of our nether regions in some embarrassment of sentiment.

But really it is that we have all become just the kind of itchy slob who will wait manically for the eradication of time while chewing her way through a delicious sherbert steak, and slobbering up his fantastic egg salad shake, and like, Wow. I am actually doing this. I can do anything and act like it’s actually important. Wow. Like this.

But there are fascists out there, and have any of them ever actually been able to successfully eradicate time?

Another golden oldie being brought back for your listening pleasure.

So, instead it’s all sex on the beach, but it’s other people’s sex and other beaches and we’re all like, Aw, come on. I wanted that beach. I’ve gotten fat recently. Not like beached whale fat, but I have started enjoying food since I got married and the preparation and consumption of food.

They say phlegmatics are supposed to enjoy the comforts of life, and I am indeed very phlegmy, so—I’ll tell you though. If I could unravel the metaphysical mysteries of our suffering, I would do that for you. There is this physical messiness but it has an otherworldly component. That we are messy is the very fuel which fires our more complex systems of thought. It is as if we were trying to extract ourselves from our own sweat and to exit ourselves from the atmospheres of the mouth to instead be nothing more than sensations and the intentions that accompany them. Does this lead anywhere good? Of course not.

I don’t even know who I am anymore, and somehow you want this nothing other people think of as me to stand up? Tell the fascist to go take a bath in his own feces, Boyer. Go on. Do it. While I stare into the future with the helplessness of a legless person watching as the volcano erupts.

We are made of different fluids, and they sit in us. They get stopped up and they can settle, but there is a flow of hormones and the accompanying sense of helplessness. We are filtering the atmosphere through us, and we are manufacturers of dirt. We can smell on occasion as we spice our fluids with the first malfunctionings of an organism is forever stumbling towards its early grave one Big Mac at a time.

I need to grow some legs, but something’s begun to pierce its way through my skull, like a bullet moving at the speed of geological time, and I am blinking spasmodically as the molten rock sputters and glistens as it begins to breach the lip, and I am thinking only of the outer reaches of the universe where light and life may very well be synonymous and all that is occurring here is like the bad dreams of angels, and I am just one of these bad dreams, and this bad dream that is me is currently crashed out on the couch on a Sunday morning.

And so, as I sit around, eating the pastries of yesteryear and suffering from visions come on like a bleeding in the brain, and clear as day seeing things eradicated that didn’t have any place in the world of places to begin with—but were more a special thing that made people feel like they’re more special than the predator and prey of the evolutionary storybooks we were read as kids—and there was never a person named me in the first place as the eyes of the night continue to bore through my eyes until there’s nothing left of the original article of eyes, even as I am still at the same time staring out at people and all the while wishing that these people would just go and erupt out of themselves already.

We think of our phlegm as an unfortunate accident of our otherwise perfect minds, but a mind is just a house of cards and our house of cards just happens to be made out of water when cards can come in all shapes and sizes. The thinking part is just a trick of the light. The light is what’s real, and I am not.

These “bags of mostly water” stand for something. They believe in something, but their first belief has to be that they are in the first place. Once I lose faith that I am, then there is no hope left. And this is exactly what our technologies undermine, the primal faith that I am, and not just a series of impulses reacting spasmodically to whichever impulse I am given.

Point being. There is a metaphysics to snot. It’s a doctrine of radical spontaneity. Snot can think. Snot can possess free choice. Snot can be counted along to make responsible decisions when it comes to electing government officials.

Yes, we may all just be piles of snot, and yes, I would like to see my fellow Americans erupt out of themselves with an artless exactitude and exacting horticulture of guts unspooled and white lies gone dim. I would like to see them explode in all the ways that persons once believed it possible to explode—metaphorically, literally, spiritually, and gastronomically—to explode as the quaint physiognomists of the past claimed could happen until, one day, someone’s like, You can’t just explode like that. That’s not how exploding works, and everyone was like, Oh. Okay. Fine. We can’t explode.

But also. These piles of snot you’re surrounded by suffer. Their suffering is as real as your own. When you begin to notice your suffering, the grotesque phlegminess—of me or you or anyone—is as immaterial as the immaterial soul. There may be no soul and suffering may be an illusion but our experience of it is more than universal. It is the universe.

And as all of these things happen, there are also other things we are capable of that we haven’t even thought of asking ourselves. There are stories we can sing that we never thought to consider singing. There are sounds we can make that have not yet been placed in our mouths.

While also—there is nothing left to see here. The corpse has already been strangled. There is no love here. Look elsewhere for your love. You will not find it in this place.

But there is a sound come into my head. This is the sound of a person moving without known motives through the alternate spaces of our times. This is a person without a clear understanding of what’s to come and stepping from one piece of the crumbling atmosphere to the next in search of somewhere to land, but there’s nowhere left to land. In short, I am a nothing with nothing living nowhere. The same old story, told much too much before. The same old story, but it’s worth telling just once more.

We are all these nonpersons making our claims to other non-persons. Mister No. I am Mister Yes. How do you do? No? Yes. No. Like this.

This is a person faced with the destruction of something they thought was important but why was it ever in the first place? And what is this sound that is coming into my head just when I thought sounds had been outlawed? What can I do to stop this sound from coming into my head even when this is just the sound of breathing? It is the sound of an endless storm. It is the sound of people being brutalized. It is the sound of all that I knew and did not know coming together. It is the sound of an ending of things.

Brookline, MA, 2017