Content Warning: violence, mental health

                             “Stand out of my sun.”

                                                     Diogenes’ answer to Alexander the Great

                                                     when told he would be granted any wish.

I want to insist from the outset on my right to say anything and not make sense.  I want to raise mediocrity to excellence, to become expert in irrelevancies, to bray like an ass.  I want to appear more inept, fragile, shy, stupid, friable, clumsy, awkward, tongue-tied, erratic, inconsistent.

I want to prevent this headlong hurl into success: Please, someone stop me before I get that degree in veterinary science, before I marry the girl of my dreams. 

Take that glimmer of beauty away from my eyes-- I want to be left alone with my heartache.  I want to put my head down on the table, I want to drag a kitchen chair from room to room. 

I do not want to be loved by family, do not want to be celebrated for my covered dish.  I insist on the right to cheat at cards, to weave like a drunk, to betray my country.  

I want bad breath.  I will own up to every hideous crime, aspire to be detained by the police. I do not want to be Mirandized, I do not want my constitutional rights.

I want to stop things from spinning around me, to move through life at a snail’s pace; or suffer an auto accident in a high-speed chase. 

I assuredly will not buckle my seat belt. I do not want aspirins, statins, steroids, abs of steel. I will perform my own surgery, thank you, with putty knife and fish line. 

I want to cease to understand my native tongue until I hear only murmurous voices, like sand flies on a deserted beach.

I wish to be remembered for my bad manners.  But mostly, I want to stop wanting: to reach for the stars is to sink into the quagmire. It is terrible to be human.  To be human is to shit and eat from the same patch, to be tied up in traffic, to fit into clothes off the rack. 

I do not want to be a human being,  I do not want to be associated with human beings, I do not want your telephone number, your vote, your charge number and expiration date, your condolences,  your heirlooms, your recipe for chocolate chip cookies,  your complementary tickets, your venereal disease-- I assuredly do not want to bear your children.

I want to forget, to hasten on Alzheimer’s:  Alzheimer’s will be the adventure of a lifetime, an abrupt departure to a place I’ve never been, a safari every time I enter the garden, an assault of the North Slope when I climb the stairs.   I want to read the Midrash in the wallpaper, my bride to be a thousand brides, each time, the first time.  I want to be as insubstantial as moon-shadow, rumor, sea foam; I want to defy physics, achieve escape velocity.  

I want to be known as a refusenik—give me my suspenders, my seven league boots: I will find heaven in a Crackerjack box, follow a wisp of smoke into eternity, disappear into the unknown.