I.
Whenever Sebastian drove around the streets of his old hometown, he realized how bad living on the south side of any city could effect one's driving. He slid past stop signs with little hesitation, rolled up on curbs often to avoid having to stop on a narrow street and let another vehicle pass. All concept of a police presence, that wasn't far too worried about rapes and murders to pay mind to speeding, vanished. Almost always, he tried to take the alleys as much as possible, to avoid seeing the ugly, downtrodden faces of the people he was so used to avoiding.
But here, in these streets, the people, while still bloated by fast food diets and bespeckled with graying clothing and hair, seemed less guilty. Or maybe just unaffected. Their ways seemed backwards, but comfortable for them. And who was he to take that away yet, while the concept could still retain a hint of its virginity?
For example, there was a corner he has passed nearly every damn time he was behind the wheel. It sat on the square, parallel to the city’s off-white, Roman-bastardization excuse for a courthouse. Nothing special gleamed about the corner aside from the sole wooden bench that sat outside of whatever business resided there (Sebastian never looked, he was in the midst of his teenage years when he would pass it, what purpose did it serve him to find out?). To continue the normality of the bench, from sunrise to sunset, a man sat and watched the cars pass with hollow eyes and mouth slightly agape. He was the most common of the Baby Boomer fossils that littered middle America: reeking of grease and social retardation, his fat hanging over his red sweat pants and poking it’s nasty head out from under the hood of his green, stained tee-shirt (displaying enough slogans to wonder if he was possibly sponsored by whatever beer company it may have been. Paid to sit on a bench and die, for the whole world to see). His existence was nothing spectacular, meaningful or even noticeable. In fact, it would seem to Sebastian that his existence wasn’t so much its own “thing” but rather a branch off of the bench’s existence. Could his hometown be host to what he so affectionately heard Jeremy refer to (cynicism awash in his words) as a “being-of-itself?”
Jeremy had been so drunk for several days. When the alcohol had run out (the whiskey bottles set upside down on their necks, for the remainder to drip out like a puddle on the table, all the beer cans rounded up and those that hadn’t been fully vanquished quickly chugged, cigarette butts be damned), Jeremy had begun eating all of the diphenhydramine in the house. Whether it was to assist in sleeping away sobriety or simply for the excuse of getting fucked up, Sebastian didn’t know. Instead, he adoringly sat on the loveseat near Jeremy’s couch (where he slept, when he did) and listened to the ramblings the strung out mysterion had to offer.
“Sebastian… did we talk about… or maybe I should rephrase that, because I know we did not. Remember the day Adeline brought me the wine, the white wine… Sauvignon Blanc, if I remember correctly… and we sat in the kitchen and talked about her philosophy teacher, the crazy bastard that took her copy of Sartre and called it rubbish? Were you here that day or off with Kathryn somewhere?"
Sebastian confirmed that he was indeed there. In fact, he had been sitting at the table, entrenched in the very conversation that Jeremy referred to.
“Ah, right. My bad, it’s, you know, the drugs,” he pointed at his temple for some reason and smiled. The bags under his eyes reacted minutely to any change in his oral expression. He continued: “Well, seeing as you were there, you remember when I was explaining the whole ‘being-in-itself’ and ‘being-for-itself’ and blah blah blah, I assume?”
“Man, you were explaining it to me. I was the one that had asked. Pass out, for fuck sake, you’re not making much sense anymore,” Sebastian teased. He didn’t really want Jeremy to fall into a fit of torpidity, he would much rather he continue with his lesson. It had become almost routine for Jeremy to do all of the drugs available and then get Sebastian a little more in touch with what he called “the absurd.”
“Again, you’re correct. Again, my apologies. I apparently can’t handle this as well as I thought. But I won’t sleep, I need to finish this first… the concept I forgot: a ‘being-of-itself.’” Sebastian’s eyes lit up and he craned his neck out to drink up the oncoming onslaught of grassroots knowledge. Expectantly, he waited. Jeremy held up one finger, as if to make a proclamation, opened his mouth, his eyes half shut. Sebastian held his breath, waiting for the words. Rather than dialogue, Jeremy just exhaled and dropped his hand to his knee. He looked side to side quickly. “Where are my cigarettes?”
“The floor. The ashtray. Right there.” Sebastian bent forward and picked them up, using his other hand to dig out his yellow lighter. He passed both, the cigarettes first and the lighter second, to Jeremy. In no rush, Jeremy opened the pack, deliberated inside his head for a moment and chose one of the cigarettes. Putting it between his chapped lips, he raised one hand up weakly and lit the end of it. A harsh inhale and then a plume of smoke exited the young but weathered frame and danced towards the dirty, tarred ceiling.
“Anyways… so you have the ‘for-itself’… that’s us, cognizant beings, the only—“
“Pour soi. Yes, I remember,” Sebastian interjected. He loved when Jeremy would use French. Some weird interrelation to a girl he had once drunkenly romped around with; she would frequently speak French during sex. Sebastian never confirmed what it was she was truly saying, but he adored the way the syllables blended and ran together, similar to what their bodies were doing at those very moments, sweating cheap liquor and bonged beer.
“Oh my, you remember far more than I expected… the French. You never fail to amaze me. So we can skip the en soi, I am to assume?” Sebastian merely nodded this time. His talking had slowed the process. It was now a race for the concept to be revealed before Jeremy’s eyes shut completely and he was lost to the world, more so than he currently may have already been.
“Well, I left a third out. Adeline’s a philosophy major… or trying to be… and I wasn’t in much mind to argue an unverified, homegrown concept like this, so I simply neglected to say anything. But why not now, right? Well this third one… this third 'state of being,' if you will, is called ‘being-of-itself.’ Yes, the title is all my creation, thank you,” Jeremy chuckled at his own self-indulgence and then dragged on his cigarette. It had gone out in the intensity of conversation. “Fucking fire safe. Wasn’t half the beauty of cigarettes the fact that you could fall asleep at any moment and possibly kill everyone in the house, along with yourself from a simple spark on an astray piece of Bible paper or a curtain so haphazardly draped over the arm of the couch?”
Sebastian laughed subtly, hoping to return to the original topic. He didn’t bother pointing out that this house had no curtains, merely blankets taped to the windows to avert the prying eyes of passing pigs or the rare, not-completely-apathetic passerby. Jeremy relit the cigarette and crossed his eyes as he inhaled, watching the tip light up, all Rudolph-orange, but cracked with the black lines of ash. “Where was I? Oh yeah, ‘being-of-itself.’ Goddamn, I’m tired,” he rubbed his eyes as he said this last part. Sebastian didn’t moved, didn’t give him the impression that he could back out of the conversation now.
“But the being-of-itself… basically a conscious being, but while the rest of us 'for ourselves,' in the sense that we are active in our existence, these types are inactive… not so much living as they are surviving. A victim of speciesism would classify animals under this category, maybe.” Sebastian didn’t bother to ask what speciesism was. He would find out later. Jeremy rubbed his reddened eyes, “I’m so very tired. This sleep will be good.” He must have noticed the look of despair painted on Sebastian’s face because he smiled rather slyly and continued.
“I, on the other hand, assign this to most of the people out there in this civilization. Alive, but not really living. Sure, they’ve got all the fast food they can eat and all of the cheap beer they can drink… some of them even have the technological trinkets to keep their eyes averted from looking ahead (at the future in front of them, or the car with the bright brake lights). They aren't for themselves in any sense of the word, they only are of themselves. They know what is at the surface of their minds and bother with little else, but keeping their bodies ticking so they can continue to act out their part. Bad faith, really. Now don’t confuse what I’m telling you for anything that our wise ol’ Sartre ever mentioned. It’s simply my own little subcategory. Categorization," he chuckled. " It’s only human nature, right?” At this point, he pulled his comforter out and leaned back on his resin-stained pillow. “I don’t think I can talk much anymore. I’m fucking tired, friend.”
Sebastian winced but nodded and exited the room. The concept was never again discussed, neither of them ever thought about it at the right time, Sebastian would claim. But since that day, the name had been bouncing around in his skull, clawing for recognition or use. Being-of-itself. When he thought about it, the man on the bench might have been exactly what Jeremy meant. He had used it to classify a majority of the population, but Sebastian was one to work in extremes and needed something more individual to connect with the idea. “Wouldn’t that defeat the very purpose of the term?” He could almost hear Jeremy mutter. Maybe it would, but it was the only thing his mind had at the moment, so he clung to it.
However, on this particular visit to his hometown, Sebastian found the bench empty. Whether the old man had gone on to new benches or died a mundane death was anyone’s guess. Sebastian imagined the old man on the bench, dead for a few hours, but eyes still open and taking in the traffic. His uncle had been a coroner and swore that he never found a body with eyes closed. “Hollywood is anatomically incorrect,” he would jest. So the old man would sit in the hot, Midwestern sun, the contents of his recently vacated bowels baking under his mass. A passing businesswoman or man would have smelled the shit and surely noticed the old man was no longer mentally a part of this world (if he ever was… a different argument for a different car ride). The coroner would have come, the paramedics would have come. His fat corpse would have been lifted by several men onto the stretcher. Maybe their hands would be too greased by his sweat to hold him and he would be dropped, humiliated in death, onto the sidewalk by his bench and the whole effort would have to start anew, this time trying to lift his fatass from a lying position. Dead weight was a struggle, Sebastian had heard. And then that was that. His body was loaded into the back of an ambulance or wherever the bodies of the deceased were stowed away to be transported. Cars would continue to pass, people would continue to go to work and now that this man was gone, possibly even sit on that bench on a nice day. The bench had been restored to it’s normal state. But without the old man, Sebastian felt it was rather abnormal now. He had a hard time comprehending the empty space he saw. A name was never known, nor had any facets of his personality, but Sebastian had come to view him as infinite, an unchanging tree in the middle of a field constantly being reaped and sown.
As he passed the bench, his car loaded with groceries his aunt had stocked him with to take back to his house in the city, he saw the current scene: a middle-aged man in a golf polo leaned against the backrest, smoking a cigarette, sunglasses hiding his stare. “Ugly Americans,” was all Sebastian bothered to whisper to himself. He found himself thinking of Jeremy for a moment and then of Kathryn. His phone had shown no movement or signs of contact. Day three since he had last heard from her.
“Don’t contact her. You look too needy already. Quit being pathetic and wait it out. Smoke this,” his friend had told him, passing him a blunt he had rolled specifically for the conversation about Kathryn. The topic stuck for the first few hits and then was on to monetary matters, the sorts of things that barely ever passed through Sebastian’s listless mind.
He set his phone in between his legs and slowed down for a red light. Glancing at the car in the left turn lane for no particular reason, Sebastian fingered his pack of cigarettes and slid one of the remaining smokes out and put it to his lips. The light turned green. Sparking the cigarette with his yellow lighter, he accelerated and merged to his right, his eyes fixed on the interstate entrance ramp ahead. His hometown disappeared in his smudged rearview mirror and he sighed a bit of relief.
“Goddamn streets are too wide for their own good.”
Whenever Sebastian drove around the streets of his old hometown, he realized how bad living on the south side of any city could effect one's driving. He slid past stop signs with little hesitation, rolled up on curbs often to avoid having to stop on a narrow street and let another vehicle pass. All concept of a police presence, that wasn't far too worried about rapes and murders to pay mind to speeding, vanished. Almost always, he tried to take the alleys as much as possible, to avoid seeing the ugly, downtrodden faces of the people he was so used to avoiding.
But here, in these streets, the people, while still bloated by fast food diets and bespeckled with graying clothing and hair, seemed less guilty. Or maybe just unaffected. Their ways seemed backwards, but comfortable for them. And who was he to take that away yet, while the concept could still retain a hint of its virginity?
For example, there was a corner he has passed nearly every damn time he was behind the wheel. It sat on the square, parallel to the city’s off-white, Roman-bastardization excuse for a courthouse. Nothing special gleamed about the corner aside from the sole wooden bench that sat outside of whatever business resided there (Sebastian never looked, he was in the midst of his teenage years when he would pass it, what purpose did it serve him to find out?). To continue the normality of the bench, from sunrise to sunset, a man sat and watched the cars pass with hollow eyes and mouth slightly agape. He was the most common of the Baby Boomer fossils that littered middle America: reeking of grease and social retardation, his fat hanging over his red sweat pants and poking it’s nasty head out from under the hood of his green, stained tee-shirt (displaying enough slogans to wonder if he was possibly sponsored by whatever beer company it may have been. Paid to sit on a bench and die, for the whole world to see). His existence was nothing spectacular, meaningful or even noticeable. In fact, it would seem to Sebastian that his existence wasn’t so much its own “thing” but rather a branch off of the bench’s existence. Could his hometown be host to what he so affectionately heard Jeremy refer to (cynicism awash in his words) as a “being-of-itself?”
Jeremy had been so drunk for several days. When the alcohol had run out (the whiskey bottles set upside down on their necks, for the remainder to drip out like a puddle on the table, all the beer cans rounded up and those that hadn’t been fully vanquished quickly chugged, cigarette butts be damned), Jeremy had begun eating all of the diphenhydramine in the house. Whether it was to assist in sleeping away sobriety or simply for the excuse of getting fucked up, Sebastian didn’t know. Instead, he adoringly sat on the loveseat near Jeremy’s couch (where he slept, when he did) and listened to the ramblings the strung out mysterion had to offer.
“Sebastian… did we talk about… or maybe I should rephrase that, because I know we did not. Remember the day Adeline brought me the wine, the white wine… Sauvignon Blanc, if I remember correctly… and we sat in the kitchen and talked about her philosophy teacher, the crazy bastard that took her copy of Sartre and called it rubbish? Were you here that day or off with Kathryn somewhere?"
Sebastian confirmed that he was indeed there. In fact, he had been sitting at the table, entrenched in the very conversation that Jeremy referred to.
“Ah, right. My bad, it’s, you know, the drugs,” he pointed at his temple for some reason and smiled. The bags under his eyes reacted minutely to any change in his oral expression. He continued: “Well, seeing as you were there, you remember when I was explaining the whole ‘being-in-itself’ and ‘being-for-itself’ and blah blah blah, I assume?”
“Man, you were explaining it to me. I was the one that had asked. Pass out, for fuck sake, you’re not making much sense anymore,” Sebastian teased. He didn’t really want Jeremy to fall into a fit of torpidity, he would much rather he continue with his lesson. It had become almost routine for Jeremy to do all of the drugs available and then get Sebastian a little more in touch with what he called “the absurd.”
“Again, you’re correct. Again, my apologies. I apparently can’t handle this as well as I thought. But I won’t sleep, I need to finish this first… the concept I forgot: a ‘being-of-itself.’” Sebastian’s eyes lit up and he craned his neck out to drink up the oncoming onslaught of grassroots knowledge. Expectantly, he waited. Jeremy held up one finger, as if to make a proclamation, opened his mouth, his eyes half shut. Sebastian held his breath, waiting for the words. Rather than dialogue, Jeremy just exhaled and dropped his hand to his knee. He looked side to side quickly. “Where are my cigarettes?”
“The floor. The ashtray. Right there.” Sebastian bent forward and picked them up, using his other hand to dig out his yellow lighter. He passed both, the cigarettes first and the lighter second, to Jeremy. In no rush, Jeremy opened the pack, deliberated inside his head for a moment and chose one of the cigarettes. Putting it between his chapped lips, he raised one hand up weakly and lit the end of it. A harsh inhale and then a plume of smoke exited the young but weathered frame and danced towards the dirty, tarred ceiling.
“Anyways… so you have the ‘for-itself’… that’s us, cognizant beings, the only—“
“Pour soi. Yes, I remember,” Sebastian interjected. He loved when Jeremy would use French. Some weird interrelation to a girl he had once drunkenly romped around with; she would frequently speak French during sex. Sebastian never confirmed what it was she was truly saying, but he adored the way the syllables blended and ran together, similar to what their bodies were doing at those very moments, sweating cheap liquor and bonged beer.
“Oh my, you remember far more than I expected… the French. You never fail to amaze me. So we can skip the en soi, I am to assume?” Sebastian merely nodded this time. His talking had slowed the process. It was now a race for the concept to be revealed before Jeremy’s eyes shut completely and he was lost to the world, more so than he currently may have already been.
“Well, I left a third out. Adeline’s a philosophy major… or trying to be… and I wasn’t in much mind to argue an unverified, homegrown concept like this, so I simply neglected to say anything. But why not now, right? Well this third one… this third 'state of being,' if you will, is called ‘being-of-itself.’ Yes, the title is all my creation, thank you,” Jeremy chuckled at his own self-indulgence and then dragged on his cigarette. It had gone out in the intensity of conversation. “Fucking fire safe. Wasn’t half the beauty of cigarettes the fact that you could fall asleep at any moment and possibly kill everyone in the house, along with yourself from a simple spark on an astray piece of Bible paper or a curtain so haphazardly draped over the arm of the couch?”
Sebastian laughed subtly, hoping to return to the original topic. He didn’t bother pointing out that this house had no curtains, merely blankets taped to the windows to avert the prying eyes of passing pigs or the rare, not-completely-apathetic passerby. Jeremy relit the cigarette and crossed his eyes as he inhaled, watching the tip light up, all Rudolph-orange, but cracked with the black lines of ash. “Where was I? Oh yeah, ‘being-of-itself.’ Goddamn, I’m tired,” he rubbed his eyes as he said this last part. Sebastian didn’t moved, didn’t give him the impression that he could back out of the conversation now.
“But the being-of-itself… basically a conscious being, but while the rest of us 'for ourselves,' in the sense that we are active in our existence, these types are inactive… not so much living as they are surviving. A victim of speciesism would classify animals under this category, maybe.” Sebastian didn’t bother to ask what speciesism was. He would find out later. Jeremy rubbed his reddened eyes, “I’m so very tired. This sleep will be good.” He must have noticed the look of despair painted on Sebastian’s face because he smiled rather slyly and continued.
“I, on the other hand, assign this to most of the people out there in this civilization. Alive, but not really living. Sure, they’ve got all the fast food they can eat and all of the cheap beer they can drink… some of them even have the technological trinkets to keep their eyes averted from looking ahead (at the future in front of them, or the car with the bright brake lights). They aren't for themselves in any sense of the word, they only are of themselves. They know what is at the surface of their minds and bother with little else, but keeping their bodies ticking so they can continue to act out their part. Bad faith, really. Now don’t confuse what I’m telling you for anything that our wise ol’ Sartre ever mentioned. It’s simply my own little subcategory. Categorization," he chuckled. " It’s only human nature, right?” At this point, he pulled his comforter out and leaned back on his resin-stained pillow. “I don’t think I can talk much anymore. I’m fucking tired, friend.”
Sebastian winced but nodded and exited the room. The concept was never again discussed, neither of them ever thought about it at the right time, Sebastian would claim. But since that day, the name had been bouncing around in his skull, clawing for recognition or use. Being-of-itself. When he thought about it, the man on the bench might have been exactly what Jeremy meant. He had used it to classify a majority of the population, but Sebastian was one to work in extremes and needed something more individual to connect with the idea. “Wouldn’t that defeat the very purpose of the term?” He could almost hear Jeremy mutter. Maybe it would, but it was the only thing his mind had at the moment, so he clung to it.
However, on this particular visit to his hometown, Sebastian found the bench empty. Whether the old man had gone on to new benches or died a mundane death was anyone’s guess. Sebastian imagined the old man on the bench, dead for a few hours, but eyes still open and taking in the traffic. His uncle had been a coroner and swore that he never found a body with eyes closed. “Hollywood is anatomically incorrect,” he would jest. So the old man would sit in the hot, Midwestern sun, the contents of his recently vacated bowels baking under his mass. A passing businesswoman or man would have smelled the shit and surely noticed the old man was no longer mentally a part of this world (if he ever was… a different argument for a different car ride). The coroner would have come, the paramedics would have come. His fat corpse would have been lifted by several men onto the stretcher. Maybe their hands would be too greased by his sweat to hold him and he would be dropped, humiliated in death, onto the sidewalk by his bench and the whole effort would have to start anew, this time trying to lift his fatass from a lying position. Dead weight was a struggle, Sebastian had heard. And then that was that. His body was loaded into the back of an ambulance or wherever the bodies of the deceased were stowed away to be transported. Cars would continue to pass, people would continue to go to work and now that this man was gone, possibly even sit on that bench on a nice day. The bench had been restored to it’s normal state. But without the old man, Sebastian felt it was rather abnormal now. He had a hard time comprehending the empty space he saw. A name was never known, nor had any facets of his personality, but Sebastian had come to view him as infinite, an unchanging tree in the middle of a field constantly being reaped and sown.
As he passed the bench, his car loaded with groceries his aunt had stocked him with to take back to his house in the city, he saw the current scene: a middle-aged man in a golf polo leaned against the backrest, smoking a cigarette, sunglasses hiding his stare. “Ugly Americans,” was all Sebastian bothered to whisper to himself. He found himself thinking of Jeremy for a moment and then of Kathryn. His phone had shown no movement or signs of contact. Day three since he had last heard from her.
“Don’t contact her. You look too needy already. Quit being pathetic and wait it out. Smoke this,” his friend had told him, passing him a blunt he had rolled specifically for the conversation about Kathryn. The topic stuck for the first few hits and then was on to monetary matters, the sorts of things that barely ever passed through Sebastian’s listless mind.
He set his phone in between his legs and slowed down for a red light. Glancing at the car in the left turn lane for no particular reason, Sebastian fingered his pack of cigarettes and slid one of the remaining smokes out and put it to his lips. The light turned green. Sparking the cigarette with his yellow lighter, he accelerated and merged to his right, his eyes fixed on the interstate entrance ramp ahead. His hometown disappeared in his smudged rearview mirror and he sighed a bit of relief.
“Goddamn streets are too wide for their own good.”
