The Spirit Of My Perverse

       All these years, after reading Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, The Imp of The Perverse as a junior in high school, I’ve incorrectly referred to it as The Spirit of The Perverse. But this makes perfect sense. Because as perverse as Poe may have been, for him perhaps the perverse was just an imp. For me, I can definitely say that it’s a spirit. A monstrous yet playful, spirit; at once frightening and benign; both scary and alluring. An immovable object and an irresistible force.
       In countless interactions and situations throughout my life, at some point, my internal dialogue will go something like this: “Right now, what is the the most absolutely horrific, inappropriate, traumatizing, unforgivable thing I could do that would completely fuck up this moment and instantly ostracize me from the entire human race?”. Sometimes, it’s just a passing thought, let go of as soon as it enters my mind. Other times, it sticks around, and I start playing with it, riffing on it. I fantasize about how it would actually look and feel, and how people might react. I jam on the unspeakable act like a musician jams on his instrument, letting the music, or in this case, the madness, guide him.
       At a wedding, for example, the church full of people gathered to witness the sacred union of two people, I will think about running up to the alter during the ceremony. Then, embracing the bride, her and I start fucking, right on the alter in front of a stunned audience. The real fun begins when I start asking myself a bunch of very relevant questions. Like, how long would it take before we were stopped? What kind of fallout would there be afterwards? Would they be able to continue the ceremony that day, or even ever again? Would the groom still want her after this rather public indiscretion? Would I go to jail? Would I become a tabloid celebrity? Assuming it was consensual, is fucking in church a crime? And if so, what’s the actual charge?
       How about this stroke of demented genius: taking an eight ball of cocaine, a bottle of Percocets, and a fifth of Jack Daniels into Kripalu (one of the country’s most prestigious centers for yoga, meditation, and higher learning), and spending a week there, floating around the halls in a haze of chemically induced euphoria. I wonder, would anyone catch on? Would the highly attuned and conscious beings there see through my charade? Or could I hide it well enough that nobody would notice? If I got bagged, what would be the consequences?
       Funerals are incredibly fertile ground for my perverse spirit. In fact, Spirit Of My Perverse: Rule One is: “the more intense or serious the occasion, the more powerful the spirit, and the more insane and horrific the scenarios imagined become”. Going over to a corpse and trying to get him to dance with me in front of the receiving line would be a winner. As would preparing a speech beforehand and, in the middle of the church services, running up to the podium, uninvited of course, and telling the mourners about the dead’s true hatred for his mother (who’s still alive and in the front row, mind you).
       More times than I could count, I’ve wanted to run up in the middle of a beautiful, heart warming, full-of-adoring-praise eulogy and yell “Bullshit!”, over and over again. Then, the stage mine, I would launch into a diatribe about all the fault’s of the deceased, maybe reminding people that “These character flaws that I’m ranting about make the dead more human, thus endearing him to our hearts even more. So I’m actually doing us all a valuable, albeit unconventional, service. My ramblings actually help us keep his spirit alive all the more. Certainly more than that sappy amalgamation of sentimental and highly embellished word drool coming out of the official eulogizer.”
       For now at least, these perverse thoughts remain in the confines of my mind, and here, for the first time, on the page. Owning and embracing My Spirit of The Perverse, in all its glorious perverseness, has subtly and perhaps paradoxically allowed for a greater capacity for self acceptance. In fact, it’s subtly shifted my relationship with my very own life experience. Maybe all of that will form the basis of a follow up post, entitled “The Spirit Of My Perverse, Part Two:Under The Hood. Welcome To My Hysterical Nightmare”.
       Imagine. All of this from wanting to jump the bride’s bones on the alter…….


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