Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Myne Act of Contrition

Hi. Thanks for coming here.

Shhh, don't speak.

This is my confessional. I know it doesn't look like much--like some cardboard box that I threw a black veil over--but this is a holy place. Everything that happens here is between you, me and the backlit Nomi Malone picture on the chamber's ceiling. We praise you, Nomi.

I have something to confess, something horrible. Something that, if discovered, would render me untouchable, like a moldy piece talking tofurkey jerky. Something worse, in the world's eyes, than all the deadly sins combined, even the sin that dare not speak its name: Jessica Simpson. I have chosen to open myself to you because you are the only soul who is compassionate and merciful enough to look beyond my vile transgression and heal me with your pure, bootylicious love.

Hear me now with pity and patience, for now, to paraphrase Flaubert, it's on and crackalatin.


I...
like...
to.....

listen.....

to.......
....the Dawson's Creek song.


No, don't look at me! I don't want you to see me like this, so dirty and shameful.

But it's true, it's all true. I like the Dawson's Creek song. I don't know how it happened--one day I was mocking it with friends, singing "Doo doo dooooooo do dooo doooooo.....," then before I knew it the chorus would randomly recur to me during the day. Soonafter I got a copy of it and began occasionally istening to it, "ironically" (or so I told myself). Eventually it, like some satanic Soloflex commercial, wriggled its way inside of me, throbbing, pulsating, pumping me sardonically with lubricity. I started listening to the song all the time--I would wake up to it, play it all day at work, then receive it all night, until I collapsed, exhausted and drenched with sweat, from rocking back and forth to it for hours. I would repeat this the next day. I would sing it too--in elevators, in bathrooms, in the shower... I would tape myself singing it and experiment with singing harmony to it. I would have other people sing it. I would drag friends to Mexican restaurants so I could request it from the live mariachi band. I would crash weddings and impersonate the singer, just so I could assault the guests with the song. It got to the point that I was keeping a journal in which I expounded on the new meanings that I would discover daily within the song. All I could think of was the song; it had become my entire existence. I was to humans what Lohan's nose is to blow: a gaping hole, sucking everything into its warped universe.

It wasn't until 2 weeks ago that I saw what I had devolved into. It was 2am, and I had been rocking along to the song in my room and composing letters to the editors of several major newspapers, demanding that they stop suppressing this life-changing song and filling envelopes with Shower to Shower. Because editors tend to have foot odor. Well, I accidentally got a bunch of the powder on my face, when I miscaculated a dance move and plunged headfirst into a bowl of Spring Breeze. I went bathroomward to cleanse myself, and when I looked in the mirror, the sight before me was unrecognizable. And ghastly. There I was, in my Paula Cole wig and costume, my face coated with ghostly white powder and my body soaked with sweat and urine , smelling like bouquet of flowers on the floor of the 136 st. subway station. In that instant I saw at last what this song had done to me. I broke down and the floor, sobbing, wailing, wiping the stains of the toilet bowl and repeating, "I don't wanna do what his father, his father, his father, his father, HIS father did!"

I don't know how long I stayed like that before a holy light shone from deep within the toilet bowl, and a serenity washed over me like pus from a weeping sore. Then the spirit of Nomi Malone herself appeared to me, rising from the toilet bowl like a celestial, barely clothed pop tart. She blessed me, forgave my sin and told me to confess it to the most compassionate soul I know. I praised her and reached out to her, but she said only, "Bitch!" before doing a dance move with her arms and silnking with a swoosh down her porcelain altar into heaven.

For the next week I fell ill, into a joyous delirium, and the week after I built this confessional. And now I have brought you here, and revealed my disgrace spread-eagle. Now, in the spirit of Nomi, I will remove my garments and accept your forgiveness physically. Remember--you are doing Nomi's work; you mustn't hold back. Take pity on me, but please...
don't be gentle.

Beep!
Ed Shepp


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