Day Two: The Virtue of Self-inflicted Humiliation - July 8

It begins.

My body is pale and thin and angular. It’s way past midnight as I study myself in the full-length mirror. I sift my thoughts down to a single word: VAMPIRE.

It was going to be a night of pushing comfort zones. We were to meet at The Club of Elite Glorification.

I took the subway, talking to no one. My thoughts were singular: I’ve discovered a virtue in a trash pile.

My feet clopped on the broken sidewalk. People passed me, wandering aimlessly. They always move with such ferocious indifference, like a parade of windup toys.

I realize: I’m just a windup toy, too.

The lamplight of The Club of Elite Glorification glinted from blocks away, its orange glow making the crowd look ominous, satanic. Giggling knots of girls flitted past me. A thought sparked but didn’t catch: I am the cheap Zippo out of lighter fluid. My desire flicked in clumsy sparks but kindled no flame.

In that moment, I’m useless.

I sat on a bench.

A silent basketball court looked like a pool of oil. Weeds poked out of sidewalk cracks. Half-broken bottles littered the street like glass skeletons, like fossils of a long lost good time.

Where are they?

I turned and saw The Club of Elite Glorification had become a medieval castle. Gates and velvet ropes fortified the entrance. Battalions of black shirted bouncers circled the parameter. It’s a scale-balance of conquest: glory and honor on one arm, humiliation and chodeliness on the other.

They arrive. We high-five. We smile and we walk. We are denied entrance to The Club of Elite Glorification. We drive somewhere else. No girls. We sit. I sip water. Then I get back on the subway, come home, and peel my shirt off. I examine myself in the full-length mirror.

VAMPIRE.

I dissect the metaphor. Vampires are not human. They look human. They once were humans. But they’re not human; they prey on humans. They’re anti-human.

I was human, once. Back when I was little and my identity didn’t rest on a foundation of bullshit. (Bullshit is anti-human.)

But I was bit. We were all bit. Vampires only survive by biting humans, by turning them into vampires. In less abstract terms, someone hurt me. Someone hurt you. Someone transformed ME into (me).

But vampires cannot survive the light; vampires cannot live under the glow of twilight.

I crawl into bed: Dreams fall onto my thoughts like raindrops. I can feel words like humiliation and identity. I am a man. This statement is simple and obvious. But somewhere between waking and dreaming, I feel its meaning. It feels the same as identity. Manliness has identity traits. Those traits are virtuous. Virtue is the cornerstone of everything: books, movies, advertising, life. We gaze upward at narratives to let us see life as it should be. Great heroes embody manly virtues or manly virtues embody great heroes. The semantics don’t matter. Only virtues matter. Stoicism is a virtue – perhaps the manliest of virtues. Odysseus was stoic. Rocky was stoic. Those beefy Greek dudes from 300 were stoic. They endured pain. But they didn’t endure embarrassment. Humiliation is not stoic. It’s pathetic. It’s something we laugh at. A narrative journey of humiliation is comedy, is satire. We have no words that virtuously describe embarrassing yourself. I try to think of a hero that embarks on a virtuous journey of embarrassment. I can only think of the 40-Year-Old Virgin. Then I fall asleep. I dream of castrated vampires.