Leo and Artie

LEO

You can't be afraid of anyone or anything. Why should you be? Where does it get you? Nowhere. You gotta tear through life like a cannonball. You can't let nobody stop you. Momentum. Force. These are the qualities that you need in the world today. You gotta gather some mass. It's the biggest planets that got the most gravity. Life should orbit around you. You should be the sun, the center of your goddamn life, this flaming fucking ball of fire that'll torch up anything that fucks with you. You gotta feel things, you gotta express those feelings, even if it means somebody else doesn’t like it. I’d rather be an asshole than meek. You can't be some little shard of meteor just twirling around.

Now, Wally is ten times better than any of the crap out there. I mean it, Wally’s terrific. He really is. I just hate to see him waste it. Life has always got to be ripening. It's got to expand and grow and unfold in new directions, and if it doesn't than you might as well blow your fucking brains out right now cause you're dead. Just climb into your grave and go to sleep. Good night.

Fear is worthless. It is a worthless fucking emotion. You see a girl, a group of girls, six feet tall in their spiky heels and their hair all poking up like fucking pineapples, go talk to them. The only thing you can do is go talk to them. If you don't, you're dead. You see a guy bigger than you, being an asshole, tell him he's an asshole. Sure, he might sock you in the mouth, but you told the truth, and that's the best goddamn thing you can do in life. Nobody ever tells the truth anymore. Our whole lives, all we do is massage our discomfort, smooth things out into convenience. Well I'm tired of it. I want rough edges, goddamnit! Show me something baby! Show me something real. There's a whole palette of emotions out there. I want them all! I wanna know what it's like to starve, I wanna feel despair, elation. You gotta throw some Hail Mary’s. Maybe not every play, but sometimes. If you avoid these emotions, these wide thrown emotions, if you clamp some lid on your low-simmering melancholy, this ennui that everybody seems to be feeling these days, well that's it now, isn't it? Not for me, goddamnit. I'm loud. I say what I mean. I feel things.

All this alienation, everybody's alienated. There's some kind of society happening that everybody seems to be alienated from. Where? Where is this society that no one seems to be a part of? That’s pushing us all over the edge of the cliff. I got news for you, Mack. You’re standing in it. You are it. We all are. Fuck it. Who cares? The worst thing is to be alienated from your own feelings, to stuff a sock into the mouth of that voice screaming inside you to go fuck that girl in the neon dress.

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ARTIE

It’s really quite odd how different dog piss smells than human piss. Just this morning I was sitting out on the deck with a cup of coffee and my little notebook and Rudy, one of our dogs, came up and splashed some piss on the deck about ten feet from me. Bosco, our other dog, not one to be outdone, came over shortly thereafter and squirted his stuff all over the same spot. Well, I’ll tell you, the stench got to be so rancid that I had to get up and go inside. I could not bear it. And yet, just the night before, since they’re redoing the bathroom and our water’s been turned off, I was pissing on the fence out back. I’d had a bowl of Golden Puffs earlier and I don’t know if you’ve ever had Golden Puffs, but one of their most charming qualities is that they make your pee smell exactly like them! So here I was pissing in the grass in the moonlight and up wafted this wonderful smell of Golden Puffs and I quite enjoyed it! I lingered for a few moments, drinking it in, and Rudy came over with a quizzical look and he stuck his snout down there and investigated it and I went inside with a big smile on my face.

For many people, this would not be a significant part of their day, let alone their lives, but for me, any time I piss in my backyard, or sleep in a tent or someone flips me off in traffic, it’s newsworthy. It can shake me up for quite a little while. I mean, here I am telling you about dog piss! I don’t know.

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LEO

Wally used to do this thing, he told me, where any time he would enter a new room, first thing he would immediately figure out what his escape route would be if he somehow became trapped. (Laughs) Which wall he would scurry up, which window he’d climb out of. I mean, that’s just about the ultimate in paranoia. In a way, that’s a pretty good metaphor for what the syndrome of being Wally is all about. This is a cat who never enters into anything, a relationship, an institution, a gas station for chrissakes, until he feels it’s absolutely secure. He’s always circling outside things, sizing them up, figuring the odds, and he always takes the lowest risk or nothing at all. Subsequently I think he’s lost out on a lotta opportunities, a lotta living.

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ARTIE

I don’t know if I like all this self-improvement that’s going on around me. Granted, I’m a deeply vain fellow. I can’t go out in public if I feel I haven’t had the chance to preen myself properly, if I’m insufficiently coiffed, but I can’t help but think all these vegetarians and people who go jogging and only use organic products aren’t doing it because they want to help anyone, or save the world, they’re doing it purely out of vanity. What this says to me is that these people think they’re so important that they owe it to the world to preserve their physical and mental facilities as long as possible. There’s a thinly veiled disgust in these people’s criticism of the fast-food diet’s many of us are on. They’re not against double cheeseburgers because they’ll kill you, they’re against double cheeseburgers because they’ll make you fat and ugly. I’m not quite sure what to make of these people, these brand consultants and triathalon runners, these goal-oriented people devouring life like it’s a Powerbar, working 60 hours a week, running ten miles a day. Where are they running? It seems to me they’re not running to anything. It seems to me they’re running from something. Have you ever looked at their faces? They’re miserable! They heave and burn and sweat, their arms limp like little Hamster claws, an excruciating look in their eyes, like they’re doing everything they can to ignore the pain. They look like they’ve been running from Godzilla for 3 days straight, liked he's coming to crush any love anyone may have to give them.

Don’t get me wrong, people have to do things. I mean, we can’t all be Buddha sitting under a tree. Life sweeps you forward. We have to eat, we have to maintain life. We have to live. And it’s very hard to find a moral way to do this, especially one that society will allow you to have. I mean, it would take a lot of courage today to go around like Walt Whitman or Jack Kerouac “afoot and light-hearted” just wandering around or hitch-hiking and expanding your consciousness. The world doesn’t seem to want you to do this. It wants you to pack your consciousness, your opinions or thoughts or whatever, into a little tin lunch box. If I were to take my rucksack and go stand by the side of the road with my thumb out the police would immediately throw me in jail! That is, if some homicidal maniac didn’t chop my head off first. But, supposing I got past the police and the axe-murderers out there, I mean, is there anything really left to see? Is it all just one long corridor of strip malls lining Route 66? Is it one neon smear of Appleby’s and Wal-Mart all across the land? Maybe the whole blasted world is just as it is here, all Golden-Arches and pavement and telephone wires.

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LEO

Despair’s got a kind of sweetness, like wine. It's a thing rotting, it's a poison, but it's delicious, in its way, it's intoxicating. I savor it goddamnit. I savor it. Granted it ain't my preferred mode of life, but I'll take it. As human beings, the best things we can be are vessels for emotion. Sure, we always strive for happiness, but we shouldn't settle for comfort goddamnit. This bland, banal, numbing comfort. Life is not merely a waiting room for death, with muzak playing for everyone to ignore and quaint little paintings for no one to look at and flowers stitched out of fucking synthetic plastic that will never die and won't make you sneeze. Fuck that! I want knife edges. I want broken glass. I want to go out tonight and have an orgasm that explodes like a supernova, that echoes and sends shockwaves through the whole goddamn galaxy. I want poetry. I don't want fucking romance novels.