Perhaps my goals have been misguided and tarnished by vanity, not mere quixotry. When I began this search, I prided myself as being more intelligent and more insightful than average. I was confident that I would be able to see what others had overlooked, and, consequently, that I would discover the identity of Coprolalia with relative ease. I couldn't have provided a worthwhile reason as to why it seemed natural for me to be endowed with such a gift; then again, I can still feel that same narcissistic effluvium contaminating my thoughts — even if it has diminished in potency. This isn't a riddle, nor is it a puzzle with pieces that others have not been able to fit together. No one has even been able to accrue enough pieces of the puzzle to be confounded by the way its assembled.
The fact of the matter is that there is a certain degree of luck to this process that I grossly underestimated. True, the ability to ask the right questions was obviously assumed to be a prerequisite for the job, but it seems as though the various trails that have appeared came about as a consequence of chance, not due to any knack for investigative research.
I have never been one to doubt in exception, especially when the exception in question concerns some type of boon for myself. It's the same basic premise upon which the lottery operates, one that very quickly leads to chagrin and resignation. And yet it seems as though there will be no exception here; I have used my time unwisely (wasted it, as the idiom goes, though how can one waste time if all moments are either meant to be or valueless or part of that long stretch of eternity that really has no meaning beyond consequents or (to be less objective about it) posterity?). I don't recall if this feeling is anguish or despair. It's unpleasant — that's for certain. And as I wallow in this rather fatalistic quagmire, my anticipation falters; I see tonight's effort to find Coprolalia as nothing more than a generalized recollection of the past few weeks: I'll meet people who delude already baseless aggressions in pints of overpriced beer, listen to stories about fading ambition, meet the ersatz avatars of Sidney Carton, who drunkenly let their one great opportunity of heroism come and go, and watch the more educated classes condemn the stupidity of people who don't think or vote the way they do. I'll proffer nothing more than head nods to misanthropes as they explain that their loss of faith has proven to be a discovery of wisdom. Evangelicals and hard-core Marxists — two sides of the same coin, really — will proselytize about the advent of a new society at the expense of rational thought (Nazis could fall into this foolishly optimistic trap, too, but most Nazis are too stupid and violent (in the most vulgar sense of the term) to understand that Nazism was initially an optimistic movement, and that its broad appeal was primarily due to its push for an elitist revolution — which is certainly a reactionary thing to propagate, not on par with commit-genocide-in-the-name-of-Germanic-purity reactionary, but reactionary nonetheless). Groups of men with thick accents and thicker necks will bitch about the Yankees and the mourn for the Mets. But then there are the more intense mourners, the mourners of sisters and brothers and fathers and wives and mothers and husbands and friends and those relations that get subsumed by etceteras, though the relation, no matter how seemingly distant or previously meager, always becomes so much more profound now that he or she has gone, has become
was in henceforth discourse, has been converted into an idea, perhaps even something akin to a Form. And the grief-stricken repeat themselves over and over until the sentiments they convey seem almost juvenile, perhaps because they are not used to expressing earnest sentimentality unless it is quickly amended to appear facetious. We all do this; so, too, do we all make things out to seem serendipitous or mildly miraculous or even retroactively portentous when reflecting upon our interactions with the suddenly dead. But it's strange how it affects you as an outsider, one who is estranged from the dead, a spectator of no relation. Yet you are related to the mourners because you have been there. And you begin to think of the individuals to whom these panegyrists relate; you take on the attribute of mourner and proceed to imagine or remember a mournee. (But you don't call the dead by first name or even surname; you utilize those cognomens that were created as jokes that they hated but eventually grew to love. You refer to them this way, and everybody else does, too. And suddenly I'm back to the night after the burial, here with the whole group of friends who haven't been together in a number of years (animosity, maturity, entropy, etc.), circling a fire, passing around a handle of Jim Beam, listening to “California Stars” on repeat, not awkward, no longer crying at the very mention of the name of the departed, genuinely happy to see all of the other sleep-deprived faces as well as the well-rested apologists who couldn't catch a plane in time to submit another friend to the indifferent earth. People are getting atrociously drunk, but there are no indecent incidents — partial nudity, no full-frontal. And each person laughs shallowly as they tell those within earshot about “this one time…” and events in which “…you were there, you remember.” There aren't those reprisals of silence — complete with eyes that seem almost viscous, not only because they shimmer, but because they want to leak even if they no longer can — that had been so prevalent the day before. Several days were filled with maudlin laughs, which sound like coughs or exaggerated implosives with a certain Pérotinian dynamic and sense of cadence. You drink a lot. Everyone drinks a lot. No one looks attractive in mourning, but you don't know if this is due to an inability to achieve tumescence on your part or if it's because most people actually look as though a gorilla has slapped them around. You remember these quick, insignificant moments that, for whatever reason, are now being exhumed from some dusty corner in that big, gray organ of yours. And you begin to share them. And those around you share incidents no less mundane. And as they come out, it's high school all over again, replayed now like some highlight reel from a football game that has become a thing of legend for only those who were lucky enough to have been there. You are told of that run from the police after braving the blistering cold to drink stolen liquor in a park, an incident you haven't thought about for years. And as the story unfolds, fear of being arrested ceases to be salient. What the interlocutor wishes to convey is inconsequential because it's now imagery lacking the tenebrous cataract it did only days before — of insectile silhouettes leaping in and out of vast nacreous fields of snow as barren as a moonscape—; of ursine masses lumbering in clumsy pursuit. And these images cascade through your consciousness — one door leading to two more, and those two to four, and so on, and so on — until the memories that are being resurrected from obscurity fill out with greater and greater detail — of walking together under the brutality of the summer sun, idly talking about how insignificant the day itself is, and how you said “In two years we won't remember this exact moment,” even though it's five or six