The Early Swan Song of Robert Sheldon

I have a morbid fascination with nuclear annihilation.
Well, I suppose that it’s cliché to call it that,
But that’s precisely the way you’d describe my fascination.
I know for sure you’d say it was morbid, so don’t try to deny it now.
But I don’t find it morbid;
I find it beautiful, somewhat soothing, even rapturous.
In the abstract, of course. If it really happened, it would be hell on Earth
And I wouldn’t wish it on anyone past, present or future.
Nonetheless, whenever I start thinking about it,
It whips up my imagination and consumes my mind with its grandeur.

I imagine myself walking down the street, passing a couple complaining
About how people never make real connections anymore.
So I resolve to connect with the next couple coming my way.
The man says to the woman, “We could die at any time, you know.”
So I jump right into the conversation, with gusto.
“Oh yes, I could die any time! I could keel over right in front of you
A mere five seconds from now!
You could keel over five seconds from now!”
The couple would be surprised, but impressed by my confident tone.
The woman would say, “Oh, sure,” so I’d continue.
“Right now, as we speak, there could be dozens of nuclear missiles
Headed straight for DC. There could have been some terrible accident
And a global nuclear exchange could be occurring
Without us even knowing it.
Right now there could be 100 thermonuclear warheads, fusion bombs,
H-bombs, re-entering the atmosphere on their long trip from Russia
And closing in on our city, ready to wipe us all out.
We could have only 90 seconds before they all detonate
1,000 feet in the air above our heads.”
I’d be getting excited now.
“It’d destroy all of DC, much of Northern Virginia,
Much of Montgomery County and a lot of Prince George’s.
Nothing left but twisted beams and scorched concrete walls,
Softening under the heat of the firestorms.
They’d get Baltimore, too. And Philly.
They’d have tons hitting New York,
And forget about Norfolk; they’d want to make absolutely sure
They got the naval base real good.
All over the country, just blazing death and radiation and fire.
It’d be all across Europe, too. From London, Paris and Berlin,
All the way out to where our own missiles started hitting,
Obliterating Moscow and St. Petersburg,
Spreading death all the way out through Siberia, almost to Japan.
And that would only be the beginning!
The radiation would spread out to all the areas not hit directly,
Killing virtually every living thing in its path.
And anything that survived that would almost surely die
Once the nuclear winter sets in and darkens the skies.
It could be millions, tens of millions of years,
Maybe even more, before life on Earth would begin to truly recover.
Maybe it never would and the planet would stay quiet for a few
Billion years until the sun goes nova and swallows it up
In the biggest nuclear explosion the solar system has ever seen,
Millions of times more energy released than when we killed ourselves.
And maybe there’d be people somewhere else,
Shaking whatever kinds of heads they have on their alien necks,
Wondering if any of it could have been different.”

And then I realize that no real couple would just sit there
And quietly listen to all that, unless they thought I was crazy
And were afraid to speak up, but that doesn’t bother me.
I don’t really go outside anymore, to be honest.
When I have to, I have to, but it truly isn’t very often.
Since the accident, I don’t have to work
And in these days of cell phones and internet, I even get
My groceries delivered straight to my door.
As long as I pay the rent and all the bills on time,
Nobody bothers me. It makes me want to scream sometimes.

But don’t get me wrong, I don’t scream for myself.
I scream for the world. For cruelty, for suffering.
For the stupidity and pointlessness of it.
For how those nice letters come in the mail,
That start with, ‘Dear Mr. Sheldon,’
Or, ‘Dear Robert,’
Or, ‘Dear Oxfam America Supporter.’
The ones that say there are starving Native American children,
Living on freezing reservations, who will continue to starve,
But for the warm hearts and open wallets of people like me.
The ones that talk about poor people not being able to
See a doctor if it weren’t for our generous donations to free clinics.
“Why do you need me?” is what I often scream.
“Why can’t these things just be taken care of?
Why does it take a man to be nearly crippled and sitting on the
Fruits of a pile of lawsuits to put food in kids’ stomachs?
What is wrong with you people? How is this is so hard?
I’m telling you right now, it is so very simple for me to write a check.
Why, if that is all it takes, why are children still hungry and cold?
Why do people drink contaminated water across half the planet?
Why do babies die of diarrhea and mosquito bites?
Why does the richest country on the planet not take care
Of the most basic necessities for its people?
Why why why why why why why why why why?!”

I scream and I scream, even though I know it is silly,
Especially considering that I’m not even really screaming.
It’s more of an intense, hoarse exhale that I let drone on for a while.
It makes me feel better if I do it every now and then.
So even if someday I rupture some important blood vessel doing it,
I’ll continue on with it when I need it.
It doesn’t embarrass me because I’m pretty sure the neighbors can’t
Hear me screaming, even though the walls are so thin in this building.
Perhaps late at night when it is very quiet,
The man who lives behind my TV,
Or the young couple who live behind my stove,
Can hear the screaming, but it must be quite indistinct,
As it isn’t very loud at all.
They probably mistake it for a radiator hissing,
Before they remember that these new apartment buildings
Don’t have old radiators that do that anymore.
Then they’ll get distracted, because people have such short
Attention spans these days, and they’ll forget about the indistinct noise.
I’ll be finished by then anyway, already writing another check,
Slipping it in the envelope, knowing they’ll
Waste some of it on sending me a,
‘Thank you very much for your generous support Mr. Sheldon,’ letter,
No matter how little I want to be thanked by them or anyone else.
I whisper an apology to the people I’m helping
For the fact that they need help.
For instance, last night I apologized to the boy in the letter for the fact that
He found himself born into a world that said
He could only have his tooth fixed,
The one that kept him awake all night crying from the pain,
If a certain Mr. Robert Sheldon felt like sending a check one fine day,
Instead of buying a Blu-Ray machine for himself.
I apologized for our failure.

But lest you get the wrong impression, that’s not all I do.
Trust me, I like to watch porn and jerk off as much as the next guy.
Believe me, when you stop leaving the house, you get less concerned
About what your credit card statement looks like.
I don’t have the right connections, I’m getting older you see,
So I pay for the good channels and for access to a few fine websites.
Rumor has it you can get great free porn on the internet,
But I swear I can’t find it.
Just a bunch of fuzzy, twenty-second videos from what I can see.
And I don’t know about you, but I need more than twenty seconds
To take care of my business, if you know what I mean.
I sometimes think about asking some of the younger guys in the building,
If I happen to run across them in the laundry room or by the mailboxes,
Where they go to get high quality free porn,
But that would probably just be weird.
They mostly try to ignore me as it is,
Even without me asking such personal questions.
I hope I’m not making you uncomfortable, by the way.
It’s natural stuff I do, nothing sick. A man’s got needs, you know?

But mostly I just watch the Weather Channel.
There’s something almost hypnotizing about that place.
Like, I can see that it’s dark outside through the blinds,
I can hear it whipping against the panes and
I can even smell it on the air,
But it just doesn’t seem to really be raining out there
Until I see the weather forecast saying so.
Isn’t that something?
And I also see floods in the Midwest,
Late season ice storms in Maine,
Tornadoes in Texas,
Mudslides in California,
Hurricane warnings in Miami,
And sunshine, sunshine, sunshine for once in Seattle!
I always give a little cheer when that happens. Poor bastards.
It makes me feel involved in what’s happening to the people out there,
In a way that I just can’t feel when I watch the regular news.
The weather, and people’s struggle with extreme versions of it,
Is just so much more personal to me for some reason.

But it’s a thunderstorm here in DC that really gets me excited.
I’m always on the lookout for those.
You don’t have to go outside for them; they come in and get you.
And those thunderstorms always remind me, in a pleasantly visceral way,
Of old ex-girlfriends I dated while in my twenties.
In truth, that’s probably the biggest reason I love the storms so much.
It isn’t nostalgia really; it’s just a sensation in my bones
That rolls in with the electricity and quickens my blood.
I’m actually transported back, by feeling, to certain places.
Like the balcony on P Street, drinking beers and smoking,
Before and after sweaty trips to her bedroom in the summer heat.
I can practically smell the cigarettes and sex,
Sitting by the window in my apartment, when the thunder booms
And the fizzing sound of hard rain through leaves saturates the air.
Or standing in the middle of Wisconsin Avenue in the middle of the night,
Finally sharing that first kiss I’d been after for so long,
Standing tightly wound up in arms, indifferent to the downpour around us.
Or laid out on the living room floor with the windows open,
Letting the flashes crash around us as we tangled until we were sore.
It’s not nostalgia because it doesn’t make me sad or melancholic,
Even though those days are so far behind me, long rusted in my memory.
It just makes me feel content. Content that I’ve lived,
Even if it was a long time ago.

So no, I don’t harbor illusions about myself and what I’m doing now.
I’m waiting to die and I’m trying to do it in the greatest degree of
Physical and moral comfort that I can manage.
I’m healthy and not too old, so it’ll probably be a while
(Several years at least, maybe even a decade or two),
But that’s okay with me. I’m a patient man.
Barring nuclear annihilation or other, lesser catastrophes
Like the one from earlier last night,
I should have plenty more weather to enjoy
And plenty more checks to send off before I kick the bucket
And the rest of my wad disperses among the charities of my choice.
I like the way I’m situated now and my motto is,
“Loneliness is for the dull and dim.”

Though now I feel I should be honest and admit that sometimes
I do scream for myself. At least a little bit for myself, anyway.
It’s usually times when I’m putting more
Sadness than anger into my screams.
It’s then that I feel more merciful and allow that I’m subject to this cruelty
And suffering and death, too, and that it’s okay to share in the scream.
I can almost feel that I, too,
Deserve an apology from someone, somewhere.
But I never allow myself self-pity and I ask that you do the same,
For me and for yourself. It’s important, damn it.
I’m really quite lucky at this point, having so little left to lose.
It’s true freedom and anyone with an iota of wisdom will tell you so.

But about earlier last night. Incident in the bathroom.
I started washing my hands and a house centipede, an enormous one,
Crawled out of the drain right underneath my rubbing hands.
It must have been hiding down there and tried to escape
Once the water started flowing down over it.
Now, for some context, I loathe these things.
If you’ve never seen one, Google image it (see, I’m not that old),
But brace yourself; they’re nasty looking.
They have a very painful bite, I’ve read
(Luckily, I’ve never had to find out first hand).
They’ve got tons of legs, are fast moving
And I swear they’re intelligent beings.
I once saw one on the wall out of the corner of my eye,
And it must have been motionless for a while
Or I would have noticed it sooner,
But just as I fully turned to look at it,
The thing made a beeline for the corner!
What kind of an invertebrate knows when
Someone’s looking at it from across the room?
Anyway, these things already skeeve me out,
But this was just the ultimate horror,
The last thing I was expecting post-urination.
I made some kind of animal moaning sound and leapt back,
My heart doing somersaults and back flips like it was going for the gold.
Now this king of house centipedes is trying to climb up out of the sink,
But the sides are too smooth and it keeps falling back down,
So I suddenly have the presence of mind to reach in and splash water on it,
To push it back down to the drain and keep it from escaping.
It goes half in the drain, and I’ll tell you, I must have been working on an
Instinctual level, because I slammed down
The flagpole and made the stopper
Crash down on the thing, crushing it
And making the sink start to fill with water.
I turned the faucet up to as hot as it would go and stepped back,
Pacing around the entrance to the bathroom, trembling with adrenaline and
Whispering, “That must have got him,” over and over again,
Until the room was getting steamed up and the sink was going to overflow.
Gathering myself, I stepped in and let the sink slowly drain.
Sure enough, the thing was dead, all crumpled up.
But as relief washed over me, guilt seeped in, too.
I wasn’t just shocked and scared;
I had truly hated that centipede for a few minutes.
I took joy in knowing that it was being scalded, smashed and drowned.
As far as I thought I’d come in giving up the old feelings that led to hate
And bitterness, and vengefulness and rage,
For all my efforts at being a venerable old Buddha,
Transcending to some other, more serene mortal plane,
Benignly wasting my final years in a cloud of memory and easy charity,
I’d just backslid because a thing the size of my finger had frightened me.

So I cleaned up the body with a ceremonial flush
And did some screaming for myself and for the world.
And then I wrote that check to help fund some free clinics,
And apologized to that young boy for the world we live in.
And then I dreamed about warm summer sex,
Followed up by nuclear annihilation.