Recite silently to oneself …
I am a complex person. I am made by desires and concerns both of an animal nature, and a sentient nature. I value both of these components of my nature. As I recite this, I realize that I am in a bad spot. My additions to delicious food, sex, alcohol, cocaine, angel dust, tobacco and my desire to hurt those who love me have left me in this position, which may or may not be on the side of a highway in Nevada with only a Susan B. Anthony dollar coin between wherever this is, and however far it is to Tonopah.
I chose to honor both my animal and my sentient components, however at this moment, I have chosen to revert back to a rarely used component of my self, that of fear. While I honor all of my body’s modes of decision-making and action-taking, I tend to use fear least frequently because I find it cumbersome. But now, I choose to use fear because neither my animal side nor my sentient side is able to plot a sufficient course to where I would like to find myself.
My animal tells me to eat. I will not eat. Less than an hour ago, I ate more food than a Hatian child might eat in a whole month; I stole a box of Eskimo Pies from the freezer of a home near the roadway. I could hear the owner sleeping in the next room. If caught, I would have fallen to my face in shame, having stolen the an unopened box of Eskimo Pies, and also a pack chicken franks, a bag of Doritos and a bag of chemically-preserved bread. But I was able to move through the kitchen with sufficient stealth so as not to awaken the likely-armed occupant. I saw a good number of valuables within easy reach, of which I took only the Susan B. Anthony coin, and only then to remove from the owner the fruitless hope that it would ever been worth anything more than one dollar. I left a Breitling Transocean on the countertop in part to provide the owner with a fair trade for my stolen food and in part because I find the use of an expensive chronometer an insult to my sentience, given the efficacy of an inexpensive waterproof digital watch should I ever need to navigate a small sailboat by the use of a cheap plastic sextant.
I made this decision while my gut was jammed with every bit of this food, I ate it all, and I buried the bags in the gravel soil. I kept the ice cream sticks, should I find them useful. My life has unfortunately not moved in the direction which I would have preferred, and I now find myself with a pocketful of ice cream sticks.
When you find yourself at the side of the road somewhere in the broken frontier between a home you just burglarized for food, and Tonopah, Nevada, you might then realize that affirmations and the best intentions may be insufficient firepower for the catalclysm that seems to await.