The Duality of a Man

Aden and I are sipping some fine French cognac (redundant) tonight. That damn Aden though, he's a connoisseur of the effect rather than its cause. His pallet for palliatives is as indiscriminate as faith is with its minions. He's also shallow enough to believe drinking red wine qualifies him as being culturally refined and bourbon (neat) a gentleman. Now this cognac, a soul of Ugni blanc that spent over 30 years earning its rite of passage trapped in an oak barrel before inhabiting our body, to him may as well have been moldy grapes picked off a dead vine wrapped around a tombstone and distilled in an urn. While I'm on my side (left) of the body conjuring up delectable images of Brie and Camembert cheeses as soft as a woman's breast with each sup, that halfwit is drowning me in gulps and refills with his leg (right) jack-hammering the ground at 100 mph as he romanticizes coup d'états and anarchist revolutions. Two peas of antagonistic varieties stuck in the same pod, he and I. In terms of naming rights, I've decided he should bear our actual given name (for an explanation see the "DNA" sentence further below, I don't feel it would suit me very well to go by just one name). Hence, I will rarely refer to him as 'me' or us as 'we', and forever Aden he will be.

Lo siento mis amigos, let me retreat before the war has even begun, for I seem to have gotten my priorities out of order. I should have jumped into salutations straight away - hello Liebchens, the name's Aden O'Shea. As I'm sure you've gathered already, that is the given name of a, well how should I put it, uh I suppose maybe, perhaps, one could argue...For the love of respectability, Aden, SLOW DOWN! Sorry folks, but this maniac on my right has reached the point where he's gargling the beloved cognac in his mouth like a debonair does with Listerine. My train of thought feels as though it's swishing around our mutual oral cavity suspended in a river of forsaken Ugni blanc. I'd ignore his foolish theatrics if I weren't afraid of him becoming so completely and utterly polluted as to throw me aside and take the reins. Not that you'd have to suffer through his incoherent ramblings or anything. I know him well enough to foresee a simple dropping of the proverbial trou, after which he would commence urinating on the keyboard while screaming some pretentious Latin slogan like, "Vivere disce, cogita mori!" at the top of his lungs, mispronouncing every word. Thankfully, he seems to have placated himself with Iggy Pop's "The Passenger". This is good, and I hope he remains a passenger, because it's not like I can hide the bottle...

Now where were we? (I love the word devolution in that phrase, so pleasing to the eye). Ah yes, Aden O'Shea is the given name of a mental duality. If you ever find yourself being led on a sled by a wild pack of dogs along the longitudinal fissure of our brain, gee will take you to Aden and haw to me. For the most part, this duality is really a discordant dichotomy. He and I share very few things in common, aside from every physical aspect of the body. Despite his previously alluded to ideological stance, Aden is very much a realist. His will is easily trod upon by the morose, seemingly backward banalities of humanity - war as negative reinforcement of charity; money as positive reinforcement of greed; politicians as scapegoats for people who deemed them necessary evils in the first place; people in suits carrying locked briefcases that one assumes are full of court writs (redundant) for tax evasion but actually contain at least six pairs of women's panties, a gyrating dildo, and the December issue of "The Economist"; people masquerading around as social 'butterflies' when the correct organisms would be 'chameleons'; people frothing at the mouth re the merits of wedlock and multiple babies (artificial insemination no longer implies a vet elbow deep in a heifer's vajayjay); people in general. In other words, he's a typical man - all phallic fears and fickle feelings. Oh indeed, downtrodden is Aden. I, on the other hemisphere, run freely with the infinite motivation of elusive goals provided by idealism. You see, it's impossible to trod on a vagueness, an essence. Ideals can be these things, like faint music in the soundtrack of life or light that always manages to seep through the bars of a prison cell no matter the state of time, respectively. I don't put much weight on having 'values', so to speak, as their worth seems to fluctuate, ebb and flow, with the tides of the global economy. No, I prefer to live by one mantra, and let me tell you, it is a mantra of melancholia to be sure - Always champion love, never succumb to hate. Why the melancholia, you ask? Well, like I stated above, ideals are elusive. And love is an ideal. Hate is just another passion, a weakness of the mind. Hate will hold your hand. Love, in its truest form, will always be relegated to the sparks that fly between outstretched fingertips that can't quite grasp each other. If you could ask this here cognac about true love, it'd be quick to quip, "Vrai amour? Pour moi, elle n' existe pas." I happen to disagree with this cognac, I think she, true love, does exist. Alas, if you asked me her name at the moment, the best answer I could provide would be "Mom". Yes, the mantra of melancholia is love.

Spiritual folk, mainly pagan women past the age of 40, would deem me an 'old soul'. I am not of that opinion. I prefer to think myself as being the mental manifestation of the knowledge accumulated by thousands of successive generations of DNA. What of Aden, then? I suppose he's the freshest pairing of genes, the here and now. He's so...so mortal when compared to me. If we were this bottle of cognac, I'd be the substance and he the dregs. I've stressed our differences enough for now, though. There does exist an aberration in our dichotomy. For as much as I'd like to call my one mantra my own, I'd be ignorant of the facts if I said Aden didn't live by the same policy. I must admit that while I'm never ignorant of the facts, I am often naive to the situation. It is for this reason Aden can be quite a valuable asset to have along for the ride, but I digress, I'll elaborate this point at a later time. Anyway, Aden is also a lover of love. Indeed, speaking of lovers, we were both madly enamored with this alluring woman, bella dama!, named Nikita. The breadth of my lives (thousands of successive generations) have been spent trying to court women like Nikita; same can be said for the dearth of Aden's (dregs) with specific regard to her. Her type almost evades description, but I'll do my best to tap into my effeminate side, as things are always best understood when viewing the world through their eyes. What follows comes solely from my perspective, as Aden is incapable (phallic fears, fickle feelings) of discussing Nikita without...Oh Aden! Aden, no, don't cry. Stop it! I just finished telling these kind people not ten minutes ago how your bouts of drunken behavior tend to involve destruction, and not the kind of the self. Yes, I knew better. It was your reputation at stake, on the stake. Fine, be a maudlin. Here's a violin, go pluck your sapstrings then. Hey, where are you taking us?! Aw Aden, come now, you know I was only giving you a hard time! ADEN! Damnit. We'll continue this later, my friends. It seems we're leaving...