July 8, 1994 Zero. It is down to this. God forbid one can exist in the minus. Zero is nothing enough. I am living in a rundown Mercury Topaz in a small town outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I am a stranger here and all I view is strange to me. I came here to be a scab worker during a factory strike at a company that makes construction machinery. Living in a car makes you feel degraded to the level of an animal. No shower. No way to store or prepare food. Even brushing your teeth or finding a bathroom is a major task. Every day I ask myself, 'how did I come to this?' Only two years ago I had a long term relationship with a beautiful woman, a home, a rental property, a fifty percent share in a small business, and was well on the way to a college degree. Now all that is gone. The cruel course of fate took the net of material security I had so laboriously created and revealed it to be a crepe paper illusion. Ten years ago at this time I was struggling to find money to eat. I vowed I would escape poverty forever. I worked, conned, connived, committed felonies to climb my way into the middle class. But once again I am reduced to the life of a peasant. Worse than this. The life of a vagabond. The situation is exacerbated by the gnawing irony that for the first time all my hopes and dreams are a realistic possibility. Yet they lay right outside my grasp and I am unable to even enter the arena wherein I can begin the struggle to make those dreams a reality. And the truth be known it is not really money and wealth which I truly seek. Money is only a means to an end, and even then, what I desire cannot be bought. Despite my circumstances, I feel clear sighted. The chaos of my life suddenly makes sense. I see that it was also ten years ago that I began a journey. A journey set sail with a momentary flash of light within my mind, and which is ending only now after a Homeric cycle of creation and destruction. I have nearly come full circle. Only time will tell whether this journey's end will bring a complete end to hope, or a beginning to the life I have always felt would start on some distant tomorrow. From the beginning I already had a sense of what life had in store for me and what was existent within myself. Although unrealized, I already carried an understanding of the impenetrability of life's underlying mysteries, the goal of my desires, and that my destiny offered the extraordinary. At the same time I also carried a sickness. An all-pervading bitterness for an evolution's worth of unfulfilled human potential. A bitterness for the unfulfilled potential in my own life which only the most naively idealistic and childlike mind could formulate. Immediately I held the view that all of life was a game. Yet I played that game more seriously than any of those around me. The doctrine of inaction was apparent to me from the first breath. Yet I acted with more volition than all others. Even now I am often told that people feel uneasy when first meeting me because they can see 'something in my eyes.' This bitterness soon grew into a murderous feeling of rage. Rage against God, country, human values, the cruelty of life, and most of all, myself. I became a conundrum of the jive soul in search of perpetual resurrection. I was greedy to savor every drop of life's essence yet I constantly ignored life in hope of finding that day when I could begin living. I reach out, yet am described as unapproachable. And it is the doctrine of inaction, the ever present awareness of futility, which fuels my self-hatred. Because this rage, at this very moment, mocks every word I place on paper. I accept that these words are purposeless, pointless, absurd, ridiculous and grossly egotistical. I continue because not to continue would be to lay down and die for all the sorrow and hopelessness that seems apparent in all I perceive. And 'egotistic?' I am acutely aware that self-hatred is the highest form of egotism. It is this dilemma which is the final barrier for those seeking the zero. For those seeking annihilation of the self. 
The Apologia is a part of Caeser Pink's novel The Murder Of The Holly King. To get your copy and read the full story click here 
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