A Manual for the Magnificently Improper

Do not ask me to be reasonable. You may as well ask a storm to behave itself or a flame to apologize for setting fire to the drapes. Reason, that flabby little god with a monocle and a ledger, has bored more souls into mediocrity than any sin ever did. Reason is the polite fiction we conjure to excuse our refusal to live. It is the prayer of the unbrilliant, the rulebook of the cowed, the drab hymn hummed in suburban parlors by those whose greatest transgression was reupholstering the furniture in tasteful beige.

I do not wish to be tasteful. I wish to be tasted.

I want scandal. I want a life that reeks of metaphor and sin. I want to ruin good evenings and better marriages. I want to be whispered about by women with stiff necks and brittle pearls, and feared by men who’ve mistaken obedience for masculinity. I want the kind of brilliance that does not glow, but scorches. The kind that makes a bishop lose sleep and a poet take notes. I want a life so lavish with feeling that it drips from the tongue like absinthe, leaving behind the green perfume of wild regrets.

What use is virtue, if it does not make you weep with envy?

Virtue as practiced by the respectable is no virtue at all. It is caution dressed up in petticoats and lace, too busy counting calories and committee votes to feel the exquisite nausea of temptation. Real virtue, if such a thing exists, is not housed in choirboys and attorneys. It lives in those who have looked into the pit of their own desire and chosen to leap anyway, not because they are fearless, but because fear is so terribly dull.

You may sit through sermons about the narrow path. I prefer the crooked alley lit with indecent laughter. The one paved with broken commandments and the echo of heels fleeing the scene. It is there, amidst the blasphemers and the brutes, the misfits and the marvels, that you will find me. Lighting cigarettes off burning bridges. Taking confession from those who have nothing left to hide. Draped in the heavy perfume of too much. Too much love, too much loss, too much living.

To be excessive is to be alive.

And yet, how persistently the world begs us to be otherwise. To be likable. To sicken ourselves into compliance. We are taught to soften our rage in acceptable rhyme, to pad our genius with disclaimers, to make ourselves palatable to people who find nourishment in nothing but starch. God forbid you dazzle. God forbid you offend. God forbid you say the thing everyone feels but no one has the courage to admit aloud.

But I will say it. I will say it in silk. I will say it in blood. I will say it with my shirt half undone and a smirk that could frighten a choir.

Do not dare insult me with reason. Reason is what’s left when the appetite dies. It’s the coward’s excuse for never having lived loudly. You invoke it like a virtue, when it’s merely the refusal to want too much, risk too much, be too much. I have no interest in explanations. I want a life that burns, offends, consumes. One that cannot be spoken of truthfully without blushing.

And most people will flinch. Most people will recoil. They will retreat into their little rooms of certainty, draw the blinds, double-bolt the doors, and sip their tepid decency with the steadiness of addicts. They will call it maturity. They will call it wisdom. But it is cowardice, dressed for a wake.

Reason, in such company, is not a virtue. It is a vice of the spiritually bankrupt.

Give me instead the glorious indecency of being known . Not understood, God no, let the critics die in that ditch, but known , the way a body knows fire or a soul knows ruin. I want to be the story whispered between mouthfuls of laughter at the wrong parties. I want to be the line too bold to quote, too true to forget. I want to exist in that delicious place where saints dare not tread and devils fall silent from awe.

Nihilism is far too grim a pastime. It is a devotion, albeit one with a wicked grin. A devotion to the indecent miracle of existence. To the scandal of joy. To the blasphemy of refusing to behave.

No soul ever yearned for safety. It yearned for fireworks, for gossip, for a reputation too delicious to outlive.

So I let the others sip their virtue like cold tea. They can rehearse their opinions and vote with fearful hands. I will take the scandal. I will take the pleasure. I will take the rapture and the ruin and every trembling second of unbearable truth. I will walk into the fire of myself and come out singing.

And when they ask what became of me, tell them I could not be reasoned with.

Tell them I was magnificent.