WHY WEEPEST THOU?

Pillow Book Monday presents A Guide for Men Wishing to Bawl

Our older brother bit by a vampire
For a year we caught his tears in a cup
And now we're gonna make him drink it
Come on Alex, don't die or dry up!

In the shower, where the sobs catch the tile, and make anybody outside think you’re singing bad opera, and nobody would ever see the tears. While eating, if the food is not properly salted, or if you’re Homer Simpson who accidentally cooked his dear pet lobster Pinchy in a hot shower. At the Olympics, for the winners when they cry, and for the losers when they cry. If you’re Gilgamesh, with your arms wrapped around yer boy Enkidu for six days; do not surrender his body, refuse to believe he is truly dead, until a maggot drops from his nostril. Because you studied the wrong chapters and the questions on the midterm look like a foreign language. Allowing yourself to not like it ironically, when listening to ABBA’s “Fernando”, and just let the tears flow for those two old men who lived. If you are Lear, Cordelia’s death is all on you, so howl, howl, howl. But Laertes, you’ll have to wait: for too much of water hast thou, Ophelia, therefore forbid your tears. Oh, weep for Adonais! though our tears / Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head! In the car, on a drive through the night when nobody can see you. Pretending it’s because of the happy ending to the rom-com, but really because that will never happen to you, or anybody, like that. Because your name is Senator Edmund Muskie, and you were man enough to weep over the diabolical Canuck Letter, but America is not man enough to handle a politician’s tears. Toys in a furnace, for fucksake, in Toy Story 3 what is wrong with you Pixar people and while we’re at it the first five minutes of UP? The band decides to keep playing on The Titanic. It’s you, Rizzo, and you know that you’re not the only one who’s had a go at Kenickie Murdoch, but it hurts, and there are worse things you could do—but to cry in front of you…that’s the worst thing you could do. You’re reading all of Armistead’s “Tales of the City” in your sixties and every single page is a sob. You’re Beavis or Butthead, and you just heard they found GWAR’s Cory Smoot (Flattus Maximus) dead in his home. Artax sinking into the Swamp of Sadness. It’s that one episode of Star Trek Next Generation where Picard gets zapped into an old probe and lives the life of a husband in a long-dead culture so that he can be the vessel of the record of their existence and he can rock that little flute they found in the probe and Don’t my baby look like she would go stupid on a woodwind? When you find his back molar at the bottom of a drawer, extracted when he fought every single opportunistic infection and now you know why the relics of saints are both icky and heartbreaking. The bridge of any song Emmylou Harris sings. Sinead, gone, singing that song by Prince, gone, “Nothing Compares 2 U”. Weatherbeaten posters for lost pets stapled to a telephone pole back in June. Onions, and my box of old yellowed valentines, and weddings, and The Notebook, and Auden’s Funeral Blues poem “Stop all the clocks”, always. Young sopranos singing Strauss’ Four Last Songs. An old neighbor walking their old dog. Looking on Google Maps at places where I loved or lusted somebody, and I know I can’t go back in there.