Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac

you dont have to be a seraphic little girl with a wistful smile of sadness to be an angel, you can be broadstriped Bigparty Butch sneering in a cave, in a sewer, you can be monstrous itchy Wallace Beery in a dirty undershirt, you can be an Indian woman squatting in the gutter crazy, you can even be a bright beaming believing American Executive with bright eyes, you can even be a nasty intellectual in the capitals of Europe but I see the big sad invisible wings on all the shoulders and I feel bad they’re invisible and of no earthly use and never were and all we’re doing is fighting to our deaths—
    Why?
    In fact why do I fight myself? Let me begin with a confession of my first murder and go on with the story and you, wings and all, judge for yourself—This is the Inferno—Here I sit upside-down on the surface of the planet earth, held by gravity, scribbling a story and I know there’s no need to tell a story and yet I know there’s not even need for silence—but there’s an aching mystery—
    Why else should we live but to discuss (at least) the horror and the terror of all this life, God how old we get and some of us go mad and everything changes viciously—it’s that vicious change that hurts, as soon as something is cool and complete it fall apart and burns—
    Above all, I’m sorry—but my sorriness wont help you, or me—
    In the mountain shack I murdered a mouse which was—agh—it had little eyes looking at me pleadfully, it was already viciously wounded by my stabbing it with a stick through its protective hidingplace of Lipton’s Green Pea Soup packages, it was all covered with green dust, thrashing, I put the flashlight right on it, removed the packages, it looked at me with “human” fearful eyes (“All living things tremble from the fear of punishment”), little angel wings and all I just let her have it, right on the head, a sharp crack, that killed it, eyes popped out covered with green pea dust—As I hit it I almost sobbed yelling “Poor little thing!” as though it wasn’t me doin it?—Then I went out and dumped it over the precipice, salvaging first those packages of soup which were not crushed open, soup I later enjoyed too—I dumped, and then put the dishpan (in which I’d stashed destroyable food and hung it from the ceiling, nevertheless the clever mouse somehow jumped into it) put the dishpan in the snow with a pailful of water in it and when I looked in the morning there was a dead mouse floating in the water—I went to the precipice and looked and found a dead mouse—I thought “Its mate committed suicide in the pan of its death, from grief!”—Something sinister was happening, I was being punished by little humble martyrs—Then I realized it was the same mouse, it had stuck to the bottom of the pan (blood?) when I dumped in the dark, and the dead mouse in the ravine of the precipice was simply an earlier mouse that had drowned in the ingenious water trap invented by the previous fellow in my shack and which I’d halfheartedly set (a can with a rod, with bait on top, mouse steps to nibble and can turns over, dumping mouse, I was reading in the afternoon when I heard the fatal little splash in the attic right over my bed and the first preliminary thrashings of the swimmer, I had to go out in the yard not to hear it, almost crying, when I came back, silence ) (and the next day, drowned mouse elongated like a ghost worldward reaching scrawny neck to death, the tail hairs streaming)—Ah, murdered 2 mouses, and attempted murder on a third, which, when finally I caught it standing on little hind legs behind the cupboard with a fearful upward look and its little white neck I said “Enough,” and went to bed and let it live and romp in my room—later it was killed by the rat anyway—Less than a handful of meat and flesh, and the hateful bubonic