Ep 69 - Derek Pauls

This statement is false: the Pseudobiography of M. Derek Pauls
Paul Derek is dead. Long live Derek Pauls.
Paul Derek had an exquisite if brief existence, beginning with his birth in Denver. Born mulatto to a dead mostly White dad in a mostly White city, Paul Derek was socially programmed, like everybody else, to see Blacks like himself as Lesser and Other. And his experience of familial molestation didn’t help a motherfukcing bit, either, serving to convince him fundamentally that he was unloveable. (Queue world’s smallest violin.)
But Paul Derek was also really fucking smart. All book sense and no common sense, admittedly, but he tested well and got scholarships. And fucking loved music, but let himself get pushed towards conventional academics instead.
As such, although ultimately bound for abject spiritual poverty, Paul Derek amassed access to vast amounts of intellectual wealth. He collected letters after his name. He wrote songs and songs and poems and songs. He delivered babies and sutured wounds. He fathered a daughter.
He saw himself as an Impostor.
And Paul Derek fell into an inexorable slough of despond upon coming to believe that his chosen mate found him repulsive, however subjective that belief may have been. Paul Derek was convinced that his marriage was over before his daughter was even born, and blames himself for lacking the courage to end his stillborn marriage at its inception — on his own terms — rather than accepting mere terms of surrender, years later.
By the end, both Paul Derek and his spouse agreed that each marrying the other was the worst mistake of their respective lives, their child aside. Ironically, Paul Derek could still honestly write a glowing personal ad about the mother of his daughter, a sentiment sincerely unreciprocated.
Bereft of love and comfort, self-absorbed and consumed with loneliness — and apparently whining like a bitch — Paul Derek tumbled from the sky in flames like Icarus, endlessly falling ever deeper in darkness, crashing to the bottom of some yawning abyss, cratering and splintering like obsidian.
Paul Derek died in guttering fire, having lost absolutely everything.
Derek Pauls is choking at the bottom of a pit of phoenix ash, weak as a newborn, but reborn all the same.
Paul Derek is dead. Long live Derek Pauls. —

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