David Capps

Nonfiction

I’ll tell you a Philadelphia story and I’ll try to keep it brief as I know you have better things to do than read a story by a washed-up academic who spends his summers piddling about the pebble shores of the Aegean, no longer so enthralled by the fireworks of ideas.

When I lived in Philly, aka the city of brotherly love, aka the city of sweatpants boners running the subways ragged, I was midway through writing a dissertation in analytic philosophy, smashing my head into its conceptual bulwark to barely see it move an inch. 

When I had decided to move in with my then-girlfriend and her childhood bestie (it was serious) and told my advisor he looked at me like I was either insane or had given up, or both. In retrospect it was pretty naïve, especially considering that I was also teaching in Stamford and that would mean a weekly commute across the GWB in the scorching heat. 

By the end of it I was pretty well acquainted with the guys who used to sell bottled water in the bumper-to-bumper haze.

Mornings to evenings on days when I wasn’t teaching were spent at a rotating sequence of different coffee shops, and if I wasn’t wired during the day I was pretty loaded on booze in the evening. Because the thing was, we lived right above a bar, and not your chill neighborhood watering hole sort of dive, but one of those raucous, thumping sports rave kind of bars a friend from out of town might invite you to so that you’d regret it the next day as you look about wondering whose bed you’re in. 

So that’s how I’d end up in the middle of the floor sometimes, between our room and the childhood friend’s room, by the stairwell where my girlfriend’s big orange cat Lyov would enjoy pawing my face as I drooled in an unknowing philosophical slumber until early light. 

Suffice to say I only lasted a couple months before moving back to CT.

Now for a surprise—this story, or at least the moral of this story isn’t about me. I’ve got no character arc whatsoever. But I remember this vividly, the noise around 2am when the bar closed and the drunken party would spill out onto the street below like the thunderstruck upchuck of taco Tuesday, and I’d be trying to sleep through the crying, shouting, fooling, screaming broken glass shattering door-slamming heel kicking rage of it, the sexed up close to orgasm panty shove of it, as I pulled the blankets over my head and crammed the earplugs in as far as they could go.

The funny thing was how miraculous it seemed that I could know anything about those revelers without knowing them, without even seeing them, I knew they had this in common: intense and unsatisfied desires. How many and how intense I could not exactly say, but it was those desires and the sequent paeans of suffering I heard each night and seemed almost to detach from the individuals below who experienced them, in much the way that a killer’s eerie smile seems to lift off his face and become the universal mask of what is hideous in all of us. It basks there, that smile, those voices, and the staggering footfalls the quiet shadows fail to eclipse—

“Desire causes suffering—that is the second of the four noble truths” I lecture to my students, “but remember that ‘suffering’ is a broad concept, you can be suffering when you are smiling, as you know that one day, like all mortals, you’ll die. That there is suffering, or dukkha, which pervades all of experience, is the first noble truth…” To which they nod, some nodding off, others idly scrolling the latest idiotic Tiktok fanny-grab, checked out with white shit in their ears, and since they think they know more than the professor anyway, I figure I may as well tell them a story.

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David Capps is a philosophy professor and writer who lives in New Haven, CT. He is the author of five chapbooks: Poems from the First Voyage (The Nasiona Press, 2019), A Non-Grecian Non-Urn (Yavanika Press, 2019), Colossi (Kelsay Books, 2020), On the
Great Duration of Life (Schism Neuronics, 2023), and Wheatfield with a Reaper (Akinoga Press, 2024). His latest work is featured in Midnight Chem, The Classical Outlook, and OxMag.