I love my life.

There's such a big difference between the statements "I hate life" and "I hate my life."

I try to limit myself to the former.

The latter is what passes today under that derogatory term, "emo."

I really fucking hate life.

The boring food and health post

For the three-hundredth time in my life, I can't tell whether I'm crazy or not.

Gluten sensitivity! My obsession of the moment.

It's really ideal for crazy people like me, because it's not well defined at the moment and I've come across lists of associated symptoms that feel like a grab-bag for me. I think, "Headaches? Dizziness? Mouth sores? Depression? etc. IT'S THE ROOT OF MY PROBLEMS, CLEARLY.

I never even considered it before a couple months ago. The headaches I always explained with any of the following reasons: I'm dehydrated from all the grain; I haven't had enough protein; I ate too much food. Now I'm realizing that I haven't had a food-related headache from eating too much beans and rice, ever. Never a headache from eating too much tofu. So gluten? Could be!

But I'm crazy, because I can't tell cause from effect. I'm wondering if I like the idea of being gluten intolerant because I can pin all my problems on one thing and imagine it away. I bet a hundred bucks I could get rid of a headache by not believing in it; I could say, "but I haven't had any pasta today, so I shouldn't have a headache," and it would go away. It's all in what you believe.

I could believe that my major depressive episodes of the past few years have coincided with high gluten intake because the gluten caused the depression.

Or I could believe that my major depressive episodes of the past few years have coincided with high gluten intake because, in my depression, I turned to comfort food.

They are comfort foods: bread, cookies; I bake when I'm sad, eat pasta when I'm missing home. Which leads me to another possibility about this situation: I could be attracted to the idea of being gluten intolerant because it's yet another way for me to give up foods that I love.

And don't I just love the denial? Aren't I addicted to the self-pity that comes with not being able to have what I want?

So what should be a simple medical issue has blossomed into a question of whether a medical issue even exists outside the mind, and at what point it is deemed to do so.

Whether it's in my mind or my body, I have rarely felt so good and healthy as I have in the past month, eating a predominantly gluten-free diet. I think I'm going to stick with it.

Hopkins, Bacon, Havok

"My own heart let me more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst's all-in-all in all a world of wet.

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
's not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather - as skies
Betweenpie mountains - lights a lovely mile."
-G. M. Hopkins

[Let it be noted that I adore Hopkins' disregard for linguistic limitation; why shouldn't "comfortless" be a noun, just as "dark" is? why not make up the word "betweenpie"? (And best, though not present, why not "selve" by forging new words?]



Listened to Sing the Sorrow twice tonight (this morning.) Haven't had such a good cry in such a long time. I looked like this:



I don't feel right unless I look like that.

But anyways. The line to revive me this time was, "Anathema I will remain, forever will remain. From below, in my seclusion, look up to the sky and see paper wings and watch them burn."

Taken out of context, they mean, to me, that I need to stay below, in my seclusion. That I am only me because I am below, in my seclusion, that I am only me when I am below, in my seclusion.

I need to write the art of my seclusion. I need to write alone.

There's just something about non-exposure that is, impossibly, paradoxically, more beautiful than the exposed. There's something achingly perfect about G. M. Hopkins writing to himself and his God only, isolating in sorrow, and making art of that sorrow, by that sorrow, and for that sorrow. There is something beautiful in that longing for happiness, forever unfulfilled, forever unpublished, forever unknown.

Tonight, (this morning,) I have remembered my nineteenth-century soul. Thank the gods of poetry; I am alive and selving.

sick of sick

Things I've been hating for the past nineteen hours:
music
sexual desire
myself
everyone (inCLUDing davey, jade, and even gerard manley hopkins)
every fucking thing
hypocrisy (see: myself)
memory
life
death
blogs

It's very uncomfortable.

Hello again, Misanthropy.

scattered thoughts

Am I really going to spend a year in Massachusetts?

I'm not even sure how this happened, but suddenly I have this path laid out in front of me that everyone is encouraging me to take. It feels like fate.

But I can't help feeling like fate is waiting for me here. Like all the magical things happen in the Bay Area. Like if I stray from home again, I may not come back.

When it comes down to it, I am terrified that when I get back, 924 Gilman will be gone. It's a silly, only semi-rational thought, but it bothers me so much. I feel like I'll somehow miss out on all the shows I should have been to, just like I missed out on Davey Havok playing with Ceremony while I was in England. It's stupid, this fear. It's the fear of a little girl waiting for magic to happen, for some perfect dream job to come place itself in my lap.

The job in my lap right now is a near-perfect dream job. I was just complaining about how all my friends are going to be on the East Coast this year, and now is my opportunity to go and be on the same coast as them.

I don't even know what's going to be the deciding factor for me. I hate that I can't be an adult and decide for myself, "This is what I am going to do." Instead I sit around waiting until someone kicks me in the ass in the direction they think I should go in.

And I hate that my father is so open-minded about sexualities, but not about gender. I hate that it's only because he doesn't know any better, and I hate that I'm too lazy or afraid to teach him. Sometimes when he talks with me about how I'm a woman, it brings me to the edge of tears because I feel so utterly frustrated and wrong. And yet I know that if I explained to him that I'm not a woman, nor a man, he would reasonably inform me that no matter what, the world will perceive and label me as a woman. I hate that he's probably right.

I'd rather live in a dream world.

I realized it's not just my friends, not just rock stars, not just fictional characters, not just me- it's my parents, too.

They're happily married, one of the sanest couples ever, they love each other. All that. But they're not really happy with one another. They're not perfect. I guess I resent them for not being perfectly. I'm upset that they're still so alone. They're going to die alone, just like me.

Sometimes when I'm upset and also artistically frustrated, I copy out poems or song lyrics in a notebook, just to feel the power of other people's words coming through me. The song I keep doing that with this week is "Fainting Spells."

There is nothing else.

Bound

Today was one of those days when you hold your head under the streaming hot water of the shower simply because you irrationally think it will cleanse your mind of its self.

Or maybe you're trying to drown the part of yourself that won't stop thinking.

My thoughts won't stop today. They keep digging holes through every part of my day and scratching against the bone of miserable truth. The truth is that I'm alone and will always be alone.

Maybe it's my friend going through a painful breakup. Maybe it's the fact that I'm so intellectually obsessed with the impossibility of sympathy that I can't forget it like most people can. Maybe it's the fact that Davey Havok has been writing on the subject for years and yet he's still alone. Maybe it's the fact that I feel like someone, if not everyone, should be able to change the truth in the face of its exposure; to force the possibility of sympathy into existence. Maybe it's the fact that I feel like a failure for being so obsessed with other people's lives and relationships, but have done such a poor job of building my own of either.

I've had these panics in the past, where I feel so horribly trapped in my body and I want to get out. So I try to scald it away with hot water. I want to get out. I hate everything about me. And it is only in these horrible, low moments that I ever want to take something. My mind gets so lost in itself that I can't even feel any truth except for my aloneness and loneliness. I feel like taking a magic pill that cures everything because I know that as lonely as I am, it won't get better. Even if I fall in love with somebody and they fall in love with me, I will always be alone. So there is no cure to being alone. There is no cure. But I feel like I want to take that magic pill that cures it all. I'm pretty sure the only magic pill is death.

But I know that tomorrow I'll wake up better. The chemicals in my head are just fucking with me. Sometimes I wish they would go away and stop hurting me, but I know that I would then just be lying to myself, and I hate lying to myself more than anything. It's just hard to keep track of the truth sometimes.

The greatest sight ever known to mankind

is Davey Havok hardcore dancing at a Sick of It All show. I can't count how many times my heart stopped during that show. That was seriously the best thing I've seen. I wish I could describe it. But it's beyond words.

On a theoretical level, it's just so comforting to know that he's still just this little punk kid who doesn't give a fuck. I will depend on that image to sustain me through many a tough time, I can tell.

For some reason, I am super in love with Crash Love right now. There's nothing I want to listen to more. It's just perfect.

And good lord is it making me nostalgic for my East Bay days. Please, universe, please, Davey, LET ME MOVE BACK TO THE ACTUAL BAY AREA SOON. It really surprised me when Ross from Ceremony said he still lives in Rohnert Park. How does he survive? How does he write? These are questions I seriously intend to ask him. Unless he gives me a magical answer, I'm aiming for a Bay Area job. Seriously.

Things I've Learned From Movies about the Apocalypse

1. Women get raped.
2. Men get killed.

I'm fairly certain that if civilization ended and I was a woman, I would chop off my hair and disguise myself as a man to escape my fate.
I'm also fairly certain that if civilization ended and I was a man, I would grow my hair out and disguise myself as a woman to escape my fate.

Warning

I ask this: why is it more socially acceptable for someone born biologically male to hate men and reject masculinism than it is for someone born biologically female to hate women and reject feminism?

And why do I feel like such a horrible person for asking?

I know part of the answer. I know that maybe as few as forty years ago, the reverse had been true for centuries: it made perfect sense for a woman to find her sex inferior, but God forbid a man be unhappy with being a man! I know that shit of that sort absolutely sucks. I know that gay liberation and feminism have changed so, so much for the better, and I love those movements as much as I appreciate their effects on my world.

BUT does that mean that what was true in the 1970s, or even what was true in the 1990s, has to be true today? Do we really have to think in the same way?

Am I fucking obligated to favor, love, and be proud of women more than men in order to rectify centuries of it being the other way around?

Why can't I just forget the past? Why can't we move forward into a place where the past, and what was true in it, don't fucking matter?

My dad ruined a song for me last night, and the worst part is that I'm the one who feels guilty. The song is Incubus's "Warning." It's a song about not letting "life pass you by." It's a song, I always thought, sung to Americans to get up off their lazy asses and stop living lives that are pre-cut to go down easier.

My father informs me that this is not possible. He informs me that because the song is sung about a "she," it's clearly about the female experience. It's about women not letting men run their lives for them. It's about Thelma and motherfuckin' Louise. It's a song, my father tells me, sung to women to get up off their lazy asses and stop living lives that are pre-cut to go down easier.

I love Thelma and Louise, but the movie's almost three decades old. Come on.

Like the whiny child I am, I sneered at my father and said, "Well I always thought it was a song about humans, not women."

"But he says 'she!'"

"And why can't 'she' be a neutral pronoun?!"

"Yeah, whatever," my dad finishes.

I shut my door because my dad was annoyed with me that I was annoyed with him being a good feminist. He doesn't realize (he never realizes) that I hate that he thinks I should be his child most embracing of such arguments. And he doesn't realize that my door almost slammed because I was afraid that he's right.

My dad and I always fight over Brandon's lyrics, and Davey's too. In my mind, both of these writers occupy a superior position in which gender is completely arbitrary.

In other words, they are my ideal.

Brandon sings about a "she" because a "she" is just as good at representing humanity as a whole as "he" has been for centuries. Brandon sings that "To resist is to piss in the wind" because he's giving humanity a cock, not limiting the power of resistance to males only, which is my dad's criticism of the song "Get up From Under." Brandon sings about his own "woman's intuition" in "Just a Phase" because the sexist decades of history for the phrase simply don't apply here: he's female, male, human, who-gives-a-fuck-what.

But to my dad, Brandon is a masculinist male who is consciously forwarding the cause of the other sex: women.

I see my dad's position as sexist, because he's the one still differentiating between the sexes, whereas I am able to forget their existence altogether. I am truly post-gender. I can see with blissful blindness to history.

All those "I" sentences: they're fine for bouts of self-celebration in a blog before dawn on a summer morning. But I would never tell them to my father. Why?

Why am I so afraid of being called sexist? It's probably because I am. Most people would probably tell me it's sexist not to give women the advantage, not to favor them as the superior sex, not to apply a sort of Affirmative Action program to women throughout life, because they've been the underdog for so damn long.

What my father told me last night bothered me the whole time I slept. I had bad dreams, and I woke up with that song in my head, and guilt in my gut. I am a bad representative of women. I have failed my sex.

But I never wanted to be of this sex!!! Sometimes I want to scream that so loud that it aches in my chest and brings tears to my eyes to hold it back. I hate being biologically a woman. I hate being constantly forced to be socially a woman. I wince every time my mom calls me "chica!" I am so fucking tired of being expected to be a representative of a population I don't feel I belong to.

See how I'm failing even more?: Instead of immersing myself in my group and bringing them up to a place of equality with my efforts, I'm leaving behind the group and just jumping to that imaginary place of equality all for myself. My post-gender idealism is just me being another apathetic young American who doesn't want to face the facts of continuing sexism. I'm nothing but a lazy, failed feminist.

But, for the first time, I think I'm starting to grow the will to say this: I don't care.

There are times when you have to struggle in order to get through, and there are times when you just have to let go, because you're too close to a situation to see clearly. If I were born biologically male, the subject of feminism would (for reasons I don't like) be something I wasn't born with, and that I could actively, consciously, take up as a passion.

But I wasn't born with a dick, so somehow that means I'm supposed to be more invested in feminism than anyone who was.

I know I'm not being reasonable, and that in the future, I'll probably regret a lot of things I've believed. But I really need the mental space right now to say, "I am not a woman. I am not a feminist. And I don't even particularly like women." Right now it doesn't matter that it's also true that I'm not a man, nor a masculinist, and that I don't particularly like men. That wouldn't be carving a mental space out of the solid rock I've been handed. But disliking the gender that's been weighing me down for twenty-one years? That's creating mental space for myself.

Maybe it's just a first step. But it's a step I need to take.

And it's all because my dad won't let me believe that an Incubus song is about a person, not a woman.

I fucking hate gender.

I'm pissed off, and I'm going to try to go back to sleep.

A Handful of Self-Indulgent Ponderings

1. At what point does something I feel become fact? With moods and passions so fickle as mine, how often do they have to occur before they are real? How can I tell a person that I'm attracted to them, when I know that 90% of the time, I feel no attraction towards any living thing? In this scenario, it's not a lie, because I am, sometimes, attracted to them. 10% of the time. That's about the percentage that I consider myself truly attracted to a person. Once you break 10%, you've made it farther than the vast majority of the human race. You're in the 99th percentile of my sexual appreciation of humans. But is that enough to become a fact? Is that enough for me to declare to a person, "I want to be with you?" Or is that too much of a commitment? Is that saying, "I want to be with you 100% of the time?" Because that will always be a lie. I need alone-time, and I need more of it than do most people. I'm probably in the 99th percentile of Americans who need alone-time.

How can anyone trust what I say, when it's only true a percentage of the time? There are so few things I can say that are true about me 100% of the time. One of them is that I am constantly changing.

My world turns itself inside out on a regular basis. Three weeks ago, I would have described myself as someone who felt like they were dying, felt that there was no hope for me doing anything good in the future, and who hates being lonely, and hates talking to people. This week, I would describe myself as someone who has hopes for the future, loves having their loneliness as their constant companion, and loves sharing words with people that mean a lot to them.

If I said today that I hated being lonely, I would be lying. It's not true today. If I had said three weeks ago that I hated being lonely, I would have been telling the truth.

If my history is anything to go by, I'll be back to hating life in a week or two. And then a couple of weeks after that, the world will be full of happy giddiness again.

These changes happen between morning and night on some days. Other times, the cycles take weeks. My only constant is that I'm inconstant.

How can I ever present myself to the world, knowing that in a few days, or a few hours, what I've presented will then be a lie?

I think about these things in relation to my gender, especially. It is a fact that I am genderless. When I am all alone, with only Sing the Sorrow, and all the petty circumstances of the world fade away into the sweet blackness, I am genderless.

Therefore, I would like to present myself to the world as genderless, an androgen, what have you.

But suddenly throw me in a circumstance where my gender affects how I interact with others, and I will usually end up caving, and admitting that my genderlessness is a lie, an ideal that can only be upheld in the 30% of my time that I spend in my head alone. Put me in a situation where it would be easier to get along with the group if I'm just "one of the gals," then I'll morph into a girl, and to claim that I'm genderless would be to lie. Put me in a situation where I'm dressed up in a way that's deliberately contrary to how young women usually dress, and the guy at the cinema box office mistakes me for a boy, then I have to admit I feel good about the mistake; I have to admit that, in that moment, it's not genderlessness that I want, but to be a real boy. When I can only get off by imagining I have a penis, in that moment, it's a fact that I wish I were born with one. When in the morning, the idea of having sexual organs at all makes me want to die, it's a fact that I don't wish I were born with a penis. Where is truth? Is truth what is true in the state of sexual, spiritual, intellectual excitement? Or is it what is true when all excitement is gone, and the only thing around and inside me is the stillness of death?

Sometimes I think that my desire to be a man is actually merely a masked desire to have more of a sex drive. Wouldn't that be great? Wouldn't it be wonderful for me to actually tell someone I want to be with them, and actually mean it more than 10% of the time?

I wonder if I'll ever know the answer to any of these questions.


2. I am wearing a pair of blue jeans today that I bought and wore in my freshman year of high school. That's eight years ago. What does that say about how dynamic a life I lead? I thought I went out into the world and accumulated and learned new things. But it turns out, I just come back to Rohnert Park and fit right back in the same pair of pants I left behind.


3. I learned today, for the hundredth time, that I'm basically the younger version of my dad. I was doing some contemplation on my favorite subject, my mind. I was thinking and realizing that something I can define about the way my mind works is that I simply reject manipulation, guilt trips, drama. It's like I have this switch in me; when none of that stuff is going on, everything's bright and fine, no worries. But the very second that someone even brings a touch of manipulation or guilt tripping into the conversation, I completely shut off. Just one drop and that's the end. I snap shut. I shut down. That shit just Does. Not. Work with me. It's the least effective way to get through to me ever.

And as I was gathering all these thoughts in my brain, I realized that I'm pretty damn sure my dad's said the exact same thing to me about himself. I'm fairly certain I've both witnessed that reaction, and heard him describe it. So basically, my emotional patterns are carbon-copied from my dad. Funny how that works, isn't it?


4. The only way I can fall asleep is by imagining death. Some nights it's suffocation, some nights it's icy ocean water filling my lungs. Lately, it's been blood flowing out from my veins, draining my body, dripping down my hands and from my fingertips.

5. The end :)

Drama makes me sick to my stomach. It stops NOW. What the fuck have I become, anyways? It stops now, until the world stops spinning. Resolution.

k-e-l-l-y

Um, we're ditching the name Shelley. Because if Davey Havok knows me as Kelly, then that's what I am.

Just kidding. I have other reasons. Really.

Back to my birth name for now, plus Blake is still cool for those of you lurkers who know me as that ;)

Someone send me to a shrink, seriously.

The world is okay today because Boudica brought me a dried leaf from outside. She's a contender for the position of My Favorite Vegan Hunter.

mope mope mope

This is stupid, but I am absolutely gutted by the fact that my cats hate me.

They're over there, being resentful to each other, too, sitting quietly and tensely, shooting me death glares every so often. Two nights ago, Boudica was sleeping on my feet just like always. As soon as the suitcases were brought out, she cut me off, so to speak. Somehow it's my fault that the other residents of this house are gone. And somehow it's not enough that I am the one who didn't abandon her. So I'm getting the silent treatment.

This is upsetting because it's just the most physically obvious manifestation of the pattern of my whole life right now: there is no cat by my feet. It's just further proof that there's something inherently wrong and poisonous about me. My friends turn away, my family turn their eyes askance, and employers never call me back after hearing my voice. I wish I knew what it is about me that makes people (and cats) run for cover.

June the second

Look who's lookin' hardcore!





Today's my first birthday, and I look it. A year ago from right about now I had my Spiritual Rebirth while listening to "The Great Disappointment" on repeat for three hours. Not a hxc song, but one a pretty darn good one. Thanks, AFI.

a message from Oscar

"Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body indistinct with spirit. For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain."
- Oscar Wilde, from De Profundis

God isn't dead. God is death.

Every time I listen to "This Celluloid Dream," I feel this knot in my chest that is my novel aching to be unraveled, written, born. It fucking hurts.

On God:

I called myself an atheist for twenty years and then realized that I'm the most spiritual person I know. I just never called what I worship a "god." What I worship is the silence, truth, beauty- the absolute that can never be reached. God is unattainable. The unattainable is god.

To avoid the discourse of "God," which makes it sound like a person, which is my problem with it altogether, I'm going to call it "Beauty."

Throughout my teen years, Beauty remained rather formless. If anything, it was the world, nature, the universe, that cosmic stuff. And I was fairly happy.

Davey Havok, why did you have to go and change things?

Okay, back up, let's examine the levels of irony here. Davey has himself expressed on nuuuuuumerous occasions and songs the dangers of pinning Beauty to one figure. It's just wrong. It never works. It leads to great disappointment. It fucks life up.

So identifying one object or person as Beauty (..."God," remember?) necessarily makes that person not Beauty. The label poisons it. The word stains it. It can't be God if it's called God.

Beauty is only unattainable. The unattainable only is Beauty.

But Davey...Davey comes so close. In the best of moments, he IS Beauty, without being adulterated by the word. The word doesn't exist, because the moment only occurs fleetingly in my mind, with his voice against my ears. I transcend the headphones, forget the disc, the middlemen; I forget my own skin. Davey is Beauty, and that is all there is. It is absolute.

But the ephemeral moment lasts an instant, and then he is only a God- a necessarily false God.

Percy Shelley (in my vague terms and very imaginative understanding) believed in this absolute silence that cannot be reached. The truest God is the least vocal, the darkest, the least perceptible, the most ephemeral. Anything that claims to be God is a false idol. Anything that claims to be God is necessarily not God.

But he believed that poetry could "lift the veil." Poetry has the potential...no- Poetry is the potential to truly capture Beauty. Poetry is the hope that the most perfectly chosen set of words can be darkness, be Beauty.

But poetry runs the risk of creating an imperfect set of words, and to therefore harden into a false idol.

Poetry can be, for an instant, Beauty. But poetry can become, after that instant, a false idol.

Davey Havok, poet supreme, is my Beauty.

Davey Havok is my false idol.

And he knows it, too. Don't you, Davey?

So the thing is, when nature, unpersonified, was my Beauty, I was happy. I could pretty much be with Beauty whenever I wanted to. Sure, the system sometimes showed its imperfection as worship of a particular image, a favoring of one tree over its brother. But there were no moments when I ached with despair at never being able to be with Beauty. It was all around me.

Then I realized that nature wasn't all that Beautiful. It was quiet, and wasn't hardened into a false idol, but neither did it get close enough to Beauty to actually be Beauty. It was no longer intense enough for me.

Davey's words were more intense, more Beautiful, closer to the absolute than nature ever was. The ephemeral moments of "Holy shit that's Beauty!" come more frequently, I realized, in listening to AFI than in any other activity.

But now I feel the pain of having Beauty within a person. Davey Havok is a breathing, moving being, who is utterly unattainable, but has skin that can be touched, and a voice that can physically hit my ear drums. And he has a presence of the world that I envy; I see the way he lives, and I want it to be the way I live. I see the shape of him, the outline of his impact on the world, and it solidifies into a shape I worship- and a shape I miss.

Ideally, my song would go like this: "To Beauty, I beg, 'May I cut in?' And Beauty draws me into its dark silence."

Often, it goes like this: "To Beauty, I beg, 'May I cut in?' But it never stops playing his song."

See? I can't even forge a sentence without casting it in His form.

And that is why Davey Havok is God, why God is bad, and why Davey Havok is the purest good possible.

It is also why you'll see me shift frequently among the terms Beauty, Imagination, Truth, Silence, Darkness, Love, Absolution, Innocence. If I made any one of these terms the defined substitute for "God," it would become an idol. Better to shift among them freely. It confuses people, though. Truth always does.

Beauty always does.



Oh, and by the way, I'm not named after Percy. I'm named after my cat. I've got a lot of fond memories of that cat.

even silence is noisy

"I want you to get into the deep beautiful melancholy of everything that's happened."
-Claire's advice to Drew in "Elizabethtown."

I ignore the trivial events of life. I am aloof to the drama of social interaction. Deep feeling about anything besides death, sex, or art is foreign to me.

I've been waiting for a Claire to come trip me up. I've been waiting for someone to drown me in my own drama and make me stupid like a real person. I've been waiting for someone to make me care care deeply about the trivia. I've been waiting for someone to make me feel the pettiest of emotions.

I can count the people who have pulled me into drama on one hand.

Naturally, I pettily miss them.

A few hours later

Eh, I don't know why I'm so obsessed with the past. Fuck that. New plan: something to do with the present/future.

Life is so noisy. I feel yucky.

Warning: bleak truths!

One year ago, I was pretty damn sure I wanted to die. I was pretty sure I was going to do it, too. A steady diet of Joy Division, Nine Inch Nails, and no food, I propose, will give anybody enough delusions of grandeur that he believes he could actually be worthy of death. But no person’s really worthy of death, are they? Not until he’s beautiful. Not until he’s dead.

I don’t know why I’m still here. My certainty about death became ambivalence about life. I’ve faded, fallen, decomposed into something less pure, just as I knew I would.

Before I go on, I’d like to inform anyone reading this that I’m not in danger of killing myself, so please don’t worry about me. The only way I feel myself is when I’m dwelling on despair, so, trust me, this is good for me, and I’m not going anywhere soon. I’m not worthy of death.

Almost two years ago, I wrote the following short little punkish story/prose poemy thing.


Billy decided to die one day. For years he had struggled to reconcile his soul with the external world, and on this day he decided those years would be ended. He would finally dive into the abyss of himself and bask in the black repugnant beauty that had been cancerously growing in upon its own emptiness. He would be whole. He would kill and possess himself.

So he walked to the bridge.

However, also on that bridge that day were, independently: Helen, who decided to escape the sorrow of meaning something to no living person; Kevin, whose brother’s deterioration and death had shown him the absolute truth of the meaninglessness of life; and one with no name on whose head a pigeon shit upon earlier that day and in whom the event stirred the realization that there is no difference at all between shit molecules and self molecules, and who then resolved to equate the molecules of existence with those equally valuable molecules of nonexistence.

So as Billy raised himself to the edge of the bridge of infinite truth his hand brushed against Helen’s, and Helen, in her shock, (for she had noticed no neighbor until this accident,) jumped back into Kevin, who bumped into the nameless one, and all four were stunned for a moment into forgetting to finish the action they had all commenced.

You’re going to kill yourself, too? Billy asked the others.

Yes, they all said, and they proceeded to tell one another how it was they had each come to need to destroy themselves in order to create themselves.

At the end of the tales they all had salted, blurring tears in their eyes. For what else could be the product of discovering like minds?

It’s so wonderful, that we all understand that no one understands! We’re together in our aloneness! They all cried. You make me whole!

And then they entered a great orgy, their chemicals feeding off one another and telling them new truths. Filling their voids with the pink of blood and sex.

And they danced together, the four of them, in a pretty, never-ending waltz, feet sweeping and arms waving blurringly fast.

Of course this led to children. And when the day came for them to tell their eldest son how they had met, he turned away with a young person’s scowl and said, So why don’t you just die already! And they all chuckled at that in their wisdom.

They continued their great orgy-dance for many years until the day came when nature killed them. They were all in very old age by then and the blackness of their youth had been bleached by their years of sunny happiness to the faintest gray.

The nature of their dancing-fucking years had filled them with pretty rainbow colors, but on that day she decided to kill them she pulled all that color right out of them. In the moment before they died, they felt the color sucked from them like marrow and stumbled, choked on that instant for the great colorless void within them. They forgot one another, and in the second before death they each remembered the richness of the black that was within them in their youth. But it was just an ungraspable flighty memory and they were erased by nature from the earth.


Lame, yes. I know. Give me a break; my life’s soundtrack at the time was Nirvana’s In Utero.

But at the time of composition, this story was deeply important to me. So what the hell changed?

And don’t tell me I’ve grown up, because that’ll only depress me.

I think this is a great problem for me in social interactions: I don’t want
to hear what people think I want to hear.

Don’t ever tell me I’ve matured.

Don’t ever tell me I’m pretty.

Don’t ever tell me things are going to get better.

Don't ever tell me that Davey Havok doesn't want to kill himself.

Don’t ever tell me it’s a good thing that I’m alive.

Please.

If you’re reading this, the chances are relatively high that you weren’t going to anyways, because you’re you and you’re reading this far in this depressing depress-blog.

Have I rambled enough for the night? I suppose so. I’d like to re-emphasize that I’m not even in a deeply existential or even emo mood right now. I’m not dying any time soon. I’m only writing about these things hoping to find my core again. I seem to be spinning out of control these days, being known by other people, moving in the real world, being infiltrated by alien causes.

I’m still going through my old rough stories I wrote before I devoted all my time to other writings. I guess my aim is to remember where I was emotionally and psychologically when I wrote them, and to relive that experience of writing them by posting them. It’s entirely different, now; back then, I was silent and beautiful, now I’m giving off static. It feels a little like numbness.

More on the times of one year previous next time, mmkay?

Drawings from the Eye (a poem in prose)

His name is Ben. It says so on his backpack, in red embroidery.

He looks up, turning his head so abruptly that the strands of his hair shake in unison, brushing noisily against his ears. The tension in his face takes over and halts his body so he can focus on looking, all his energy diverted to observation.

The sun and a bird sing in the oak’s branches. The dappled pattern of light and leaves falls upon his arms and face to mask real imperfections with superimposed ones. He snaps away his gaze, severing the taut string of connection, and the bird and the sun are abandoned to flail in nothingness above him.

Ben’s jaw slackens as he replaces vigor with a light smile. He resumes walking up the hill, and picks up a tune. He whistles.

The intensity of his stride compliments the levity of his expression, just as the clean whiteness of his t-shirt matches the ruggedness of his dusty hiking boots, and his elegant height the cropped dry grasses.

He substitutes whistling with singing, “Tell me, Gracie,” then humming.
When he comes to the next bit of shade, under the next oak tree in the hot field of fragrant dryness, he pauses, panting. He turns around to face the path he has covered, then compares it to the distance stretched out before him, up the arid hillside.

He lifts a hand to his face, slowly enough to enjoy every movement of his slender arm’s muscle. When his fingers brush across his jaw, his eyelids traverse their orbs as anguish crosses his expression. A yet invisible bruise there still gives him pain. So he abandons it to brush through his hair with his fingers and take pleasure in its calming smoothness.

Looking up at the hill again, with his hand resting at the base of his neck and the angle of his elbow high in the air, he clears his face. He irons memories, trivialities out. His face becomes the same consistency of tormented beauty as the nature around him.

Until he suddenly dons perplexity. He frowns at the distant sight of a woman who has just surfaced over the horizon created by the hill.
The strange woman, apparently oblivious to her neighbor, does not hesitate before climbing up into the tree at the hill’s summit. Ben moves to correct the woman’s escape from his field of vision, eager eyes preceding his feet on the path up the hill.

After a few minutes’ approach, during which his face is increasingly wrinkled by curiosity and the heat, Ben arrives under the towering oak. He peers up, searching for a moment before finding the woman lying on a thick branch about midway up the tree’s height. The woman is curled around the branch, facedown, with closed eyes.
Ben calls out a soft “Hello?” but there is no reaction of any kind. The woman still has a thumb tucked in about the middle of a book that she is using as a pillow. The other four fingers cover the title written on the book binding, so all Ben can make out is that the author is Hardy.

He watches the woman in the tree. The woman’s story has to be interesting. She looks clean and middle-aged, motherly. And has walked up a significant distance (Ben looks and can’t see any nearby farms or cars) to lie in this particular tree and read until falling asleep with a peaceful smile. Ben wonders if this smile is the habit of a good-natured woman or if it is reserved for this tree.
Looking at the easy smile makes Ben realize the severity of his own frown, and that awareness makes his frown deepen.

He turns, frustrated, and starts down the hill. Not the way he has come, nor the way the woman came from, but perpendicular. The source of his frustration out of sight, he eases up, swinging his arms with thoughts of lighter things.
The ground in this direction soon becomes quite flat, and a few minutes’ idle walking leads Ben to a narrow creek, beneath a group of orange-barked trees.
He sighs and rests his forehead on one tree’s trunk to rest, closing his eyes. He opens them again on an inhale, and takes a judging look at the nearly still water. He holds onto the tree for help easing down to his knees and then crawls to the edge of the gentle creek. He peels off the backpack, setting it to the side, and exposing a sweat-darkened back to the cooling shade. From the side pouch of the bag he pulls out a water bottle and shakes it, to measure its emptiness.
About to dip the opened bottle into the smooth surface, he pauses. Instead of into the water, he pushes the bottle into the dirt at his side, resting his weight on it as he leans further over the stream.

He stares at the water’s surface for several minutes, fascinated by something underneath. At one point he reaches up to brush a lock of hair away from a cheekbone, an elegant dance of fingers and face. Meanwhile he never stops gazing into that shallow water.

Then he suddenly breaks the surface, scooping in to capture water that is subsequently splashed onto his face and rubbed in. He dips the bottle in his right hand into the creek and wipes his wet left hand on his denim-clad thigh. He glances once more at the water, now trembling from his intrusion, and then stands up, knees creaking.

He performs a quick leap across the creek and then a 360-degree turn as he seeks a destination. A quarter of the way into a second circle Ben pauses, peering into the line of glorious-scented trees trailing northward from his resting spot. His eyes narrow at the idea of something hidden within that grove, but his attention is distracted by a flash of red on a bird flying in the other direction.

Having discovered a sufficient motive, Ben marches towards the few black specks of black and red in the patch of taller grasses, intending to lie down and bask in the calls and color-flashes of his favorite bird.

But when he drops his backpack at the border of the taller grasses, he straightens, sternly gazing at the convulsing sobs of the birds. His face rains upon the ground beneath him as he slowly folds into thirds, in a child-like pose, and his arms shake from the intensity of his fists.

Ben silently heaves in anguish while the birds give voice to his sorrow and his tears imprint the dirt with his sincerity.

He sobs for minutes, continually, evenly. It is never going to stop, and the pain radiates from his form to taint everything around him with dark.

I feel his emotion and his need for comforting human contact, read it in the lines of his shaking form, his aching breaths that express a loneliness too vast and deep to be mapped by words. I approach.

“I just want you to know,” I began gently, to allow my words to sink in, not startle, “I think you are perfect.”

Ben subdues his sobs, listening and slowly sitting up and turning his head. His eyes of glass are finally upon me, and I look through them to the beautiful depths of his pain, which re-inspires my sympathizing tongue.

“I feel you, Ben. I…want to reassure you, to fill you with my understanding. I see how the beauty of…everything hurts you. I know the pain of uncontainable beauty, and I know you, that you, feel this too.”

He stands slowly, eyes fixed on me. The path of his remaining tears shifts when he opens his mouth, but he does not speak.

“I just want you to know, to really know, that you are beautiful, and perfect.”
I close my eyes briefly in the intensity of my expression. When I open them again, I see the reflection of my own face in the surface of his eyes.

I lift a hand towards him. But his forehead transforms into a maze of furrows in the moment before he reaches down for his bag and runs away from me into the tall grass. He moves briskly backwards for a couple of seconds, frowning at me, before turning away from me in flight. My hand still, extended, I watch him fade into the grasses.