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?