My lioness is a playful thing, really. I felt like a prey at first, while she dangled away and I watched her turn her back, only to turn back around and lunge at me. It was scary, the first time her claws pierced my skin, but then I played along and you know, blood only looks like blood if you’re not really watching.
The pain she deals isn’t really pain at all, not after she starts covering the wounds with kisses. What scares me the most isn’t really her power to destroy me, but the clean, disinfectant licks that follow. There’s something soothing about taking this break from any and all afflictions.
And then I stop being a prey. Thick tufts of fur break through my mind and I become something else entirely. After we tumble a few turns in the sand, completely oblivious to the machinations of the burning village you call society, I’m struck by an epiphany. We may just be an inch too happy for it to last.
She doesn’t really get affectionate before she claws me, but perhaps in time, she’ll learn. If there’s anything I know, it’s that whatever rules life has in store for you, they break and bend if you want something bad enough. Besides, I’m pretty sure you have to get a few scars if you want to earn love from such a deadly creature. It’s strength and endurance and a calm mind if you want a dance this sharp to end well.
But I’m coming along nicely. I get something so much better in return – my vision hollows, I feel free from whatever anchors choke me from a fading past. As she runs wild, I learn to trample and sprint and dart through dunes I’d normally be slowed down by. In the end, I have her pinned down and I dive deep into those leaf-shaped eyes and almost drown in the intoxicating howl of prevail.
I'll always try to remember I was there, if only for the sake of argument.
It’s the cruelest of cruelties, to hope that even someone as worthless as me can share an orange sky moment with someone else, so complementarily pure. That even below the beastlies of natures, Nature can shape a smile in the dirt. That something she says is so wrong can feel so right?
Of course it’s cruel, it’s so cruel I pour a glass of alcohol on top of an already full one, drowning the table and miraculously not shortcircuiting this keyboard into a mass of useless plastic. The fact that I’m not getting bolted could mean, to a more troubled mind (or my admittedly drunken one) that there’s a string of fate, or something similarly stupid.
If there’s somekind of a God, I figure, he wants me to write this. He can also suck my dick, here and now, at this crossroads of the infinite flesh failures.
It feels as if were yesterday when we were reciting poetry to one another and grinning in the car, or tumbling in the sand or crushing our oh-so-different skins against one another. The time since we last kissed or made out or she told me how she was born with this great need for affection and giving affection, it’s compressed and crushed into nothingness by the severals gallons of booze, tears and lost memories I call last night.
Because you see, I was almost there. I was so close to feeling OK, I felt OK in anticipation.
And that’s just stupid. My friend Dan asks me, while he’s picking up the laundry:
“How long has it been since you last heard from her?”
“Two days.”
“And you actually think you can lose a girl forever in just two days?”
I retort retardedly, shaking a glass of wine like it wasn’t filled to the brim with sulphites:
“No you dumbass, it just takes an instant.”
And then I drink. And I pour another one, dissolving my short term memory as well as my emotions and I feel barren and I forget everything until I get dragged into another “friends-want-to-fix-you-but-they-can’t” conversation:
Lexy: Do you really think alcohol can solve your issues?
Me: It’s not meant to solve them, it’s meant to eclipse them.
And it does. Every time I see the IKEA label shaped by the glass flux draining into my open mouth, I think to myself:
“Shit. I need more.”
So it’s about two bottles now, and counting. I’m surprised I can spell, then again I arrogantly submit to myself that shit – I probably have more of a clever, dry brain in this state than most of you have while sober. So fuck you. And then I pour more, because really, until you pass out, you’re still going to feel pain, if only a little.
All I can do at this pitfall in time is close my eyes and picture her delicate features, sad, catlike eyes and heartshaped lips and fool myself that she’s somewhere out there and that it’s OK if I stay away and things are OK for her. How much of an asshole would I be to try to pull her into this maelstrom of misery? I’d be like everyone else then.
Because really, when I think of planet Earth, and if, hipothetically, assholes could fly, the whole planet would be one big fucking airport.
I try to call her, but I can’t. Partly because I just dropped my phone in the toilet bowl, and partly because I can’t even dial her number and partly because I think of how lame the upcoming conversation would be. But mostly because I realise that by now, she associates me with everything that is bad and wrong about the human race. And there’s plenty. It’s guys that me that make it so hard for guys like you to get laid with sensitive girls. They just lost their faith in guys altogether.
You’re welcome.
But no, really, if it’s any consolation, you should know that I’m not indifferent to things. In fact, I swear it, by this fine cheap wine I’m about to drown myself in, we are not soulless. People like me get the first blood in the skirmish.
People like me bleed too. It’s just that people like me, much like people like you, don’t like to bleed. The difference is that while people like you stop the hemmorhage with bandages, antibiotics and the caring arms of their loved ones, people like me call a shady dealer, like I’m doing now, phone freshly pulled out of a piss-filled toilet bowl and carefully dried with an electric hairdrier, and moan:
“I need something.”
“Sure man. What can I help you with?”
“Nothing less than watermelon will cut it.”
And by watermelon we mean the warmest blanket in the world. The hardest aenesthetic the streets will give you. The big H. Morphine diacetate. Intravenously numbing to those hard of mind and weak of spirit, like myself.
I will henceforth medicate myself against the blunt realisation that I fell in love with the perfect girl and then lost her.
I sip another inch of whiskey before I get eyeslapped by a nipple.
Strippers are more or less hookers in their headquarters. They’re the cynical, miserable, expensive coinflip of the game some call love.
I’m a serial loser at that game so when she asks me for another whiskey I go
“fuck off.”
Of course, she thinks I’m cute. That’s partly because sure, I’m not half as bad looking as the people who actually need to visit a strip joint and partly because she wants to squeeze me for all my money.
See, you’re not getting laid if you buy a stripper a drink. Not even if she likes you. Oh no. You might settle at the end of her shift but that’s gonna cost you extra. Unless you’re that mythical guy who’s so slick he can get them for free (chances are you’re not), you’re going to pay a full hooker price after buying her a few drinks and pretending like you’re not utterly disgusted with the thought that she’s there, week in, week out, rubbing wet panties against a metal rod for the delight of the drooling working man who spends his hard-earned money on his standard 3AM pretend boner.
Street hookers are easier. You almost never see their clientele and it’s an upfront deal most of the time. In a way, it’s cleaner. Then again, I’m not here to fuck these broads. I wouldn’t pay for something like that – not because I’m cheap, but because if I want to throw money away on empty promises and expensive illusions, I could always start paying my taxes.
A fat and greasy figure stuffs a fat, generous bill in one of the girls’ panties, making sure to tickle her pubes just enough to get some shiny sweat on his nails when he pulls his hand out. In case you didn’t know, strippers stuff their tips into their underwear so their bosses won’t take it away when they finish working. I mean, those guys know better, unlike the depraved fools who clap when one of the girls rubs her oily tits with sketchy sensual gestures. I catch a glimpse of a dude getting a lap dance with his wedding ring clasped around her butt cheek. He’s jonesing for what his wife could never give him.
But that’s not me. She moves on to me and suggestively rubs her thumb against her index finger to suggest payment. So when I tell her to fuck off again, she meows and bats her eyelashes for a while before giving up. It’s half past pathetic.
What I like about strippers is not their acting – you can only fall for that if you really, really want to or you’re really, really dumb. You can’t act stuff like romance when you’re putting up a show for the desperate and the alone, because acting is about planting a new seed, not sucking the pollen that’s already there. I don’t even like getting lapdances. What I like about strippers is their pole dancing.
If you get to see a good pole dance, it’s like seeing good ballet. Actually, pole dancing doesn’t even come from the slums of decadent pay-per-view adventures of the drunken burgeois, but the circus.
So as I’m watching her spin and her panties fly like a boomerang and land straight into the ice bowl, I’m not thinking – she’s Whoever the Hooker with a Motion Promo and slippery clothes. I’m thinking she’s an artist. For two minutes there, she spins and she spreads her legs and does a vertical flip with no hands and it all reminds me of a suave acrobat fairy.
For a minute there, it’s not that I’d want to hit her like a locomotive – unlike every other male with a pulse on the couches around me. It’s about her waving her magic wand of a body and it doesn’t matter that she’s probably got more germs than a Bangkok public toilet, because for a minute I forget that and she’s just a silhouette performing for my eyes and my eyes alone.
And I know this because while all the other pairs of eyes are wet with greed and lust, zoomed in on her boobs and her ass and her fat, custom lips, I’m engulfed in a strange, blind admiration that makes me wish I didn’t have to come here to see this.
I wish I knew a girl who did it as a hobby and saw the spectacle without hunting down the naive and the generous. I wish acrobats were in town. I wish the drinks weren’t this goddamn expensive and I wish I didn’t have to pass through a redlit hallway to get to this show.
But I don’t, so I stay and sigh and when she’s done, the thin female figure I had earlier told to fuck off whispers in my ear that she likes me. I’m not seeing the dance anymore so she’s back to being a drinkmagnet and I’m back to being bitter.
Beauty and art don’t last much in this world, and when they do, it just serves to emphasize how hopelessly you have to dig for it and how rare and improbable it is. But without that, the world would be made of rich drones jonesing for hot callgirls and hot callgirls jonesing for rich drones.
The more urban it gets, the more blurry, the more colorful, the more initials and less descriptive. Oh man I love every second of this.
Things blur in. Blur out. It’s like staring through a caleidoscope. A pair of tits staring me in my, dilated, blown-out, strung-out eyes. Then they fade and we dance for a few hours and I turn into a fucking waterfall by the time I even realise I start sweating. It all whirls into the bathroom and I don’t ask for her name when she unzips my fly and starts keying her number on my phone and she’s got the perfect pair of breasts man, I mean, alright, she looks like she’s maybe five years older than me but about five million times hotter than anything I ever hit.
And while she’s down there, vacuuming my soul through her narrowing lips I’m thinking: “I really should stop doing this shit.”
I’m getting blown in a really uncomfortable club bathroom and all I can think of is an inventory of everything I did in the past three hours. I’m smiling – no – grinning- but beneath my grin I’m actually clenching my teeth really tightly. And sure, that’s because of the happy pills I took but it’s mostly because I’m really, really dissapointed in myself.
I’m getting waves and waves of heat and I cum all over her face and I’m laughing like a maniac and you can picture it – eyes blown out of their orbits, and it’s the most wonderful feeling in the world, followed abruptly by the absolute worst loneliness and despair you can picture. Which is why, as she’s wiping away the thick, white cream decorating her face with the back of her hand, she finds the process eased by warm drips falling from above.
I’m crying. I’m really crying, and cackling with a grotesque bass and I feel like the loneliest, most broken thing in the world, until she holds me really close and my rythmic dementia gets silenced by her almost maternal shush.
“Everything is all right.”
“No, you don’t get it. It’s not all right. I don’t even know who you are.”
I swallow a bulge of nausea and I go on:
“–but I need you. I really really really do. Because without you I feel like I’m back in my childhood when my mom wasn’t there. Or back in my afterteens, when the girl I put four years and everything I thought I meant wasn’t there and she was just falling for that douche with perfect gums and a perfect body and a perfect life working on the perfect Porsche. I’m the most pathetic form of life ever to have lived on this planet, no wonder everyone dumps me for the perfect fix of a perfect life. I mean, what can I offer? A few cheap thrills, a few E pills, but after the smoke clears out, I’m a broken twenty-three year old sharing a flat with four other people who despise me and think I’m a wreck. Because I am.
I’m damaged goods, probably beyond repair, and that’s probably why I need you so much right now. Because in a half an hour, when I get home and shower and start putting this shit up on the Internet for all the world to see how absolutely gigantic a failure I am, I’ll still think that I could have fallen in love in a dirty club bathroom with a girl who’s name I didn’t even get. Knowing that, much like every other woman before her, she just wiped her mouth and vanished as soon as something better came along.”
I’m really really tired and I let her go and I rush out and I get into a cab and I get home and start typing away, knowing that all I have to look forward to is a succession of being held tightly then abandoned.
But hell, at least I’m smiling through all of this. Really. Because the truth is, I wasn’t ever owed anything. “Man up” I tell myself “there’s nothing wrong with being alone. Everybody is.”
This journey, much like any other journey, starts with a single step. I don’t know why they still say that.
It’s Friday evening, I check my watch, it’s thirty two past seven and I’m stuffing my stuff into my backpack and choking some clothes under my elbow. My flatmate’s name is Shummes and he’s all excited cause he gets to bang his hotter than average girlfriend for two days straight while, I imagine him imagining, I’m probably puking my guts out at some freak party on the other side of the country.
I let him relish in his enthusiasm because quite honestly I can’t wait to get the fuck out of here. Funny, isn’t it? I couldn’t wait to get here last time I wasn’t actually here. I’m starting to get the feeling I have Perpetual Dissapointment Syndrome and another feeling right afterwards that strongly suggests such a condition might actually exist. If I’m wrong, I wonder if I can coin it PDS when they invent it.
He’s like “You’re gonna be late, homie.” And I’m like “just one more thing, bro. One thing left to do…”
I disappear into my room and snort a fat bump and run outside, brofisting Shummes and light a smoke and shapes become sharper as I slide into a cab and start ordering the driver around like I’m Napoleon and he’s the guy who wiped Napoleon’s ass. My pupils widen like I’m a cat staring at a bullet when I check the time on my phone’s display mainly because I’m spun as fuck and secondly because it’s something like four past seven and my train leaves six minutes from now.
A million drugs later, I’m on my friend’s couch and Fynn plays Battlefield to my right while Allister says from the left
“It’s over 9000.”
Fynn continues:
“Definitely over 9000.”
Jean concludes:
“No doubt about it. Over 9000 penises.”
Fynn concurs:
“Jean is correct.”
I’m trying to download something but I forget what exactly I only recall they said something about “over 9000”. An angel calls and I answer and I’m like “Thanks babe, I got this image in my head like you’re supposed to save me or some shit.”
The angel says on a kinky, smooth operator voice: “I can be your superhero and you can be my sweet damsel in distress as long as I get to wear my yellow spandex suit that really brings out my boobs.”
I am become a carnival of starving lions. They’re not sure what color my eyes are, but they paint me blind. Then they say I’m no good anymore, like a broken toy that doesn’t bring in any joy to anyone else.
They look at me like I just rest on the shelf, coils springing out the sides, stitches open, shoes lost in the sandbox.
They would look the other way if I confronted them about it. So I don’t, and I tell myself “remember you don’t really care”. People are poison.
And well, the other poison is poison too. Give everything up. The only way to win is not to play the game.
The junkie tilts his head back and dies.
Rest.
And from the ashes come s a clean paradigm: to live as if it never happened. They won’t notice.
But she will. In the land of dope fiends, the clean behemoth is king. They won’t crown him. But she will.
The world may never be mine, but if the poison washes out, she will.
She scoffs “just fucking do it, stop rationalizing.”
She’s right. I get distracted by the need to argument. Like now “some people just want to know there’s a person behind that wall of text.”
I deflect “Some don’t.”
Arching the edges of her mouth like a wild cat prowling, my friend retorts “Why do you care? You’re not forcing them to read and we both know you’re not an egomaniac.”
I’d say Maybe I am, but in the end, she’s right. If it saves a pedantic, conceited speech every time someone ponders why I am who I am, let’s sum it up on a page and skip the explanations.
So I made a Me? page for the benefit of absolutely no one.
Oh and these are my latest doodles worth posting, studies of various intent, and I feel like I’m taking a small step forward with every sketch. But I’ve been wrong before.
Reply: Really. I’m not the first to say this, though I’m confident that if I get one person to get off their asses and stop wallowing in self-pity and gross quasi-justification, I haven’t written this in vain. Unless you’re talking about a singing voice, which has more to do with your laringae than an innate abstract brain piece. Or Ron Jeremy’s cock. Who may or may not have brushed your mom’s teeth on several occasions. Or these people, who may or may not be created in Aperture Science Labs.
These people eat, fuck, piss, talk, smile, cry, get dumped just like you and me. There’s utterly no innate supernova fueling their mindblasting skills. If you ask me, it’s this: a shitplanet of hardwork, a lifetime of passion and the good fortune of being raised in environments that promoted their respective professions.
Your reaction: Passion? What is this “passion” you speak of?
It’s loving what you do, continuing to do it against all odds, social norms, financial strains and the ridicule of your peers. Passion exists – it is the most beautiful form of madness.
You: Alrite, wat do?
Reply: So let’s assume, just for a minute, that you’re not a vain, liberal troglodyte blaming nature for your mediocrity. Ready? Alright, I’ll give you a minute. Come on, it shouldn’t be that big a leap. And even if it is, you don’t need talent to play pretend. Imagination is something anyone can tap into (Alcohol prerequisites vary depending on subject.)
There we go. Now: pick up a pencil, grab a piece of paper. Write your name on it. Done? Fine, I’ll wait. Great. Can you read it? Awesome! Congratulations, you are now certified pro artist potential.
Invest ten thousand hours (cca 10 years into anything and you can be the dumbest form of life on the planet (a sports commentator, a politician, a full-time blogger or a cop) and you’ll still excel. Especially since you’re not doing anything with your life in those rare, retarded almost hopeless cases.
Your reaction: So then why did my parents lie to me? My friends? Everyone says I’m talented, for I use fluffeh werds, syntagms and expressions I pick up in pubs and label as my own on Facebook while nobody with a job really gives a shit.I CAN WRIET! I HAS TALLENT GDAMIT! AND 700 FRENDS.
Reply: How many of those “friends” have you shared an hour with this year?
You: I HAS TALENT MOTHERFUCKER YOU CAN’T MAKE ME CRY!!!!
Truth: No. No you don’t. No such thing. Walk into God’s personal living quarters and you’ll find an empty motel room.
You’re the same snappy picklesniffer you were yesterday, except you have one less day to live. So sit back, free your mind and burn your self-importance. Each minute you spend feeding your ego means one minute of soul starvation.
You see, people are sheep. Easily amused, trend-hungry fashionistas in the majority of cases. The fact that you probably don’t know jack about samsara, twentieth century blues, the mocking laughter of the abyss or that this phrase was a Filth reference stands as solid proof that you were raised in a shallow, one-dimensional manner by a society that wants you dumbed down not because it’s a premeditated conspiracy, but because society as a whole is potty trained by the kind of gurus and personalities so bursting with dumbfuckery that they need you to form crowds to validate their own pathetic aspirations. Windowlicking, slackjawed, bucktoothed festivals of attention-grabbing televised orgies. Your overlords aren’t evil. They’re mouthbreathers who feed on your time and pump clever-sounding one-liners, generic pop music or TV Shows that would make your eyes bleed if they were only open.
Talent was invented by people who want you to be a consumer. By people who don’t want you to question tradition, the tyranny of democracy (which, in layman’s terms, means popularity equals power). The only freedom you really have is figuring things out for yourself – you don’t have to believe me. Maybe I’m an idiot spewing bullshit. Maybe you’re right.
But before you start bitching about how the Internet allows me to convey you a message this wrong and subversive, try it out. Before you expect me to shut the fuck up, have the backbone to defy your dogma. Prove me wrong and hold public verifiable evidence that “talent” is what’s stopping you from creating great things.
Meanwhile, I’ll get back to my shit. I never set out to be anything, just live creatively and sustain myself just about enough to continue doing what I enjoy. I’m not an artist, a trendsetter, your friend or a public persona. This is not a public service announcement. This is not a fashion statement. This isn’t even a blog, because to be completely honest out of the about 100 daily visitors (spiders, spambots and your mom included), I don’t expect more than three to actually listen to this rant, and I’m not logging anything. You can call this multiplayer WordPad. And I’m more than happy never to be acknowledged as succesful or insightful by the willpower-retardant automatons who call themselves “fans”. But I’m not after me. I’m after you.
So the next time you open an Internet browser, take a second before you check your Facebook updates. Sit a while before typing in toilet humor comedy masked as pseudo-intellectual banter.
It’s your life and it’s ending one click at a time. Before your next RSS feed, TV rerun of Jersey Shore, forum flame war and most of all, blog sensationalism turned social phenomenon, well, just ponder this for a bit: does that shock-value overdose of ignorant propaganda actually convey anything? Or is your bookmark list just a mildly entertaining aimless medium for some angry emo kid to spit out all the spunk he’s been holding in since the thick, erect horse dick of adolescent frustration extended to his mid-twenties and came on his esophagus?
Do you really want to take these people on as role models?
Clarification for people scratching their heads at this point: I’m not saying it’s bad to be entertained, I’m saying it’s bad to be a tool, it’s bad that shallow, one-dimensional hacks are hailed as visionaries and it’s bad that you take it for granted that they have “talent”, “skill” or an IQ made out of more than a digit for that matter.
So I picked up drawing again. Insomnia TV is a livestream with doodling and everything that I learn about digital painting. Basically, it’s me drawing.
And since I’m practicing, you can get a free portrait if you’ve got a webcam. Just add mongoloidpolaroid on Skype.
