do i kill myself or read more comics? we may never know.

ENIGMA ISSUE #5 "Lizards & Ghosts," (1993) by Peter Milligan & Duncan Fegredo

long time no write, not for a lack of anything to say but a lack of ability to fully formulate it into words which other people can understand. i've been existing in a limbo wherein i have no control over my words, over my thoughts, my interpretations. most of my thought processes are ending up in "well you could kill yourself." and my growing pessimism concerning the landscape of things of which i like are seemingly life destroying conclusions for others. i have a very passionate stance concerning the exclusivity image portrayed in their existence is disgusting to me as someone who despises the imagery of royalty. i am not very confident in the future of culture, the machine eats, vomits, eats, and i am anywhere on a sliding scale of "culture is dead everything is dead it's over with" to "nothing matters so whatever."

i think i'm a go-getter in my own way but i'm not loud about it; i try to keep my plans and ideals concealed for my own sake. i love the machine, though, just as much as i hate it. because the line between the two are very slim. the barbie movie is hyper-capitalistic and selling liberal feminism, it's branding is on everything. you're a nimrod for being upset about it, what did you think would happen? ignore the machine. we can't get out of it, just exist and find our own things to entertain ourselves. i hate myself, i love myself. everything is horrible and everything is great. i love the multiplicity of the machine that is beyond our power to conquer, it does such amazing things for us to bask in. gala's where everyone misses the point, failed virtual reality set ups what average 38 users daily, stupid bullshit. just laugh. the revolution isn't coming anytime soon, and it isn't my job to fight it, either. i will not be taking arms against a sea of troubles, it's 107f every day, i'd rather let the tide cool me under the sun. i'm cynical sometimes because it is fashionable, nothing is real because if it is, i die under weight of trauma, i have a cigarette every now and again because i forget to breathe, i mean nothing i say but i believe in it all. i sound very pretentious, but that, too, is fine.

on a less abstract note, i have been recurring dreams paralleling only the gruesome deaths in things such as hellraiser and monstrosities rivalling silent hill. it seems that 22 years of having a less-than-great relationship with your father leads to traumatising dreams about him. in them, he dies every time -- each time a more and more gruesome death. but i'm the only one who can speak to him. the first dream took place in a house made of prickly wood, resembling an all-wood playground which used to exist in san antonio that my father would take me to. it was a sprawling house with many doors and many exits and long hallways, very eastern japanese in it's design. behind one rice-paper sliding door i saw my family discussing where it was my father would be buried.

this is a very real concern of mine. my father's family doesn't have enough money to buy a plot of a land wherein to bury themselves, and i'm terrified that he won't get a burial or a cremation or any of that. i'm terrified of him being displaced in death just as much as he feels displaced in life. the same is to be said for my grandparents on his side.

back to the dream. my grandmother [his mother] was still alive, and the occasion was all very solemn as discussions around death typically are. i was the only one not present at the discussion and as i walked back to what used to be his room, i found him alive with the top of his head removed and a cavernous hole as though drilled occupied the vacuous space where his brain, eyes, and other such innards ought to have been. he was the walking dead and refused to acknowledge that he had died, brushing my questions off. he looked like he was carved out of wood.

the second dream was a bloody mess, directly lifted from the pages of hellraiser comics. skin being pulled from hooks, flaying, mutations, all of this on my father's body. his cigarette burns becoming bulbous like some terry gilliam nightmare and bursting into blood, iron, metal gates, and scalpels. it was horrific. every dream i wake up gasping for breath, pulling at my hair or digging my nails into the bed sheets. what is there to do about that? what does it mean? i don't know. death is a symbol of transition, the numbers i've been seeing, the feathers, this miraculous luck with things that make me so happy, it could only mean something potentially good. it is the horrific, violent nature of those dreams which haunt me. it feels as though i'm seeing my father the way he sees himself, he has always had a skewed sense of self. the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree in some cases. these dreams have kept me awake at night, worried i'll fall into one of these dreams and when i wake up; the dream had come true. and he would be gone. he may have seriously hurt me, but if he dies, i die. "without your shadow, i shake."

outside of these dreams, i have been reading and drawing a lot these days. by reading, i mean various vertigo comics iv become enthralled by. the highlight so far has definitely been peter milligan and duncan fegredo's "engima" which was so beautiful to me it cracked through the tough exterior i'd developed to cope n made my cry. my walls are high, so far up that i can only barely grace my fingertips against the mid-section. i want to slash the concrete tummy of my neurosis and be free again. unfortunately, i'm instead self cannibalizing and falling short, crying every night and feeling empty. sleeping more than usual, unable to think rationally ... just walking the dead.

i thought that going out to a bar with an old friend would help me some, be social, have a few drinks. instead i realised i didn't enjoy it at all and had nothing to say. i had suggested maybe wanting to go home soon, she told me she couldn't stay out past 12, so it seemed to align. when she returned from the bathroom, i think she had taken something, and told me a friend was coming by. so i left. no one, i guess, is really at fault but it did solidify my otherness. blackest sheep of the black sheep? i don't know. it hurts to be alone but even when i ask for somebody to talk to me or put myself out there, something about me is repellant. i'm trying to stay alive, but it's up the hill backwards. sisyphus is not happy.

i love you always forever

free radio harley xoxo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68F5HwpnTDA