My Offerings to Thee, O Wise and Powerful Internet

All the things clamouring around inside my head fighting to get out get crammed onto this page instead. Saves space where it's needed most, right?

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Location: Burnaby, british columbia, Canada

everything written or spoken about a person is merely a single facet of a very complex gem that we rarely ever even get a proper glimpse of.

Thursday, July 14, 2011

too drunk to make any sense

or am i? What is the dividing line, that magical barrier that one cannot cross without sacrificing the ability to communicate? Do i even require such a badge, that of standards? surely the truly dedicated, the deliciously hardcore, will accept and absorb this message, this communique.
Here i sit, squat, rest in repose. while the world turns around me, while existence plays out in tones of clarity and beauty and wonder. Doomed am i, perhaps, to squander what wicked energy I've absorbed on fruitless vanity and decadent squalor? Is squalor even a word? Yes, children, I sit, here atop a throne of ridiculous concepts, of impossible indulgences, attempting to construct something out of nothing more than vapours and bad ideas. to be continued my sires, my offspring, my darlings.....

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

So here we are, or are we? Questions concerning the legitimate status of our existence are more or less par for the course at this point. I've long since abandoned any hope of answering the question of why. From what I can tell, the game is rigged. We comprise not only both teams, but the referee and the audience and the announcers as well. Purpose and meaning are not something handed down to us from on high. They are ours to craft, from whatever raw materials we can assemble. Human beings are basically empty. what if nothing fills that void? what if our brains simply produce a chemical that allows us to feel desire, and whatever we accumulate, physical or emotional or otherwise, can't prevent that feeling from returning?
If this path of logic leads to truth, then what exactly is the point of our obsessive collecting? Are we not merely feeding a deeply rooted addiction, something given sanction by every major aspect of our society?

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

What little capacity I still retain for honest emotional expression is in danger of slipping away. I've been doing what I do best. Carefully burying all that I've uncovered, blocking and burdening any progress I've been able to make. In the wake of a negative experience, one with long-term repercussions on my psyche, I simply force myself into a state of blunt contentedness. I run, I hide, I distance myself from the problem and the area of my mind that allowed the problem to occur in the first place.
I guess the point is that I feel really grey and gross right now. I think I'm just at a place that craves human interaction on even a really basic, fundamental level.

Monday, December 07, 2009

I remember him, he had many different names. He was very thin, pale white skin, with pitch black eyes. They swam with phosphorous green, it played over dark rooms like a children's toy at night. He never told me anything about himself, like how old he was, or where he was from. I remember he came back from some late night venture one time, he had dark stains like blood all over his clothes. I asked if it was his, he said some of it was. But when he took off his shirt, there were no marks on his body of any kind. I guess, maybe he lied to me. But about what? What did he do at night? What was he looking for? Maybe a night job. It'd be impossible to get regular work with eyes like that. I don't know...
Maybe he's the villain.

I'd been tracking this one for years. He would commit some horrible atrocity, make every headline for a week, and then vanish. Every time, eyewitness accounts would prove useless. People would either see nothing at all, or some ghastly bogeyman from the depths of their nightmares. The only connection between crimes was the crime scenes themselves. Bodies pasted to walls, ceilings, impaled on light fixtures, occasionally scattered to a fine mist over a thirty foot radius. It was horror on an utterly baffling level.
One woman lucky enough to survive an attack staged two years ago was now locked up in an asylum. She did nothing but write on the walls, repeatedly chronicling her trauma in a shaky, childish script.
She had been a bank teller, a lifetime ago. The attack had commenced without any warning, any sign of danger. He walked in during the busiest hour of the week, on a Friday afternoon, and began his grim work. No requests for money or valuables were made. He took no hostages, and had only allowed her to survive as a witness, to tell others what she had saw.
She couldn't communicate with anyone anymore, screaming until her throat went hoarse every time she had a visitor to her cell. The walls were covered with crayon and felt marker, smudged and dirty and crude. Her hands and face were that of a terrified child's caught scribbling on the kitchen floor.
I had visited her once, months after the attack. The attendants had to sedate her in order for me to gain entrance to the room. Without her cooperation, I'd been forced to piece the story together from the walls. The look of horror frozen on her face, even while comatose from the drugs, had convinced me never to go back. She was the only living witness to his crimes.
After every attack, he disappeared. In the beginning, he had only surfaced to strike once every six to eight months. A few people at an empty restaurant, two men at a convenience store, little strikes into the civilized world. The murders always committed in the same mysterious fashion, like he had forced them apart from the inside. Sometimes the trauma came from sudden contact with walls or ceilings at high speeds, but it was always in a completely impossible fashion.
Then, a year ago, the attacks began to grow more frequent, with locations more and more public being hit almost once a month. I was beginning to lose hope of ever seeing him, when I finally got a tip. An old man running a curiosity shop in the southeast quarter.
"You are looking for someone, correct?" He piped up, moments after I had wandered in. I had heard in a bar down the street that this place had answers to unusual questions. I paused, an old stone statue of a demon still in both hands.
"that's right. How'd you guess?" I put the statue down, my interest piqued. He picked up a long wooden pipe and lit it, inhaling deeply.
"You have that look in your eyes. Are you sure you want to find this man?" He looked up from the pipe, smoke trailing from his mouth and nose.
"Very sure."
His eyes narrowed. "Success in this case is almost certainly going to mean death. You understand that, don't you?"
I walked closer to the counter, opening my coat enough to show off the long-barreled .45 at my hip. The ivory grip was barely visible in the shop's low light.
"I know what I'm getting into, old man."
He laughed then, long and loud, slapping the counter with one hand.
"Good! Good, young man! You hold fire within to liven the loneliest hearth!" He leaned a little closer, his voice dropping almost to a whisper, charged and serious. "If you're certain of your path, you are definitely going to need a little help." He turned around, walking slowly to a shelf on the back wall. He arrived at a small metal box, dull, gray with age. Lifting it with both hands, he walked back to the counter.
"This is a weapon my friends and I built, a lifetime ago. It glows from within, whenever his kind are near." He opened the box, turning it towards me. It was the hilt and the handle of a sword. Simple and economic in design, about the length of my palm, and wrapped in red leather.
"Will you accept it?" He pushed it towards me slightly.
I paused, my hand hovering over the box's open lid.
"His kind?"
He cleared his throat. "deadwalkers. More common occurrence than you might believe. My colleagues have been hunting them for generations." He pulled a pendant out from his shirt. It was the same dull metal as the sword hilt, a simple sphere with one line dividing it neatly in two.
"We act not as the last, but the only line of defense against the beasts, the wolves at our gates." He placed the pendant back in his shirt, his movements calm and slow. "They are cursed to use their latent abilities, to draw from this world and stave off descent into the next, or die."

Saturday, November 14, 2009

so there's that.

I'm in a pretty bad place right now. Mostly because my girlfriend dumped me last night. Yes, it's a fairly raw deal, and I'm pretty choked up about it. She says she has unresolved issues regarding her previous boyfriend, and in order to deal with these issues, she's going to go it alone for some indeterminate amount of time. Whatever. I guess because she's done everything significant in her life on her own, she feels this can't be the exception. Whatever I said was ultimately meaningless. Had I been the best boyfriend on earth, it would have spurned her even more furiously to dump me. She's convinced that this is something she must do herself, she's too terrified of opening up to other people to break in front of me. I personally think that kind of trust is important. Like maybe if you really plan on getting married some day, like the least you could fucking do would be to maybe open up to that person a little bit. I just don't understand how being alone will help you at all in developing this ability to trust, you'd think isolation would actually be detrimental to your fucking progress, but hey what do i know?

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

tree stories (b)

Or maybe the setting's too rustic. Something more modern, perhaps?

-So tell me about these dreams you have.
(pausing to light a cigarette)
-Trees, man. The dreams are all about trees.
-Like a nightmare? Massive redwoods and oaks and pines lumbering through valleys to dismember you sort of thing?
-No, man. Nothing like that. I'm not leaving out any crucial plot elements when I say the dreams are about trees. That's literally it, man. Just trees.
-Are you seeing multiple kinds of trees? Can you identify them at all?
(takes a long drag)
-what? No, of course not. Look, my dad wasn't like in the forestry business or any obvious shit like that. I'm rooted in this city, here. Have been my whole damn life.
-Maybe that's part of it. Maybe you long to get back to nature. It could be a, you know, sub-conscious desire or something.
-I have no idea. I figured the dreams would get more interesting, but it's pretty much been trees for the last maybe five years or so.
-How often do you have these dreams?
-More or less every night, man.
-....
-....
-Weird shit, huh? Look, thanks for the drags, man.
-... No problem.

John had been in

Monday, September 14, 2009

work in progress.

I am dreaming, taking steps like stone through jelly, glacial and stiff. The passerby are moving the same way, never seeing one another, held in place solely by my fascination. Or perhaps they too are trapped in strange dreams of their own. My pulse radiates outward, causing the sidewalks, the bricks and steel and mortar, to breathe with me. The clouds overhead breathe faster as they dissipate, the new blue of the skies above breaking the chains that bind me to the streets. I'm pulled away, everything blurring and streaking into a solid mass of wind and noise. The sun, once a far off reminder of time's march, now greets me anew. I tumble and roll through clouds tall as skyscrapers, wet and shivering with moisture, with rushing air. My clothes grow stiff with new ice, my left side is covered like it snowed last night. I turn full, straighten out to a man-sized torpedo, pointing at the distant ground. It's all spinning now, faster then I can track, dirt and stone reaching up to embrace me. The winds have cut lines of force into my face, pain like racing stripes tracks along my sides. Then there's that brief moment, one second before impact, that holds everything still. My mind doesn't know how to recreate this meeting. It feels like I might stay here forever, drifting in stasis above the last thing I see, when I wake up.

The underside of my bed sharpens into focus. Familiar scratches and grooves decorate the heavy wooden frame. The black and white shoebox remains at its station, gathering dust. A small pile of shirts and socks is pushed against the darkest corner. There is a fan shape around me where dust will not gather. I have not woken up in my bed for almost two years. My alarm clock is the only light in the room. It reads a flashing 4:57. The flash is another pulse, a presence in my room that breathes with me. I push aside one corner of the curtains, peeking out into the city. The sun will remain a figment of my dreams, it seems. The daily ritual completed, I turn back to the cold shelter of my apartment. Most of my friends stopped dreaming about the sun a long time ago, but some nights I wake up feeling it on my face, still. That one moment when I break the clouds and face the day star head on, it stays with me, I cling to it like a nun to her rosary of wood and scented oils. My friends and I, we stopped even talking about the skies almost a year ago. Like a son or daughter lost in battle, it's too disheartening to discuss openly.

The train ride to work is a crush, gray faces suspended above dusted overcoats and scarves, almost a hundred to a car. No one moves until the doors slide open, a soft rushing sound buried in the stomping of work boots and heels. A voice too polite to be real announces our arrival at station thirty two. The air that meets us at the door is stale and cold. Second in my dreams to the sun is wind. Only at these doors, dead air meeting dead air, do I remember the fleeting sensation of winds.

Fast forward to my cube, cold gray walls, gunmetal floor, a ceiling that brushes my scalp. Hands hook into my terminal, a lover's embrace between man and machine. Automatically, I am linked to miles of fiber optics, currents rushing to connect with points all over the building, all across the city, the globe. My seat shoves forward, sandwiching my prone body between it and the terminal. i can feel my eyes water already, light ebbing out from the porous gel that acts as the visual interface. A sedative finds its way inside, and the day is gone. The "work" day ends with the same rude shock, being dumped into a massive lobby with all of my coworkers. The floors are lined with a foam that feels too fleshy as you lie on it. We stumble out in droves, some of us unable to walk, still disoriented from the dream that is our work day. A lot of people become insomniacs after taking this job. Natural sleep impossible once the chemicals become a part of your work routine.