13% [chapter 14]

FIRESTARTER


And so it was that your love affair with crystal meth was rekindled like a house of cards on fire and smoldered until it was just a carbon fluke. It became a saving grace because you no longer cared. You could be spun up and in league with projects, theories and ideas for days, weeks, always. You never succumbed to bouts of loneliness because you were too busy cleaning, repairing or organizing some minute shit into the tiniest of enclaves. You bonded with meth, paint brushes and power tools instead of most women and men, on and off, for like, the next fucking decade.


But you don't demonize the drug for being there when you weren't there for yourself. It filled in a space. It occupied a time when you felt empty and heavy and gross and lost. Like good ideas unrealized. Like decent jobs laid off. Like old people crying because they can't remember their children's names. Like analog synths and tube amps trending on ebay. Original movies that need not be remade. Black mayonnaise. Kodachrome color. Super 8. Gone off. Long gone. Then insultingly regurgitated. Retro. Chic. Limp. Stripmined. Razed. It sucked to see history being co-opted by those who could afford to jack up your rent and take take take with an air of careless ease and entitlement. But nowhere near as painful as it was for more than 50 million Native Americans.


Ever so conveniently, your drug supply was now showing up in the form of giant fist sized boulders via your new boyfriend, Evan. Again, you were so low you would have done anyone that night you met him while getting drunk at Zeitgeist. Well, that is to say, you would have done anyone that Actually Managed To Turn You On, which was a complete rarity. Certainly, you never would have guessed that he'd still be hanging out with you the next day. But you also don't blame him for finding such melodramatic humor in watching the sharp arc of your orbit toward this fiendishly pathological habit you both shared over the next few years in close proximity.


Not the healthiest relationship ever, but at least you did feel some flashes of gushy love and deep compassion for him on more than one occassion. So much so, it still surprises you to think on all those amber impacted memories. Which is why you prefer To Not Think About Them. It's easier to concentrate on, and not cry about, what went wrong.


Evan was quirky and pretty fucking hot in his own weird way. Politically aware and musically inclined, he had a curious enthusiasm that was inspiring. Shaved blond head. Bright blue eyes. Hairless bulldog chest. Could keep it up for as long as it was required. Not afraid to go down on a woman. And not totally clueless once he arrived. Which must be honorably mentioned, for that rare oral sex equality that his willingness never belied.
Think: Giovanni Ribisi, tweaked. Uhhhmmgrrrr...right?


Initially, Evan said he loved that you made comix, music and art. But the second he had to take a back seat to the pencil and the Sharpie marker or the Korg Monotribe and the mixing board for a full afternoon or two, he felt neglected sexually. Only 6 weeks into your relationship, he cheated on you. Good to get that outta the way so quick, your favorite dog trick. But you saw it coming BEFORE it happened this time.


The moment you laid eyes on his sunglassed face that morning at your door, your head clearly said knowingly, "the next time you see him, everything is going to be different." He didn't show up that night like he said he would. Hours stewed slowly by. You sat at your drawing board but drew nothing. Just sat there. Randomly, you dug out an old copy of Nirvana's acoustic Lead Belly cover "In the Pines" and listened to it. Over and over and over. Doing line after line after line. Getting progressively angrier, more depressed and crying onto the sketchbook pages that remained mockingly unmarked and white. He finally showed up the next day all teary-eyed, telling you he got really drunk, fucked another woman, and spent the night. Yup. You already knew that. Then you turned around and started drawing again finally.


Sloppily, he offered to bring you some more drugs. He only spoke to your shrugging back. Yeah, ok. You thought this is the best kind of crack whore you could ever hope to be. "Alright, bitch. Bring it!" you snapped as he departed sheepishly. The truer gift was this voice of warning in your head because it was, once again, correct. And you had to celebrate the fact that you could still hear it under so much drug addled sleepless duress.


You soon forgave Evan for fucking someone else. So he cheated on you some more over the years. You knew it every time, yet let it go unconfronted as you had ceased caring what he did with his own dick by then. At least he was still talking to you like a human being, and that was of the utmost importance. You could accept all kinds of sexual deviance up the yin yang, so long as you weren't being spoken to like a dumbass.


He once said, "Every man has a stable. Every Single One."


How can any one woman believe that she means anything substantial to a man, when she's up against the bottomless sexual questing of one entire objectified and furthermore, self-objectifying gender? Unless he sees her as an equal human being, treats her the way he treats his best bro friends and not as a conquest or a trophy to make other men jealous, then it is impossible to ever be anything other than eventual sworn enemies. And Evan agreed. He was understanding, thoughtful and decent. Yet his dick still wandered from one "willing slit" (his definition) to his ex's address constantly. It didn't seem to matter how honest or in love or open you were with him. You would never be enough. So yes, caring became a commodity. Every year, you had a little less and less trust in love's truthfulness left.


Evan called himself a writer but the only writing of his that you ever read were the letters he prolifically wrote to you during those years. Then you read all the letters from his former girlfriends that he wanted to share with you for some strange tweaked out reason. This only made you realize the total futility of your presence in his life. Here were their similar reactions to all the same stories he told them just as he had told you. All the same songs on a mix tape sent to someone else. You saw yourself as simply another name that would be said to the next woman down the line. Erased was any sense of being different from any other interesting cunt he had loved fucking previously. It lost all it's uniqueness, the biological him combined with you; as if on some molecular level, the mixture of 2 specific people could create a sort of atom bomb of social change that found its genesis inside an explosive relationship, affecting all else around it. Like Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, like Yoko Ono and John Lennon, like Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, like Mileva Maric and Alfred Einstein. That looks great written on paper to you for Valentine's Day in his blood, but loses all it's meaning when repeated like spam to every woman who ever bared her breasts to him.


Yes, you were a sucker for that soulmate myth. What woman isn't during a large portion of her child bearing years? It feeds into the operatic fantasies while trapped in that ongoing battle with your own hormonal body; that fight to the death between the womb's attempt to breed and the brain's raging need for independence, respect and liberty.


So how the hell would you know How To Have a Good Healthy Relationship? Your success to failure ratio is a solid 0:100%! Good job! By Jove! But you do know that being in a relationship IS A Job. So get yer head outta the stove and go make me some turkey pot pie, Ho!


Oh, and let's not forget to mention that ravenous animal living between your legs whose impetus to eat fuck and kill only increases exponentially when on amphetamines. Isn't it nice to think that a soulmate would still be there after the 8 ball is all done? Not leave you to wipe up the mess of those liquidy communal expressions of lust that are stuck and crusting over as you come down on your own? Better not come down then. Perhaps the destruction of monogymy's soulmate myth really was for the level best.


It is what it is.


Adopted as a toddler, Evan had managed to locate his biological mother after years of searching for her. You felt it neccessary to warn him that she might not be happy to hear from him. But he waved your pragmatic suggestion aside, and beamed with excitement. Their relationship was initially rebuked by his mother who had never informed her husband
or children of Evan's existence. Evan was crushed. His mother eventually came around, but their relationship remained tentative and strained. He probably felt it was easier to place that disappointment on you, instead of facing the truth of this difficult situation that fell so horrifically short of his long held fantasy filled expectations. You didn't blame him for being upset, but many pointless arguments ensued. You stuck to your guns, saying he was lucky to be raised by people that did love him instead of being treated like shit by his own flesh and blood.


You know someone is not listening to a single word you say when they tell you, "I am so sick of listening to you." No longer could you stand the feel of his skin against you in bed; all gropey, moist, disconnected, overfriendly and available to so many other women and men --yet so unjustifiably mad at you for fucking someone other than him once. Once.


You wanted to take a breather from "the stuff", as Evan so deftly called it. But he just kept bringing it over anyway and chopping that shit up right in front of your face. And when that voice in your head came back and said, "don't ever have children with this man because he will molest them," you were pretty much done. What a horribly cruel joke your life might have become -- it's likely you would've ended up in prison because if anyone, including your husband, ever raped your daughter or son, you would have castrated them.


Evan professed so strongly to be against the antiquated idea of marriage, yet he so quickly married the last woman he was cheating on you with. His opinion must have been as solid as catsick. Oh well. To each his own bowl of hell.


In fact, all of your former boyfriends got married almost immediately after the disaster of you occurred in their lives. Is that a compliment or an insult? Who gives a fuck. Probably had absolutely nothing to do with your narcissistic butt. But, like clockwork, they all contacted you down the road, having contracted that 7 year itch, post wife and kids. They wanted to relive the sexual exploits of their younger days with that crazy bitch that was into sucking dick, anal sex, other women, yadda yadda yadda, it was all ok, except putting them in diapers and playing with their poo. There was a reason you didn't want children. And you certainly did not get off on a man who fantasized about being a baby. More often than not, you'd end up being the man in every situation anyway and you hated that. But hearing from your ex-boyfriends again under this topic of discussion did nothing except depress the fuck outta you. These existential trainwrecks are neither here nor there, ultimately. So why go there? It was for these kinds of thoughts, specifically, that you turned to drugs to annihilate. Into ridiculousness. Black and white. Hard shorts cuts. Like a French movie. Absurd. The choices you made in life were yours to make. No regrets. Only pinched off torpid turds.


You still wanted to be good for something other than just sex. Other than just a jerk.


Long after the end of Evan, you kept his letters bound by a string. A more definitive fate would later bind them together forever better. Along with all the other remnants of all the men, all the women, all the leftover shrouds of hope, of fear, of failed careers, of love rage sex and dope -- Fire.


Disappearred. Up in smoke.


All those years of us being close for nothing but a ghost.




*u can call me ph!*

13% [chapter 8]

POINT OF NO RETURN


Back in LA, it did not take long before that idea of watching the sunset on the ocean was stowed behind the snobbish shoulders of private property holders, over the constant border patrols and beneath the police brutality riots simmering in caustic volitility. It all became too crowded, too cloudless, too crass a concept to bring you any peace of mind. That crap pile that is society kept stealing the spotlight and getting in real beauty's way. So, you soon found yourself back on an eastbound plane.


Adam was persistently urging this return. Apparently, he was not kidding when he said he wanted you to be his wife. But it was difficult to consider his proposal seriously. The moment you were back in his company, he gave you something that would last a lot longer than most marriages do: Herpes. Great. Though you were grateful he didn't give you syphillus or AIDS, you bowed out saying, "Thanks, but no thanks," to the honorary title of being his old maid.


A debilitating fear had formed around this worrisome concept of the wedding dress of chains. Wife just looked like a worse version of the girlfriend role you already so sucked at playing. So again, you failed to achieve any of the love you thought you wanted until it was staring you in the face. But it only resembled death by then. All the joy lightness and vitality of your previous feelings for Adam had dissipated. Now it felt forced obligated and confining, in a really tediously dull and boring way.


Then a distant relative died -- an aunt from your father's obscured family line. She used to call you "devil's spawn" so the thought of her leaving you a parting gift was completely unexpected. She willed you a savings bond that could only be cashed in your name. Therefore you actually received this one and only cash sum of $1200. All other gifts later bestowed upon you from other relatives never made it past your parent's bank account of utter unhidden disdain for the "drifting through life" choices you continually made.


With his head hung low, Adam glared at you resentfully from the station's departure platform. You just giggled, childishly waving Bye Bye from the window of an Amtrak train headed west for San Francisco Bay. You decided you wanted to be a comic book artist and finish college at the Art Institute. This was the new aim in your life spent adrift. At the farthest other end of the country, you felt you'd be safely out of your parent's disapproving reach. "Fuck them," you said, and I agreed.


You had already chosen to live, that much was true. You accepted that there would be a shit ton of work to do, but no fucking clue as to the How To... How to live, how to live with other people, how to live with yourself. So you began with Aldous Huxley's 'The Doors of Perception' in one hand and a bottle of valium, a bag of weed and a bunch of acid hits in the other.


America's various sameness dramatically swayed through the smoking lounge car's window. Night and day cascaded across the hard labored serpentine rails. The lullaby of a rhythmic angelic cradle. Moving from and moving to. In one long continuous 96 hour blur. From black to brown to yellow to green to white to gold and to gray.



*u can call me ph!*

13% [chapter 6]

ROADKILL


A couple weeks after arriving in Los Angeles, you went down to San Diego to visit Richard. He was your first love when you were both high school sophomores in Hightstown, New Jersey. The two of you would often hang out together after school, but he asked you not to act like you knew him in the lunchroom. He was worried how it might look to his upper crust preppie clique, if he were seen hanging out with a weirdo druggie band geek chick. This first love, unrequited, kept you chasing it. Just like that legendary virgin dragon crack hit. Ride the snake. It's a long cold class war bitch.


You wrote scores of letters to Richard over the years. He never replied. Still you kept sending them, just to write it out, that shit that life is all about to people like him and you -- grown up kids who grew up under the willows and toadstools of abuse. It didn't matter that he never wrote back. Though, at the time, you hopelessly hoped that he would. He did tell you much later that he finally caved in to feeling something for you while reading all those hand written pages that he had actually kept in a box under his bed. And that meant the world to you.


He now seemed somewhat amused that you'd even bother to come visit him again from so many miles away. Stepping off the Greyhound bus, his first comment to you was, "You looked better when you were fat." How fucking great is that?


Back in Massachusetts, a couple years before this particular visit, you'd be so wound up after your shift at the mental institution that you were crawling up the walls of your small rented room. Silently, you'd slip out of the house around midnight, pop the clutch in your little silver Toyota Tercel until you were safely down the hill before starting the engine. Then you'd be off to see Richard. He was living in Winsted,
Connecticut. A mere 3 hour drive away. You'd hang out for a little while, maybe have a quick fuck around 4am, then drive back to Burlington before your parents woke up at 8.


The impetus to stay up all night driving was, of course, to be with someone whom you loved. But it later became clear that these repeated roadtrips were really all about the drives themselves. About being alone on and off the major highways. About roaming through the dark craggy forests and foggy moonlit fields. About feeling the immense freedom to cry and sing along to Smiths and Cure songs as much and as loud as you liked. It was therapy. And it was on these solitary night drives that you first began to notice you did not need to be on drugs in order to feel good and alive. All you needed was solitude, music and that long road to motor into the truest version of you that could be derived.


The last quick visit to Richard in Winsted gave you your first pregnancy scare. He said he didn't care. So to save yourself the $300 it was going to cost to get an abortion, you decided it would be cheaper to do all the cocaine acid whiskey weed and pills you could get your hands onto and gluttonously shove that shit into yer face instead of eating any healthy food for the next few weeks. 24 hours before your appointment at the clinic, you successfully miscarried. Your nose bled out almost as much as your confused womb. But your rent got paid that month. And no one was there to bitch at you.


This time, in San Diego, visiting Richard only spawned several huge marguaritas, thankfully. But you were totally unsure of yourself, of why you were here, of what you had hoped to gain by revisiting him and this old wound. Nothing had been discussed about the past. And so nothing but unresolved insecurity, commonly the emotional terrain of youth, filled your pudding of proof. Proof of your inherent unloveability. There was a polite but oddly robotic screw that you gave him on his back porch the following morning. Then, perplexed, you left his place with this weird emptiness of having achieved some great reward. The reward of knowing that There Is No Reward. You spent your last day there wandering along the boardwalk alone, cuddling several cheap beers to liquify this pointless game you had just senselessly played and lost again.


A couple sitting on a beach blanket called out for you to join them. Julie was a white hippie chick from Berekeley. Her long haired Mexican boyfriend was named Jose. He never removed his shades. He scared you, but she seemed harmless enough and lulled you into feeling safe with her flowery blousey she-won't-let-anything-bad-happen-to-me gaze. They poured more booze down your gullible gullet and smoked you out. You all sang a Jimi Hendrix song rather flailingly and laughed cuz Jose pronounced "Joe" without the j sound, so he sang it "Hey Yo" instead. They said more music booze and drugs would be on the way if you went with them back to their place. You agreed, assuming it would be a short walk around the corner. But it was a long hour's drive down several unknown freeways.


Their place was a small dank room in a run down long stay motel. It didn't take long for them to propose a threeway but in your lost stoned drunken and paranoid state, you found this idea grossly depraved. Everything below your neck had grown numb to sensation anyway. And you did not find either one of them sexually attractive at all. Oh well. There goes another fantasy that in reality only turned you off with its utter inability to titillate. Perhaps part of porn's success lies in it's absence of odors, those moist reeks that you
cannot psychologically erase. And, right on cue, as always when combining weed with booze, you puked and just wanted to be left alone with your self-deprecating dismay.


Julie kept saying, "Just check out Jose's beautiful cock." But you were stubbornly unamazed. Frustrated after several failed attempts to fuck you, they agreed to give you a ride back to the boardwalk so you'd quit complaining. Jose's last attempt to grope your tits and grind against your ass was met with more struggling, so your body was tossed out of the van's passenger side door as they drove down the freeway on-ramp.


It had grown dark. Wearing only a pair of ratty cut off shorts, combat boots, and a bathing suit under a thin 'Confusion is Sex' Sonic Youth tshirt, you were totally exposed to the sudden desert chill. You checked yourself. No money except for some small change. No ID, just a slip of paper with Richard's phone number on it. No major injuries. Only some minor cuts and roadrash on your hands and knees from making out with asphalt and gravel. You were glad to be free from Jose and Julie, and made your way toward the highway to hitchhike back to Richard's place. Though, in what direction or how far it was, you could not say.


Coming to a 7 foot tall chain link fence, it took forever to scale the thing. Immediately afterward, you promised yourself to set a personal goal of gaining more upper body strength so as to avoid this kind of fat-assed humiliation during any future attempts to escape. Finally on the freeway, you looked down and found 2 dollars crumpled up in the dirt. Things were looking up. Thumbing it down the breakdown lane, you prayed to not fall prey to a rapist or serial killer out on the hunt for young female strays. Such a contradiction to
the deathwish that had purposefully put you here in harm's way.


About 2 hours passed. A Latino man driving a white pick up truck pulled over. He couldn't speak a word of English but he drove you to the nearest gas station so that you could call Richard on the payphone. Richard translated to the man over the phone where you needed to go. The man then silently drove you for over an hour back to where you had originated. You tried to give him the 2 dollars in your pocket that you found in the dirt. But he just smiled, shaking his head no and drove away.


As you turned toward the familiar basketball court near Richard's back porch, you fell to your dried bloody knees in the soft green grass and thanked the heavens above for crossing paths with the kindness of that unknown man. You made sure to mark this moment should you ever feel tempted to judge any one entire race for the despicable dickheaded actions of one person when another person will perform the most selfless and generous of deeds.


That goes for judging Julie too, which is why, when you saw her several years later walking on Cole Street in SF's Upper Haight, you restrained yourself from charging over there and punching her in her super friendly face. Instead, you thought about all this upper body strength you had since gained.


As for Richard, you still keep in touch with him. And you still feel love for him. In the best and only way you know how to love another person -- from a distance that is safe.



*u can call me ph!*

13% [chapter 4]

LOOSE ANGELS


Nowhere felt as permeated with fake brick wall falsehoods, with the whorrific dull hum of unfulfilled longing, as did LA. Nothing seemed real. And not much was. Except for the people that grew up there. They purely did not give a single solitary fuck about any of that lalaland porniconography bullshit. Mostly because they were too busy working to stay alive. You liked these people because they had real world problems. And they treated you like a real person not an opportunity to get whatever they could get outta you.


But what is there to get from a 23 year old who's already rough trade? From a murky dirty bitch with an unpretty pockmarked face? No money, no honey, and thighs that rub together on most days, even though you were throwing up everything you ate. From some feckless femi-nazi who shoplifts on a regular basis cuz stealing from corporations cheers up that glum, especially when angry and drunk, which is, again, on most days. But you found expensive cheeses much to your taste. That and fruit seemed to be the only foods you could stomach without the constant nauseous pangs of female shame that made you heave into a shape that glamourized near invisibility. Faded, yearning to be erased. Long long before being diagnosed with caeliac's disease --whose symptoms include vomitting, headaches, depression, mood swings, constipation, rashes, dizziness, migraines, diarrhea, seizures, fatigue, distaste. Just from eating wheat. What a fabulously obtuse waste.


This was how you learned how powerful the power of suggestion really was: Keeping steady eye contact and waving a receipt for the one box of tea you had actually purchased in the security officer's face, you held a bag that contained not only the tea, but also blocks of fancy cheese, a carton of orange juice, a box of frozen fried chicken and a fifth of tequilla. You angrily exclaimed with the shrill disgust of a spoiled teenager that he was mistaken for stopping you at the exit. "Look, I have a receipt! GAH!!" And it worked. He cowered without examining the crumpled slip of paper, apologized and let you go.


Decades of poverty induced shoplifting forays keenly attuned you to when you were being watched or suspected. Especially during the holidays, when you'd bring home hauls that surpassed a thousand dollars in worth. You wanted to spread the love and cheer you could not afford, but felt that others deserved.


Those internal signals warned you to stay true to hightened survival intuitions too. "Don't go down that street." "Stay on this side of the door." "Slow down, an animal's going to run into the road at the bottom of this hill." Once, during shop class in New Jersey, it said, "Get up from that stool and come over here to the other side of the room." So you did and stood there fumbling for a second, not sure what to do. A loud snapping sound came from a table saw. Something silvery flew across the room. The sharp circular blade thumped, it's teeth stabbing hard into the wall at chest-level where you sat only moments before. When you were 3, living in Germany, "Setzen, Jetz!" is what that intuitive voice, in German, said. Then something violently shook the chain of the swing you were sitting in. Your father was mowing the lawn behind you when a bolt came loose. The shaking of that chain was the lawnmower blade spinning off and slicing through the air a few inches above you.


If only you would have listened every single time you heard those whispered warnings, then Los Angeles might not represent the City of Utter Failure that it so disasterously means to you these days. But back then, you were still starry-eyed and full of hate. And if a disembodied voice was the only thing that wanted to protect you, you were grateful. It was better than no one. Though you were never sure why you would be worth saving.


Working for minimum wage at the Nuart Theater on Santa Monica Boulevard, you stood in the shadow of a towering Rutger Hauer at the premier of the director's cut of Blade Runner.That did not seem real, but it was Really Fucking Awesome. So was meeting Dennis Hopper as he stared down at some stray drips of red paint below a stairway railing. Rubbing the dried drops with his shoe, he wondered aloud, "Is that blood?" As he would do.


What was not awesome was being completely annoyed by the reoccurring appearance of Christian Slater with his sloppy entourage of rich young white coked up yes-friends. He'd stand there, all fidgety and fuckfaced, demanding free entry to obsessively watch himself on screen and impress everybody. Somehow, even from your lowly position of being a nobody in the box office, this sad arrogance seemed pitifully real. You said no and made him buy tickets at the full price every time. Pffft. Thespians. You saw no skill or craft in his lame imitation of Jack Nicholson.


Who's a critic? Everyone.


You didn't own a car in LA. Back in Boston, walking around with your headphones on was a calming form of exercise, an impoverished necessity to get home from work, but one that you had come to enjoy in some semi-meditative way. However, here in LA, you received much public humiliation for performing this derided activity. People honked, laughed, threw old sneakers at you and screamed, "GET A CAR!" So you turned up the volume on your Loop tape, attempting to drown them out with 'A Gilded Eternity' and just kept walking.


Arriving back at your cousin's apartment on 12th Street in Santa Monica, you tried to eek out some small sense of contentment by smoking a shitload of purple haze. She had agreed to let you stay on her couch until you landed on your feet. But there was no real ground on which to land and you now felt ashamed of using your feet at all.


This feeling of envious disability was exacerbated by the fact that the $200 rent for your cousin's comfortable one bedroom apartment was paid for in full every month by her parents while she was a full time student at UCLA. They also paid her full tuition. Contrast that with this: While staying with your parents in Burlington, Massachusetts, they charged you $200 a month to live in their house while you attended classes at a small art school near Salem and worked at a mental institution near Danvers so that you could afford to pay both the rent and tuition yourself.


Proudly, you brought home one of your first paintings to show your parents, having received an A grade. The assignment was to combine various elements of another artist's work into your own unique vision. You did a variation of Magritte's work and painted a thick colorful cartoonish oil image entitled "A Fish With Toes And Tits Surrounded By Small Multicolored Flying Penises Wearing Bowler Hats." Your father, a frustrated painter himself, was mortified. They had absolutely no intention of ever supporting you in this pursuit of a college education, suggesting you be more like your brother, do something useful and join the military.


This might be why landing on your feet in LA was a bit difficult. You felt legless. And passionately despised every ounce of this demonstrative counter-productive self pity that you were swimming in. So you took to flight instead by getting really fucking high most of the fucking time.


*u can call me ph!*

13% [chapter 3]

GOD IS NO PLACE


Growing up in the military, you were accustomed to moving to different places bi-annually. This made it difficult to form any real lasting relationships with people, always getting torn away from the friends you finally managed to make. In some ways you loved, and in some ways you hated being the new girl again and again.


And in many ways, you wished you could seasonally shed all of your skin like a snake, devour yourself tail first, yet somehow avoid ending up with your head up your own ass, so to speak. Oftener, you'd curl up into a protective armoured ball like a roly poly and just roll away.


So much of a child's life is out of their own control. So much of what they are taught is on the importance of learning how to obey rather than learning how to think for themselves. To have some illusion of control over your own mind and body was the only form of autonymous choice you could fully embrace. This is why you told yourself that it is a decision you make, whether or not you allow yourself to fall in love or go insane.


As a rootless kid, you had formulated the ridiculous paranoic theory that every new town to which you were forced to relocate was just an updated version of the same ten people in the same small place, having been elaborately redecorated while you were all stuck up in the air inside that massive military cargo plane.


Since you and your brother were often the only children on board, the pilots let you sit in the cockpit and gave you lollipops to keep your curious hands occupied. You strained your little necks up to get a good view out the front window. You could see the tops of huge thunderhead clouds as you cruised straight through them instead of passing by alongside. This was one of the most beautifully sublime places you'd ever been to in your entire short life, up there in the boundless sky.


While unpacking moving boxes in Warner Robbins, Georgia, you pretended it was Christmas again and handed out all the wrapped items to other people so they could feign surprise upon opening each new gift of that thing they already owned. Your first day in kindergarten, you said hello in thick German. All the kids gasped and screamed, "Hitler!" But you had no idea what this word meant. It must be something hateful judging by their scowls. So your 5 year old speech patterns quickly shifted into the long slow drawl of an American's southern accent.


In Austin, Texas, a tornado came and blew out all of the windows of the house while your family huddled together in the tiny tiled bathroom, gripping the sink and shuddering. Afterward, you all went for a grateful walk across the flat cracked muddy plains that
seemed to stretch out forever beyond the little grassy fenced in yards. You played with some scorpions and knew you should be afraid of them, but you were not. Nor were you scared when your brother threw down his fishing pole after spotting a huge yellow water moccasin on the river. You grabbed his hand and brought him back to the spot where his pole landed unharmed. Then you made yourself conquer your fear of the high diving board at the public pool. Soon, that new found thrill became an obsession. At 7, you were a drug addict just waiting to happen.


While living on the Greek island of Crete, you saw 'Star Wars' on the big screen in an outdoor 3000 year old ampitheater beneath a bright sea of stars. You rolled around happily in fields of poppy and clover and swam with seahorses urchins stingrays and starfish in the heavenly clear blue Mediterranean. At night, you covered your ears to block out the slaughterhouse sounds of pigs being butchered because they sounded like children screaming. Along the edge of their fence lay scattered dry dead hoofs and horns and snouts. In utter glee, you rode many a wide bellied and very unimpressed donkey. For Easter, a goat was hung by it's feet in an olive tree and left to rot for 2 weeks. You inspected it's decomposition daily. At Knossos Palace, you sat in the King's throne but knew it really belonged to the Queen. You also wondered if Jesus was a time traveller from the future, where we all know how to heal each other already, and that he was stuck here, keenly aware of exactly what he had to stoically go through in order for the Piscean Age to unfold in the inevitably brutal and neccessarily ignorant way that it should. You found an Ankh ring on the village street and wore it even though it turned your finger green. While watching an opulent wedding from the kid's table, it made you cry. This lavish act of ceremony glimmered so sweetly in your 9 year old mind.


Ultimately, it was great for your mental health to have lived in so many different places growing up. You were especially grateful to have been exposed to the ancient Celtic, Minoan and Egyptian cultures, where, with the clear third eye of a child, you could sense the presence of memories from people that passed eons ago. These emotional but ordinary scenes
from older civilizations felt far more expansive and equalitarian than that of the non-Native American country you now inhabited; imperialistic genocide having paved the way through these desecrated lands; shopping malls in defecit being converted into private prisons for profit; a poorly housed chemically tainted urban sprawl that, for thousands of years prior to capitalism's arrival, was a communally sustaining well-tended crop of sacred maize.


It was this loss of sacred nature, replaced by the punitive hard line formation of strict angry man-god and woman hating laws to obey that turned you against organized religion's Just Do As I Say. You shut the Bible immediately after reading the passage that if a man cheats on his wife, he pays for his crime with a camel. But if a woman cheats on her husband, she is buried up to her neck in sand and has rocks thrown at her head until she is dead. Although you were still a kid, the stink of this injustice was not something you would ever be able to obey, much less worship. Christianity was no safe haven. Even it was calling you a whore before your 12th birthday.


So you curled up and rolled away.


Traveling induces egolessness. It invites you to befriend the present moment as something from which you need not seek permission nor escape. It will begin and end as it does regardless of your participation, so you might as well be there and appreciate. Listen to what you might hear it whisper in the wind, what it might show you while gazing out from that oval hole on the plane. Traveling awakens empathy for others as you see them from the bus lane, struggling on the streets to get home with their overflowing burdens before it's too late. It instigates the truest feelings of spiritual freedom you've ever known, as motion and light never discriminate. It induces a timeless sense of psychic connection to the organic structures of conception birth life death and decay. Air fire water earth and ether are moving in space, in swirling patterns that are all exactly the same.


And you don't even have to be totally high for motion to make you feel this serene, this constantly changing, this anonymous, this ok.



*u can call me ph!*

13% [chapter 2]

LIFE AFTER DEATH


After the twin abortion, you left Ben.


His guilt over cheating on you preempted him to propose marriage. But you wanted to live now, not die some more. And honestly, you knew he would probably be happier with someone else. Someone else who was way better at doing this girlfriend thing than you were. He seemed to be alright, as he sat there watching you pack up your shit. But he knew nothing was going to stop you. He cried a little at the kitchen table. You cried too, but not until after your suitcases were loaded into the cab and it was pulling away onto Commonwealth Avenue. You had already become way too preoccupied with partying constantly to hang out at the apartment with him, all sullen and serious and sad. You could no longer see the point in discussing the unspoken issues of distrust this failed relationship now had. But you did keep his Joy Division 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' tshirt as a momento and wore it into the ground for the next 20 years in tribute to your one and only experience of domestic bliss.


By some twist of predictable fate, a few weeks after ending it with Ben, you found yourself hanging out with Adam, a guy who happened to be supplying you with all the LSD you could ever want or need. He had fallen for this new passionate vitality you now embued, but couldn't profess to know the Actual You, or that death had so nearly just claimed you. Usually, your starving mouth was too full of crullers from the latest Dunkin Donuts dumpster dive to talk about the past.


Adam's house was the kind of place where your circle of misfit friends gathered in groups; making art out of everything including shit and puke (as college sophomores do), playing chaotic music through random amps that invaded the basement, watching bizarre cult movies in the couch and bong infested living room. And sometimes just fucking, exploring each other in unisex groups of more than 2.


Don't overanalyze it -- it's what happens when everyone's young and uninnocent, drunk and on drugs, searching for something that always remains unclear. Just another bunch of punk kids in some other definitive-only-after-it's-over year, learning how to navigate and trying to dance on the dangerous transitional seas of a carelessly self-aware youth.


Tripping made you giggle at everything, including Adam. He was a tall lanky slim jim of a stretch toy with purple dreads, a drug dealing comic book dude. He had long fingernails, a lot of scars and a beautiful ancient sword mounted on his wall. Dead Can Dance, African Head Charge, Sleep Chamber, and Current 93 filled the room as he slipped a silver lizard ring on your finger. He said he wanted to marry you. That struck you as incredibly hilarious too.


One morning, whilst gently gliding back down to earth after tripping balls all night along the Massachusetts shore from Magnolia to Manchester-By-The-Sea, you watched the sunrise alone over the Atlantic ocean. In an instant, you decided you wanted to watch the sunset on the Pacific. Your first thought was "my parents won't let me." But then, the realization clocked you: you're on your own now. It's a fact. No longer do you need permission to live your life in whatever way you see fit.


Within the week, you sold some crap for cash, grabbed what few possessions you still had left, shoved them into a bag, headed for a plane direct to LAX, and told Adam you'd be right back.



*u can call me ph!*

13% [chapter 5]

THE 3 FACES: HEREIN LIES THE HOLE


It begs for fulfillment and has always begged for fulfillment since the dawning of humankind. Throughout history, all manner of things have been used to fill the Hole: drugs, booze, money, sex, power, risk, crisis, relationships, religion, gambling, materialism, nationalism, etc. for the sake of feeling a purpose, in order to feel Real Love.


Your Hole was filled with some of these things too, but only ever Felt Full when filling it with music, art or other compulsive acts of creativity. Akin only to the bellows of being boiled alive or the scraping desire to tear off all your skin and bash your skull against a brick wall til your brains seeped out, this uncontrollable burning urge to Create Something always instantly derailed the equally strong impulse to Destroy Something, most likely yourself.


These compulsive acts of creativity never held sway over the resulting expressions they produced. They never turned on you. They never abandoned you. They never ridiculed you for being too depressing, too brutal, too sad, too aggro, too political, too victimy, too intense, too strong, too cold, too feminist, too emo, too stupid, too you. Being in their midst seemed to be the only time you could catch a fleeting glimpse of that tiny beautiful spark hiding in the depths of your abysmally dark heart. This essentially made the Hole a necessity. Each time you filled it with creativity, the feeling of Real Love that shone forth was that of the miraculous and unconditional kind. It made you grateful for the Hole lies herein.


Although it would take many years to learn not to take for granted this face, once you began talking to it, spending more time with it and developing a resonating respect for it, you found yourself devoted to being its lifelong companion. Not until semi-consciously painting this phrase onto paper, did you realize it's ugly truth: "the only time i feel happy to be alive is when i am alone."


Because being alone meant being creative, not trapped under anyone's thumb. Being alone meant being uninhibited and standing naked in the light of your spirit not your sex. Being alone meant doing no harm to anyone including yourself. It meant channeling all that rage and aggression into something somewhat atrocious that also housed little slivers of a mysterious tranquility, an indiscrimate hint of redemption. Being alone meant being transported away from the meager repetitive trivialities of your own traumatized ego into a realm of pure thought, heavily populated with energy, ideas and that revitalizing feeling of Real Love.


It should be said that this sense of expansion and connectedness could only have happened after gradually shedding it's contrasting skin -- that tyrannical grasping at the feral act of expression as if no one within a ten mile radius was permitted to engage in their own creativity. This thing, this face, was the only thing that you felt was truly yours. And you hoarded it. Hiding it away as if it might be suddenly stolen or betrayed. Then putting it on blast upon completion, splaying it out to the whole world. But 'the whole world' seemed to only consist of that one dude that was currently fucking you, plus a couple other dudes that wanted to fuck you whenever that first dude had decided he was done fucking you.


No draw. No fans. No love. No duh.


Still, you'd put out more work than put out sexually (while remaining present in the room) and just kept hoping. Hoping for validation. Hoping ideas might be brought to life without all the junkie-slut judgements and false rumors that haunted you -- rumors that originated from the butthurt mouths of men whom you had refused to bow down and deliver some sacrificial oral sex to. Hoping your work might be seen and heard on the merit of The Work Itself, not only after taking into consideration that the person who made it has a cunt. Hoping you'd exist as something Before Cunt or After Cunt or Other Than Cunt. Not a woman artist, but an artist. Not in a girl band, but in a band. Not a female filmmaker, but a filmmaker. Hoping that your presence on this earth was even worth spit.


However, more often than not, splaying out only seemed to further the alienation. It most assuredly caused all sorts of schisms that ended every relationship you had with men who felt it was your duty to nurture their creativity rather than spend so much time and effort exploring your own. Relationships with women ended sadly as well. For what reasons you still can't tell. Maybe after you pull the broad axe out of your back and crawl out from under the bus, all will be peachy, swell.


Most other people ignored your work. Or belittled and denigrated it. Or just got more weirded out by you than they were before. And sometimes, they felt so moved that they'd send you pictures of their dumbass dicks. How terribly fascinating that is to someone who has seen nothing but the mediocrity of dicks since the age of 4?


Occassionally though, others said the things you made inspired them. You later read somewhere that the best thing any human being can do is inspire others. This surprised
you because you always felt insulted by the compliment; preferring they book you a show, buy some merch or share their tour contacts and technical knowledge with you rather than just get inspired. You translated this into meaning they now felt motivated to go make their own better version of what you just made because nothing you do is ever Good Enough.


And how could anyone argue with that kind of logic?


Inspiring others didn't garner you any of that sought after support from "the community" either. You only noticed it bringing repulsive levels of disdain, rejection and other grossly competetive behaviors your way. This, of course, is inevitable for anyone willing to put their underpants on display. But so reviled by the hypersensitive; to one who's grown so weary of those odorous unlovable traits that kept being force fed into your already stuffed up face. It only gave you more reasons to hate. Even though you were now a fully grown crybaby who had the capacity for hard reflections and real profound change.


Unfortunately, change only actualized after it was already too late. And that thirst to feel part of some imaginary creatively sustaining group, like those photos of surrealists in Paris circa 1932, never bore any of the hoped for fruit. Truthfully, hope had blinded you to all the fallen fruit at your feet. While you pouted and stomped around, spouting out your enormous expectations and warbly angst ridden images and sounds, those modest but sweet opportunities were just laying there, rotting on the ground.


After all those formative art fag punk years spent being ugly overbearing arrogant awkward anxious and weird, you're fortunate that this artistic devotion was never completely smothered in those heavy handed, desperate-for-love clutches. At some point you had to let those things you created walk away and go live lives of their own. Watching your little creative children from a distance as they went on living gave you a beaming teary-eyed mother's sense of pride -- if this is what a mother's pride feels like.


Eventually, you'd come to see through the stunted hierarchal power play for recognition that occurs in every creative "scene". You despised that word since you never really felt part of one. And if you were, you were completely unaware of it. Pretty much mirrors the feelings you had about your family. Every conversation was always instigated by you. The only time your phone rang was when someone's butt or bag called to make muffled noises and squishy sounds. Ha Ha! Loser. Perhaps your mom was right when she said, "You're such a downer. It's no wonder you go through men like water." And if your own mother doesn't really love or support you, how could anyone else be expected to? Yup. There's that yoke too.


However, when others did absolutely love your work and asked you to autograph something, fawned over you with dilated pupils or began liking every single thing you posted on social media, you got creeped out by the attention and felt as if your virtual personal space was somehow being infringed upon. There really was no way to win with you. Essentially, no matter how other people responded, you consistently felt afraid of everyone and suspicious of their motivations on both sides of the ditch. It was just as difficult to deal with violent opposition as it was to deal with sincere admiration. Either way, you'd be a disappointment. Right, mom?


So Fuck it. Stop trying so hard to be anything to anyone.


And when you finally felt that transformative joy of letting go of those wobbly notions of control, discovering that the Less you clung to your own need for an ego boost via creativity as if it Belonged To You, the less you tried to control others or allowed them to control you, the More that energy would recharge the environment itself -- setting the room and everyone in it alight, turning a small free noise and doom show in the living room of an old slum (affectionately dubbed bleakhaus) into a generating storm of lightning bolt positivity for electromagnetic acres around. One might notice this with any live music venue. Everyone feels, not only high on whatever they're already on, but also noticeably more aurally alive during the course of that sonically cleansing night. And those were some of the happiest nights of your life.


Perhaps creative energy is a lot like a woman. When you try to Own it, Control it, Make it Conform to Your Needs, it can no longer breathe, so the spark of love withers and dies. But if you take a step back and Let Her Do Her Own Thing, she is a wonder to witness, a joy to behold, a time to admire.


You liked to liken this more approachable attitude to being a radio. The radio does not Own the show it broadcasts any more than you Own the creative energy that just so happens to flood through you, tapping into your veins whenever it feels like. Being receptive to its sudden company is always a welcomed high.


Like those moments when the music moves you to tears, when a unifying psychic awareness of the tenderness in the present moment makes colors shine bright, when the sweltering heat is tamed by a summer thunderstorm's downpour, when every vulnerably fractured emotional toll doesn't seem so tragic anymore and your heart's willingness to feel springs back to life.


Regardless of whether or not you were high on drugs, it was always there, that clear-seeing energy within alpha state, that unconditional love that softens off the jagged edges of pride, that forgiveness that opens you up to what is outside.


At last, comprehending what this enigmatic Hole face had been trying to show and tell you the whole time -- that Creativity IS Mysticism, doofus.


Now go start a fire!


*u can call me ph!*

13% [chapter 1]

THE 3 FACES: AVARICE!


Depression's been a constant dull ache since you were in 4th grade, so you always welcomed the presence of rage. It supplied you with the energy required to destroy whatever was in front of you in an effort to create positive change. Rage was such a regularly occuring emotion, you consistently recognized it's face. But it was so prevalent that by the age of 14, drugs began to build for you a buffer zone so as not to see this face so fucking often. An additional coping mechanism was also instated at this time called vigorous physical exercise.


Anyone born into a kid that receives ample abuse and neglect from those who are unable or unwilling to nurture and protect, intimately knows this horrifying red rage-filled face. They also know a child's instinctive longing for calm kneejerks them to grab the nearest broom and clean up the huge mess that the red face inevitably makes, regardless of whether it stems from elsewhere or is a self-made mess.


Who could blame you for being confused? The need to bond with others opens the oxytocin floodgates in our brains and sends warm fuzzy hormones careening around all over the place. However, in your case, twisted mental pathways interpret this hormonal release as a signal that someone is going to hurt you, so you turn away. To survive and protect yourself, you learned to turn away. For 40 odd years, you kept turning away. Yet at the same time, you so deeply yearned for that feeling of connection that continually eluded you. Seeing successful connections being made everywhere around you produced even more confusion. So you'd hide from the face of rage under your buffer zone drug blanket and bury yourself under quilted cries from wanting to be held but knowing that you cannot be held. There's a fabulous joke in there somewhere that you might one day find.


Whenever someone was engaged in the act of beating the shit out of you, they were also screaming bloody murder and visibly in pain. For this reason, you preferred violent physical abuse to the sexual kind -- preferring also to be the target of the attack rather than to watch someone else getting beaten. It felt far worse to witness your brother being hurt than to psychologically dissociate while going through it yourself. Also, your brother never discovered this secret weapon which proved to be your most powerful deterrent: urine. A few punches in, you'd let loose the bladderful you'd been saving up for this special occassion. And, like magic, yelps of disgust would replace the torrent of scorn. Instantly, the hitting would quit. You found pearls of joy in those tiny triumphant moments sitting on the kitchen floor in a peaceful puddle of tears spit piss and glory.


But the scars of sexual abuse were far more insidious. The sights, the sounds, the opaque presence of a person's intense feelings of pleasure while causing someone else terrible pain displaced that pain into a realm much colder. A hurt that hides deeper, in a distorted trench just below, but too close to, your own pleasure zones. Violence might find that cold hurt's hiding place but cannot hold a candle to it, nor can it ever cure it. Bruises, broken bones and burns prove violence occurs, but hidden are the scars of sexual abuse beneath the molten words, "I will kill you if you tell."


Enter the deathwish; swimming down there like an invisible shark, constantly stalking a freedom that is absolute -- a freedom that can only come to you from somewhere outside yourself. Deliverance via suicide, they say, only traps your soul in that state of wretchedness, confining it to that time and place instead of bringing you any of the desired relief you so desperately crave. And maybe that's all bullshit, but the benefit of the doubt must be given to all the ghosts of people who successfully committed suicide and later crowded around you asking for help. Clearly, they were not resting in peace.


Being a woman with a quick temper, an iron poker opinion and not much respect for authority, your chances seemed pretty damn good that you might one day receive this gift of deliverance from some angry asshole's bitch-killing hands since America is #1 in the world for acts of violence against women. So hooray for that.


But shit happens.


When long slow periods of cowering in fear suddenly transform into an overwhelming shockwave of action, critical mass occurs. Well directed, that shockwave of shit is capable of altering and healing lives. It can flip the switch for the victim -- to give up the ghost of victimization, to shift the mind out of that passive frozen in time emotional vortex it is stuck repeating, to actively crack open the present moment and lean you into the inertia of growth that naturally throws you toward letting go.


Unforgettable was your moment of cracking open at critical mass on June 10th, 1988. Squarely, you thrust your steel toed boot into the charging crotch of your dad who had for so long, shoved that thing in your face and at your punk ass.


At the age of 6, you already had enough defiance in mind to not let his dick penetrate you, though all kinds of other things did. How you had gained this early knowledge of carnal invasion was, as of yet, unknown. But now that you were bigger, you could better defend yourself from the unpredictable hair trigger walking on eggshell eruptions of animosity that bombarded you. At last, you could fight back.


Watching your father collapse so quickly, writhing there on the floor, scrunching his nuts in hand -- you stood so solid and strong, like some kind of engorged proud prisoner of nuclear war! Perhaps this shit happened because it was during your very first very short very scary experiment being a straight edge skin head of the anti-racist sort. A blinding glimpse through a clean drugless window with no buffer zone between you and a world where your rage was a wholly warhorse of consumption that you had none of the skills to rein in.


And when your father angrily jumped up from the floor with his balls still sore, he hurled himself back at you, screaming, "I HATE YOU!" His fists wheeled against your teenage frame. So you kicked him again. In the same place. Harder this time. Your mother cried from the sidelines, then ran to his aid during his second tour of the writhing floor.


Marching off toward the front door, you swung it open. While still in the eye of this purging hurricane, you let loose a stream of FUCK YOUs, puking out all those long rooted petrified agonies at your parents who had for so long sewn them into you. Quaking inside, you felt a subtle shift, the loosening of a crystallized stillborn cacoon. It's newly wet wings just beginning to protrude. Slowly unveiling over several seasons, they would emotionally inchworm you away from that tendency to dwell in your own personal hell and go for that oh so stereotypical due-to-the-aftereffects-of-child-abuse noose.


God forbid, you had never returned that wrath back to the source from whence it came, it would have been 87% more likely that this constant unexpressed chasm of avarice would have mutated into that common concave outlook of My Childhood Was Shit So Now The World Owes Me. This would only have produced relentless passive aggressive manipulations, surreptitious self-interest disguising itself as sympathy and other malignant misanthropic deeds. Undoubtedly, these traits would then cause harm to countless innocents surrounding you for the rest of your suppressed aDult days.


Those innocents include the children you never gave birth to. Abortion was your only inroad to harm reduction. Often, tears of gratitude were produced when thinking back on all the possible atrocities that were avoided; all the scars your younger tempermental fucked up self would have inflicted onto those poor kids because it's not as if you didn't show these malevolent signs during your earlier period of hope's decline.


But that initial critical mass, that shockwave of shit, ultimately saved you from your statistical self. It gave you a 13% chance of having a less than bleak outcome in life. Not being a mother was the sacrifice you were willing to make. Take that to mean whatever you like.


And as long as you resisted the urge to do one or more of these 4 things: prostitute yourself,
commit suicide, get incarcerated for assault,
or overdose on drugs, then you would remain in that 13 percentile. Seems simple enough. But you'd be surprised at self-destruction's tireless jags of acrimony, it's imperious drive to which the only defense is a softening into the impermanence of time and some resolute vigilance, always mindful and kind. No matter how hateful and angry that drive is to end your pathetic wasted life.


Up until this attack, self-defense was characteristically pacifistic, a psychological impasse. Kicking your dad in the nut sack was a heroic act in a heroless tract. By now, you knew no one else was ever gonna come save you but you -- a person that you did not trust even existed. Someone who'd one day emotionally understand how to take full responsibility for their own happiness.


A future you that would splatter and stain walls, vent onto paper instead of people, grow a pair for fuckssake, what's the magic word, be nice, say thank you, stand clear, speak up, have the courage of your own convictions, understand mutual aid, practice, lose yourself, it's ok. Find the frame of mind that differentiates self-pity from self-compassion. Be willing to walk the valley alone between self-deception and self-hate. Remember where you came from. Have a little faith. And feel the majesty of that moment when all fear vanishes and out blossoms the enveloping awe of a justified rage, a pivotal truth, in all her glorious unfurling furies of grace.





*u can call me ph!*

13% [chapter 0]

THEY CANNOT KILL US,
WE ARE ALREADY DEAD.


All you wanted to do was go home.


You hate hospitals. Their slippery smell. That look people get when they're paid to care but can't afford to anymore. The nurses were so curt with a fuckup like you. Pregnant again, barely 22, unmarried, uninsured, minimally waged and oppressively uninterested in life or in bringing any more into this world.


Pain thresholds are actual places. You found yours in a windowless little room at South Boston's General Hospital on February 4th, 1992. As they inserted bamboo spikes into your cervix, one after the other, the nurses complained about your screams, "It can't hurt that bad." When you stood up and stumbled through the door, you let out a stream of yellow puke that decorated the long hallway. Then you passed out onto the floor, so they carted you off into another darkened little room.


They couldn't understand why the induced miscarriage wasn't working, working under the assumption that you had waited too long to have a regular abortion and that this fetus was now at 15 weeks. Later, looking inside your womb with an ultrasound and some cold goop, the noise that came outta the nurse's mouth when she uncovered the truth did nothing to soothe you. Quickly, she turned the monitor away so that you could not witness the state of what was growing in there, all misconstrued. It was not one infant, but a conjoined two. Aggravated, they agreed that an operation would have to be performed the following morning to remove this misery your uterus was attempting to reproduce.


That night, your thoughts drifted back to Ben, the one and only boyfriend you ever got an apartment with after falling into some kind of love. The relationship itself felt much like the type of music you both coveted - industrial. Cathartically exorcising your demons every week by dancing at a venue in Cambridge called Ground Zero, you reveled in the electronic barrage of Controlled Bleeding, Revolting Cocks, Skinny Puppy and Front 242. No spooky gently flowing hand gestures here, just hard sweaty aggressive transcendence. But the underlying coldness of your young detatched love that lasted a whole 7 months revealed itself upon the discovery of this unplanned pregnancy. "Oh well, there goes my new carburetor," Ben exclaimed with all the joy of any proud father.


Abortion was a given. There was no discussion. There was no fucking way you'd be a good mother. This, you most emphatically knew. Barely able to feed yourself or pay the rent on time, you were too drunk, too high, too self absorbed and too unstable to raise children - especially and/or inevitably, on your own. Hell, you couldn't even manage being someone's girlfriend.


Already, at the ripe old age of 8, a boy told you he liked you. The second you agreed to go out with him, he snatched you by the wrist and dragged you around the schoolyard to all the places he wanted to go. When you spoke, he told you to shut up. You got angry, snatched your limbs back, yelled that you didn't like being treated like a dog and broke up with him by the end of recess.


This trend seemed to have no end. To you, the word "girlfriend" meant being socially cajolled, sexually objectified, emotionally suffocated, spiritually stifled and wholly controlled. As if it were expected of you, being born female, that all of your interests, skills, duties and concerns in life should revolve around the pleasing, nurturing and supporting of men, no questions asked, no two way street of equality. Yeah. So Fuck That.


The next morning, as they put the anesthetic mask over your mouth, you found it noteworthy that the doctor made sure to reprimand your slut life. His eyes glared barely beyond that clipboard holding your sordid medical record. "This is you third abortion?! You gotta stop doing this to yourself," he declared. Counting backwards from 10, you fell under at 7, but not before muttering a nice muffled "fuck you" to all those comfortable judgements standing above you in that operating room.


You gotta stop doing this to yourself...


Thusfar, all of your experiences in life had taught you that sex was all you were good for. This belief found itself compounded by your mother's accusations as to why your father had been sexually abusing you for so many years. "It's your own fault," she said, "for dressing like a slut." She never took into consideration that the abuse started when you were so young that she was the one dressing you.


By the time you were in 8th grade, you outted your father's disturbing sexual proclivities to the school counselor. As a result, your mother stopped speaking to you for a couple years. Maybe she harbored some kind of deluded, jealous resentments? Perhaps the guilt from knowing her husband was fucking around with her daughter while she did nothing to stop it, forced her into a hard corner, painted thick in denial? Because, several years earlier, your father had confessed to her that he wanted to seek professional help for this compulsion toward pedophilia, immediately after he molested you for the first time. But she convinced him not to seek help and assured him that everything would be just fine.


Sitting there in the school principle's office with both of your parents in rapt attendance, your father rapidly admitted his guilt and let out a sigh of loathsome relief. On the next downbeat, your mother bleeted, "She's a liar!" Huffing and stamping her feet, teeming with a ridiculous display of disbelief. You just sat there, frozen in that wooden seat. Staring deep into the swirls of a knot in the rounded worn out armrest, gripping the chair to ground out some momentary stability, to find some faith in the reliable forces of earth's gravity. Had you the strength to raise your thoughts out of that knot, you might have been graced by the wave of compassion that came crashing toward you as the principle stammered at your dad, "I have a daughter too, but I just cannot imagine...how you could...how Could You?!"


It was a profoundly sad sense of pseudo-community to later read that statistically, this anti-intuitive abandonment by the mother is a typical response for over half of all daughters molested by their fathers; the mother lashing out due to the achingly insecure notion that her own daughter represents some kind of sexual competition in her gapingly sad dysfunctional marriage.


Observing also the shrugged off stance of your father; guilty only of repeating his own childhood traumas. Offhandedly, he succumbed to his sexual impulses. So What about his giving in to the almost culturally permissive right to have this primordial fascination with sticking his dick into the tightest orifice possible? Oh, Whoops was his attitude toward his need for total control over these other people that belonged to him exclusively, that he perceived as being his own private property.


And perhaps your mother was just another one of the countless women that unconsciously clings to those remnants of Victorian-era thinking; believing that without a man she is nothing, worthless, not a real woman, nonexistant, less than a whole human being?


Nothing could be more pathetically tragic or hopelessly banal in this supposedly advanced civilization -- save for the predictable vicious cycling of grown victims victimizing their own flesh and blood, doing others in as was done to them as though that makes it less of a sin, ripping open their own calcified scabs of self hate, guilt and shame all over their own offspring's spit and skin, ad nauseum.


However, given your mother's ignorance of what the word incest meant (you had to spell it out for her when you were 13), what the fuck was Her Excuse for this loveless level of protection? How quickly after giving birth to her second mouth to feed had she written you off as a downer, a bad egg, a lost cause, a reason for regret, the dreaded black sheep? Why would the frequent violent beatings put upon both you and your older brother cause her to do nothing but stand aside and helplessly weep? How many paces away would she publicly stay, hoping others would not think you were related in some way? How deeply ingrained was her conviction that your conspicuous independence was a liability to making you a 'good wife' some day? How hammered in was the dogma that, by not hiding your intelligence for a fragile male ego's sake, you'd render yourself useless to this domineering patriarchal world, to this shit hole that your only goal should be to submit to and to accommodate?


Not surprisingly, this pattern of being the scapegoat in every relationship, both professional and personal, would remain on heavy rotation for years to come. You could take the blame, bear the brunt of other people's unresolved pain because being hated was better than being ignored, any day.


But, you gotta stop doing this to yourself...


Now you were old enough to pretend you actually enjoyed having sex with other people. And sometimes, in a drunken dissociated state, some other animal in you did enjoy it; the way you enjoy being stuck in bed with the flu when you're sick of your crappy job. Or the way you enjoy getting so fucking high and deprived that you keep creeping up to that tipping point where, at any second, you might altogether transcend life. But you wielded your martyred pussy like an unholy weapon, aggressively pointing that thing at whichever half flung demented ill-conceived hard-on dared come near you. As if you were getting revenge on the world by giving it exactly what it wanted...WTF?


Any chronically depressed deathwishing tomboy would behave likewise. Listlessly giving in whenever a dude predictably bitches about his pitiful lack of sensation from wearing a condom during those few minutes that he'll be fucking you from behind with his eyes shut tight. His momentary pleasure always outweighs any of the consequences that you, the disposable drunk slut, might incur from this lackluster, futile attempt to feel loved by another human being -- albeit, another random jackass of a human being that you just met at some lame keg party down the street. But rest assured, he will tell you the next morning, almost immediately after you've spit his cum out of your mouth, how much he truly loves his girlfriend. And for a moment, you'll sit with the despised wondering of why there was no mention of any girlfriend last night. Then he will magically vanish after taking down your number, just in case, and politely inquiring, "Uh, what was yer name again?"


Stop doing this to yourself.


So as you laid unconscious on that operating table, with all that scar tissue to cut through and anemic as a paper plate, you rapidly bled out. Your soul easily slipped your body off and for a minute or two, you were gone. An immense peace engulfed you as you floated above your body and flew through a long dark tunnel toward the warmest golden white light you've ever seen, completely beyond even the concept of beautiful. A vividly androgynous being of unknown origin, bathed in a radiant royal blue light appeared before you and asked you, in a deeply soothing oak tree voice, to make a choice. Begrudgingly, you chose to live. The blue being then said, "There is a lot of work you must do."


"We almost lost you there," the glib nurse said when you woke up in another semi-sterile metal bed. Twisting the stiff white sheets aside to go take a piss, that 5 foot shuffle pretended to last an eternity as you dragged that drip bag behind you like a life line. "Lucky yer not dead," she said with a chuckle and left. Closing the bathroom door, you sat surreally slowly down onto the toilet seat and stared at the silverfish slivering indifferently across the flecked olive puce and tan colored linoleum tiled floor. Eyelids heavy as lead from the morphine that flooded your veins like teddy bear stuffing, you listened to the drops of pee echo as they fell into the porcelain bowl's belly.


Still no visits from your boyfriend Ben. But J9 came by. She'd left a little jar of yellow and white Get Well daisies, there on the window sill. You were so grateful for this gesture then, and even now still.


One day later, you were pushing hard against the glass doors. Despite the hospital staff's concern that they should not release you until someone showed up that you could hold onto, you informed them that you had no more quarters left for the pay phone and that you wanted to wait outside. "I'm sure my boyfriend will be here any minute," you said. But you knew he was never gonna show up.


Soon enough, you'd be home. Soon enough, you'd lay your eyes on your bed and instantly know that Ben had cheated on you during your 3 day vacation with death. Soon enough, you'd see it behind your actual eyes in one sudden flash - a short, stocky woman with brown curly hair flailing about wildly while he did her doggystyle. His infidelity would not shock you. You wore cynicism like a suit of shining armour. Rather, you'd be more intrigued by this newfound clarity with which you could psychically perceive what had happened in your absence, as if those rumpled sheets would hold this memory of his betrayal just long enough to show it to you. And soon enough, Ben would admit that the event you could somehow see in your head was indeed,
correct.


Bolting out of the hospital doors into the soft sting of winter's air, breathing never felt so good. You had made the choice to live, to return to this bittersweet hell, to smack back down into grim reality after being absorbed in the pure infinite peace of that other place. It had changed you. Your soul now felt wide awake, palpable, real. It exists ~ it is aware and alive, inside of and in spite of, this damaged scarred beaten down motherless and childless but fucking resilient young begotten body.


Yes, there is a lot of work you must do. And this new driving force fueled your long walk all the way back to Allston. It's godlike song kept your steps in time as you trudged through the snow and ice with the threatening determination of a thousand furious horses on fire.

WHAT GETS MY POST TRAUMATIC GENERAL RELATIVITY GOAT RIMBAUD?

Last night was the longest amount of time i've sat in my room in the company of a male friend since Feb 13th 2011:

[that date being the last time i stood in this room, holding onto my broken bones while a full-blown psychopath thrashed about destroying my shit (not including the 3am break-in that occurred 2 weeks later), and simultaneously giving my roommate/landlord the real reason why i should be evicted~eh whatever. wrote a song about it that i care about more than either one of those 2 fuckers.]

lo and behold, here i was, actually feeling nearly comfortable. i didn't flinch, didn't feel weird if my back was turned toward him, i was not afraid to leave him unattended in my room with my piano....and i thoroughly enjoyed having a conversation with someone who knows when to write "you're" not "your"  -- albeit my reoccurring case of mouth-diarrhea. it was good to be around someone who was there because i'm a person, not because they want a tattoo, or because they want to make their partner jealous, or expect anything from me. we were just Being There.

after the movie was over and he went home in the wee hours, for no reason that i can explain, as soon as i sat back down in that spot that i've been sitting in for these long 5 years, i just started bawling like a baby. 

i'm not even sure if it's because i was happy that i was able to enjoy the company of another person for that many hours in my room, or if it was gratitude for the body and spirit's unquenchable ability to heal, survive and overcome trauma, or if it was the still present underlying fear of ever being close to anyone again - maybe even the loss of that fear - if i let people into my life again, am i just going to make all the same mistakes and find myself in the cross hairs of another cunning sociopath's gun? (i don't feel my current company was anything like some of the people i used to hang out with; he's a much gentler person and made no demands on me, but it's more about the ACT of letting someone in as opposed to the person themselves.)

i'm 5 years old again, completely helpless in the face of being a full grown fucking human being that Cannot Deny that it DOES feel better when there is some form of social contact, even if it's just a meager amount. talked myself down fairly quickly though, made another cup of tea and tried to stick with thinking about other things today instead, like how amazingly awesome that movie was…especially the ending, and in fact, i think INTERSTELLAR could possibly be the Best Film I've Ever Seen, despite how much others say they hated it.

i also absolutely LOVED "ALL IS LOST" which is one of those films that only a person who has experienced the broken-down-on-the-side-of-the-road-dragging-a-ton-of-bricks-and-an-empty-gas-can-to-the-next-town-that-might-as-well-be-a-thousand-miles-away-but-you-have-no-choice-but-to-deal-with-this-difficult-situation-so-you-do-just-that-&-deal-with-it-scenario could appreciate. people who have not lived through much hardship hated that movie too. they found it boring. because all those quiet subtle moments where it's just you and that cold wet cement you're up against, but somehow you find a small piece of string hanging off the end of your sweater that just might hold your heart in it's chest cavity long enough to get to the next tiny moment which offers you some small but immense feeling of relief that you've made it this far. 

i've seen a shit load of films…..

BUT HERE'S WHAT GETS MY OVER-GENERALIZING GOAT:

every big space adventure movie is always about how necessary it is to save the human race and yet the reality of our current situation on this planet clearly shows us that if people had any interest in saving the human race, along with all the other species facing extinction, all those billions of dollars would be spent on stopping the rape of planet earth, instead of perpetuating it, even if out of our own apathy and/or nihilism.  and yet, just as it is the case with Burning Man, we humans always seem more willing to spend way too much money, effort and time to EXPERIENCE CREATIVITY AS A REMOTE ESCAPE FROM THE REALITY OF OUR LIVES IN SOCIETY instead of CREATING A DAILY REALITY WITHIN OUR OWN COMMUNITY THAT WE DO NOT FEEL A NEED TO ESCAPE FROM, experiencing a society made better with all that money, effort and time, a society into which you do not need to decompress before reentry.

but the impetus for this kind of shift would probably only occur after some drastic loss of convenience, after people had overcome their cell phone separation anxiety, and start to see things differently  -- really SEE just how much blood is dripping off all of our hands, to hold that bottle of water after you've just gulped the last drop, and KNOW this plastic bottle in your hand will exist on this earth LONGER THAN YOU WILL for that short 10 minutes of refreshment. refreshment who's RIGHTS HAVE BEEN BOUGHT, yes water rights, by yet another corporation. 

it's the same thing that is so frustrating when it comes to every genius invention or discovery that could potentially do so much GOOD, but the best ideas are derailed or corrupted in order to cause more harm. 

for example, the Rife machine, which can cure just about every disease known to mankind through the direct application of FREQUENCIES that alter or eliminate that molecular structure. it's been discredited widely by mainstream funded experts saying some people still died. yes, people do still die. in fact, the number of people dying every year from side effects on psychotropics is over 100,000. but if it's got the stamp of approval from "trusted" medical establishments, it's ok that so many people are test subjects for this great experiment that has yet to actually substantiate any of it's claims. better still if those people are poor. 

our endless anthropocentrism = thinking we humans are The Shit, and still doing Really Stupid Things to the earth like FRAKKING without having an ounce of distrust that the ENERGY COMPANIES THAT EXIST FOR PROFIT, NOT BECAUSE THEY LOVE US are lying about how much methane is leaking into the atmosphere and making our situation 8X WORSE than it was with coal emissions.... and we cannot claim ignorance anymore, we already have all the pieces of the puzzle and slowly as people lose their fear of how they will be judged by the mainstream, the parts will come together.  once that habitual assumption of respect for some antiquated authority erodes after everyone knows that the authority figure was secretly fucking all those kids behind closed doors, the authority figure cannot keep the fear mongering machine going because now you reject it's authority and no longer listen to it.

none of this, in my book, will be possible for the human race in general, until one thing becomes crystal clear: ALBERT EINSTEIN DID NOT DISCOVER THE THEORY OF RELATIVITY ON HIS OWN. Mileva Maric, his wife, saw this in a dream, and brought it to the chalkboard to work it out with her (then, EQUAL) husband....only to be whitewashed from it's publication, divorced, and eventually committed to a mental institution purposefully, so that she could be closer to hers & albert's schizophrenic son.  if the human race can't even bring itself to admit that one half of it's population is worth being considered equal, not treated like a dog tied up in the back yard, or paid less than, or derided when in positions that "should be" held by the other half of the population, then we don't DESERVE to fuckin live. i've heard a theory on why man looks upon something beautiful, loves it, then goes about destroying it -- because he has no uterus. he cannot create life. and since women CAN create life (with men's spooge duh!) then, she shouldn't be allowed to DO ANYTHING ELSE OTHER THAN GIVE LIFE.  pfffft.   and the LAST thing this planet needs right now is More Fuckin Human Beings.  so uterus-envy. get over yourself. although, the upside of that is, if men could give birth, abortion would probably be globally legal and more children would grow up without being damaged by parents that didn't really want them = less crime = less drug addiction = less sexual slavery = less of lots of shit that all stems from the fact that women are still not 100% allowed to have control over their own reproductive systems. 

it's easy to become overwhelmed in that scenario, and the ONLY way anyone could sane in the process of so much fluctuation would be to look at the changes ahead in the same way that the surviving mountain climber actually made it down off the mountain in that documentary K2 == never look at the TOTAL DISTANCE you need to cover.  Look only at the next small mile marker and aim for that. once you make it there, aim for the next small mile marker, and just keep going, in small increments... 

The Mother of Invention once told me in a lucid dream:

"If you take lots of little steps to hell, 

you will eventually end up in hell. 

If you take lots of little steps to heaven, 

you will eventually end up in heaven."

To which Rimbaud now replies:

"To whom shall I hire myself out?

What beast must I adore?

What holy image is attacked?

What hearts must I break?

What lie must I maintain?

In what blood tread?"

P>S> regarding the recent double-edged event of the solar and lunar eclipses & 

all the crazy things happening everywhere therein...

don't think i'm done processing the effects of this major shift yet...

still trying out this Becoming Friends With Death & Endings, but we're still in the honeymoon phase

and so far, it's like depeche mode says:

it's a lot

*u can call me ph!*