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 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!*

I T I S C O M P L E T E .

Children of the Black Sun
though i was originally calling it a graphic novel of sorts, 
at the end of it's progression, it's probably more accurate to call it "a graphic manifesto".

in case you receive the Not Available error message from youtube
the 'high quality video' will be posted on my site soon [post coding video app]
so that we can all feel A Little Less Stalked By The Google Monster.



speaking of feeling stalked:
The Most Good My Stupid Smart Phone Ever Did For Me: 

during a recent trip to sacramento to play at the NORCAL NOISEFEST (**!fun!**), 
i decided to make a somewhat holiday of this short, but much needed trip away from sf.
  
I <3 Motels ~ especially Motels with Swimming Pools that You Can Actually Swim In, 
so upon arrival around midnight, i got a room at a motel 6 and excitedly looked forward to a swim in the morning before going to the festival.  

while doing the heavy-noise-gear schlepp to my room on the 2nd floor, i was greeted at the top of the stairwell by a guy staying there for what looked like an extended amount of time, as his wide open door displayed a disturbing array of long term debri strewn about the room.  he bummed a smoke, then said he'd buy it off me.  as i rolled him one - which takes a minute - he asked several questions to which i responded with a vague but cheerful answer. then, he attempted to slip a dollar down the front of my shirt, rather than Hand It To Me like a human being.  instantly, my face fell from cheerful to disgusted and i took my leave of him.

across the street stood an all-night diner and i was starving at my usual 3am dinner time. my phone had died during the drive, and to get food, i would now have to pass the creepy guy again on the way downstairs, so i brought the dead phone with me and proceeded to have The Most Intimate and Hilarious Phone Conversation With My Most Awesome Other Person In The World Who Will Also Cut You In A Crazy Heartbeat If You So Much As Think About Fucking With Him Or Her.... and it worked!!!  

fearing possible witnesses, he said nothing to me as i passed him to go order food, and again as i came back with my food, once more to get a drink out of the vending machine, and finally back to my room, not a mother fuckin peep... needless to say, i bolted the hell out of my door the second it closed.  
   
SELF-DEFENSE BY SUGGESTION...!! 

about 20 minutes later, around 4 AM, the dude felt he had some sort of right to come POUND on my door. [HOW RUDE!] and AGAIN at 4:04 [THE AUDACITY!!]  i did not answer, all lights out, nor did i respond to his jeers across the parking lot about wanting to "see something good" while i swam a few laps in the pool the next morning.  for some odd reason, i had packed the straight razor i used to carry every time i left the haus, back when the PTSD was at it's THREAT LEVEL RED, and although i haven't even seen it in over a year, i came across it while packing for this trip and brought it Just Because....i had come across it. it did indeed come in handy when that next morning came, even if just for emotional support - because i'll be damned if that fucktard was gonna get in the way of me being able to Do Something That I Love To Do, like swimming in the pool on my One & Only One-Day-Vacation.  

as i packed up to check out, the desire to kick him in the nuts or at least rip him a new facehole and/or asshole was MASSIVE.  sat down instead, did my daily meditation and was quietly swayed by THE GUIDING LIGHT IN MY GUTS that told me this:

the male ego, being the fragile little baby duck covered in vanilla pudding and chocolate sauce that it is, will not take kindly to any form of scolding; not only would he Not Listen To A Word I Was Saying [as per usual], his resulting frustration would probably be taken out on another woman, or on a kid, or on an animal later on that day.  teaching him a lesson in how i make peanut butter with my steel toed boots was also a No Go.  i'd be standing there, in front his room-house, likely to also be the home of at least one loaded gun.... then, i'd still have the heavy gear schlepp through the parking lot = plenty of aiming time = not worth it. 

SO WHAT TO DO WITH THIS EMOTION ?? as i drove in the general direction of the festival, i knew i would have to expel the rage before it had the chance to solidify and coagulate into Anger Unexpressed aka Depression. pulling over, i wrote added verses in a new and incomplete track called "I'm Being Stalked By A Corporation".  most of the words in the first version were just funny, focusing more on the Corporation-As-Human aspect, but after the refresher course in what it's like, i was now compelled to focus on that feeling in human terms and began scrawling down words like mad. 

although this was a fairly slight and somewhat insignificant episode of The Grossness That Is, especially in relation to my last 40 years of life, is it possible that a mere 5 minutes of daily meditation has made this shift occur in my thinking and reaction to yet another example of The Grossness That Is? the life-long empirical theory i have held onto is that The Only Way Of Ceasing A Male's Repetitive Violence Upon You Is By Extolling Sudden and Severe Violence Upon Him Once Or Maybe Twice If He Wasn't Listening The First Time. 
and it served me well from 19 to 39.

but here i was, Managing my rage, Giving it free reign in one well-lit area, Letting it express itself while still being contained and not hurting anyone or myself with it...  
all while drinking the much appreciated large cup of peet's coffee.

suddenly, feedback squeals and sound check hums caught my attention, so i looked over my shoulder and realized i had parked a mere 40 feet from the venue where the noise fest was starting... 

a couple hours later, i performed the new "song". with all the mic effects, i'm certain no one could understand a fuckin word i was saying/singing/screaming but it didn't matter. 

catharsis is as katharsis does. 

and that is why i had pretty much forgotten all about that satchel of rage it until just now, and instead remembered the whole experience as The Best One Day Vacation Ever.   


*u can call me ph!*