Thirty-one years and hit the ground running.

I consult my oracles, but nothing's clear. I still love you so much. I still feel you.

I'm getting lost again, caught up in the flow of the stream. And I think I like it. I like getting pulled around, I like the kicking I get when my ribs hit the side. I like the meaty texture of the sorrows and joys.

Maybe it's a coward's grave for me. A pauper's. Maybe it'll be a burial at a sea of tears. Or hung by the neck from the tallest tree outside of town. Tortured for information - fingers slit open, skin flayed, all loves betrayed. A smokey bullet from a grassy knoll. Hands in the dark. Over indulgence.

"Here lies another bastard who couldn't learn to keep his damn mouth shut."

I watch the birds for the signal. Telling when it's time to act, when it's time to notice things. When it's time to alter the path or take up arms against no-doubt invisible agents.

I leave the lights off inside. I'm probably going frightfully pale, but I eat lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, so I'm as of yet scurvy-free.

What have I learned since last year? Well, this year was a big one. Or so it feels. A year spent downtown, adjusting to being fully in the city, and leaving it as well, going down deep into the North-East Side.

I made a lot of big choices over the past year, and... Then had them all kind of unravel, leaving me questioning what I'd ever chosen anyway. What I'd let fate choose for me, and I what I wanted for myself. The hand of fate gives and the fucker takes away, don't she? Or rather, when your thirsty, its real easy to get just enough water to drown yourself.

School Teacher or Assassin. That's what I'm trying to decide now. What do I want to be when I grow up? Somebody with a mustache? Somebody who wears a tie? Somebody with perfect grace and the ability to take a man's life without flinching? Somebody who gets all the ass he wants? Somebody who does it all and shares it with the rest of the world? Somebody who hides? Somebody who breathes?

I await paranoia. A stray bullet. The unexpected death from beyond the clouds. The fulfillment of the prophecy of rage. The sweet lightless dreamland of the space beyond what IS.

Well buck up, little soldier, and look towards the sky. This is that day. There is a fire in the sky and it bleeds life down on us all, and the life grows back up through the soil and into things made of meat like you, and that life is was around before you were here and it'll be around long after you're gone, and in the meantime all you have to do is whatever you can make happen.

Get ready for it! Here it is! HERE IT IS!

She said she wanted to go somewhere fun, so I told her to stay away from me. That's as good of directions as I can give.

I want to type. I want to put text where it can be found. I want to get this shit out of my system. I want somebody to see what I'm going through. I don't want to tell anybody. I don't want to ask for help. I don't want to admit it.

But I keep slipping. Down and down, lower and lower. I can't see out of here. I can't feel as well as I'd hoped I would. I can't untie. I can't.

I didn't mean to let that thing make me so mad. Those girls though, they just got under my skin and set me into rage. And I didn't want to get talked down from it. I'm tired of talking myself down. I'm sick of taking good advice.

I used to stand for something. Now I'm all teeth and empty stomach. I'm all quiet rage and misplaced glances.

If I could choke the life out of you instead of letting you walk away, I'd consider it. I'd kill you all and arrange your bodies like you'd all fallen asleep at my party. I'd tuck you in and burn the fucking house down as I left.

I'd like to promise you that I'd have stabbed myself through the abdomen today, but I'm breaking all my promises. I'm undoing every truth I ever told you. I'm recreating my past just so my childhood tales will be lies.

I'm obsessed with checking my mail. Looking for updates. Looking for contact, communication. There's nothing. My world is freezing over. I have nothing to say to anybody. I just want to be lifted up out of this.

I can't have a birthday tomorrow. That's what I want to tell everybody. I'm sorry, but we're going to have to postpone this until my heart stops feeling like somebody took a big crap on it. Come back next year. Maybe I'll be better by then.

 Whenever the going gets tough, when I start to forget who I am, when I'm not sure what comes next or what I want to be or what I want the world to look like... I turn to Jamie Hewlett. 

I turn to the Gorillaz, I turn to Tank Girl, I turn to the shit that's been turning me on like a light switch for as long as I can remember. There's a lot of other artists that've come into my world since then, but that's where I turn when times get tough. That's where I go to when I want something to springboard off of. When I want to try to get myself to another place that I'm having trouble imagining.

That world beyond, the higher world, the realm of pure mystical understanding and imagination. And fucking whatever. 

Here I am. There I was. Point to it. Think about it. Boxes of photos tucked around the corner and on-line. And who fucking cares? Me? Do those dead scraps of paper and digital code make up my prehistory? My life? Is it just what I remember? What I choose? How hard to I have to fall before everything shakes loose? And what'd be left? 

What part's me, and what part's the void? 

Was it the drugs bringing these feelings back? What am I reaching for here? What do I want out of all this? HA - That's the question for sure. What the fuck do I want out of all this? This life? This realm. Where am I going? What will I do when I show up?

I think about those perfect moments, and I want to try to strive to replicate them. I experiment, and I repeat the successes, and avoid the failures. But nothing's ever a failure, it's just a stumbling moment along the way to something else. Isn't it?

I love you. But what are we going to do? Seriously, what are we going to do? When the music gets to that fevered pitch and we're locked in this embrace that I can't comprehend and everything just melts away, what's going to be left? You and me and what else? Those dirty punk kids? That beautiful man in the long dress? Where does it all have to happen after this? 

I'm just trying to say that when I want you, I guess I want a larger wanting that goes along with it. I want the feel of the endorphins that pull me towards you. I want the heady madness and uncertainty and the feeling like the pit of my stomach just got kicked in. I want to savor that shit. I don't want to completely upset our little dollhouses, but I want to knock some furniture around.

Deeper. Darker. Dripping with sincerity. Compassion. Warm murky feelings of abandonment. A hug, a kiss good-bye. We could have a few of those moments together, you and I. We could go to an uncomfortable place where we'd question who we'd been before. Where we'd forget who we were before. Our old lives burnt away by a passion for the new. My past is nothing but trash and unmarked boxes. A bomb left in a forgotten place. An old scar you can't remember getting. 

 Fuck me in the eyes.

I moved. I gave up sleep. I partied. I had time with a friend. Over a 50 hour period of time, I slept for 4 hours, took a handful of substances, and even had a splash of intimacy. What the fuck? Oh, and I moved. I moved from a one-bedroom into a... 8X8 closet.

I'm up and down like a hooker with epilepsy. My emotions are fraught with tremors. I think I know what I'm doing, but it's hard to tell.

Sometimes I feel a great wave of optimism welling up, like a tidal wave of hope set to drench the sands. Other times I feel my head and heart grow heavy, as though the weight of the world is set to pull me down the gravity well to the center of the earth. I had to fight to not cry on the bus.

I want to say that I feel scared and alone, but I know I'm not alone. I've had too much friendship and assistance over the past few weeks to feel alone. I feel crazy blessed by my friends.

I spent a few hours rewatching Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas - put some commentary on, enjoyed some perspectives. The movie thrills me almost as much as the book does, sometimes. It grants a bit of perspective. 

I spent way more money than I guess I needed to today, buying lunch supplies and snacks and shit to brush my teeth with. I don't think I've brushed my teeth in like 3 days now, which is probably the longest I've ever gone. It's kinda scary. I assume my breath must smell like a cat's asshole.

I should go out and get some food. It's almost 9. I need something to eat, and a walk to have a smoke. I can walk 7 blocks and try some new take-out. I don't really want to spend the money, but I'm willing to suck it up and just say "It's a new day. Treat yourself to some food."

They couldn't stop me. They never saw me coming.

I don't know what I heard, I forget what I saw. I don't know what you heard, but most of it was probably lies. Everybody I hang out with is a liar, so I have to assume that most of what I hear are lies.

It used to make me paranoid, but now it just lets me see how flexible this loose-knit construct of reality really is. I surf the half-truths, never quite sinking fully into deception, but never quite coming up for a breath of true, fresh air. I feel, I know, but it's slippery. Hard to keep your footing.

We tore up the streets to plant flowers, but not nice flowers. The horrible meat-eating kind. Semi-sentient things that drip smelly saps and make the air too thick to breathe easily. The birds love it, but that's just because the birds love feasting on the bits of corpses left behind by those awful flowers. We all hate the flowers now, but they've taken root. There's no getting them out. They go far deeper than the sidewalks did, far deeper than the soil, some suggest. If that's true, it's all over already anyway. No sense even packing.

Somebody broke into my life, my fucking life, and rearranged all the crap I was keeping in my existence. I can't find anything now, and I'm tripping over all this shit I thought I had safely locked away in storage or at the back of some miscellaneous drawer. Strings and, you know, bobbins.

I didn't want this. I didn't want to hurt anybody. I didn't want to be anything less than perfect. I didn't want to know a single moment of dissatisfaction. I didn't want to meet my maker. I was going to do something first, I was going to kick down a door and stare so hard at the moment that living electric flame would explode from the contact of my ideas on the building blocks of hard matter. Molecular fires are my favourite fires.

Anyway, before we knew it, it was time to go. Time to shuffle off with our little walkmens on shuffle. Mix tapes fully mixed. Minds only partially blown, like half deflated gas spheres.

19 weeks since I updated this thing last. That's not bad.

I used to be so happy that I'd kept it up for so long. In some ways, it's my only record of where I've been. For the years when there were no pictures, just notes and this blog.

You want things to be otherwise, but things are not otherwise. Things are just how they are. Life is hard. Some things are even harder. One moment you're doing it all, you think you're the king of everything you can see. You feel like... the sun bursts just to see you on the street. Everything just falls around you.

And then suddenly you're counting up cardboard boxes and shopping for a newer, much smaller bed. The sort of bed you wouldn't be able to invite anybody to share, and it fits. It fits your life, because you're not really ready to share yourself with anybody else.

Instead you build walls. And then you write yourself letters like ladders to climb up over those walls. I'm not building walls, I'm compartmentalizing, mentally. I'm putting things in places so I don't have them bleeding over into the rest of my life. The rest of my mind. Keep that mess where it can be dealt with, like a suicide in a bathtub.

I'm tired. But I know what I'm tired of. I'm tired of trying to be special. Of trying to be cool. Trying to get noticed. I'm tired of thinking that there's something bigger than myself that I want to have loving me. I'm tired of trying to write my way out of my life, instead of working at changing my life into something more livable. I'm sick to fucking death of despair, and irony. Ah, that last bit's probably an exaggeration.

I think I want to own my own washer-dryer. Maybe even in my own home. Or maybe I just want to rent an apartment that's got them. I want to start smoking so I can have something to inhale and exhale that isn't air. I want a touch of drama at my fingertips. I want a hint of malice in my eyes. I want people to trust me, but I don't want them to take that trust for granted.

I want you so bad. I just want to touch you, or to hear your voice. I want you to know me, to know that I put myself in this situation so that I can be taken like this by somebody like you. I want you to want me like I wanted you back before I got to know you. I want you to hold me down and break me into a billion pieces. I want you to suck me up and spit me out, like a fine wine at a tasting. I want to know the love of the inside of your mouth as I slide down your drain and settle onwards to mingle with the rest of the waste in the gutter.

I want a note tied around my corpse that says "I did it for you." I want a rose tied around my heart, held in by the barbs. I want a tattoo of my life laser-etched into my eyes so I never forget all those terrible mistakes and those moments of bliss. I to feel it, and I want you to feel it to. Feel it dripping down the inside of our heads like we're sharing a strong trip on weird acid. Mushroom clouds pressing our skulls together, the electricity of our thoughts a single spark in the darkness of this eternal night our lives haunt like flickering ghosts in the either of an uncaring universe.

Lift it up. Bring it down. Put the claws in. Pull the guts out. Wear it like a satin dress. Kick 'em like high-heels. Beat a rhythm into their heads with a big stick. Make sure they can't forget it.

Keep dancing. Keep dancing you crazy bastard. Keep your hands in the air. Mind the sharks, mind the sharp angles, the sever angle of descent, as we plummet, as we shoot up off into the sky like fireworks, like cheap porno orgasms, like the beat hitting its crescendo and flowing forth into a rhythm stronger and more pure than anything that had ever come before.

I need a new art. I need a new style. Something to do with sharpie markers and graffiti tags. Something to do with things moving around, things not being in place, but being everywhere. Art appearing spontaneously. Talking animals. Can you see where I'm going with this?

Pictures. Form. Idea. I'm all murky, and undeveloped. I am a lifetime of old Polaroid film, the kind that goes all smelly when it's off. I am metaphor, for you.

I used to write to you a lot, back before. I don't think about you as much now. I just go about my day, bouncing from street to street, keeping my head down and my nose clean, spitting on cop cars and swearing at old ladies, minding my own business and taking pictures of suspicious birds, breathing smoke and leaving a trail of ash, glancing nervously and wandering away, turning up the music and moving along.

So where you at now? You ever get that thing written? You ever finish that piece of art you were working on? I did this thing, and I'm doing this other stuff, but ain't that always the way? I don't know what I've got to show you. I'm dating this girl, you wouldn't know her - she's from two towns over.

I'm still chasing The Cool, like Jack Kerouac searching for himself by searching for America, I search for nothing while searching out crap on the Internet. It's kind of the same, except instead of riding on the backs of flatbed trucks, I sit here in this hand-me-down office chair. I'm getting older, I don't have to tell you. I've gotten much older since last we spoke, if we ever really spoke at all. I mostly just remember that glassy stare, like putting my own eyes through the mirror.

Of course I'm not talking about anybody - I'm talking about myself, or an idea, a construct in my head of an audience for which I perform. A cross-section of people from all walks and ways of life, mostly disinterested. No, not like that, like something else. It's hard to say. I shouldn't even say at all, shouldn't mention it. Should just let it go. Move on. Tomorrow's a new day, surely today might be too? As well? Maybe even yesterday was a whole new day, a new chance to get things right, to be really impressive, to really stand out and be counted, to be noticed, to not dwell but create anew. Onward! Upwards! Into the breech, past the gums, over the hill, around the corner, through the front door, third shelf on the left, two rows down. That's where you'll find it, and in behind it - the key to my heart, still all sticky from the last time it was in my heart. My heart still aches.

YOU HEAR ME, YOU BASTARDS?
It still aches.

But it's cool. It's not like it's a thing, it's just there, like mosquitos or malaria. Like laundry in the drier, going around and around, getting hotter and hotter, going nowhere but still arriving somewhere. Can we similiarly travel through time, churning over and over, getting hotter and hotter, and only to arrive perfect where and when we are meant to be there? Oh well, who wants to be laundry anyway? Living for the hands of another to pick you up and put you to use. I'd rather be soup, or at least, some sort of super-hero. That's a little pun. I left it there, the way mice leave poo everywhere they go.

Anyway. It was a long day, and now it's a little shorter. Not much so, but it's all good. I'm looking forward to all the parts of it that should be full of joy, and prepared to bash in the head of any cartoon gopher who dares dispute my right to bliss.

 I was walking home, crossing the mouth of an alley, when a car came up sharply at me. 

I was right there. In the center of the walkway, and the car came straight at me.

So, already feeling pretty crap, I flipped out.

I started screaming "I'm walking right fucking here," and then I stepped forward, and started smacking my arms on the hood of the car. "Right! Fucking! Here!"

It was a little old lady in the car. Gray-haired. She opened her car door to get out, and I moved at her, screaming "Yeah? What the fuck?" Then I saw something that looked like a badge on her jacket. An old cop? A security guard? 

Seriously, at that point I got a lot madder. Some asshole authority figure just jabbed at me with their car like I wasn't even there. Like I didn't even fucking exist.

So I screamed at her until she closed her car door. Then I shouted out "Jesus! I'm right fucking here!" and walked away.

I feel bad already. I really do. I like little old ladies. And that could've been anybody. That could've been your mom. Maybe it was.

But I was so fucking mad. 

I sort of want to apologize. But Jesus Fucking Christ. She almost fucking hit me! And she was driving slowly enough to see me from a ways off. Somebody's crossing, you don't enter the intersection. You wait to make your turn until they are the fuck out of the walkway. Because doing otherwise is scary and dangerous. Scary and dangerous.

So, fuck it. Chalk this up on the list with all my other sins. Screamed obscenities at old ladies. 

Fuck. There's no part of this where I'm laughing. I just feel like shit from every angle.

 Enlightenment hits as he double back-flips off the spring board - it hits like a bullet curving with the natural urges of space-time motion. The bullet hits his brain and his thoughts splinter into a billion brightly coloured fragments & neural snaps. Everything goes blue and red and blue again, the colours sweeping over the mind. The blanket goes over the cage, and the bird falls asleep. 

His body hits the water with all the grace of a sandbag. His stomach goes bright red where it contacts the water. Liquid goes up his nose, in his ears, down his lungs. He tries to care, but his thoughts are still too far spread out, still too dilated with pure colour and light. Somebody pulls him out. A life guard performs mouth-to-mouth.

He sputters to life, his eyes as red as his stomach, his mind gripped by the screams of the fight-or-flight impulse. How can this ever-expanding sensation of yawning dread be enlightenment? How can this crushing fear be the truth and the knowledge of the eternal states of being beyond the flesh? He rushes out onto the lawn, the freshly cut grass barely giving way to his weight. He tries to remember what he saw. He falls on his knees.

Up above, the sun expands to eighteen times its original size, and then slowly uncurls. The sphere reveals itself to be a great long serpent, each scale as long as thousand planet earths laid side to side. The serpents wings blot out most of the sky - the wings are red and green and orange and yellow and right at the edge they're purple, as though fading into ultra-violet and other colours beyond the human spectrum. The wings flex and flap, wing strokes from here to eternity, wider than the orbit of pluto, soundless flapping in the vacuum of space. 

He reaches up, and the great serpent's head reaches down to meet him. One eye blinks, and as it does, the force of a supernova cuts through the earth, reducing solid stone to molten ash in an instance. He bathes in the light. It flows over and through him, even as every last thing in human existence fades away to distant memory like butter in a hot pan, or flowers before a flame-thrower.

Once again, the enlightened core within him is activated. The chakras up and down his form twist, and twist again, his spine knotting and then un-knotting itself, spilling its special nerves and fluids towards the cold horizon of space. Wisdom, peace, and inner security follow. Enlightenment spills out into the universe from his eyes.

Out on the lawn, they help him up, and put him in a chair. He wets himself, cries, and demands nachos, with olives, and no chicken. He passes out six minutes before they arrive, and burns to a crisp red in the sun. The serpent in the sky waits until night is just about to fall, and then sneaks off behind the westernmost mountains.

 “What's going to shake these blues away?” she asked me, ruffling my hair with her hand.

 I shook my hand violently like it'd bitten onto my wrist and I needed to get it off. Specs of blood the size of a worm's eye flicker off me and hit the white wall.

“What'd you do to yourself?” she asks me. She's got dark tanned chocolate skin, and the sort of cleavage that makes me think of the sun rising for some reason. There's nothing going on between us, nothing compassionate or interesting. 

“To myself?” I asked her back. “Why's it gotta be like that?”

“Fine,” she said, rolling her eyes in my general direction. “What happened to you?”

I unwrapped my Finding Nemo bandaid, because we were out of the Hello Kitty ones I'd been looking for. “Somebody cut me off. With their car. While they were talking on their cell phone. So I grabbed their radio antenna as they went by, out of frustration, and then the little bit on the end of the wire took a chunk of my little finger with it as the car went.”

“You grabbed the antenna?” she asked me skeptically.

“I was just angry. I didn't want to punch the roof or kick at the car because... I've been trying to not let my anger win those arguments, you know? I didn't want to let my anger out that much. So I just swiped at the attena, I sorta wanted to pull it off or bend it, but... It just cut me. And I really doubt that she even noticed. She just sped on, eyes on the prize, ear to the cell. Whatever.”

“Can't let that stuff get under your skin,” she warned me. 

I thought of the woman I loved when I put the alcohol swab to my injury. I knew it was going to burn, so I said to myself, “wouldn't you stick your hands into fire for her?” I thought of how much I loved her, and I pushed the alcohol to my open flesh. And it burned. But just a little.

I'm answering this, so I must be blocked... I'm just going to be straight up, and save the metaphors for something that comes later. When I go out, I like pancakes, because they're cake that comes with delicious syrup. Cake for breakfast, and pie too. Though most days I just have granola and yogurt.

My god. This is even more boring than I thought it would be when I started out. You know what I need? Some tea. I need some tea to lift me up out of this wake-n-bake haze. I had something to eat so my brain would stop trying to kill me with sharp metal bits, but I think if I don't give it some tea pretty quick, it's going to burn down everything that's left of my ability to function in this workaday world we call home.

It's just that... the kitchen is so far away. So very, so very far away. So far away I can't even imagine. My feet will be a thousand pounds each, and the journey shall become a thousand more miles with every step. And then - then I have to wait for water to boil. A cup of water. Brought to a near boil. Do you have any idea how long that takes? Of course you don't. Nobody does. It's impossible to tell. It's forever. It's long enough to wander away and forget what you were doing and then when the kettle goes off it's like a thousand ghost trains winding through the kitchen, their engines howling like remorseless dogs. So yeah. That's why I don't want to go into the kitchen to make tea. Something about ghost trains.

There's a trio of giant bugs out on the front lawn, beetles the size of raccoons. They've got pinchers that're longer than your thumb, so when they bit, they can take up to eight pounds of flesh, real easy. Last week the city released jungle cats to help take care of the over-sized menaces, but the cats haven't been seen since. I think they took off. To hell with that fighting-from-the-shadows crap. I'm glad I don't have to go to work today - some other commuter-type can deal with those monsters out front. I'm calling it a Sunday, and keeping the shades drawn. I'll wade through the yellow bug-guts on my way to the store, after somebody else has taken a shovel or a shotgun to those little beasts.

Drifting now. Hunger settling upon me like a distant fog rolling in from off the cool mountain plains. I can see it coming, surly as a sailor can see a coming storm. My brain is breaking up into little bits of nonsense and foam now, little bubbles of thought trickling out in a steady stream of blah-blah-blah. I struggle to keep my head up, but before I know it, everything inside just tumbles on out, my forehead opening like big, sturdy cellar doors, and a thousand brilliant balls of pure blue lightening escape out into the morning. 

 Atomic robo fuckwads is more like it! Disgusting creatures that piss in my ear with their digital cries, like tin cans raping each other in the back of a burning car, that's what their voices sound like. Normally I'd slam down the phone in disgust, but this one's pushing right into the apartment!

 God! The eternal debate rips me apart! Eat or write? Eat or write?! 

We get to a new planet. We tap its core. When it explodes, we ride the shockwave out, and that combined with the energy taken from the core, pushes us on to the next planet. We transverse the galaxy this way, hoping to eventually find a place to call home. The gravity must be just right. The atmosphere must be something we can convert for our needs.

Most of the planets we reach are dead. Nothing can grow on them, or perhaps just some micro-biotics, single celled beings and virus clouds. Nevertheless, we must survive. We made the decision long ago. If our people are to survive, if our lives are to have any meaning at all past this ship, then we will need to destroy ever planet we come to until we find the one which will support us.

Some few planets we have seen displayed signs of civilization, sometimes quite advanced. Our core agenda however must never change. We will not survive, we will not make it to our impossible dream which must exist somewhere out there in the stars, if we give up. We must kill every planet we come to. Until we are home.

 Drip drip Drip

The little cat runs fast across the floor. The shovel hits me hard and I fall dead to the ground. It's a nice feeling, the ground rushing up to devour me whole. The snow giving way to my body like a blanket. Cold takes me in, cold and inertia. Everything slows down to a crawl, and then stops moving altogether.

...........................

Moving fingers, moving brain cells, every moment on fire. Every moment like a bum, held down and dowsed in gasoline and lit up with a match. Every moment pain, confusion, burning deeper and deeper, past the skin, past the tissue, into the bones. Real life burns like the sun.

Fire Hatred Explosions Dust - All these things and more fit in the back pocket like some dime-store detective novel. Things start out OK, but they don't hold. They drift towards the center of the road, drunkenly leaning over the center line, waiting for the punch from the other side of the street. Waiting to feel back teeth pushed out through the back of the skull. Waiting for inertia to catch up. It always does.

Sad? Frustrated? You dunk you head into a bucket of thick oil, and feel the dark globs of grease invade your nose, your ears, your mouth and your eyes. Hot oil, forcing its way between the cells of your skin. Hot oil, dark and black and bubbling. 

Again and again the hammer comes down. Bits break, scattering everywhere. They fall under the table, and behind the counter, from where they will never be retrieved. Everything breaks and falls away.

 Harder to see now, with all this mud and blood caked over my eyes. Harder to move forward. Can't tell where I'm going. Can't see any end in sight. Just miles and miles of blood and filth. Human filth. Dead skin. Excreted matter. Tears and the broken bits of souls that get tangled in your shoelaces. I lumber on, like a dinosaur in a tar pit, like a fly on a fly strip, like something trapped and ready to die but still moving forward. Still forcing myself onwards and upwards, into a great sense of clarity. A better sense of mind. Just tap it all out. Let it come. Put back your head and howl. All these twisting words will form a noose in the end, and you'll climb that noose to freedom and beyond. Just stick your neck through it, and lift with your chin. You'll be safe and sound in no time at all.

Eating yogurt w/granola. Smoking. Looking at snow. Listening to seabirds. Listening to Chris Public. Listening to Dirty Mary. Feeling the cold air from the open door. Listening to the dull hum of the heater. 

............

We ran. We fell head over heals down the stairs, and landed on our feet like cats. We were ready for them. We were ready for the great beyond.

Uh, I'd live in Vancouver. Where I live. Surrounded by... mountains. And the ocean.

Of course, I'd also choose to have my cake and eat it too, so go figure.

The channel changes viscously.

"So, here's how it's going to be, my little Kikio," she says, scratching me behind my ears. The surgery that gave me slightly fuzzy, slightly pointed, ears and hyper-acute hearing left me able to hear a fly fart from three blocks away, and a little itchy around the edges of the scars. "We're gonna burn this place down to ashes on our way out the door."

She's calling herself Dirty Mary these days, after my favorite song. It's got like 899 plays on my portable personal music device. That's practically a loop for 18 days solid. She's been bored for too long now, and that means something bad is going to have to happen. I'm feeling slow, like I've got long links of heavy chain wrapped around my mind, pulling my thoughts down to the dirty floor. It's always a struggle to keep up with her, especially when she's unarmed. 

"I've completed drawing up the perfect plan in my head," she told me triumphantly. "Except for one fatal misstep, which is that the pick-ax is still in the back-seat of the car." We had to leave it there though, because Klaus, the bartender, hated it when we got cop blood on his once-clean floor. Once clean as in, "once, back in the late 70's..."

Who else was there with us? I don't even remember. There was the tall girl, who had those eyes that looked like she wanted to eat your teeth. There was that other girl who always hung out with her, the smaller one with the big scar up her face from when she bounced off the partially paved roadway at some sixty miles an hour. She wore it well though, like a badge or a big "fuck you" at the world. Oh and that guy was there, Keith. He wasn't bothered by anybody though, he was just playing pinball in the back. The collar of big leather jacket was up high, making him little more than a dark brown skull poking out of a mound of black biker accessories.

"Lets burn this mother out," Mary says to me. 

Reality hits me like a bad dream. I don't know where I am, what I'm doing. Everything spins. Clearly I shouldn't have stood up so fast. "I need a plot," I shouted out, just as I began to tumble back down to my mind. "I need a direction! I need some background notes!"

But there's never any time for background notes in life. Just hindsight. Most people's hindsight is 20-20, but mine is laser-sighted, night-vision equipped, and deadly accurate. My hindsight can kill a memory or a dream, running, from over 1,000 feet away.