Sorry, Depressed
So I’ve not written anything in a while. I guess it’s time I put finger to keyboard and got something out there, so here goes.
I feel like all the parts of my brain that handle writing have switched off. All the lights and bells and whistles that used to flare and buzz and make me feel well and truly alive have just winked out, and have left me a shell and… wasted. Why is this? What’s changed?
Medication, I think. Maybe.
I once said to my girlfriend that I was surprised to hear she was on anti-depressants because she didn’t seem dead inside. Now I am, and I feel it. I’m considering going off the medication to get the fire back, but I want to be well and not… how I was before I started taking the meds.
But I feel more depressed since I started taking anti-depressants than I have ever felt before. What’s with that? My sister says that it’s probably because the medication hasn’t actually taken effect yet, but it will, and that then I’ll feel better. I don’t know. I’m not sure I want to find out. Everything feels so broken and wrong and I feel like a derelict merry-go-round, nobody wants to play here anymore because it’s lost all the music and fun and love and now it just feels kind of oppressive, and ramshackle, and if you tried to play on it it’d probably kill you.
Probably.
I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I know that I want to write. I want to go back to when I was churning out stuff every couple of days. But I just don’t feel it. And I hate that. I feel like I’ve been neutralised, and I feel impotent. But I’m writing this right now, so maybe there is hope for me yet. Maybe if I could fire up the drive to start something then the words would flow again. If I can break this dam and gush words out, hundreds of thousands of the bastards, all over the screen in something beautiful that I have made again… maybe I’ll feel like I’ve got my purpose in life back. Maybe by writing this now I’m taking steps to get back to that point.
Maybe.
I hope so, anyway. Because I don’t want to be a shell. I don’t want to be wasted. I know that I do still have the power to write stuff that people will want to read, but it’s hidden away underneath a woolly cover of drugs and depression. There has to be some way to let it all out again.
Thanks for reading.
Kedge
Every Door, Shut
It’s like I can’t see. So much has happened and yet not really much has happened, but my life is changed and I’m not sure where I’m going anymore. Every door has closed and I can’t see out and my course is all blurry and I don’t even know if my ship is still moving in the fog or if it’s just floundering, uncertain.
There was so much I wanted to write but I can barely bring myself to.
But I know I have to. Because if I don’t, who will? I know no one else can write my words for me. That’s why they’re my words. And there is power in me yet I know it. It’s just uncontrolled at the moment and that scares me, it doesn’t have a focus or direction or intent and I’m afraid if I don’t get to work on it soon it may all fizzle out and I’ll just be a shell rather than just feeling like one.
I’ve got to write. I’ve got to stop procrastinating. I’ve got to do it. But I can’t do it now. I just can’t do it now. I can’t see through these shut doors and I can’t just create words on the other side.
Or can I? Maybe I can. Maybe we’ll see.
Something that bothers me. A bit.
I’ve got quite a lot of views now.
Pushing 3,000, in fact.
But I’m not happy about that.
Why am I not happy about that? You’d think that I’d love to have my work getting seen like that, that’s the point of the blog, isn’t it?
Well, you see, WordPress is a very clever site. It tells me not just how many views I’ve got, but on which posts those views are coming from. And a simply colossal amount of views are coming from that one random post I did about jellyfish tattoos.
In case you didn’t know, I had had a few people finding my site via searching for jellyfish tattoos and I’d never actually mentioned the two together, so feeling helpful I made a post with lots of images of jellyfish tattoos and just jellyfish so the people finding my site that way would have something to look at.
I am sure somewhere in the region of 1,500 (at least) of those views are just on that post and its images.
That’s not what I really wanted to be seen, you know? I write all this stuff and sure maybe you think some of it’s bollocks but the point is that I put it here because I want people to see it. And now my way of gauging how many folks are seeing it is completely skewed because of people who just want to see some jellyfish tattoos. Which is all well and good I guess but I feel like my purpose is being sapped.
I’m not going to stop, though. I’ll keep doing what I wanted to do and maybe someone who finds this and is reading about tattoos will think “Oh, I can read some dark shit too” and read some of the rest of my blog. Just maybe.
Anyway, if you’ve read this post, odds are you’ve read some of the rest anyway, so thank you.
Kedge
Beauty
I’m followed by a ghost. I’ve talked about her before; a part of my love is always with me and I can feel it constantly, and the only time I’ve mentioned it before here it’s been about the pain she can cause me.
That’s not all she can do, though.
I went out tonight, again. I think that’s when she feels most comfortable to truly make her presence felt, to come out, to become a kind of real and touch me. When I left the club this time though it wasn’t knives and broken glass and cold blue behind me, it was warmth and glory by my side. A perfect knowledge of contentment and purity, crimson and hot and holding my hand as I walked through bare streets to come home. Keeping me smiling when I had no reason to as far as anyone around could tell.
I don’t know what you’d call it, and you can call it what you like. It doesn’t matter to me. What matters is I’m not alone. There’s presences around, guardian angels that are always with me that can be both beautiful and terrifying. But now the jellyfish is asleep and the angel is here, wrapping her gossamer arms about me and telling me she loves me yet and I have hope and beauty and heat.
I’ve never had love as perfect as this before, and I am grateful for it every day, and I will never throw it away.
Who’s Writing Who?
Control. Is that what writing’s about?
Having the power to realise things, make them happen, take the reins of lives and make them dance to your tune, even if those lives aren’t real. Perhaps your own life is tortuously or delightfully chaotic and lacking in control, so you devise false worlds where you are king, even if you don’t actually exist to them any more than they exist to someone who hasn’t read anything you’ve written.
Sometimes, generally in darker times, I do think that could be what my writing comes down to. I devised these worlds. I am the puppeteer and the weaver, the one pulling the strings and making tapestries. I am in control, here if nowhere else.
But when I think about it further, or if I look at it through an optimistic lens, I think that’s wrong. Any other writers reading this are going to know what I mean. You’ll be writing a story, and you may think the cast are entirely at your whim. But then someone will say or do something you didn’t expect, because that is their character. It’s not something you planned for, it just happens and it flows from your fingers through your pen or keyboard onto the page or screen and you stop and you look and you reread and you think “What the Hell? Where did that come from?”
You reread the whole text and you see that it makes perfect sense, even though it featured not in your plan – that is, if you plan at all. This particular thing is why, generally, I don’t plan. It makes it even easier for your creations to surprise you. I believe I have done my best work when I have a setting I understand and characters I am familiar with and I just let it come out. I’ll watch myself write and I’ll be surprised sometimes by what happens, or at least and perhaps more specifically, I won’t be in control of what happens.
And so we’re back to control. If I am not controlling the world, and in fact the characters are deciding more about what happens in their lives than I am, surely that means that they are in fact controlling me.
Is that a problem?
I don’t think so. I think it makes things richer. It means you care more about a character and when they, for the sake of example, charge headlong at the bastard who killed their lover in a revenge-fuelled rage you can see that they have no hope of standing up to this villain. You know before you even began that at this stage they will be butchered like a pig and… you have to write it. You have to let it happen, because that is what would happen, were it real. It can break your heart but if it does that’s a good thing. My stories aren’t designed to make you feel good, necessarily. They are designed to make you feel. And if they make me feel, I hope they will for the rest of you. If you felt the wrenching pain in your gut when you read of Oscar and his vision of his father and what he did immediately afterward, I’m doing my job right.
What I think this means is that when you are reading the fiction on this blog, you’re not so much looking at something I create as you are simply looking at something else. Rather than me being a man who has invented, I am a conduit to things that never will truly be yet can still remain painfully real. If I’m doing my job right.
I suppose it’s one half of the death of the author, and I am sure I will come back and discuss the other half at a later date.
This has, like many of my non-fiction posts, been quite rambling. I don’t know what you’ll make of it, but… well, the other half of the death of the author, I guess. My opinion doesn’t actually matter.
Kedge
Inspired
I think I know that at times I have probably been misunderstood. Sometimes I say things and I mean them a certain way and my words are taken and interpreted differently, sometimes because I worded them badly or did not understand exactly what it was I was saying, or sometimes because the person I am saying them to expects something of me that my words are not giving. I don’t think this is a product of the psychosis. I think this is something everyone has, sometimes.
So I guess here I’m going to attempt an explanation, of sorts.
I did my ex-girlfriend wrong. Kate, her name is Kate. And I did her wrong. Because I wasn’t what she thought I was, but I did and said what I did and said and as much as I’d like to take so many things back I just can’t do that, none of us can. I tried to be what she thought I was or what she wanted from me sometimes but the fact is it never really worked and it just wasn’t me. I did not love her. In some ways I guess I strung her along. If she ever finds her way to this, I would like her to know that I’m truly sorry. I made a big mistake, I’ve talked about it before, and we all make mistakes and I guess arguably all we are is a collection of mistakes moving forward through life, adding to them and enjoying the times in between. I don’t regret ending things with Kate; I don’t regret all of the time we had together either, we just shouldn’t have been in a relationship. I talked about this in my first post on this site, about the “Stupidity of Settling for Second Best,” a turn of phrase which also possibly implied the wrong thing. But she’s a good girl. I hope she finds her happiness and I hope she makes someone else very happy. The fact was and is, though, that she wasn’t my girl. She was not meant for me and I definitely wasn’t meant for her, and I know I’m with someone far more perfect for me now. Someone actually perfect to me.
Her name’s Sheherbano and I love her unconditionally. It wasn’t easy at the beginning, for a whole load of reasons, and it’s not “easy” as such now, but by everything I consider beautiful it is so worth it. I’ve written about her here before, but not as clearly as this. The sound of her voice makes me feel safe again. She loves beautiful things, beautiful words and beautiful pictures, in a way I’ve not really seen before in anyone else. Not like she does it. And that… kind of makes me feel beautiful, too, which is such a wonderful thing that I can’t really find any of my words to describe it. It’s not something I’ve ever really had before, a feeling like this of being whole and having worth, even though sometimes despite myself I try to deny it. The colour of her skin is the most gorgeous hue I’ve ever laid eyes on, and her smile bursts through thundering rain like new sun to me. To run my fingers up and down her arms is bliss. To kiss her in the cold warms me, with my fingers in her hair. And when I hold her close I never want to let her go. When we hold hands its as if I have a connection to something pure, primal and real and perfect. A sublime link. It’s like a drug, everything’s so much more intense when we’re together, so much more actual and worth savouring. Without her I know I wouldn’t be writing so much, and writing is something else I truly love. If she can make me do that, that’s how I know above any of the other wonders that she is the perfect girl for me.
Is this all a bit obvious? A bit open?
Yes, yes.
Do I care?
No.
I don’t want to hide this. I don’t really see why I should. I want to make it clear, unclouded. I’ve written about her here before, and those who have open eyes can work out without too much trouble which posts they were. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to make it simple sometimes, undecorated. Clear exactly who it is that’s making me feel like I can do this, like I can carry on and present the things I’ve made to your eyes and confer worth upon them I never used to. Creatively I’m not half empty, as I’ve been for years, I’m full. Fuelled and ready, not because there’s anything new in there as such but because I feel like it is worth saying and sharing, and that’s a gift I could not have asked for, because I couldn’t ever bring myself to ask for things less than that and now I’ve received everything.
This girl is my world.
She makes me see in colours I didn’t know existed.
An Oddity From the Site Stats
I check my stats. I use them to measure my worth as a human being.
Okay, well not really, but I do check my stats.
So why would Cosmic Arms Race Part IV get more views than Part II and Part III? How is it making any sense to anyone that way?
How odd.
Jellyfish Tattoos
I find a lot of people are searching for “jellyfish tattoo” and finding my website. Anybody who follows my website will know that while I have mentioned tattoos once and jellyfish several times, I don’t actually have anything about jellyfish tattoos on here. I would like at least one jellyfish tattoo myself though, and I feel that these people are probably being shortchanged as they’re expecting tattoo fun and instead they have, well… a lot of cosmic horror. If they like it that’s all good, but you know what? I fancy giving them what they want, and I can also use it as a point of reference for when I get my own jellyfish tattoo.
So, courtesy of Google images, here are some pictures of jellyfish tattoos, as well as some just of jellyfish for more inspiration.
Disclaimer: None of these are mine, and all images are property of their respective owners.
I hope this helps you out, Google searchers!
Something to live by…
I found this on the wall of my parents’ house, pyrographed onto a wood block just inside the front door. I think it has not always been in that position, but it has always been in the house. I like it, so I thought I would share it with you.
Kedge
I shall pass through this world
But once.
Any good thing, therefore,
That I can do,
Or any kindness
That I can show
To any human being,
Let me do it now,
Let me not defer it,
Nor neglect it,
For I shall not pass
This way again.
Flensing Ghost
I went out tonight, to feed. On the emotions of others. To drink deep from their happiness and perhaps fill myself with it. It’s something I’ve not done in a long time, and I thought perhaps it might help.
To start with, it did. I drank water and I danced and I sang and I embraced friends not seen in time. But no matter how much I took in, my glass remained half empty, or less.
I went to sit by myself on a leather sofa in the corner of the bar, the music still thundering and the lights flashing and the people doing what people do. And then I was joined by a phantom.
Were she truly there, her skin would have been the colour of sweet caramel and soft and light as spring rain. But she was not truly there, and instead her skin was as crushed glass and icy blue. She cuddled up to me and wrapped her arms around my chest and rested her head on my shoulders, raking her scouring skin against mine and I bled and I wept. She knew not what she did. She wanted to love me, but this caustic ghost cannot give me what I truly need. With each stroke of desire my skin cries crimson and my pain builds until I can’t take it anymore. I cannot stay there. Not in her company.
So I left the bar and I came home, but she followed me. As we walked together in the rain we paused and held each other close and kissed but her lips were as jagged as the rest of her and I tasted my own blood in my mouth.
She’s here now, as I sit alone in my living room writing this. She’s behind me with her arms draped around my neck and she is resting her head on my back because I provide this ghost with some kind of comfort, somehow. I don’t understand it. I don’t think I ever will or even can.
I love this flensing ghost. With all of my heart. But I need her to be instead her true form. With skin as caramel and eyes of chocolate, a laugh as the streams of my home and a touch as purifying to me as oxygen to a man suffocating.
That’s… all, I think. I am so sorry I left without saying I was going.
Hollow/Untouched
Something’s burning on the outside. Not the inside. Just the outside. It doesn’t reach in. Inside’s just cold and cracked, unscathed now but oh-so-broken before. It was probably just made broken. A mis-mold of a toy. You don’t expect Action Man to come without a face, or with shallow pits scattered over his back. Plastic and unreal, that’s what he is, and that’s how it is here too. Plastic. And. Unreal. Nothing actually comes to touch because it’s freakish and warped.
If you had the misfortune to own the atrophied Action Man, you wouldn’t want to play with it either. You’d play with something soft and cuddly like a teddy bear that loved you and wasn’t a monstrosity.
Hold my face beneath cold water and as I reach up and break the surface force it back down again and drown the fucking beast and starve it of the air it craves.
Make my hair chill flat to my neck. Make me shiver.
Make me anything. I don’t care anymore. I just want to feel it. Touch me. TOUCH ME. Why. Won’t. You. Touch. Me.
I should lash out for this, for this spurning, for this denial. But I know you don’t mean it and that makes it worse. If it’s not you then it has to be me because it’s not like there’s anyone else in here now is there? Just you and me and this bathtub that’s filled with the ice water and flecked with floating oozing blood from when I struck out.
I’m sorry, but. I can’t be hollow. Either recognise something of me other than the defective deformity or just keep my head down ’til all the hollowness is filled up with that bitter, biting clear liquid and it freezes me alive. That’s better for both of us.
And stop asking if I’m okay.
Last Out Of Pandora’s Box
This isn’t going to be a long post. It’s not going to have lots of fancy metaphors or words I had to double check on dictionary.com. It’s not going to be verbose or over the top, and it’s not going to be melodramatic.
I’m just going to mention something that I should have been shining light on far sooner.
I write a lot of stories where the heroes face terrible odds. Old Gods vs the world? Yeah, all bets are off. And that’s just the obvious stuff, I know what’s going on behind the scenes.
So what’s the point?
The point, true believers, is hope. Hanging on to that thought just a second longer, because hope can make a man mighty.
At least, I hope it can. And I guess, semantically, that’s enough.
I do wish, though, that I could tell you that the release of hope here marks the end of the bad shit to fly out of Kedge’s Box. I can’t do that.
Thanks for reading,
Kedge
Poison, Revisited
Some of you may remember this post: https://notationsandnihilism.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/poison/
Originally that was posted on tumblr, with an attached picture of a jellyfish – the same picture that’s down the right hand side of the current site layout. It was the first picture of a jellyfish that made it to the site, and I guess it makes sense that that was the post it accompanied.
It does kind of have a bit of a topic derail around the halfway mark, and that’s because I tried to exercise some control. I channelled the hate at the society we live in (perhaps it was justified) rather than at everyone, which is where it was originally directed.
What I want to do here is…
I’m going to apologise for it. And I’m going to make a future apology for any other posts that have a similar theme, any unchecked hate and murderous intent that I know may come, and point out that it’s nothing personal. I hope some of you already knew this. After What This Is All For, I guess everyone knows that from time to time I may not be what they consider “myself.” I’m not always sure what I consider “myself”, and I guess that’s the point.
So… yeah.
Thinking About Something I Would Never Do
The sword of thunderbolt iron is a razorblade, and my wrists the beating, vulnerable heart of the beast.
I often think that the only way I could truly defeat whatever this is, could truly kill it, is to kill myself, and take it with me.
I guess that’s a bit like the narrator and Tyler Durden in Fight Club. Except as I’ve said, life isn’t a movie or a novel and I’m not about to blow my own cheek out with a nine millimetre. Apparently that bit of the movie makes sense and he was able to defeat Tyler because he was “willing to kill himself.” That’s bullshit. He was willing to blow his own cheek out. I’d blow my own cheek out too if I thought it would work.
But I knew someone who killed themselves. I don’t know if they felt something like what I feel now, but I don’t think they did. I guess there are myriad reasons why someone would want to take their own life. I knew him, and I saw what happened when he went. I saw all the fallout, hell, I was a part of it. That was the first time I went to a doctor, but that’s neither here nor there. Or is it? I don’t know. I’ll address it later.
Yes, I saw all the fallout. People who didn’t know him, emotional wrecks. People who did? You can imagine how horrible it was.
So. If I did that, if I tried to bow out and take this bastard with me, I wouldn’t actually be solving anything at all. I’d be dead, ignominiously, and he wouldn’t have been suffocated along with it – no, he’d have gone out in a shining blaze of glory inflicting hurt on all those who care about me. Now, he doesn’t want me to kill myself, but if I did that’s how he’d probably see it. And I can see the point.
I should really stop calling it “he.”
I don’t want to cause pain to anyone. And I know, or I hope, that the pain I would certainly cause via that final solution far outweighs the pain I may bring on others by continuing to live.
I guess I am technically contemplating suicide, as attention seeking as that sounds. But I don’t need help, or attention. I’m not going to do it. I couldn’t. It would be a failure on my part. So while I am contemplating it, that’s exactly what I am doing.
Contemplate:
–verb (used with object)
The Death & Rebirth of “Fiction”
Maybe this is just completely stupid, but it was bugging me that on the Categories bit on the right of my page there was this massive link for “Fiction” because there is so much of it on here. It bugged me because it seemed meaningless – I don’t think anyone’s going to want to just filter in all the fiction on here, if they want to read Deimon stuff they click Deimon, if they want to read Cedge Mythos stuff they click Cedge Mythos. I don’t think anybody would ever want all the fiction in one block, because then you’d be mixing settings and the whole thing would be confusing – and the point of the categories business is to avoid confusion. So I deleted the “Fiction” category, so now there’s the category for my non-fiction stuff (That’s Notations and Nihilism, if you didn’t notice, though as may have been implied by the “What This Is All For” post just because something is non-fiction doesn’t mean it’s not fucked up) and then a category for each setting I plan to actually publish more on here.
This meant that I needed a new category, because I’m damned if I’m gonna use the “Uncategorised” category (somewhat of a misnomer, I feel). So “One Shot Fiction” was born, for anything that doesn’t fall into an existing setting and is just “Oh hi, here’s some prose, bye.”
Maybe I should further subcategorise so if you’re just looking for whimsy you can filter out the jellyfish and sadism… nah, you can just take it as it comes.
Thanks for reading,
Kedge
Mist Over The Interchange
Remember I said I wanted to step away from the gothic/cosmic horror and surreal fantasy¹?
Here’s some more surreal fantasy.
Kedge
¹ In case you were wondering, I class both Deimon and the Cedge Mythos² as cosmic horror. Dream Ascendancy isn’t really anything properly yet, but it will be a slightly surreal space opera. I’ve also been working on some werecreature stuff (modern gothic horror – it’s solely for a tabletop roleplay, it won’t be gracing the blog. Probably) and Aether³ (the surreal fantasy that I’ve put a load of offline work into).
² You’ll learn why soon enough, I know it’s not particularly cosmic with what I’ve posted so far.
³ Not sure if that’ll ever reach the blog yet. We’ll see, eh? It’s quite nihilistic⁴ in the end.
⁴ Everything I write seems to be.
Mist Over The Interchange
A masked figure stood on the edge of the hall on the mountain, his white tiger furs ruffled in the cool highland breeze. Men on horses galloped down the ridge, below the cloudline and out of sight towards the Station. The sound of bamboo pipes sang around him, and for a time he considered peace. For a time it seemed as if the combat was far away, and rest finally awaited him. That time would be short lived. Battle and ferocity was his purpose, and his blade cried out for more blood. How long had he been here, watching? He did not know.
In a schoolyard full of ghosts, a woman in uniform chewed a lollipop. Hazy figures shifted in and out of one another, wandering aimlessly, oblivious to anything going on around them. Did they have lives? Or were they just puppets to Zammerann itself? Just who was running this show, anyway? Eyes fixated on the lost spirits, the woman too knew struggle beckoned.
This is a dark place, a cage surrounded by fire and smoke and calamity, and the men that spar there are pain itself. Defined by whips and constraint, these fighters revel in sadistic delight, and for them there will never be enough screams.
Here, in a darker cage, weapons clash in a climactic duel. A man with scissors for hands and a grasping mask writhes in glee, dancing around a robed figure armed with sword and shield. Here, lunacy meets stoicism in combat to the end. Here, the fates of minds will be decided.
Far away from this, a lady in the garb of a medieval entertainer and equipped with a behemoth sword slays men in suits, her weapon cleaving right and left and with each swing turning these mannequins to the dust from whence they came. She has been fighting them for time now, and the end is not quite in sight, but if the Interchange wills it allies will be drawn to the bloodbath.
We return to the masked figure on the edge of the hall on the mountain. Another man has joined him, boasting a mighty cleaver and wrapped up from the chill of the highland breeze. Their swords clash, and with swipes, stabs and kicks the mask is broken. The men have the same face.
Below, over the Interchange, the mist turns to storm clouds and lightning of every colour cracks the sky. The war continues.
What This Is All For
I feel so sick.
Is this really about stories? Is it really all about just me getting my work into the minds of others, seeing what they think, telling stories? Because I don’t think it is anymore. When I made it, that’s what I thought it was for. That and stuff to do with what I thought about the world. I was told by a woman I respect to blog, that’s why I started, but reading her own blog back it’s made me think about what all this is really for.
It’s not stories. I mean, that’s certainly part of it, of course it is, that’s clearly why “Fiction” is the biggest category on here, and one of my settings is pretty much just about stories and what they are and what they represent… but the blog as a whole? Notations and Nihilism? It’s not about stories.
Love, then? Is it about love? A large portion of it seems to say so. Angsty love letters to my girlfriend in a public place, waxing lyrical about the nature of the beast and what it can do to you and how it should be treated. Explorations of what love can really be, and my own learning of things, like how you can fuck and make love at the same time. I figured you could do it with the same person, but that bit right there is new on me. Except it’s not about love either. It can’t be all about that, when mixed with so much despair.
Is it about that, perhaps? Despair? No, not that either. Even with all the stuff about raped corpses and ever-present monsters and the hopelessness of standing against darkness, the blog’s not about despair.
Fantasy, and dreams? Dreams are tagged all over the place. As is cosmic horror, but I guess that ties into despair. Surreality and the lush scape of beauty that can be found in your… ah. There it is. But it’s still not dreams.
Does it even have to be about only one thing? I don’t think so, but when I think about it, when I look at the blog of the woman I respect and I see the things that she talks about, I see what, at least I believe, hers is all about, and suddenly what this is all for clicks into place in my head.
In my head. Ha. How fucking apt, and I’m not even trying.
I want people to read my stories. Naturally. That’s what stories are for. I want to talk about love, I want to talk about despair, I want to talk about pain and hate and rage and passion and what souls do in the face of insurmountable odds. I want to talk about hope, when hope seems gone. And I guess that, right there, hope is what this is all about. But, more specifically:
This website, everything you see here, it’s about living with whatever’s in my head. It’s not always something I can deal with as well as I should, but it is always there. It’s incandescent and beautiful and terrifying and it stings but its marvellous and it is my guardian. It’s a thing of rage and desire and violence and madness, and I have to live with it every damn day, and if I can talk about it here, even if I don’t seem like I am, I am acknowledging its presence. I am nodding my head to the giant, belligerent, acrimonious jellyfish in my head and it is nodding back at me, recognising that it, too, has to live with me and together we can be formidable, though we may quarrel.
It’s my ally and my enemy, my closest friend and my darkest nemesis. I’ve learned to live with it, and thanks to this I can tell you about it, and maybe others with jellyfish in their heads they don’t understand will find what I write and learn to acknowledge theirs, too.
And that, true believers, is what Notations and Nihilism is all about. Cnidaria medusozoa in a human head, wrapping and stinging and loving.
So enjoy this dream, as I do. Because I don’t resent this jellyfish. And I hope you won’t resent me.
Now I can’t remember why I was feeling sick.
Magnesium
Hold her down by the wrist. Fuck her hard.
Don’t let her get up, don’t let her break
Free. Stub a cigarette out on her breast and
Twist, and as she screams she loves you in your
Ear dig your nails into her neck and kiss her
Like she’s never been kissed before. It’s lush and
Verdant, this pain and pleasure blossom that billows
Like blood in cold water, it’s pure, fertile and primal.
Why buy into what you’ve been told about love?
Life’s not a movie or a novel, and as far as this goes
The two of you need to find what works on your own.
When you rake your nails down her thighs and blood
Weeps out and stains your sheets, anyone you may
Care to tell may care to judge. Except this works
For you. She likes it. You like it. It’s a meeting of
Bodies and passions and emotionally you are conjoined.
So when you make her burn or make her bleed,
Remember she likes it and loves you, and no one
Else can come close to touching you like this.
Obsolete Shield
I guess I’ve unlocked the door and thrown away the key. That’s a bizarre feeling. But it’s like the pain wheel has found a place to vomit onto now, and this is it. I always tried to protect people, I feared they wouldn’t understand or ostracise me. I suppose that’s pretty arrogant. Why should I try to protect others from myself? I’m not ashamed about any other part of me, why should this one be any different? It’s just another piece of the broken mirror.
Because everyone leaves you in the end. On a plane or on a bus or maybe they live up the road and one day they just stop giving a shit. What’s the point of trying to hold back? If they can’t deal with the piece of the shattered looking glass that’s going to cut their palms, why should they get to enjoy the funky shaped piece that plays distorted and beautiful reflections on anything you turn its face towards? Why should they? What have they done to deserve, if they don’t get the pain first?
And that’s a stupid way to be. Judgemental. Prohibitive. There isn’t some sort of fucking test to pass to be my friend.
I don’t even know how I’d grade it.
My point, my point, my point is that why is it all so filthy? Why is it all so broken and scattered? Inside this head it’s wallpapered with terror and magenta lightning and stinging tentacles. It’s all my own pain. As far as I can tell, at least, others fill my gauge pretty slowly. I bring the tremors on myself and then as I bounce around my living room screaming and punching walls and shaking and crying, I’m just reacting to some stupid perceived slight that isn’t even a thing. Something so tiny as to be less than nothing, not even an issue, and my own colossal pain wheel just overclocks and spins like a circular saw, wrenching its way through my ribcage and out into the world where it ricochets about and slaughters and covers the walls with blood, and while it does it bellows for more. It’ll never be satiated so long as I let it live with me.
And I do let it. I would rather be this way. The difference is worth it, the other times when the wheel is just gurgling away at the back and indirectly powering the factories of my imagination, those are good times. High, powered, tight and ready.
But now? Break it all. Slam your fist onto brick and roar with glee and ecstasy and that primal pain, grab the nearest sharp object and rake it across any bit of yourself you reckon is soft enough to suffer an effect, slam your forehead into the lightswitch with the rhythm of the dark song in your head and say names on the beat, knowing that nobody is actually going to come and help you, because you scare them, and you should, because you’re demonic poison.
Push them to the floor, if they come. Backhand their faces, if they come. Tear out their throats and spit in their eyes and glut yourself on their attention because they are not you, they are someone else, and therefore they do not matter.
Except I could never believe that. Every soul is special and perfect, in twenty one years of time and space I have never met anyone who wasn’t special, except this double helix broken mirror violently spinning crazed destructive wanker I’m piloting in the game we call Real Life. And that’s why the shield exists. Someone has to watch me and make sure the only person that gets hurt is myself, because the others are special and they do not deserve the pain I would indiscriminately hand out. The others are special
The others are special.
The others are special.
I’m just one guy and my smile’s not important compared to that on the faces of the men and women of the world, that warmth and electricity, and the fact is everyone one of you has better people to pay your attention to.
Because I can deal. I can. I have to.
Kedge
Capacitor
Finally time to talk about power, or at least a kind of power. Pain is a fuel, a charge like lightning or a nuclear reaction that can either be released immediately in a furious scream or stored for the coming atomic blast. Your own pain fills up as if it’s a petrol tank, and eventually it’ll overflow and someone will flick a careless cigarette and your car will explode.
Their car, too, probably.
How do you accumulate this pain? This fuel? Hear unwelcome stories. See dark visions. Stub your toe, twist your ankle, break your arm, cut off your own fucking head. Some people are self-generators, they don’t need a reason, they just have a constant barbed pain wheel turning in the back of their head and it can’t be switched off, it’s just always powering the capacitor.
There’s only so much someone can take before it just bursts out in pure, uncontrollable fury and of course there is collateral damage. It’s probably the person closest who takes the brunt of the blast, the boom shock that is a violation in itself. Closest physically or emotionally, it doesn’t really matter and it’s often both.
Is this truly an expression of power, or is it control? Is there a difference? Is that all power really is? Total control?
Pain affords the power to control another’s pain. To use the hurt you are familiar with to empathise with theirs, or to take your stored energy in your agony capacitors and hurl them out in all directions, not caring who you inflict the suffering on.
Some people purposefully fire the engine. Why do they do that?
Are they just ignorant? Why do I want to hear what I am being told? Will it make me happy? Will it even make me understand?
No, it will just make me ache.
Sometime soon I’ll probably be up to full charge again.
I apologise in advance.
Kedge
Missing
There’s a part of me that’s far away, and distant, and I can hear its heart beating.
Is it me? Or is it someone else? Could it be both?
If I don’t think about it, it’s just a dull ache. I can get on with my life and do my job or enjoy time with my friends and it’s like nothing’s the matter. But then I think about it again… And I know you may think me callous to attempt to put it to the back of my mind, but when it’s in the front of my mind, it’s pain. Pain that she’s not here.
It burns in my chest and rolls in my stomach, and it makes me nauseous. Not mentally, I am glad of the feeling for what it represents. Not emotionally, for I love the cause. But physically, a backlash from the hurt of being apart, I feel like I need to be sick.
In the end, it seems a simple thing. I’ve been alone before. I spent some of my best times alone, I spent some of my best nights out or in without any designated company. But now I know her, now I’m without her… alone isn’t enough. Alone always used to be enough.
When I was a kid, sure I enjoyed playing with friends, but I was just as at home on my own. I had my own toys, and I had my imagination. That was enough to power any entertainment I wanted. Optimus Prime hanging out with Spawn was always a fun one.
Thinking about it, I never had a figure to represent the villains. It was always difficult to the point of impossibility to play with two properly pose-able toys at once, and for a struggle you really do need both participants partaking in the combat. So even my villainous action figures were transferred to anti-heroic status and pitted against the monsters from my mind. I guess that’s also from the same place as some of the things I’m writing now. Optimus Prime, Spider-man and Venom, up against something that at the time was just from my head, but looking back was really a mechanical Cthulhu.
That’s well off-topic. My point was I never needed to hang out with other people, especially with the advent of video games, but before them books would also be (and still are) enough. I could deal with being alone, because my own mind was a playground of marvels.
But now? I’m missing a piece. My imagination still works, better than ever I hope, but it’s not enough for me anymore. I need the other piece of me. I need to stop feeling sick. I need to reach out and touch her hand and hold her. And when that happens, I’m complete. I’m not sick anymore. I’m safe and nothing else about the world matters, not a thing. Maybe that’s selfish. But I don’t get to be complete often. I want to relish it while I can.
Kedge
Notations & Nihilism 