Don't look now. The Intellectual Nobility, the Sweet Shy Guy, the Cosmic Cutie, the Rock n Roll Cowboy, All-Them, are staring at so-and-so's tits, (round balls of fat, so mesmerizing!). Not one of them can honestly say that body parts aren’t some prominent equation in a stark heat ridden room. They who are hiding their ravenous eyes behind thick frames of glass, pretending to be above the simple mechanics of human reproduction… they find themselves much too advanced, looming above "trivial/trite" relevance. Brimming with pragmatic, progressive, proud profundity, though peering at one’s own thoughts objectively is out of the so-called question.
We used to talk about revolution, we used talk about "new" ideas, what it was to be "against the grain", though the metaphorical t-shirt we’re wearing is no more beyond basic pro-active fundamentals. And who actually uses their brains to tread off old ‘zine handbooks is uncertain (now turned into common culture, counterculture bought, easily accessible). Rowdy, pointless banter takes place of advancement. Irony, icons, buzzed out, blotted out. Mortals can dive from buildings with manifestos tattooed across their chests, rock bomb McDonald's windows, tell Henry Ford to fuck himself, beat each other to bloody pulps, yet still manage to ignore an important fact: their ability to harbor honesty AND loyalty in their human interactions has taken an MIA card, or maybe it was never a resident to begin with. You're shit, baby. You're just God's biology in action.
There’s no way to measure communication. Besides, no goldsmith is available to stamp them "sacred" with 14-carat, and we might object to the idea of assigning what is (and what is not) sanctuary. But I know about Fevering, that galvanic quest, and how it goes all awry, readily abandoned for "fun". The digital cocktail provides eyefuls of potentially dime-a-dozen attractiveness to accompany in the pursuit of faux happiness. How it is that everything transforms into vanity and hoodies (or, on the flipside, the huge attempts at shielding one's jugular from the vampire teeth of said coxcombs), I do not know. (Maybe it has an inkling to do with the fact that it would take too much effort, especially after 2 hours of fixing your hairdo and carbon copying octaves chords from records you spent too much money on, so on and so forth, to take on a horribly plebeian role like Substance).
"I've got a little black book names & numbers and faces forsook, lips puckered, I swear they never spoke, put your lips to my neck for a key to the action index, the secret sign that says your mine, call; i'll give you back your dime. Something coming from the stereo; hysteria, coming out of her stereo. Something stung me with malaria, hysteria is coming out of her stereo. Underneath the collar, is where it begins the wearer of the mark of the love of pain, beneath the sheets, under the covers, is where it all begins. Action - don't you want some action?"
N.O.U.'s "Hickey Underworld" has taken over! It became a truth, a wide victorious reality, in a matter of years. (Scratch that, it’s simply another all encompassing, historically consistent flaw of humanity.) Every crook of them pushes to be peeled of fabric. My head spins. "Oh, geez, I gotta keep remindin' myself that I have a girlfriend!" The boy with the nice hair and the handsome jaw line is mumbling temptations to himself. I smirk and push a little laugh through my teeth. But when my eyes meet the silvery mirror, I see that I, too, am marked! The round bruise on my delicate neck is the culprit of my worst fears; it tells me of contradictions I'd rather not hear. Some things we need to know, whether we want to know them or not. I wonder about the blueprints of this phenomenon, how the meat market REALLY works, where it comes from, and who is buying it. Amongst friends, there's chitter-chatter (like no tomorrow) on romantic scenario, boring stories of co-dependency, never forgetting that Electroclash had skyrocketed the many soliloquies of one-night stands and other detached caveman feces poured straight into my ears.
Our worlds, junked junkets of sexual static, emotional tactics - vulturism has no choice after all but to prevail. Might as well forget what hearts we have in these scrawny slaves of ribcages, who the hell needs 'em? Heartache makes for such colossal obstacles; at a point sufficiently futile effort and enough resulting vulnerability with the big "L" word will build up to an implosion point. Those heartaches will be convincing enough to not allow people Love. Being unarmed is certainly not an option, now is it? Most come from an all too familiar standpoint of Anti-Love, immensely guilty of the severe fear, anxiety and defense heartache has inflicted upon everyone I know. Even due to growth and comfort, very matures will still find themselves desperately searching for something more productive than the shitty aftermath of romantic tragedy, even if a safe replacement for love at best. I could relate. I dreamt of smashing bottles with a potentially platonic sidekick in an empty blackened parking lot. We would build our own foundation for a worth more sacred and stable than the "love" emo-politics defined, a plan that was never so lucky, considering.
Most who've embraced the Anti-Love anthem had not forgotten sexual slavery; the plan crumbles and I become well aware that there is no freedom in choice. You have A) the physical replacement for Love (along with loneliness, comfort, boredom, etc.), extremely common, far more popular than just the work of solitary monsters. Even those with the best intentions roll on the floor, just like the void and biological suckers they sigh at, with people who seemed great candidates for their kid powered adventures. To at least carry on one-sided true blues for oneself seems better than void tableau, but when life lives as a passionate contradiction, chances are the urge to break stuff, or succumbing to violent sobbing instead, goes hog-wild.
Then comes B), sadly, the stooge tries defiance. (Defiance is another word for defense. Ignore is another word for abhor.) Starts off as “be your own”, ends up a frigid “fuck off”. How to Forgo the World When You Are Used To Its Company. In my adolescent case, the mane came off like sleet and other attempts to represent non-gender. The closest I came to (what would be) falling in love was with a boy whom no one had touched, who had no desire or need to touch. He, who spent his days and eves indoors, making brainwaves out of movie samples, a genius scientist of white noise, became more than mentor. I began a collection of toy robots, admiring their tin infrastructure and how they harbored absolutely no means for sentiment. No need for others to satisfy them, just a key to wind them up. I, too, could fuck shit up and be without external justification for my existence. Pursuits would keep me well grounded; significant others, a cliché.
The statistics also propelled my stance as army of one: the chances that I would “hook up” with some adulterine predator posing as a fine purveyor of soft sensitivity, whom would throw empathy out on the table for me to gobble up like rare and precious enlightening hallucinogenics, were too high. Other frames of this portrait were challenging - late at night I had a recollection where I had come from, a womb, a mother, of Love, my heart beat rapping on the door, Edgar Allen Poe only knows. Reversion from B) the knowledge that one or two of the proletariat could be devoted, that somewhere there were holy magical microcosms being shared without power games, cruel intentions… could nihilism really make a convince of me? And my body, the enemy? The metal of robots made me their collection, pushing genuines into acid pools, even with their platonic propositions. Lashing out on all representatives of Love, true or poo, desecrating the happiness between comfortables. Denying and hating sexuality, denying and hating Love, secretly knowing both things were ingrained in my make-up. The fact that we could ever be undressed, ever love or be loved, gives its life savings to terror.
Love and sex, unfortunately, happen to be two generally mutual creations that became tainted products of an ill-minded consumer. It's a difficult task to separate the tainting from the actual sexuality or Love itself. I couldn’t even start to untangle this mental wire knot I thought myself into: unable to deny feelings of Anti-Body, feeling full of human biology, not having a balance between friends and lovers, a bucket overflowing with misunderstanding. Why bother trying to untangle the mess? Forever spend click-clock in aims of protection from (non)reasons stuck by when it comes to emotional/physical intimacy. Look not at them as a people, but the pieces of ass or emotional crutches to use when convenient. Nothing to be done than to sit on a throne of hurt and all this emotional mind-fucking is not a misdirective to an alternate progressive pathway. Right?
I declare a disagreement. A part of me laments when I witness the good people getting brutalized. A part of me dies when the victims end up grabbing the whip to degrade others just because they fell into this trap “needing” to protect their Egos by playing the same filthy card the jerks that hurt them in the first place owned. The compulsion of meddling with the Anti-Love Pro-Fuck-Me game (how do you even fit two in one?) finds stomachs turning. I've trouble looking at "whores" without being able to disconnect them from what’s behind their acts. I love not treachery or broken child hoods or self-righteousness at the cost of other people's trust and comfort levels. No surprise that reservation hardly wants to compute to vulturine standards. But the Standard Elites wear blaming gloves, pointing fingers at the Logic (that wants to be okay with Love and Body) as unhealthy, silly, abnormal, regressive, priggish. Idealistic. Oh, and as a gullible side note, their motives have nothing to do with it whatsoever.
What you are, what you do, why you do what you do. Why you catch attraction to people, why you want to bury your brides in their beds, breaking blood, cracking hearts, used, abused, disrespected. Why you may (or may not) often follow through with those desires. Why you desire to tie yourself to legs, drag your personage on cement, why needing someone is the only way you can feel whole, why subjection to making another your own safety blanket is prominence. I find it funny that a Standard would attempt to come up with game plans that work only on a surface basis. Approaches like a mutual agreement of what happens after sexual relief!, what the agreement means!, limits a deeper understanding and acts as a contract. As you get permission then is it perfectly acceptable to ignore self-examination: the individual gladly denies him or herself from understanding going inward. It only goes outward, like the cum flow the agreement was I guess created for, healthy physical release with surface communication. “Fucking responsibly” as they call it. Intentions are imperfect, there might as well be no reason to deal with them; that's too much psychological trouble. Self-examination makes people yawn, yet I am unable to live without it. Shit, not knowing is the first sign of dishonesty, baby.
Suppose they have me poured over this new glamorous destiny: self-fulfillment, through the use of other people, their bodies especially. That which I do not understand is supposed to excite me, right? Imagination is boring, they would seem to say. I want to just be okay with that sometime, to write off what the knaves do with their lives, their hearts, their bodies. "Fine, I can pretend you don't have some secret void to fill." People are terrifyingly opposed to locomoting a more difficult and (in the long run) lasting path. Perhaps it's easier to not actually try and figure it out when there seems to be no light at the end of the tunnel. Inside of me lives this sexless time bomb who only really wants to make it with Transcendence though my physique and essence both equally continue to be overshadowed by the winged silhouettes of creep creatures. The option to blend in with foreign scenery, to pretend it is mine, in hopes of not looking obvious or drawing attention to me (as prey) is a very tempting misconvenience. It could save battles on top of battles worth of Time (and wound healing). The reality of it is frustrating and saddening but it's a reality, and realities must be accepted.
They could teach us politically correct sexual etiquette, the aesthetics of black hair dye, the appeal of sarcasm and king-cool persona, that power is erotic stimulation, and vice versa... Maybe your “scene’s” biggest coercive rapist since an unnamed grindcore drummer was a pro-sex feminist. Who would care as long as it was in the name of culture? Control gets people off. Submission, submission, it's doused with denial and sold to the kids for a reasonable non-corporate price, no SKU #, a-okay. Now I'm exhausted. It's like watching from a gutter, one tied up in electrical tape and confusion and migraines, into another gutter, that of heat and the brainless cycles of user mentalities, and then wondering when the train to the mountainside will ever come. It's been too long now. Are we loveless truly? Do we accept flesh as a tiding, a biding of time? Do you find it easier to do so without knowing why? Do you even ask yourself these questions sometimes? And beyond that we still need to ask ourselves so many new questions. Without questions, there are no answers, and without answers there is no change, and without change there is no way we are ever going to actually get anything done. It’s just a bad cycle, these lives, and bad cycles don’t do anything great. This is not esoteric. This is no country club. So go ahead. Ask away. I dare you.
Originally printed in Mission:Destroy #2 (2000?) & The Tragedy of Lemmings #1 (2002).
