March 2013
1 post
I felt that old flame surge up again. I have vinegar in my veins and my only impulse is for destruction. I keep the inferno contained but it swirls around and goes nowhere. You have no idea the powder coarsing at my fingertips. It’s starting right at you ready to turn your world upside down. My heaviest shield. My mightiest hammer. My darkest dark.
January 2013
4 posts
I felt the flesh of his hand grow tight around my throat. I broke free and ran and thrashed through the walls and tore apart the desk, stealing the words from myself and carrying them with me from the dream world into wakefulness. My ghost would seek vengeance, but for now the words were mine.
The Passenger
That old terror fuels up again and shoots sparks and tightens its grip and I push back, keeping it from spilling.
An hour passes and it sinks down again. I kill myself just a little bit at a time and it keeps the hitchhiker under the bed, the passenger of my thoughts.
I dove into an empty pool where madness spent its summer
Ghosts of the past laughed through the flames as we watched our house burn.
December 2012
3 posts
Michael Moore: “If Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were here right now, what would you say to them?
Marilyn Manson: “”I wouldn’t say a single word to them, I would listen to what they have to say, and that’s what no one did.”
Coin Toss
They’ll be looking for a reason for the mayhem, an answer for their grief, but they won’t find one. Violence is an animal that endures and adapts and ricochets off of us before continuing on, mutating and growing frightening new limbs but staying the same inside. Every mass murderer is a person that exists in the society we’ve created. Someone with the drive to kill will find a...
“We avoid risks in life so we can make it safely to death.”
July 2012
2 posts
The Voice
It takes years of practice and pain to even know when you’re hearing the voice. You have to slip below the pressure of dangerous depths and be pulled out before you know the source of its whispers and how it dragged you down there.
It’s the voice that tells you you’re not good enough. That you’re not man enough. That you’re not strong enough or smart enough or good...
You’re a cricket in the night; I’m a car alarm in the distance.
June 2012
1 post
Devil Beside You
You walked out on me ten years ago when I needed you the most. Since then you’ve tried coming back in, only to end up stealing money from me and running off again. The positive impacts you’ve made on my life don’t make up for all the wreckage you’ve left behind. I regret ever communicating with you since then for fear that I somehow mislead you into thinking your behavior...
May 2012
1 post
Slow Burn
I climb inside my own mind and scan the room like a periscope. Everyone seems to be having a genuinely good time and I’ve glazed myself in a pretend joy. I smothered the festering smoldering ember of manic blackness but it would wedge itself under my thoughts and wait to slowly pivot them into its steady, slown-burning flames. The alcohol dulls the sharp desolate edge of the heat stinging at...
April 2012
1 post
Dragon Armor
We don’t live in a warrior society. The great battles and mythical beasts we’re supposed to endure and defeat in order to rescue the beauty don’t exist. yet we yearn to be tested by them, so we create battles for ourselves. We replace dragons and giants with conquests and charades of money and sex. We try to look like modern day warriors and kings, when truthfully we are...
March 2012
1 post
Coyotes
February 2012
2 posts
The Lost Summer
I don’t remember much of Summer 2007. I remember glimpses of parties and people. I remember bussing tables back home for a month before going back to NIU. I worked in the computer labs and at Housing & Dining for the latter half. That period of time is much clearer because I was waning off an addiction to prescription sleep aids.
This is how an addiction can happen. That Spring...
The Limit of Joy
I don’t swing the front door wide open and welcome happiness into the foyer of my life without asking for ID and what it’s selling. I don’t fully trust it. I know its visit could be cut short. I fear when its peaks are too high, something bad will likely happen to balance it out, for my luck is historically not that good.
Joy is an old friend who escaped from prison; he will...
November 2011
5 posts
Crickets & Car Alarms
I like to sleep with the window open in the summer. The sound of nearby crickets and occasional car alarms lead me to sleep like a submissive prisoner. It’s strange how both sounds have entirely different meanings, yet the same effect on me. I never run to the car in question to make sure it’s not being robbed, I just assume it’s going off accidentally, because it almost always is. The owner will...
Knowing we can die at any moment, should we live our lives differently? Should we stop preserving? Stop acting with regard to long term outcome or effect on others? I’m not sure where my compass is pointing anymore.
Screw You, And Screw Your Man Card
You get enough man cards and I bet they’ll give you a $10 rebate at the Ed Hardy Shop. I don’t need it. I’m not a real man. I listen to Snow Patrol. I drink rum and Diet Cokes. I like a good number of Hugh Grant movies. I don’t give a shit. I do what I fucking want, which should be the first and last stupid retarded “man law” ever. Everything else is...
Light Intensity
I’m never satisfied with my work. I thirst for beauty and I keep pursuing, hoping and waiting and wishing for the perfect moment, the perfect photo, the one that will make me feel complete and make the client say it’s the best they’ve ever seen. But I shoot and produce and consume and deliver and it’s not good enough so I do it again.
I feel like every day that I waste at this job is another year off my life.
October 2011
1 post
Bravado
I work at a university. I see really attractive girls all the time that I instantly want to sleep with. I’m a raging hornball all the time. And while I like myself and the person I’ve become, I’ve never been the social butterfly, alpha-male type that has a long history of unhinged success with girls. Day to day, I can be kind of apathetic towards others. That’s who I am, my...
September 2011
1 post
Side Effects
Absence of thought. Inner monologue. Winces of regret and pangs of passionate hunger. Gleeful deprivation. You feel a metaphysical social separation from other humans even if it isn’t there. You get lost in your own mind and forget how long you’ve been driving for. You aim for the barren middle ground, a foggy wasteland void of response. Sometimes you snap between the two poles, mostly the south....
May 2011
3 posts
The end of the Spring semester can be a depressing reminder of three things:
That more friends are moving on - to grad school, jobs, or back to their hometown.
The population of potential wives in this town is about to significantly diminish.
I am still stuck here, 2 years after graduating. Granted, I have a steady job that I tend to enjoy, but I still want to GTFO.
They dance with the bad guy. They don’t wanna take him home.
53 North
The last good memory I have of my father is from the summer of ‘05, one year before he left for the second time. That spring, he began to show clear symptoms of his disease, and after his third car accident of the year, we decided he would not drive anymore.
By summer, I was unemployed and he was without transportation, so we worked out a deal where I would chauffeur him in exchange for a small...
April 2011
6 posts
April 25, 2009
Squinting at the road ahead glowing from the sun through the morning fog, I adjusted my grip, squeezed the throttle, and charged down the prosperity of my regrets, heedless and resonant and echoing fire.
On Work & Meetings
I’ve explained this situation to a few people recently, all of whom had a similar reaction.
When I’m at work and sitting at my desk I feel only half-alive, like my mind isn’t firing on all cylinders. It doesn’t seem to matter how much coffee I have, either. I assume it mainly has to do with the nature of my work (designing brochures, posters, books, websites, and other...
I think I’ve had it rough until I read about dudes who got an STD from girls who knowingly gave it to them.
“Any system that is meant to help the people, and at the same time be “for profit” is destined for failure. The wealthy people in your country are nothing more than a modern day Dracula, they gain strength off your blood. Form a torch mob and sort this shit out already. Or have you forgotten how to deal with monsters?”
I always tried to do the right thing, but I ended up hurting people anyway.
“I have a theory that men get more bearlike as they age, increasingly taciturn, hairy, prone to long spells of slumber, prone to growly solitary rummaging. The man can get unsocialized as he ages. And the married man can come to believe there’s a division of labor: The woman forms the social connections, and the man is treated in social situations as if he were just learning to feed himself...
March 2011
9 posts
I fall for every girl who pays me the least bit of affection.
Morning bled at the water’s edge The city was bringing me down And my mind was on a ledge Saying who’s gonna help you now?
Why did I have better luck with women when I was broke and naive?
I check the fridge the same way I check facebook; I keep expecting something new and deliciously interesting to magically appear.
there are very subtle details that, at times, can reveal a great deal about someone’s personality. such as the giant flames on the tie of the man here to fix the printer
I’m listening to limp bizkit and wii bowling in an elgin trailer park.
Sometimes I worry that I have a mild form of tourrettes and I’m quietly shouting a brief stream of pure consciousness sprinkled with curses while I’m at work. And everyone just politely ignores it.
bands I want to see in concert
Queens of the Stone Age/Them Crooked Vultures
Rammstein
AFI
Led Zeppelin (with undead Bonham)
The Faint
Tool
February 2011
8 posts
This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a...
I’ve had several reminders this weekend of just how short life is and how quickly it passes.
I encountered a bunch of guys in their 30s/40s all giving advice to 20somethings about what they wish they’d known when they were young, and the consensus was we need to do a whole lot of living in our 20s, because before we know it we’ll be old, burnt out, and/or tied down with spouses...
My new to do list
Listen to jazz
Take beautiful photographs
Work on and ride motorcycle
Fall in love
Work awesome freelance jobs
Find new full time job
September 7, 2010
We said our goodbyes in the driveway of his Tennessee farm as his face began to wince, fighting back the sting of new tears. I could see the brokenness in the face of a man who once towered above me, physically and mentally. His disease had changed him and stripped him of the armor he held onto for so long. His armor became mine. I built it up over the years to withstand his blows, and it remained...
After the experimental operation on my eyes, I could now see more frames per second. With reality happening in slow motion, I could react to my environment with ease.
August 24, 2010
They were mere caricatures of men, beating their chests and kicking up dust
They chewed on the shadows of ghosts and hid in plain sight at slow motion parties
They crashed through the windows of my mind and didn’t have the drugs to sort me out
January 15, 2010
I awoke with the renewed strength to kick my old habit and undergo the treatment I owed myself. The track marks on my heart would fade over time, evidence of the sexual heroin I made myself a slave to. I sat in fire as my loins burned with the pangs of withdrawal.
November 28, 2010
I’m a cricket in the night; you’re a car alarm while I sleep.
*I usually think of things to write, say, tweet, or forget about while I’m driving, showering, working out, or doing some such activity where I haven’t the means to easily write them down. And they’re not usually longer than a few sentences. I guess I’ve learned to be more concise. So, as I find old notes,...
