desperately needs somewhere to live. East Bay or SF, hopefully not in any boondocksy area. (Have no car, work in the financial district.) anybody have any leads on rooms or apartments to rent?
nevermind! home found
nevermind! home found
Time to get a real blog up! In honor of my first publication of poetry in quite a long time, here's Hans und Greeting, recently published at the fantastic online journal, Action, Yes:
Hans und Greeting
now Hans’ eyes glitter, now rheum, now vitriol, now glissando; Greta now
greeting mops them all up. the waxed lacquer glistens, full of his eyes
and their rhymes; is a meniscus of shed things, things best not named
after all.
their names are exoskeletal, are bone husks and rebar bent cunning all
over what is in the end an indiscriminate pulsing.
—o—
now Brittney slips slickly from the town car, flashing her immaculate
gorge. the day so humid it drips and the crowds aswarm around her are
silhouettes with LED stareyes. everybody drops to their knees, hands
upraised clasping at the cloying sweetness she proffers. glossed and not
at all sticky, even in this heat. she Speed Stick, she pH-balanced.
even now she is ascending to a kewpie doll heaven.
—o—
no matter how we claim now smoking is the way. the past still reaches out
its tarry hands and throttles us; from the inside out; this is the
virulence, the contagion. we fear. we H1N1. April comes in like a virus;
October finds us compost heaps.
—o—
now Hans and Greta settle down for the 5 o’clock news. in the flickering
wash of indigo Greta dreams of teeth, or a mouth that beats upon itself
until its teeth are porcelain shards.
Hans dreams of breath, and or the rinds of bread blooming bluewhite in the
moist and needled dark.
in the corner of the living room
a woman rocks upon a creaking chair, counting the snowfall of her hair,
sucking a shaft of crystal candy; pink ridges of her gums rupture,
quietly, as the anchorman mutters, soft, urbane, of the two that fell from
an ultralight plane in the bluegreen pines of the Oakland hills tonight.
her dreaded hair walks like spiders up the wall. now Greta and Hans smile
down the 5 o’clock new
—o—
it is only flesh furl; slow pearl-dewed and lunar flesh wound;
man—i—cured; it’s only LED eyes that make it; only the un-stained, the
immaculate cloth …
it ratchets open; it ratchets open its cunning mouthparts, its delicate
gloved bone; it armatures of cartilage and nerve, pieta-arms webbed with
lucent spittle
and screams
revealing what white
what Holy
wood
what Zoom® whitened smiles
—o—
they trickle godsweat, through latex fingers, through glass retorts,
through slender vessels where a curled rodent grows—a single,
cartilaginous wing, wrinkled as bat nose and just as tenderly wriggling,
unbreaking wave of flesh poised to scoop up ripples that ride the
breath—in the godsweat steep, the afterbirth of dreams—two tender fibers
intertwine and write, are cellseethe and benign, parthenogenesis of
timeless sleep—in the night the bioluminescent dogs do wimperwrithe,
cavernous nostrils dilate wide, catching iron tang of flesh upon the
wind—out of the corners of your eyes—their skulls, the chambered nautili,
secrete another calcine, windsilk rind—Hans lies wakeless, a shuttling
between impossibilities; in her dreams Greta has chainsawed the last, the
last log, and scrapes a flare of sulfur—as every inch of her goes
nerveless
—o—
we were doing it; at last we were doing it, were doing it for something
sacred; for something sacred and so the woundflesh ground, one against the
next; the coarse flesh sobbed and sawed against and all our loose ends
our tickling black threads were drawn out and out again; hung limpid and
useless
waiting for us to fall back to ourselves again, in damp sweat and hollowed
pant
waiting for dawn again
Hans und Greeting
now Hans’ eyes glitter, now rheum, now vitriol, now glissando; Greta now
greeting mops them all up. the waxed lacquer glistens, full of his eyes
and their rhymes; is a meniscus of shed things, things best not named
after all.
their names are exoskeletal, are bone husks and rebar bent cunning all
over what is in the end an indiscriminate pulsing.
—o—
now Brittney slips slickly from the town car, flashing her immaculate
gorge. the day so humid it drips and the crowds aswarm around her are
silhouettes with LED stareyes. everybody drops to their knees, hands
upraised clasping at the cloying sweetness she proffers. glossed and not
at all sticky, even in this heat. she Speed Stick, she pH-balanced.
even now she is ascending to a kewpie doll heaven.
—o—
no matter how we claim now smoking is the way. the past still reaches out
its tarry hands and throttles us; from the inside out; this is the
virulence, the contagion. we fear. we H1N1. April comes in like a virus;
October finds us compost heaps.
—o—
now Hans and Greta settle down for the 5 o’clock news. in the flickering
wash of indigo Greta dreams of teeth, or a mouth that beats upon itself
until its teeth are porcelain shards.
Hans dreams of breath, and or the rinds of bread blooming bluewhite in the
moist and needled dark.
in the corner of the living room
a woman rocks upon a creaking chair, counting the snowfall of her hair,
sucking a shaft of crystal candy; pink ridges of her gums rupture,
quietly, as the anchorman mutters, soft, urbane, of the two that fell from
an ultralight plane in the bluegreen pines of the Oakland hills tonight.
her dreaded hair walks like spiders up the wall. now Greta and Hans smile
down the 5 o’clock new
—o—
it is only flesh furl; slow pearl-dewed and lunar flesh wound;
man—i—cured; it’s only LED eyes that make it; only the un-stained, the
immaculate cloth …
it ratchets open; it ratchets open its cunning mouthparts, its delicate
gloved bone; it armatures of cartilage and nerve, pieta-arms webbed with
lucent spittle
and screams
revealing what white
what Holy
wood
what Zoom® whitened smiles
—o—
they trickle godsweat, through latex fingers, through glass retorts,
through slender vessels where a curled rodent grows—a single,
cartilaginous wing, wrinkled as bat nose and just as tenderly wriggling,
unbreaking wave of flesh poised to scoop up ripples that ride the
breath—in the godsweat steep, the afterbirth of dreams—two tender fibers
intertwine and write, are cellseethe and benign, parthenogenesis of
timeless sleep—in the night the bioluminescent dogs do wimperwrithe,
cavernous nostrils dilate wide, catching iron tang of flesh upon the
wind—out of the corners of your eyes—their skulls, the chambered nautili,
secrete another calcine, windsilk rind—Hans lies wakeless, a shuttling
between impossibilities; in her dreams Greta has chainsawed the last, the
last log, and scrapes a flare of sulfur—as every inch of her goes
nerveless
—o—
we were doing it; at last we were doing it, were doing it for something
sacred; for something sacred and so the woundflesh ground, one against the
next; the coarse flesh sobbed and sawed against and all our loose ends
our tickling black threads were drawn out and out again; hung limpid and
useless
waiting for us to fall back to ourselves again, in damp sweat and hollowed
pant
waiting for dawn again
this blog was going to be some of my visual work, but since SG only supports images under 200k and in JPG or GIF, it won't be.
I'll amend later.
I'll amend later.
So, I've been looking over my SG blog today. All of it. Ever since I joined way back in ought-6.
And my god does it raise up a strange roiling maelstrom of feelings.
My last blog post was almost exactly a year ago, announcing what was then my newest publication. There have been more since but I'll try to get to them in a future post. If such a thing happens.
Looking back at those blogs I feel saddened in a lot of ways. First because I realize that at the time I was part of a small but surprisingly vibrant little world of SGers. And now I'm not. Most of those who commented on my blogs, and with whom I PM'd and chatted and grouped with, are gone now. Accounts inactive, deleted, no more. And I find myself missing them.
I also find myself missing the person who wrote all those blogs. I don't really write all that much anymore. At least not with the creativity and passion and verve as that guy did. I hardly get the time to think about writing anymore, actually. I'm busy still—actually, even more than I was then—but my god have I changed.
And that, also, is kind of saddening. Because I often don't think I have changed. But there it is, the evidence, as plain as day. My blog acting as a kind of diary, showing me the face I used to wear. The thoughts it thought and the things it wrote so energetically, so absorbed in the task of writing, of chronicling itself—a task I never seem to get around to these days. It's partially a simple change in aesthetics, a preference for visual art over written, and a preference, when I do write, for restraint and thoughtfulness over lush imagery and dense wordplay.
But looking back on that writing, I'm impressed. Possibly in the way an experienced editor is impressed by the juvenalia of a fledgling poet, but impressed nonetheless. Impressed, and aware of an inability to write that way anymore.
God I'm being maudlin. Perhaps it's just the monsoon outside.
In any case, if you're out there, lost friends, and kid_hideous of almost five years ago: I miss you. More than I ever would have imagined.
And my god does it raise up a strange roiling maelstrom of feelings.
My last blog post was almost exactly a year ago, announcing what was then my newest publication. There have been more since but I'll try to get to them in a future post. If such a thing happens.
Looking back at those blogs I feel saddened in a lot of ways. First because I realize that at the time I was part of a small but surprisingly vibrant little world of SGers. And now I'm not. Most of those who commented on my blogs, and with whom I PM'd and chatted and grouped with, are gone now. Accounts inactive, deleted, no more. And I find myself missing them.
I also find myself missing the person who wrote all those blogs. I don't really write all that much anymore. At least not with the creativity and passion and verve as that guy did. I hardly get the time to think about writing anymore, actually. I'm busy still—actually, even more than I was then—but my god have I changed.
And that, also, is kind of saddening. Because I often don't think I have changed. But there it is, the evidence, as plain as day. My blog acting as a kind of diary, showing me the face I used to wear. The thoughts it thought and the things it wrote so energetically, so absorbed in the task of writing, of chronicling itself—a task I never seem to get around to these days. It's partially a simple change in aesthetics, a preference for visual art over written, and a preference, when I do write, for restraint and thoughtfulness over lush imagery and dense wordplay.
But looking back on that writing, I'm impressed. Possibly in the way an experienced editor is impressed by the juvenalia of a fledgling poet, but impressed nonetheless. Impressed, and aware of an inability to write that way anymore.
God I'm being maudlin. Perhaps it's just the monsoon outside.
In any case, if you're out there, lost friends, and kid_hideous of almost five years ago: I miss you. More than I ever would have imagined.
0. Larvae
Becoming a vampire’s pretty much dead-on analogous to growing up human—I mean, nobodie’s born dead-sexy, fast as greased lightning or strong as a Hell’s Angel on angel dust. Nobodie.
Face it—if you’d met your dream girl when she was 6 months old, oozing drool and mucus out one end and what looks like oil paint out the other, she wouldn’t exactly be your dream girl any more, would she? Oh, she would? Well ain’t you St. Fucking Peter? Or St. Sick Fuck.
Anyway, here’s how the whole thing unfolds, schematically anyway. I’ll get into the details later.
First, you get dead. No other way to go about it. For most of us, you get dead by getting torn to fucking shreds and half-eaten by one of your future fellow undead. But as most of your future compatriots are out for a full and fulfilling meal, you gotta be (un)lucky enough that your shambling gourmand gets interrupted mid-gustation. Otherwise you end up as nothing more than zombie-shit. Well, no, you don’t actually—zombies don’t shit, obviously. In fact, you still end up undead … sorta. You’re just part of another zombie, feeding its mind, its carcass, and you don’t matter for shit anymore: hence, zombie shit.
But if you’re one of the blessed/doomed, your consumer ends up getting distracted, either by one of those classic feeding frenzies wherein the parties involved up forgetting what the fight started over amidst all the delectable, fresh fellow zombie meat there is lying around (yes—they eat each other as well, though only for the sensual satisfaction of it, the sensation of chewing meat of dubious quality; no nutritive content to the stuff, even for a zombie), or by the sudden juxtaposition of a shotgun blast, chainsaw or blunt instrument with your diner’s brains (yes, it has to be the brains—heart’s worth fuck all by this point, just a flaccid black balloon that does little more than feebly stir every hour or so). Don’t ask me what or why, but the brain is still doing something up there, if only knocking around like the proverbial belfry bat.
If you’re lucky, it’s not the latter that interrupts dinner. (To be honest, I’m not sure if “lucky” is quite the right term here; bit of a stretch, actually, but it’s the best I’ve got for the moment. Having your maker around later can be handy, but it ain’t exactly a Sunday picnic in the park. But again, I’ll get to that later.)
Okay, so now you’re dead and (possibly) buried. Good on ya. Circumstances differ depending on whether or not you’re buried, so it’s worth going into some detail on the two possibilities.
If you checked out in one of the DMZs then you’re probably lying out somewhere in the open, a smear of bloody meat and fantastically convoluted entrails in the midst of some city square, on the corner of a now-defunct red-light district, or slowly sliding down your refrigerator door. Again, circumstances vary, but you get the gist: You’re dead, lying somewhere, more or less intact—and believe me, it doesn’t take much for the process to occur. If you’re got a brain and maybe a bit of spinal cord left, then you’re good to go.
(And that’s why the meal has to be interrupted. As I’ll explain later, brains are fucking important here. They tend to forget that shit in the stories and the movies. It’s there, yeah, and everybody still moans “Braaaaaaains” when they’re playing zombies and Indians, but all you ever see or read about is the cannibalism bit. The flesh-eating is important, yeah, and fun too—but it’s the brains that are the heart of the matter. Handily, even the most mindless of zombies leaves the brain for last. Can’t say if it’s an instinctual thing—like the zombie flesh knows that it has to leave at least some chance of gustatio interruptus, for preservation of the species and all—or if it’s a lingering memory of the old gourmand’s mantra, “Save the best for last,” or if it’s just that a skull is a fucking hard nut to crack for a drooling moron of a carcass, but it’s a fact.)
Good to go. Not locomotion wise, probably, but set for transformation. You die … your soul/spirit/mind … whatthefuckever … goes drifting off into the aether, the Elysian fields, the white-lit tunnel, the fucking pearly gates … and LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT—then you are snapped back into your bodie faster than a monk can say ‘Hail Mary’ after a late-night self-abuse session.
And it m o t h e r FUCKING h u r t s.
But you’re back, safe as houses and spewing up the vilest stream of linguistic effluvia you’ve never even imagined, as if all that cursing might somehow relieve the pain, but you’re back in your bodie. And glad of it too. I mean, even if you are faithful and all, death is a harrowing shitter of an experience. It might end up alright (I, obviously, would not know), but being torn from every familiar facet of experience, tossed into something you didn’t even know you had to be hurtled away from everything you ever knew—it doesn’t matter how that ends: It’s soul-shattering.
But you ain’t all there. No, sir, not by a long shot. Only the barest fraction of what you called ‘you’ back lifetimes ago, before the Great Mindfuck, has managed to scrape itself back together from the mosquito-guts-on-the-devil’s-windshield you just momentarily became. Actually, fraction is a generous term: You’re an iota, an ion, a muon of the nucleus of what you used to be. Thankfully, said muon has a bit of a memory, and it knows what it was, it wants to be what it was all over again—nay, it knows it can be more—and it knows just how to get there: Braaaaaaaaaaaaains!
But first you’ve got a fortnight or so (due to variance in levels of trauma, user experience may vary) of pure agony to lie through. Cause, yeah, all those bones and nerves and bits of gristle and ligament have all got to regrow before that muon of consciousness can even consider having the chops to seek out some fresh grey matter to gobble down. Fabulously, the sensory capacities of this iota of consciousness left to you are incredibly acute, and so you get to live through the regrowth of every millimeter, every horny layer and mucous meniscus and fascial cache—and you can feel it more robustly, more subtly and with more nuance than you ever managed to watch a sunset, swish a mouthful of Burgundy or endure an hour in the dentist’s chair. Imagine being able to feel your fingernails growing, then fill that experience up with the worst pain you’ve ever endured, and you’ll maybe, depending on how vivid your imagination is, have an idea of what this period is like. To return to the “growing up human” analogy, it’s like enduring every moment of the cellular mitosis that ended up as an infant you, and making it all incredibly painful.
Thankfully, your shard of consciousness can’t handle all that much experience at once, so you tend to wax and wane in and out of awareness a lot at this point. Fucked up thing is that whether or not you were there, were conscious, for every moment of it, you still remember it. Vividly. I’m pretty sure that primal trauma is the main reason that most of my brethren are so damn fucked up; that and the unholy hunger, of course.
Up to this point, it hasn’t really mattered whether or not you were buried. If you weren’t, you get the added enjoyment of feeling even the slightest breeze playing across your nerve endings like an acid-soaked violin bow, the noon-day sun searing your flesh so you can smell it, and the incessant tickle of ants and flies and maggots crawling over, in and out of you—but then, if you were, you have the opportunity to revel in the same feelings performed this time by earthworms, centipedes, and whatever foul, too-many-legged submarine monstrosity the earth can conjure up etc. Plus you get the very real bonus of feeling probably sanctified earth sliding and shifting in and around your regrowing flesh. I never took a mud bath while alive, but I imagine that returning to life in hallowed earth is sort of the inverted, dreamed-up-by-Goebbels version thereof: agonizing as the mud bath is (supposedly) oddly pleasurable.
(Don’t ask me why the whole sanctified earth thing makes a difference; it’s possible it doesn’t actually, since pretty much all graveyards are blessed and there is, therefore, no control group to speak of. But I’m guessing it does, because I still can’t get within ten feet of a church without feeling the sudden and overwhelming urge to turn myself inside-out sea cucumber style. I know this probably sounds like I’m saying there is a God and that the undead are unholy, but I really don’t think that’s the case. Personally I think it’s an issue of deep-seeded, wholly unconscious faith sucker-punching one in the nuts. I mean, even the most confirmed atheists I’ve ever know have said “Goddammit!” when they hit their thumbs with a hammer. But what the fuck do I know, eh? I’m a bloody fucking vampire.)
But once one has sufficiently regenerated to make ambulation, or at least the grossest possible facsimile thereof, possible, it makes a difference. If you went tits up aboveground, you’re in luck: All you have to do now is fucking stand up. (Harder than it sounds, believe me. Attaining an upright position whilst a zombie is sorta like reenacting the evolution of man with cordwood for tendons and compressing a couple million years into, oh, say an hour. (Much like the gestation process described above, not as Hallmark-miraculous as it might sound.) And that’s an hour if you weren’t all that damaged to begin with. I’ve spent entire nights watching larvae—s’what we call ‘em—trying to get vertical. Rather the undead version of Comedy Central, if you ask me: Sometimes funny, but mostly you just have to laugh because otherwise it’s too painful to watch.)
But if you were buried … Shit, that is not to be envied.
First you have to get out of the coffin. And the modern coffin, as if built with the presumption of an eventual zombie uprising, even before it actually happened, is somewhat like a scale model of Fort Knox. The wood is thick—unless your family went cheap and Old West and got the $19.95 pinebox and thank Jebus for that—as hell, and the latches are nothing to scoff at. Thankfully one does have not-inconsiderable strength on one’s side, which strength is only boosted by the adrenalin rush (or facsimile thereof; I don’t know that we have adrenalin glands anymore) one experiences upon attaining some slight shadow of awareness whilst coffin-bound. Once you’re out, you’ve got six feet, give or take, of tightly packed and naturally depressed earth to crawl through, bloody and naked, with nothing but fingernails to use for trowels. (By the time you’re topside these have generally splintered to itsy-bitsy, exquisitely scale model piano keys still lovingly attached to the cuticle.) Every inch of that earth is like sliding over carbide sandpaper under a citric acid rain in a rock-salt landslide. Fun!
And then you get to stand up.
Becoming a vampire’s pretty much dead-on analogous to growing up human—I mean, nobodie’s born dead-sexy, fast as greased lightning or strong as a Hell’s Angel on angel dust. Nobodie.
Face it—if you’d met your dream girl when she was 6 months old, oozing drool and mucus out one end and what looks like oil paint out the other, she wouldn’t exactly be your dream girl any more, would she? Oh, she would? Well ain’t you St. Fucking Peter? Or St. Sick Fuck.
Anyway, here’s how the whole thing unfolds, schematically anyway. I’ll get into the details later.
First, you get dead. No other way to go about it. For most of us, you get dead by getting torn to fucking shreds and half-eaten by one of your future fellow undead. But as most of your future compatriots are out for a full and fulfilling meal, you gotta be (un)lucky enough that your shambling gourmand gets interrupted mid-gustation. Otherwise you end up as nothing more than zombie-shit. Well, no, you don’t actually—zombies don’t shit, obviously. In fact, you still end up undead … sorta. You’re just part of another zombie, feeding its mind, its carcass, and you don’t matter for shit anymore: hence, zombie shit.
But if you’re one of the blessed/doomed, your consumer ends up getting distracted, either by one of those classic feeding frenzies wherein the parties involved up forgetting what the fight started over amidst all the delectable, fresh fellow zombie meat there is lying around (yes—they eat each other as well, though only for the sensual satisfaction of it, the sensation of chewing meat of dubious quality; no nutritive content to the stuff, even for a zombie), or by the sudden juxtaposition of a shotgun blast, chainsaw or blunt instrument with your diner’s brains (yes, it has to be the brains—heart’s worth fuck all by this point, just a flaccid black balloon that does little more than feebly stir every hour or so). Don’t ask me what or why, but the brain is still doing something up there, if only knocking around like the proverbial belfry bat.
If you’re lucky, it’s not the latter that interrupts dinner. (To be honest, I’m not sure if “lucky” is quite the right term here; bit of a stretch, actually, but it’s the best I’ve got for the moment. Having your maker around later can be handy, but it ain’t exactly a Sunday picnic in the park. But again, I’ll get to that later.)
Okay, so now you’re dead and (possibly) buried. Good on ya. Circumstances differ depending on whether or not you’re buried, so it’s worth going into some detail on the two possibilities.
If you checked out in one of the DMZs then you’re probably lying out somewhere in the open, a smear of bloody meat and fantastically convoluted entrails in the midst of some city square, on the corner of a now-defunct red-light district, or slowly sliding down your refrigerator door. Again, circumstances vary, but you get the gist: You’re dead, lying somewhere, more or less intact—and believe me, it doesn’t take much for the process to occur. If you’re got a brain and maybe a bit of spinal cord left, then you’re good to go.
(And that’s why the meal has to be interrupted. As I’ll explain later, brains are fucking important here. They tend to forget that shit in the stories and the movies. It’s there, yeah, and everybody still moans “Braaaaaaains” when they’re playing zombies and Indians, but all you ever see or read about is the cannibalism bit. The flesh-eating is important, yeah, and fun too—but it’s the brains that are the heart of the matter. Handily, even the most mindless of zombies leaves the brain for last. Can’t say if it’s an instinctual thing—like the zombie flesh knows that it has to leave at least some chance of gustatio interruptus, for preservation of the species and all—or if it’s a lingering memory of the old gourmand’s mantra, “Save the best for last,” or if it’s just that a skull is a fucking hard nut to crack for a drooling moron of a carcass, but it’s a fact.)
Good to go. Not locomotion wise, probably, but set for transformation. You die … your soul/spirit/mind … whatthefuckever … goes drifting off into the aether, the Elysian fields, the white-lit tunnel, the fucking pearly gates … and LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT—then you are snapped back into your bodie faster than a monk can say ‘Hail Mary’ after a late-night self-abuse session.
And it m o t h e r FUCKING h u r t s.
But you’re back, safe as houses and spewing up the vilest stream of linguistic effluvia you’ve never even imagined, as if all that cursing might somehow relieve the pain, but you’re back in your bodie. And glad of it too. I mean, even if you are faithful and all, death is a harrowing shitter of an experience. It might end up alright (I, obviously, would not know), but being torn from every familiar facet of experience, tossed into something you didn’t even know you had to be hurtled away from everything you ever knew—it doesn’t matter how that ends: It’s soul-shattering.
But you ain’t all there. No, sir, not by a long shot. Only the barest fraction of what you called ‘you’ back lifetimes ago, before the Great Mindfuck, has managed to scrape itself back together from the mosquito-guts-on-the-devil’s-windshield you just momentarily became. Actually, fraction is a generous term: You’re an iota, an ion, a muon of the nucleus of what you used to be. Thankfully, said muon has a bit of a memory, and it knows what it was, it wants to be what it was all over again—nay, it knows it can be more—and it knows just how to get there: Braaaaaaaaaaaaains!
But first you’ve got a fortnight or so (due to variance in levels of trauma, user experience may vary) of pure agony to lie through. Cause, yeah, all those bones and nerves and bits of gristle and ligament have all got to regrow before that muon of consciousness can even consider having the chops to seek out some fresh grey matter to gobble down. Fabulously, the sensory capacities of this iota of consciousness left to you are incredibly acute, and so you get to live through the regrowth of every millimeter, every horny layer and mucous meniscus and fascial cache—and you can feel it more robustly, more subtly and with more nuance than you ever managed to watch a sunset, swish a mouthful of Burgundy or endure an hour in the dentist’s chair. Imagine being able to feel your fingernails growing, then fill that experience up with the worst pain you’ve ever endured, and you’ll maybe, depending on how vivid your imagination is, have an idea of what this period is like. To return to the “growing up human” analogy, it’s like enduring every moment of the cellular mitosis that ended up as an infant you, and making it all incredibly painful.
Thankfully, your shard of consciousness can’t handle all that much experience at once, so you tend to wax and wane in and out of awareness a lot at this point. Fucked up thing is that whether or not you were there, were conscious, for every moment of it, you still remember it. Vividly. I’m pretty sure that primal trauma is the main reason that most of my brethren are so damn fucked up; that and the unholy hunger, of course.
Up to this point, it hasn’t really mattered whether or not you were buried. If you weren’t, you get the added enjoyment of feeling even the slightest breeze playing across your nerve endings like an acid-soaked violin bow, the noon-day sun searing your flesh so you can smell it, and the incessant tickle of ants and flies and maggots crawling over, in and out of you—but then, if you were, you have the opportunity to revel in the same feelings performed this time by earthworms, centipedes, and whatever foul, too-many-legged submarine monstrosity the earth can conjure up etc. Plus you get the very real bonus of feeling probably sanctified earth sliding and shifting in and around your regrowing flesh. I never took a mud bath while alive, but I imagine that returning to life in hallowed earth is sort of the inverted, dreamed-up-by-Goebbels version thereof: agonizing as the mud bath is (supposedly) oddly pleasurable.
(Don’t ask me why the whole sanctified earth thing makes a difference; it’s possible it doesn’t actually, since pretty much all graveyards are blessed and there is, therefore, no control group to speak of. But I’m guessing it does, because I still can’t get within ten feet of a church without feeling the sudden and overwhelming urge to turn myself inside-out sea cucumber style. I know this probably sounds like I’m saying there is a God and that the undead are unholy, but I really don’t think that’s the case. Personally I think it’s an issue of deep-seeded, wholly unconscious faith sucker-punching one in the nuts. I mean, even the most confirmed atheists I’ve ever know have said “Goddammit!” when they hit their thumbs with a hammer. But what the fuck do I know, eh? I’m a bloody fucking vampire.)
But once one has sufficiently regenerated to make ambulation, or at least the grossest possible facsimile thereof, possible, it makes a difference. If you went tits up aboveground, you’re in luck: All you have to do now is fucking stand up. (Harder than it sounds, believe me. Attaining an upright position whilst a zombie is sorta like reenacting the evolution of man with cordwood for tendons and compressing a couple million years into, oh, say an hour. (Much like the gestation process described above, not as Hallmark-miraculous as it might sound.) And that’s an hour if you weren’t all that damaged to begin with. I’ve spent entire nights watching larvae—s’what we call ‘em—trying to get vertical. Rather the undead version of Comedy Central, if you ask me: Sometimes funny, but mostly you just have to laugh because otherwise it’s too painful to watch.)
But if you were buried … Shit, that is not to be envied.
First you have to get out of the coffin. And the modern coffin, as if built with the presumption of an eventual zombie uprising, even before it actually happened, is somewhat like a scale model of Fort Knox. The wood is thick—unless your family went cheap and Old West and got the $19.95 pinebox and thank Jebus for that—as hell, and the latches are nothing to scoff at. Thankfully one does have not-inconsiderable strength on one’s side, which strength is only boosted by the adrenalin rush (or facsimile thereof; I don’t know that we have adrenalin glands anymore) one experiences upon attaining some slight shadow of awareness whilst coffin-bound. Once you’re out, you’ve got six feet, give or take, of tightly packed and naturally depressed earth to crawl through, bloody and naked, with nothing but fingernails to use for trowels. (By the time you’re topside these have generally splintered to itsy-bitsy, exquisitely scale model piano keys still lovingly attached to the cuticle.) Every inch of that earth is like sliding over carbide sandpaper under a citric acid rain in a rock-salt landslide. Fun!
And then you get to stand up.
Now selling my art prints and T-shirts at:
Bleeding Inc
prints and t-shirts featuring the following images are now available:
And more besides!
Bleeding Inc
prints and t-shirts featuring the following images are now available:
And more besides!
bye.
should anyone wish to reach me, you can email kallisti666@hotmail.com.
that is all.
Have fun kids.
should anyone wish to reach me, you can email kallisti666@hotmail.com.
that is all.
Have fun kids.
Just wanted to add that the anthology of hiaku in which I -- not to mention numerous other incredibly talented individuals -- am featured is now available for sale at Daily Haiku. It's cheap, it's delicious, it's nourishing.
In my time here on SG I've had the pleasure of meeting numerous incredibly talented artists. And, as always when I meet such, I'm moved by the impulse to work with them. Unfortunately, that's impractical, given the number of artists I've met here -- not to mention the number of collaborations I'm working on with other artists met outside these confines.
So it has occurred to me that an excellent way to work with you all would be to found a zine. A Suicide Artists zine, dedicated to the work of the creative personas thronging these electric halls.
The zine will feature work of all types and genres, and must meet but one criteria: it must be good. For me the good must also always be the "edgy," the new and exploratory. If your work meets these criterion to your mind, send it my way: kallisti666@hotmail.com.
I believe I can open files of just about any format for Microsoft: pdf, doc, rtf, docx, jpeg, gif, indd, etc. I'll be setting up the pages in InDesign. A free electronic version will appear through Issuu's pdf tool, and, perhaps, a physical copy will be made available through Lulu.
Of course, this all depends upon your participation and interest, so please contribute!
The first issue will have a loose theme; try to create and submit work which at least references the theme in some way. Work which doesn't address the concept will still be considered. The theme will be, apropos to our context: The Suicide Note.
Tell your friends here on SG, and urge them, and yourselves, to submit. Submissions will be open until I've received sufficient work to stock the pages.
In my time here on SG I've had the pleasure of meeting numerous incredibly talented artists. And, as always when I meet such, I'm moved by the impulse to work with them. Unfortunately, that's impractical, given the number of artists I've met here -- not to mention the number of collaborations I'm working on with other artists met outside these confines.
So it has occurred to me that an excellent way to work with you all would be to found a zine. A Suicide Artists zine, dedicated to the work of the creative personas thronging these electric halls.
The zine will feature work of all types and genres, and must meet but one criteria: it must be good. For me the good must also always be the "edgy," the new and exploratory. If your work meets these criterion to your mind, send it my way: kallisti666@hotmail.com.
I believe I can open files of just about any format for Microsoft: pdf, doc, rtf, docx, jpeg, gif, indd, etc. I'll be setting up the pages in InDesign. A free electronic version will appear through Issuu's pdf tool, and, perhaps, a physical copy will be made available through Lulu.
Of course, this all depends upon your participation and interest, so please contribute!
The first issue will have a loose theme; try to create and submit work which at least references the theme in some way. Work which doesn't address the concept will still be considered. The theme will be, apropos to our context: The Suicide Note.
Tell your friends here on SG, and urge them, and yourselves, to submit. Submissions will be open until I've received sufficient work to stock the pages.
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