kalischild

Current mood: thoughtful
Current music: Moby, "Hymm"

Today's writing project turned into a slight case of oversharing.

But in the end, this wasn't written to be thought provoking, or controversial, or to entertain; I wrote this to remember, and so as not to forget.

-o-

I was born on an air force base, and it seems that the sound of the warm jets got under my skin; I've always wanted to fly, but I'll never be able to because of my eyes. But that's barely a loss, really. Even young I knew I'd never be a good at the 'following' gig; I'd never wear a uniform, have a buzz-cut, or learn to obey. My inanimate Japanese girlfriends have always been my panacea for the loss of the sky that was stolen from me by my dead, dim eyes. My motorcycles take me the closest I can come to the place where boundaries end.

My eyes. So bright on the outside; but like so many other parts of me, they're just for show. Form over function. Shiny chrome on a beater.

I know this, about my eyes, but deep inside there's a boy who always wanted to fly.

My Mum married my Dad so her mother could see her married before she died. That didn't work out so much, and my southern belle momma moved me and her back to Dixie.

And I wish she had never left.

I grew up in the North Carolina woods, playing with caterpillars and tasting the nectar of honeysuckle flowers. I had my own bridge to Terebithia, though I never did meet that Terebithia girl. And all was tromping and playing, until one day the Devil came back to Georgia and took us back home, to a riverside town in the central valley; I came to a hideous and ugly city, full of the shallow, and the hateful, and the mediocre, and learned to call it home.

My Daddy was a doctor, but we were still white trash. We were the poorest family in a rich white suburb. That taught me that those things that everyone wants are sometimes not everything they want them it to be. Money don't buy happiness, so why chase it? Burn out, drop out, walk upon the beach.

Daddy was the crazy one; He'd shoot off guns in the backyard, and talk about going down to the dirty Mexican border towns and hunting border-jumpers with remote control planes. I remember him, half-naked at two in the morning, hunched over screaming power tools; dragons lived in our garage, and they woke up at night, their industrial roars tearing into my little boy ears at a time in the night when all good people are asleep and dreaming. My dad would read me books every night he was home, and take us camping every once in a while, but when he wasn't crazy, he was gone. Gone working in any of a dozen trauma wards across California, to come home and collapse for twenty-four hours, walk around in his tighty whites, and spend dinner telling me and my mother grisly motorcycle accident stories over bloody-rare steaks.

Sometimes we'd leave the house; every adventure with my dad was an exercise in absent-minded abuse. It trained me for the thousand mile hellrides I roll on today, for starting fights with bigger guys, and the multi-year-long relationships with crazy girls that I'm trying to leave behind; Life has never been about how much fun something is, it's always been about how intense it can be. It's about how much you can survive. There's never been a volume knob that I could turn up or down, there's never been a time to just relax or be happy; there's only ever been two settings; on and off. My house was fighting and screaming and chaos all the time; My mother had passive aggressive viciousness down to a science, her walls and distance could cut you in half. I lived in an ice-house; my parents never touched, and that's part of why I'm a whore; My little boy inside has always whispered that if everyone would just touch, all the time, then love will happen, and no one will ever fight; the absence of touch is conflict. If you grow up shivering, locked in an empty freezer painted in blood, you can either fuck, or fight. But you have to do something for warmth, or you'll just die in the cold.

Daddy was a clinical psychotic, delusional and paranoid. Every day a new opponent was out to get him; there were always elaborate schemes and unnamed conspiracies, men in black lurking in the shadows with mirrored eyes. My father thought my mom was a witch who controlled him with spells; he told me so. And my mother was as brittle as spun glass, with as many cutting edges. Rigid and fragile, she refused to be ruled by an environment that was destroying her. My mother stayed in the hell of our house to 'keep the family together', when it was obvious to a five year-old boy that our family should never have happened at all. But underneath the sacrifice and the justifications, I think she simply refused to admit the magnitude of the mistake she had made by retreating to the safety of the familiar.

It's from my mother that I get my strength, my cruelty, and a self-destructive streak that's subtly and cleverly geared to be almost, but not quite, enough to break me like a twig.

I was a crazy little wildchild, too small to fight, but always fighting all the time. I cried over everything, and was small and pale; and oh, how the wind knocked me down. I played with explosives and read all the books in the world. As soon as I learned to break out of my bedroom and climb the rickety wooden fence around my house, I wandered the parks and pathways of central valley suburbia at by night, hopping from shadow to shadow, following a trail of cast-off condoms and empty beer bottles, artifacts that taught me that there was another side to the daytime world, a side you can only find in the shadows, when everything dirty dark and ugly is hidden; when ugly things like me and my life and my family are shrouded and there's no one around to see. I learned to love being alone because there was less screaming there. I learned to love being alone because that was the only time no one criticized you, or hurt you, or to change you with their fists or their weakness. Coming home at night, my father almost killed me a dozen times, only to wake up not remembering almost killing his son. Rinse and repeat. But how can you hate him? You can't; so what do you do when your father is deadly only by accident? Living with my father, I learned stealth and ninja powers; when your father is deaf and blind and delusional, you learn to walk softly and carry a dozen knives. I could walk the streets alone at night in the southside ghetto without being afraid, because I was insane, was dressed in black and shadows, and always carried knives.

I never understood other people. I was never wired to be social, or to learn the confusing rituals of status, or hierarchy. There was no point going to school; all going to school ever earned me were F's and black eyes. All school ever taught me was that your elders lie, and do not think, or question. It taught me that within the system, the nail that sticks up will be hammered down, and that being outside is better. It taught me to abandon society, to undermine group mentalities, to loathe unquestioned dogma.

And then, one night, one summer, my mom finally left; My father had done a father-y type of thing; He had decided to build a Jacuzzi, because this is the sort of thing that father's decide to do, and in the pursuit of this, he had bought a truck full of wet concrete on the hottest day of summer. And in the euphoria of his anticipated Jacuzzi glory, he had elected to take the family out for ice cream. So there we we're, father, mother, son, at three A.M., breaking concrete into sand with hammers, barefoot in knee-deep ice cold water, all fear and grating tempers, and bloody feet and ankles, swinging sledgehammers splitting stone under a full moon in suburbia. Surprisingly, it's at this moment that Mom decides there's something wrong here. And it's at this moment I see my chance. I'm twelve years old, the kid, the dependent, and I'm the one who packs the bags, and tells her that it's time to go. And we finally do; we finally do what should have never had to be done a second time. We leave. But to this day, my mother believes that she's the one who got us out, she's never acknowledge that I'm the one that told her to leave.

So we left, and young pubescent me goes off to live with a Southern Belle who refused to go back where she belonged, who refused to return to Faulkner-land;

And there you have it. The Southern way, deny failure at all costs. It takes a Gettysburg to get us to quit.

So it began, a crazy, bitter boy living with an angry bitter woman, the mother fighting far too late to gain control of a boy left to his own devices for far too long. At home I became my own father, I turned and was turned into the monster to fight with, to demean, to resent. In the daytime I hopped from school to school, house to house, and with no violent deadly monster at home to keep me afraid, I had no reason to be afraid again. We lived in a vacation paradise for gangstas; I guess when you're at the bottom, you have nowhere to slum but up. The nights were spent wrecking with gangstas and guns, bloods and crips, and stalking, predatory cars. And in the night, just like in the school hallways during classes, the goth children were caught in between. I was shot at for the first time when I was fifteen. I remember rolling into finals on my last day of school coming down off of acid with a flask of stolen gin in my pocket, black sunglasses, and a piece of paper telling me that I'd scored 1390 on my PSATS. I decided it was time to go. I never was one for being tamed or socialized, and that's all school ever was. A damage factory for manufacturing docile minds. I found out later that I got A's on all my finals.

I graduated school with a 0.0 GPA. I was very proud.


And then girls. Always the clever ones, compared to the boys, always soft, and weak, and vicious, and beautiful and mysterious. Girls are wonderful, because they're rarely your equals. They're either untouchable, carved from marble, Olympian, or as weak as mice. Except for Shannon, who is just good. My first girlfriend broke up with me on Valentine's day, and that pretty much set the tone for everything that's happened since. My first sexual experience was a drunken menage-e-trois in a public park and that pretty much set the tone for everything that's happened since.

Roaming, spending too much time in a nowhere town with no passion or ambition, fucking every tourist wanderer vagabond who rolled through. Nothing on TV, lets do LSD. Tab after tab of psychotropic lanterns lighting the way along the paths of Solipsism, ontology, nihilism and the Tao, breaking myself down, and burning with self-hatred until the phoenix was nothing but ashes, ashes, and we all fell down. First breakdown. Western mind in Eastern emptiness, Ego death. All the while all black and pretty, homeless and desperate. Trekking, traveling, sleeping in alleys even though I had a home. Sleeping in Portland, in San Diego, Reno, Monterrey. Job to job, day to day, loving, fighting, thinking, no thoughts, no center, just empty and pretty and sad. Living the damage, giving and taking, building and breaking and running away. Making myself perfectly empty so that I could start clean, with a new name, and no fear or desperation. All independent and calm. Still addicted to damage after all these years, I'm a reflecting pond surrounded by a firestorm. The desert saved me, and showed me an unreality that made sense, where the only rules were the ones I'd choose for myself; no law but self-reliance. Partnerships made up of the ones who could do it all by themselves, beautiful outlaws in a space where love is the law. Learning what life can be like when the volume is always at eleven for everyone. Fire dancer, scenester, image, icon, whore. Smarter than I look, I learned that everyone always gets exactly what they want. All anyone ever gets is exactly what they want, and I want to live, and love, and burn, and never be accused of hurting someone ever again. I take no responsibility for you, yours, or your actions, and don't expect you to take responsibility for mine.

I'm terrified of people because they often won't take care of themselves; if you try to get close, they want you to take care of them, but you can't. They want you to lie to them, hurt them, love them, accept unconditionally what they hate about themselves, double-binds and contradictions, and there's no way to win.

Trained from birth to build walls of cushions, to build the most complicated mazes to keep out the ones who do the damage, and to always smile in the face of monsters, I don't trust. The only person that can take care of me is the person who doesn't want to be taken care of. The only person I trust is the girl who wants orange sherbet more than salvation from her fears, a girl who kisses like she stole it, and likes to fire guns because of the loud bang-bang. I have always been the center of my world, and I will be, until the day I die. In my life, while wrapped up in fire, while wrapped around my motorcycles, enfolded in walls of bass, I've have felt like a god, and I gotta tell you, I like the feeling. I infinitely prefer being an entity to being a person; you tend to end up at much cooler parties; and in the end, after all is said and done, the last thing I want is to find another mouse to huddle up against in the darkness of mutual insecurity and secret pain. I want a pain angel, an entity, an engine of desire that prefers fire to ashes, life to death, passion to safety. I let go of fear, and my own narcissistic view of myself as a victim, ego death to ego rebirth, the phoenix cycle complete. And I expect the same, and will love someone for as long as they are surprising, because what I've come to expect is disappointment, but I refuse to give up. I want the wild child girl who will never be owned and who will own me completely. I want the girl who sees that everything normal is insane and was custom tailored to the weaknesses of people who are not mad like the Cheshire cat, but mad like the homeless guy in the alley. This world and it's routine and rituals were made both by and for people who are broken and think that being broken is sane. I want a lover who will never talk speak the language of mendacity, and whose grins are always wicked. I hate you all, I love you all, and I like you all, very much.

These are the facts of me. Indigo is a color that can't be perceived; Indigo doesn't exist. When your father is deadly, and your mother wants to die, you learn to flow, to be a chameleon, the prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet. I changed my name to see which of the dancers that I meet in life will look beyond the prepared faces of the other dancers, and see what lies behind, and which ones prefer the masks, because they loathe their own faces. Indigo is a subtle color, both in appearance and in it's definition, it is by definition mysterious, but the other half of the equation is that Indigo is the illusion of depth. It's really just a distraction, a will-o-the-wisp. And none of this is who I am; All of these things are just a handful of experiences I've had my life; I am not the sum of my experiences, but of the experiences I've had, these are the ones I will never repeat. These are not Indigo, and Indigo is only even a small part of me.

Indigo is the pretty secretary. He's there to greet you, and pour you tea.

The board members only meet behind closed doors.

If you'd ever care to meet them, you can always step inside, but you should be aware, they are businessmen, and far from kind.

All of this should be taken into account before you try to know me.

And I just realized something. I'm writing this because I'm tired of being strangers. I'm tired of half-dead interactions.

And so I want to know, after all is said and done, stranger, who exactly are you?