The machine is pain
I can’t really say why I feel the need to write things down, to share them and be honest. Especially when what I say can be so misunderstood. Or in hindsight it is enough to cringe about. Or like tonight it’s just so damned messy.
I am staring into the cold hateful eyes of truth and the damage I’ve done. The loss and loneliness. I hate my existence right now. My whole fucking being aches. The slow bleed is not enough. The leaking of time and erosion isn’t fast enough. Waiting for tectonic plates to move. It’s all so slow and dreadful.
Sitting here tonight I have a picture in my mind. Kneeling on the floor, leaning my face forward and kissing the barrel. Stretching to thumb the trigger. One loud pop and the spraying blood and grey matter. Then all gone, all gone. Relief. Goodbye.
How much pain, how much of this do I have to live through. How many more nights of not being able to sleep without the television on. Because when the lights go out and it gets quiet, my thoughts start to go feral and attack. How many more days where I have to brace myself just to step out of my room. The fear and anxiety that becomes vicious . How many days will I have to wrestle with this darkness. The urge to erase my life. To step off the ledge and into the void. It’s a nasty truth and I am sure maybe some of you are worried or frightened. And maybe for the sake of common decency one shouldn’t speak of such things in polite company.
A broken machine man crawls across the floor picking up scraps of metal and paper looking for the pieces that meant something. The whole time mumbling something that sounds like a strange melody. A prayer or a curse its hard to tell. The machine man is frayed wires and smoking motors. Beyond repair but too unconscious to turn off. Redundant and unimportant it spends it’s days wandering the factory floor trying hard to remember what it was built for. Remember what it did long ago before the humans left. Sadly it has no purpose. It just whirrs on and on. Tuneless and alone. An empty life.
Why?
The tattoos on his arm spoke tough and loud.
A silk-screening of a Robert Mitchum character…I can’t for the life of me remember what movie, though I know I have seen it. Cool image.
Frustration is becoming frustrating. But I am not reacting to it as I used to. Trying to keep away from the crazy despair and howling. Anger too, I am trying very hard to re-do it all. I get angry still and I have things I have every right to get angry about. But I don’t sit in it and fester and grind until it becomes spite and hate. It’s all just frustrating because I still have these negative feelings. I would love to be one of those shiny, happy people Michael Stipe sang about. But I think perhaps it may not be possible. See there’s a beast that lives in and around us. And as a creative person, a writer or whatever I may call myself (you need not agree) and an addict I have turned and looked it in the eye. It’s an act of courage and stupidity, but it is an enlightening act too. But like a crash victim, you cannot just walk away unmarked and unscathed. And the beast has looked back at me and left a black spot on my soul. It has scarred my heart. Now I know this sounds kind of melodramatic and fruity. But it’s the only way I can describe it. And it has left my vision of the world slightly skewed and dark. I fight the darkness each day, everyday. I wrestle with the urge to destroy myself or to lash out at others daily. It’s like that scared whooped dog that is ready to bite even the gentle and giving hand. I struggle against my judgements and hatred so often that I feel like I must be broken and flawed. Though I am coming to know I am not. It’s so frustrating. I want to love and be close to you, to anyone. But I fight to do it. I have seen the worst things man does to itself with my own eyes and felt it in my own body and soul. I carry memories and images that make me want to hide from you when they become to vivid. Death, hate, blood, rape and broken animals tearing the flesh off each other all run through my memories. It hurts and I am casting them off, like an exorcism. But it’s no fast process. It’s not as easy as dropping a heavy load. It happens a little at a time. Much like Margery Williams wrote in the children’s book The Velveteen Rabbit.
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but Really loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get all loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
Do you see ol’ Hoss? That’s what it means…The change. It hurts a little and it is scary sometimes. But it’s good, it’s good in the end.
Funny, I am sitting here with tears in my eyes. That passage does that to me. I got a copy of the book for my daughter and had to put it away because I never can read it without crying. Because I think more than anything in this world I want her to know what it means to be loved, loved till her seems burst and her joints get loose. Love that only gets stronger and more real with time. She’s my baby and I want her to always know that.
Geez…I thought I had nothing to write about today.
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