sleep schedule

Bryan’s come home and I’m still awake, sitting dark swathed in marijuana smoke. This place feels like I should know it, they’ve been living here three years. Catching up is interesting, it’s sweetness to be here, to talk late with Bryan, the closest I came to an older brother. We remember each-other, our words, our echoes. We don’t like the house they built on the ruin of where I used to live, but I know in his own way, he doesn’t know how to listen to me. From the speakers flow low music, songs entangled with too much emotion. It’s distracting, though required tonight. My heart isn’t here, it’s elsewhere. It’s tangled in long dark hair. My mouth spouts facts and truths and history rebounded on automatic, engaging without finding myself in the words. My tongue knows I’m in the wrong place, that this isn’t the time. I would tell myself that I shouldn’t have come, but I know my physics better than that. I know my orbit wouldn’t have changed, that I’m still falling always inward at the same distance. I wonder if this is a step toward accepting the mantle of adulthood, this continuing in spite of things, but it’s just always been here, part of my frame. I understand something is happening. I understand that it’s out of my control.

Take comfort that some of the fear is mutual. We are savage flowers, bleeding at the roots, utterly convincing.

I expect too much

I called and I felt like I shouldn’t have. I felt like I was talking to emptiness, a discussion wounding in its pointlessness. I won’t call again, I’m sorry. It’s not my place to phone out of the blue, no matter what I dearly wish. Perhaps I should not have pushed so on Monday, perhaps I should have let my forgiveness fall like Damocles Sword. The way you said goodbye made me feel like I’d made a mistake.

“…if he should die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine that all will fall in love with night…”

I’m spending tonight at Mishka’s. Maybe it will help to finally have someone to talk about how hard this is on me, what pressure it places on my heart and the inside of my skin. There’s no discussing anything with Gavin. We’re very quiet, locked into pleasant conversation with his parents or lost in the silence of travel, looking out windows and sporadically talking about painting. He’s not my lover, there’s little I might say. It’s a constant weight, knowing so many people and having no one to talk to.

She’s on the phone with her boyfriend now, which gives me time to write. After Gavin left, I outlined my love. “I’ve never met anyone quite like him before.” I told her, “And then he was gone, and all the colours, the light of the day, crumbled and went out.”

You’re not allowed to be a hollow shell, love. You have a life which requires living, you have someone you bed down with who needs you, I’m sure. It’s the toss of the dice and the tick of the most damned clock. Maybe I need to learn someone else to take my time where I am away from you, but I don’t think I can. You’ve stolen me and created desire. I can’t help myself from needing you. It’s your voice when I sleep, your eyes meeting mine in my dreams, but you’re already complete. I think I sold my soul for you, and in a perfect world, you would look at me and understand that. I could drown in your vision, my blind hands taking yours to hold me. The truth says that I don’t want my soul back, that I want to break as much as you do. These secrets don’t keep when we know each-other. My darkest admittance is that giving you grace is the vice of self betrayal, denying everything that I’m learning to love. My soul, Love, I don’t want to buy it back. Simple like a child, I only want you. If there were something to pray to, I would use your name to ask to make it worthwhile.

I can feel that he’s dying. There’s black in his mind, an iron vice around his heart. The sky is falling, (selfishly I wish it were ours), crushing capillaries in urgent communication. The stresses of metal, of steel burning. My name isn’t mentioned, he calls for an Angel.

still on repeat

Gavin is thinner, sleeping with him in the bed is like being locked in a cage of bone. We’re leaving at noon, catching a bus to the ferry and arriving on the Island for Three. Part of me is happy I’m going and another part doesn’t want to to leave. I have unfinished business here this week, I’m almost afraid of being without a connection to my in-box for three days. I can taste my hesitation, a sour tang on the back of my tongue. We will be back on Friday, maybe late, but don’t keep from calling. Sunday I expect people over, though now I’m not certain who. I called True Confections this morning, I’m going to pick up a second cake to keep it interesting, to keep it fair. I’ve no reason not to. Gavin leaves on Monday.

I wonder at myself, that I’m beginning to be demanding, that I’m beginning to express craving in words. “You’re not allowed to carve yourself up over this, you know why? Because that would give me a hold on you that I could never forgive you for.” I walked to Main street yesterday like an angel bearing death. I was blind, one one foot in front of the other, bright flowers in my hand like a weapon.

Radio silence begins here.

bad signal : up the creek

WARREN ELLIS

People keep asking if I’m going to say something about the death of Hunter S Thompson. Hell, a couple of newspapers have asked. This is because (for the sake of the Marvel readers who have joined us) I wrote a graphic novel series called TRANSMETROPOLITAN, the creation of whose protagonist was somewhat influenced by Thompson’s writing, persona and life.

I got the news from a friend at CBS at four in the morning, two minutes after it hit the ticker. I was, and am, numb. I’ve tried to write about it a couple of times. When John Peel died, I was wrecked. This time, I’m just numb.

I read an article a few years ago, that I haven’t seen cited in the obituaries yet, wherein it’s stated that Thompson’s body was pretty much packing up on him. His stomach was having problems with toxic substances like, um, food, and his diet was mostly liquid, mashed avocado and yoghurt. He’d spent time in a wheelchair in recent years. His drug use had always been exaggerated for comedic effect, but, at 67, he’d been hammering his body in a committed way for some 50 years. And, at 67, you don’t grow back the bits you killed. There’s a fair chance he was looking at years of dependency, chronic illness, and listening to his own body die by inches. Anyone would find that frightening.

He always wore his influences on his sleeve. JP Donleavy, Faulkner, Mencken, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Hemingway. He used and re-used the last line from A FAREWELL TO ARMS, over and over: “I walked back to the hotel in the rain.” Legend has it that he retyped a Hemingway novel to understand how the writer got his effects.

Hemingway, of course, shot himself in the head. Old and sick and unable to live up to his own ideas on manhood.

I always thought it peculiarly apt that the man who wrote that line, whose work was all about keeping the expression of human feeling underneath the surface, sat somewhere quiet and alone and put a shotgun in his mouth.

Hunter Thompson waited until his young wife left the house, and then shot himself in the head with a pistol. He must have been quite aware that either she, or his son, there in the house with his grandson, would find his corpse. Dead bodies don’t lay neatly. They splay, spastic and awful. There is often shit.

I never met Thompson. Had the opportunity a couple of times — magazines wanting to send me out to Woody Creek, that kind of thing — but turned them down. I’ve been lucky so far, in meeting my great influences. But they don’t always go well. Friends of mine have had horrific experiences with their personal heroes, and it often leaves them unable to enjoy the work afterwards. And I wanted to keep the work. So I don’t know what kind of man he was.

And the numbness, in part, comes from now finding that he was the kind of man that’d let his family find him like that. I have a personal loathing for suicide. It’s stupid and selfish and ugly and cowardly and reeks of weakness. Someone said to me yesterday about Thompson, “What a ripoff.” And I kind of know what he meant. It’s become convenient to write Thompson off as parody in recent years, and there’s a case to be made that he peaked around the age of 36, with FEAR AND LOATHING ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL ’72. But he could still make me laugh, even in the most recent collection, HEY RUBE. ” ‘We have many cigarettes here,’ I said suavely” still makes me smile. Writing had clearly become difficult, and a job, but every now and then you’d get a clear burst of the old anger, as in his support for Lisl Auman (google it). He was done with the big fireworks, but the devil was still in him. Probably his great work of the last twenty years was in Being Hunter Thompson. In performance.

But how you leave the stage is at least as important as how you enter it. And he left it alone in a kitchen with a .45, dying in — and wouldn’t it be nice if it were the last time these words were typed together? —

— dying in fear, and loathing.

Warren Ellis
down by the sea
February 2005

I wish my love were here to hold me.

I’m up sewing at Jenn’s apartment. My clothes are half off and we stripped Jenn topless so I might lace her corset properly. Derek and Jeff are over, talking shop. I checked my mail here to discover that Hunter Thompson shot himself. I’m partially recovered now, though my hands are still shaking. A writer has been ripped from us, I should have been older when this news came.

I wish my love were here to hold me.

hunter s thompson is dead

Hunter S. Thompson, the acerbic counterculture writer who popularized a new
form of journalism in books like “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” fatally
shot himself Sunday night at his Aspen-area home, his son said. He was 67.

“Hunter prized his privacy and we ask that his friends and admirers respect
that privacy as well as that of his family,” Juan Thompson said in a statement
released to the Aspen Daily News.

Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis, a personal friend of Thompson, confirmed
the death to the News. Sheriff’s officials did not return calls to The
Associated Press late Sunday.

(AP)

cakery day

It is not new news that I won a cake from True Confections. Originally I was planning on sharing it with everyone this Saturday, the 26th, but it might be that too many people are otherwise booked. Rather than set my plan, I’m giving it to the majority. No matter what day is chosen, this will be a late evening get-together.

edit: would you please comment to say who’s voted?

when the moon is burning

I hate being justified. It ruins me more every time. There’s a dance to interaction, a gliding movement which swirls to include even the most clumsy social graces. Rhythm metered conversation, quick wit feet making love to common understanding. It might be the the closest thing I have to a hobby but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. I tear observations unborn from truth and sometimes it’s just not pretty.

It has been days. I have received no word but a broken promise. Silence. Invitation revoked, last night Judas kissed me and silver fell from my mind.

I have learned to have a limit. A heart line drawn in lonely sand with a sword. It does not matter anymore if I crave someone from fingertip to deepest spark of thought, I’ve learned that I must make myself matter. This cannot be passed again. Certain creatures of thought and emotion are easy to mold, but hard to create. Their birth is an effort, a screaming violent expulsion.

It’s going to be too late.

Tomorrow Gavin arrives and we leave the city together.

I would be your emotional tampon

It’s four a.m. and the last of the poets just left for bed. I should be crawling into mine but some compulsion instead leads me to the keyboard to tap.

I had a rather spectacular crash a few days ago and it wiped out about half of my address book. It would be a kindness if you were to drop me a line or text me a message on msn. (hotmail : bloodkrystal).