The pieces of my life are in constant motion; shuffling to find balance only to realize they were never puzzle pieces. They were just pieces.
It was a lifetime ago that I came to write here. I never actually got around to introducing you to my cat. He's a magical little shit, I swear to you on all that is holy and hairy, and possibly the only cat in the universe that doesn't give me allergies. There will be another post for that, I don't want my fluffy chonk tainted by stinky mortal problems. He's way too good for that, little enchanted ball of mischief.
So yes, back to the pieces.
This is gonna sound like the intro to a low budget horror movie where the relatable protagonist - or the person we thought was the protagonist - dies in the first 10 minutes. Unfortunately, this is not what happened here.
The scene opens with Shandy; a klutzy, chubby brunette stumbling on old furniture in her dusty attic. She's going through some files in the god rays, then she gets distracted by a ballerina music box on her grandmother's old nightstand.
"2019 was not a good year for me. It was the year that my life decided to pull a premature ScarFace. I lost my house, I lost my job, and I lost my three-year boyfriend. At 26 years old, I moved back in with my parents. My days blurred into a sea of endless weekends, candy and artificial sweetners; retail therapy was really the only kind of therapy I could afford.
In February, I got this snazzy ballerina box on sale for only $5.99! Sweet deal, right?
Except that sometimes, late at night, I could swear I heard voices coming from the dark corners of the room, saying horrible things. I'm sure it's nothing, the box isn't actually speaking, it must be the central heating. It's been off for a ..."
Sound of a machete falling into flesh and bone. Blood-curdling scream sounds off-screen. Cut to black. Transition to blue sky on a scorched desert afternoon. Country music plays and a Cadillac drives off into the horizon.
But like I said, that's not what happened here. It's because the pieces were never really meant to make up anything. They were meant to make...anything.
Except when we're young, we look for our choices in all the wrong places. That's the great thing about shocks, traumas and unexpected turns in the road that lead you off a cliff. For a split second, your head rebounds out of the frame and you see the whole picture right before it falls apart, and for a glitchy split second, the potential liberates you. Then it breaks you, and you forget about it. Head trauma is a bitch like that.
But that's too morbid, let me draw you another picture. I now know that I can.
So much has changed, again. I keep expecting it to stop somewhere; that's where bad scripts come from I guess. We get that tube-fed into our subconscious from a really early age. The plot thickens, then the mic drops. The guy gets the girl and the bad guy gets what's coming to him. They walk away from an explosion in slo-mo. The credit rolls and you jizz a load of adrenaline all over the screen, then you get up and go about your day. You are a cobra, you just shed your skin of disappointments and your endorphins hold you off till the afternoon.
Then you crash. Because you're not a fucking Cobra man. They're so much cooler. Our skin falls off eventually, except it sags off of us without ever letting go until it eventually takes us down with it. No phoenix, no fire, no rebirth, no punchline. Just a bunch of shitty stretch lines, if you're lucky.
I spent so long chasing things, running away from things into other things, running at things. We're not meant to move that fast.
They say you really grow up when you realize you became the stereotype you hated all your life. Getting into a long-term relationship out of my second year of college was a mistake. I should have focused on my career, made more friends, was less of an asshole, was way less honest. Nobody needs to hear what you have to say anyway. We have a voice but we don't really know how to use it. Evolution says thou shalt not get yourself into troubleth.
Thou shalt keepeth your mouth shut, smileth and noddeth along.
We tend to say that kind of shit to ourselves when we're in pain, but it's really just a load of shit. We think it means something because it makes a pretty pattern, and we like patterns. They ease our existential dread as a species walking the black lands in scattered groups and marching off into extinction. We use it to tell stories that have a plot, but somewhere along the line, we forget that stories don't exist in nature. We never walked into the woods and found one hiding under a low hanging tree. It's not naturally recurrent. We made that shit up. We made a crap cracker and put a cherry on top, then we ate that shit.
We make so much shit up to survive reality. We hold on to it and we build a virtual life around it. We put on pretty filters and we sound self-righteous to ourselves. We make patterns out of patterns, weave those patterns into other patterns and connect them to pre-existing patterns. We swirl into the patterns in a frenzy of kaleidoscopic colour and light until we lose all sense of ourselves and all the shit that hurts, scares or confuses us. We feed off the colour and the light because we're too afraid to look up. If we did, if only for a split second, the frame would glitch and we'd see we were down all along.
The movies got it wrong. Morgan Freeman shouldn't have been narrating all those blockbusters. If something had to sound off destiny's trumpets, it would have sounded a bit more like A$AP ROCKY, or like a really bad Alexa recording. She mixed her shopping list and killed you instead. She played A$AP ROCKY right after though.
Your ghost floats off, tripping and shit. "What does it all mean?", it wonders. For the first time in its short life, it is gender-confused and now identifies as it/peeled banana. A$AP ROCKY materializes, clad in holy bling. "It means nothing," he says. "It just sucks, for no reason and for a really long time, and then it catches you completely off-guard and sucks differently. You just gotta drop down and get your eagle on." He then goes off and disappears in a typical dude move, leaving a feeble puff of stage smoke in his wake. You cough your heart out, that damn asthma.
I think if we try and remember that outside of its usual two-minute window, it might give us a whole new outlook on life. Except that outlook will not be like the outlook Yoga gives you, it might not sit well with your dinner. Your mom's spaghetti, etc.
My train of thought had another accident there. Let me try and grab on to some rails.
Cue camera two
They really don't tell you enough about your late twenties. Textbooks are all on that thirties and forties shit. Your twenties are like your unicorn phase. Peak body, peak career, peak sexuality, peak physique. I'm da bomb, homie. Never met a motherfucker fresh like me.
Well here's what they don't tell you.
Your twenties are a volatile state. You're constantly forming, moving along and thinking you got it right. Problem is... there are just too many sparks flying around, and before you know it, a spark catches on to the polyester kitchen curtains and causes a gas explosion. It's an iridescent marvel of leaking colour, rendered in low light. You're exhilarated. It's so beautiful, you have never seen anything like it, then your skin catches living colour and burns you at the stake like Joan of fucking Ark. As you perish in flame, you grab on to the nearest cause.
And just like that, you're saved.
You won't get it until it happens to you, it's just one of those things. I guess that's why nobody ever bothered writing a book about it. There's no way of getting that information back down the generation line. We're just not there yet. Arachnids are. Alas, we're not that cool either.
Here's how I was saved. I realized the futility of it all. Isn't it funny and moronically ironic that the answer was in the bible all along? "The wind blows over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more." Stage direction, hidden in plain sight.
There's something to be said about losing the things that you use to define you. Can you really tell yourself apart from your career? How would your twitter bio sound like if you take out your title, pet and fandom mentions? We box ourselves into so many things, we take comfort in them and they make us smaller. It takes an invasive procedure to get you out, except your skin is not used to all that light. It shrivels up and hurts you in self-defense. What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. What doesn't make you stronger, gives you hella perspective.
I should try my hand at vampire fanfiction. I got all the gore flow down. Tumblr would eat that shit up like hot popcorn. I can tag it with all kinds of things like #depression and #asexual and make friends that look like my leg after a long winter; hairy, pale and desperately in need of a manicure.
To be continued. Subscribe below to get notified when the next issue of "Clockwork Vampires: Dragging Your Life Out of the Coffin and Into the Scorching Light" comes out! xoxo
It was a lifetime ago that I came to write here. I never actually got around to introducing you to my cat. He's a magical little shit, I swear to you on all that is holy and hairy, and possibly the only cat in the universe that doesn't give me allergies. There will be another post for that, I don't want my fluffy chonk tainted by stinky mortal problems. He's way too good for that, little enchanted ball of mischief.
So yes, back to the pieces.
This is gonna sound like the intro to a low budget horror movie where the relatable protagonist - or the person we thought was the protagonist - dies in the first 10 minutes. Unfortunately, this is not what happened here.
The scene opens with Shandy; a klutzy, chubby brunette stumbling on old furniture in her dusty attic. She's going through some files in the god rays, then she gets distracted by a ballerina music box on her grandmother's old nightstand.
"2019 was not a good year for me. It was the year that my life decided to pull a premature ScarFace. I lost my house, I lost my job, and I lost my three-year boyfriend. At 26 years old, I moved back in with my parents. My days blurred into a sea of endless weekends, candy and artificial sweetners; retail therapy was really the only kind of therapy I could afford.
In February, I got this snazzy ballerina box on sale for only $5.99! Sweet deal, right?
Except that sometimes, late at night, I could swear I heard voices coming from the dark corners of the room, saying horrible things. I'm sure it's nothing, the box isn't actually speaking, it must be the central heating. It's been off for a ..."
Sound of a machete falling into flesh and bone. Blood-curdling scream sounds off-screen. Cut to black. Transition to blue sky on a scorched desert afternoon. Country music plays and a Cadillac drives off into the horizon.
But like I said, that's not what happened here. It's because the pieces were never really meant to make up anything. They were meant to make...anything.
Except when we're young, we look for our choices in all the wrong places. That's the great thing about shocks, traumas and unexpected turns in the road that lead you off a cliff. For a split second, your head rebounds out of the frame and you see the whole picture right before it falls apart, and for a glitchy split second, the potential liberates you. Then it breaks you, and you forget about it. Head trauma is a bitch like that.
But that's too morbid, let me draw you another picture. I now know that I can.
So much has changed, again. I keep expecting it to stop somewhere; that's where bad scripts come from I guess. We get that tube-fed into our subconscious from a really early age. The plot thickens, then the mic drops. The guy gets the girl and the bad guy gets what's coming to him. They walk away from an explosion in slo-mo. The credit rolls and you jizz a load of adrenaline all over the screen, then you get up and go about your day. You are a cobra, you just shed your skin of disappointments and your endorphins hold you off till the afternoon.
Then you crash. Because you're not a fucking Cobra man. They're so much cooler. Our skin falls off eventually, except it sags off of us without ever letting go until it eventually takes us down with it. No phoenix, no fire, no rebirth, no punchline. Just a bunch of shitty stretch lines, if you're lucky.
I spent so long chasing things, running away from things into other things, running at things. We're not meant to move that fast.
They say you really grow up when you realize you became the stereotype you hated all your life. Getting into a long-term relationship out of my second year of college was a mistake. I should have focused on my career, made more friends, was less of an asshole, was way less honest. Nobody needs to hear what you have to say anyway. We have a voice but we don't really know how to use it. Evolution says thou shalt not get yourself into troubleth.
Thou shalt keepeth your mouth shut, smileth and noddeth along.
We tend to say that kind of shit to ourselves when we're in pain, but it's really just a load of shit. We think it means something because it makes a pretty pattern, and we like patterns. They ease our existential dread as a species walking the black lands in scattered groups and marching off into extinction. We use it to tell stories that have a plot, but somewhere along the line, we forget that stories don't exist in nature. We never walked into the woods and found one hiding under a low hanging tree. It's not naturally recurrent. We made that shit up. We made a crap cracker and put a cherry on top, then we ate that shit.
We make so much shit up to survive reality. We hold on to it and we build a virtual life around it. We put on pretty filters and we sound self-righteous to ourselves. We make patterns out of patterns, weave those patterns into other patterns and connect them to pre-existing patterns. We swirl into the patterns in a frenzy of kaleidoscopic colour and light until we lose all sense of ourselves and all the shit that hurts, scares or confuses us. We feed off the colour and the light because we're too afraid to look up. If we did, if only for a split second, the frame would glitch and we'd see we were down all along.
The movies got it wrong. Morgan Freeman shouldn't have been narrating all those blockbusters. If something had to sound off destiny's trumpets, it would have sounded a bit more like A$AP ROCKY, or like a really bad Alexa recording. She mixed her shopping list and killed you instead. She played A$AP ROCKY right after though.
Your ghost floats off, tripping and shit. "What does it all mean?", it wonders. For the first time in its short life, it is gender-confused and now identifies as it/peeled banana. A$AP ROCKY materializes, clad in holy bling. "It means nothing," he says. "It just sucks, for no reason and for a really long time, and then it catches you completely off-guard and sucks differently. You just gotta drop down and get your eagle on." He then goes off and disappears in a typical dude move, leaving a feeble puff of stage smoke in his wake. You cough your heart out, that damn asthma.
I think if we try and remember that outside of its usual two-minute window, it might give us a whole new outlook on life. Except that outlook will not be like the outlook Yoga gives you, it might not sit well with your dinner. Your mom's spaghetti, etc.
My train of thought had another accident there. Let me try and grab on to some rails.
Cue camera two
They really don't tell you enough about your late twenties. Textbooks are all on that thirties and forties shit. Your twenties are like your unicorn phase. Peak body, peak career, peak sexuality, peak physique. I'm da bomb, homie. Never met a motherfucker fresh like me.
Well here's what they don't tell you.
Your twenties are a volatile state. You're constantly forming, moving along and thinking you got it right. Problem is... there are just too many sparks flying around, and before you know it, a spark catches on to the polyester kitchen curtains and causes a gas explosion. It's an iridescent marvel of leaking colour, rendered in low light. You're exhilarated. It's so beautiful, you have never seen anything like it, then your skin catches living colour and burns you at the stake like Joan of fucking Ark. As you perish in flame, you grab on to the nearest cause.
And just like that, you're saved.
You won't get it until it happens to you, it's just one of those things. I guess that's why nobody ever bothered writing a book about it. There's no way of getting that information back down the generation line. We're just not there yet. Arachnids are. Alas, we're not that cool either.
Here's how I was saved. I realized the futility of it all. Isn't it funny and moronically ironic that the answer was in the bible all along? "The wind blows over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more." Stage direction, hidden in plain sight.
There's something to be said about losing the things that you use to define you. Can you really tell yourself apart from your career? How would your twitter bio sound like if you take out your title, pet and fandom mentions? We box ourselves into so many things, we take comfort in them and they make us smaller. It takes an invasive procedure to get you out, except your skin is not used to all that light. It shrivels up and hurts you in self-defense. What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. What doesn't make you stronger, gives you hella perspective.
I should try my hand at vampire fanfiction. I got all the gore flow down. Tumblr would eat that shit up like hot popcorn. I can tag it with all kinds of things like #depression and #asexual and make friends that look like my leg after a long winter; hairy, pale and desperately in need of a manicure.
To be continued. Subscribe below to get notified when the next issue of "Clockwork Vampires: Dragging Your Life Out of the Coffin and Into the Scorching Light" comes out! xoxo
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