Visions of demon skulls and death’s heads danced
in the clouds in the morning sky. Cold winds licked at my flesh.
The sunrise could not warm my spirit. I shook outside my front door,
too intoxicated to care. Fever clutched at my consciousness.
Nothing made any difference to me.
I went back inside. The temperature
warmed my body nicely, but most of all being inside represented safety.
No matter how loaded I got I never forgot my terror of being discovered.
Inside, with the door locked and all of the windows blocked, no one could
see me and I need not worry about seeing anybody else.
All of the locks and curtains did nothing
to protect me from the beast in the mirror. No amount of preparation
could have softened the sight. I caught a glimpse of the evil behind
my eyes, eyes that were totally glassy and red. My eyes gave the
rest of my features the vague similarity to those of a goat.
I turned the mirror so that it faced the wall.
It stayed that way for many months to come. It joined the fate of
the television set, which also faced the wall. I saw the devil in
the mirror, and it was myself. I saw devils on the television.
They were my brothers and sisters. From then on I made a promise
to myself to give my attention to the floor rather than focus on things
that would disturb me so greatly.
That morning every part of myself raged in
conflict, each side turned against the other. Though I often courted
the occult I never could see into the future. If I could none of
this story would ever have taken place. This is not an easy story
to tell. It is many things, all and nothing. That wintry morning
could hardly be considered an origin, and yet it is as good a place to
begin as any.
That morning I came down with the shakes.
It was not the first time, and it would not be the last time. I thought
to myself that death must be a great luxury. No matter how idiotic
or cliché it sounds I still believe that. That cold morning
I stared the insanity of my own addiction dead in the face and saw nothing
at all wrong with it. That morning was on All Saints Day in my twenty-first
year of life in God’s great creation. In many ways that morning was
a turning point for I decided to go on with my madness no matter the cost.
For one fleeting second I held the power to change all of the nasty, unpleasant
things that would happen. If only I would have opened my eyes and
acknowledged the truth that was right in front of me, history would have
run a far different course. Such is the nature of my disease and
my curse. I am forever doomed to make the same mistakes again and
again.
So many experiences led up to the moment when
I lay shaking on the ground. I don’t know how I will find a way to
relate all of the events that turned me into the person that I am today,
the person that causes the righteous to turn away in disbelief and disgust.
These are the occurrences that eventually led the force of law in our government
to label me as dangerous and lock me away, so that the world would be safe for
all the shallow people who live blissfully simple lives. This story
chronicles a voyage into the bottomless pit of self loathing and despair
that comes from all forms of self destructive and deeply aberrant behavior.
If this narration did nothing more than wallow in all of the negativity
that clouded most of the days of my life then it would not be any fun for
a normal, happy person to read (and no matter how I try to gloss it over,
it probably isn’t). The treatise you hold in your hands stands for
much more than just a diatribe of how I became a monster in the eyes of
society, of how I came to hold all things macabre in such high regard.
It also relates the events that showed me how empty and meaningless my
existence had been when based on nothing more than the relentless pursuit
of ever intensifying sensory pleasure. Beyond that it shows how fulfilled
my life could be if I turned away from the endless cycles of abuse to embrace
the beauty that exists within myself, to my great surprise.
Despite all of the aloof and egotistical remarks
I have made to myself and other people over the years about how my writing
is important to me only on a personal level I have discovered that my readers
are very important to me as well. For the sake of honesty I think
it is crucial that I tell you I care, sincerely, what you think about not
only what I have written, but also about me as a person. I want you
to know that I am not so full of myself that I think this work will be
important to everyone who reads it. Quite to the opposite I feel
that I will be extremely lucky to encounter a single person who will actually
read this and receive any sort of enlightenment from it. I find it
comforting to believe that you exist, and that you will like this.
That belief keeps me going, so I refuse to let go of it. Perhaps
my attitude comes across as misguided and immature, but it is the genuine
article. I ask you to please bear with me. After all, I did
all of this work for your reading pleasure. Cute, huh?
In a sense I have crawled out from under the
rock where I normally hide and I am sunning myself shamelessly in full
view of the whole world. As my skin heats up I drag myself across
the rough surfaces of the bottom in which I dwell so that the external
layers of dead flesh flake off and flutter away on the breeze. Quite
a few of the scales landed here on these pieces of paper, and that is what
you are looking at now. These are the discarded visages which once
wrapped my body from head to toe. Though they are nothing but husks
many of them are still quite frightfully lifelike in their appearance.
Do not be overly alarmed. There is no way for these things to bite,
infect or harm you in any way. This medium represents the ultimate
in safety and discretion.
***
For two weeks before Halloween I planned the
party I would have that night. I made sure I had plenty of LSD, and
marijuana to take the edge off. The grand design in my head involved
friends, socializing, women and intimacy. None of those things worked
out the way they were supposed to. I can not bring myself to laugh
about the way things go wrong when the whole world turns into a hostile
hallucination. I dropped sixty-six hits of acid. That much
went according to plan. The plan also appeared sound when I arrived
at the bar where I intended to chill for the night. As soon as the
doses started to kick in nothing made any sense any more. I got the
hell out of there as fast as I could. Everything had begun to look
sinister by the time I hit the parking lot. The drive home reminded
me of something out of Dante’s Inferno. I don’t find any of those
facts too remarkable.
The remarkable part of my Halloween party
that year was that I thought I could take sixty-six hits of acid and be
okay. It is even more remarkable that I thought I might be able to
pick up a woman in that state. After the trip started the idea of
speaking to anyone, or anyone speaking to me, became terrifying.
Insecure and threatened I fled for the safety of the cocoon I called home.
If only my troubles had ended when I made it home. The mental problems
that led me to take all of that poison in the first place stayed close
by my side. One might have suspected that those mental problems were
the little blue blanket I had been carrying around since childhood.
The things I felt and saw that night mean very little when compared to
the fact I would subject myself to such an experience. That remains
the true nightmare.
In an effort to explain, to feel, to grow
past the insanity that caused me to do that to myself, I know that I have
to take a long hard look at the things I tried desperately to ignore.
I have to look at the wrongs inside of myself. I need to examine
the negativity in my environment. I must tell myself the truth about
all of the people I thought were my friends, and all of the women I thought
I could love until the end of time. Nothing about this process will
be simple or easy. In fact it is going to hurt like hell. The
only way to begin something so difficult is to plunge in, taking a deep
breath on the way. After I take that dive I’m not surprised the depths
are frigid, so bitter cold my breath takes leave of my body. I think
about the past and I wonder where all the warmth and love went. My
only hope is that dragging all of my excess baggage into the light will
allow the ice to thaw.