The long howl thrills me through! Peace! ye revellers, and set the watch! Oh, life! ’tis in an hour like this, with soul beat down and held to knowledge,—as wild, untutored things are forced to feed—Oh, life! ’tis now that I do feel the latent horror in thee! but ’tis not me! that horror ’s out of me! and with the soft feeling of the human in me, yet will I try to fight ye, ye grim, phantom futures! Stand by me, hold me, bind me, O ye blessed influences!

the double dose of comfort and sheer terror you get from reading something that resonates DEEP WITHIN YOU like a dark endless scream!!

yes: we both experience the same reality . . . but we’re also both trapped inside of it, and there’s nothing we can do for each other except acknowledge our shared misery!

hey that’s my car

(names blurred to protect the innocent)

I PACED THE STREETS
IN ALL DIRECTIONS
DRIVEN ON BY WRETCHEDNESS

sometimes dante will wake me up in the middle of the night to feed him . . . he’ll sit on my chest and paw at my face, and graze my cheek just barely with one little claw until i get up. and i’ll go out into the kitchen, which is dimly lit purple and red, and i’ll feed the guy. i’ll drink a full glass of water and more often than not pop a few aspirin. i bought this bottle of aspirin in december i think. i got the jumbo pack: 500 pills, baby, all primed and ready to alleviate The Unassailable Pain Of Being Alive. this morning i felt a great sadness when i held up that bottle and saw that i have consumed round about two-thirds of it already, barely six months later. i’m talking over 300 of these things are gone! long since absorbed! i got what i could out of them, and now i think their effectiveness is waning.

when i first started my job, this stand-up dude showed me around, and i remember he opened a cabinet in the kitchen where all the over-the-counter painkillers were. he said: “here’s all the aspirin, tylenol, advil . . . you name it. we go through a lot of this stuff.”

when i really think about it, i’m hurtin all the time. i guess i’ve gotten so used to it that it feels like my default state. my skeleton is screaming inside my body round the clock.

well . . . time to pop an aspirin~

mmmhmmmm

i know exactly what my big huge problem is— the worst one of all! and i think i could even articulate it well, and leave it here for posterity . . . and maybe also in doing so that would make it concrete and Real. but i’m afraid that once i say it, i can’t ever go back to the way i used to be, even though i can’t do that anyway!!

hmmmmmm