I hate Halloween. 

Fake monsters and normal folks dressed like sluts. 

Me, I like real monsters, and real sluts. 

I’d like you to be something real baby. Something that crept out of the shadows and came hungry, hunting for my throat. You’d like that right, to make a meal by slitting a razor-blade across my jugular? 

I’d like you to be some real, fictitious character. Some beast that comes in the night. You’d like to come in the night, wouldn’t you? Your head back and howling? You’d come for me in the night, like an executioner, like a killer, or like a well-fucked porn-star. 

I’d love for you to be real, and not just words on a page that doesn’t exist. Light that’s not even an inch deep. If all these thoughts were blood, there still wouldn’t be enough to drown you in. 

I’d love to be real, myself. I’d like to be something real, like a vampire, or a closet monster. I’d like to be a monster made out of fangs and desperation. 

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

I feel like a mutant army of disaffected teenagers, standing over the smoking ruins of your world. I feel like falling leaves turning to mulch. I feel like I used to feel something a little more relevant than this. 

I live like a frequency, all action and movement; my god is me.

It’s a war against gravity. It’s the poetry of immobility.

My lungs are full of warm bird-shit and thick black goo. I feel it rise and fall as I breathe; I feel it threaten to burst from my lips when I cough. My body is an engine full of molten metals, melting slowly into something unrecognizable. 

Yeah, sore muscles and rotting thoughts. Big ideas spoiling on the vine. Conversations that come a few minutes too late. People who weren’t quite nice enough to remember, forever returning phone-calls.

She was: pretty cool, for a day or two. But then she wanted something more out of life, and she tried to tear it out of my skin. I laughed, like I was breaking down. Like an engine sputtering, as a car breaks down, I laughed. 

I worship at an altar of pure kinetics. Pure kinetics altering everything. The earth spins about the sun, and the sun burns and burns. These are real religions, real facts, real gods. Gods of motion, and gods of gravity. Gods of moving forward. 

“Make it real. Make it bleed.” She gives me orders like she’s writing pop songs. I follow her lead, I follow her ass, I follow her bullets into battle. She rides me like I’m a good song on her headphones, like we’re fucking under strobe lights.

Ahead of us, a bunch of bastards. You know the sort. Rednecks and authority figures and cunts named “Phil” and “Bethany Ann”. Twerps and twats, aimed with baseball-bats wrapped in chains and shot through with big spiky nails. Bad people.

I take aim, like I’m looking into the heart of an eclipse. You’re not supposed to that. Unless you’re wearing sunglasses. I’m always wearing sunglasses. Especially when I’m falling in love. Or taking up arms against a sea of oppressors.

Hunter Killer Drones, that’s what I think of them as. 

I squeeze a trigger, and my gun is god. My gun is death upon a pale horse. My gun is my will and karma turned into chemicals and kinetics. My gun is what makes me better, still standing, still shooting, still focused and driving on. 

My enemies, our enemies, they suck violence through the holes we punch in their bodies. We laugh and laugh and laugh, not because it’s cool, but because you gotta do something, and I’m too tired to cry. 

My gun is heavy and my will is strong. I feel like I’ve taken a bunch of sex drugs and been ordered to take charge of an orgy. 

“Kick the charges and light their hears on fire,” she orders me. 

She takes charge. I take orders from her like I’m taking a shot to the gut.

Boldly, bloody, we press on like fake fingernails. 

“Girls are my biggest waste of time; they distract me from writing, which I only do to attract girls.” 

She’s half-black and a quarter-robot and twenty-five percent some sort of living mystery. I don’t try to decipher her, because I like the way her coding feels against my consciousness. 

Her hands remind me of weapons, but she’s sweeter than that; she’s as sweet as her coffee and twice as dark around the imagination. 

She knows I want to be her friend; I keep leaving all these hastily scrawled love notes in her bed. She says she feels safe, letting me watch her sleep, because she knows that I’ll fight off any other perverts that want to get in on the view. 

She smiles at me, and when I’m doing blinking, I realize that I’m standing alone in a burning house, in a house that’s burning down. 

I put a hand over my heart, and see if I can feel her absence. 

From across the burning room, I see her smile again. I’m not really lost, I’m just sort of feeling out the edges of the fire in the dark.

If you’re reading this on my blog, this is page one of 176. 

That’s a lot of writing. I mean, at least half of it, maybe even two-thirds, is pictures, mostly of tits. But they’re nice tits. (You’ve got nice tits. Yeah, you know who you are. You know I noticed them. I’m not saying things aren’t what they are, but you totally kinda wanted me to notice. It’s cool.)

That’s like, a lot of writing. There’s easily room for a few thousand words on every one of those pages… I don’t even like to think about it, the mass of pseudo-literature I produce. And I’ve only been here a few months, or like a year or something. 

I kept a livejournal, a couple of them, for almost a decade. You have no idea how much text that is. Fuck, and that’s just the stuff I’ve published online. You cannot imagine how much text I’ve thrown away since I was 17 and first started seriously typing. I have thrown away more pages of text than any twelve people you know will write in their lifetime, aside from, y’know, serious writers, which I know a bunch of you are. I know a bunch of you are just like me in this. You produce. You cannot help it. I can’t.

If I try to stop writing… it’s worse than giving up sex and masturbation. It’s worse than giving up white sugar and coffee and weed. I climb the walls, and threaten suicide at passersby. Ha, I have given up writing, a few times in my life. It’s always a painful relief to see it go, and it’s always like a heart-ache healing, when it comes back.

I’m glad you’re reading me, I really am. I know this is kind of weird or gross or whatever, but like, my audience is as important to me when I’m writing, as my partner is when I’m fucking. I don’t know if that diminishes you, referring to you as “audience”, but it means something to me. I’m not always even sure what, but it means something.

Well, most things mean something. If you look at them long enough right. 

I’m going to fall in love with you a bit, from a distance off. It’s cool. I live a ways away, and I’m quite busy, and I’ve got a full-time job, girlfriend, and hobby, so it won’t get too weird. 

Yeah, I’m gonna write my love up like a neat little computer virus, and package it. Send it off. Let it just float out there in the artificial ether, like a big old cluster bomb, a deep-sea depth charge just waiting to go off. 

All these intolerable affections; an affliction of affections. Cuddling gone right out of control. Giggling like something’s gone wrong. Suspicious minds and lying memories. 

I’m going to fall in love with you, just a little bit. Just a little.

I’m going to fall in love with you. I’m going to take it out, and just put it right down here - imagine I pull a long and shiny sword from the centre of my chest and I just put it in the middle of the road, between you and I.
I’m just going to put this thing here, and back away slowly. 

It’s heavy, sorta shiny, shorta sharp. Sorta unwieldy, sorta overly large, especially for your little fingers. My love’s kinda like that; you gotta use it right, if you’re gonna use it at all. You gotta aim for the heart and go straight and true. No fucking about. 

Some loves are lighter things. Imagine a fencing foil. Imagine flickering lightly with love. Cut out the eyes. Cut across the fingers.

My love is a larger, more solid sword than that. A big, ancient blade that stumbles forward with a lunge that decimates the surroundings. You look like a character out of anime when you hold it; it towers over you, and casts a great glistening shadow of reflected light. 

I’m gonna fall in love, just a little with you. 
You don’t have to do anything with it. I just wanted you to know.  

I’m over-medicated, feeling too much, thinking too little, and angry at the world. I’m ranting at the stars and pulling down the skies, I’m bleeding out clowns in the middle of the street, and kicking puppies down stairs. I’m sick of my voice, sick of my writing and goddamn it I’m sick of you but I just wish you’d send me one of those real nice letters that tell why you think I’m so fucking cool as you gradually reveal bits of yourself like some sort of strip-tease of personality. I’m over-medicated and I can’t type fast enough and I can’t go far enough with you, into you, I can’t get to the other side of you, I just feel useless and used up and all I want to do is fucking burn burn burn like a Batgirl going down in a hail of bullets alone in the night, like some mysterious stranger all strung out and sick of my own skin. I’m so fucking sick of my own skin, I’m so sick of you looking at me and touching me and trying to make me see you when all I can hear are these stupid fucking voices fucking in my fucking in my head. 

She spoke to me like I was supposed to break apart in the rain, like castles made of sand drifting into the sea. She spoke to me like I was disposable lover, something she’d fuck until the batteries were dead, and then leave for the maid to throw out in some roadside hotel. 

“Next time you shoot the little cops first,” she warned me. “They’re the ones with something to prove. Past that, it’s from smallest moustache to largest.” She’s got all these little codes of conduct. “White wine with vanilla ice cream,” she lists off. “Unmixed gasoline goes to the right, and that shitty homemade napalm is in the jugs to the left.”

She puts her hand in mine, and it’s cold as stone. She looks at me, and she’s evaluating how many bullets I could absorb if she was crouched right behind the wider parts of me. She doesn’t have to hide it. She’s not likely to.

“I’m in love with you,” she tells me. I remember when I said that to somebody once. It fills me with one of those oddly places sense of, lets call it, regret. 

I call the team to come together!

Girl With Hands - She’s got fingers, and thumbs! Do you need a jar opened? Do you need a letter written? Are you considering driving a car? Then perhaps you could be assisted by the always-amazing Girl With Hands! She blows my mind, and one time broke my heart.

Too Much Too Soon Boy - A heroic young teen with the uncanny ability to always show up a little early for every party. Observe as he opens up to you just a little quicker than he should have, thereby ruining any sense of social security you may have been enjoying! 

Bomb The Bomb - My best friend is a guy who explodes every time he blinks. Yeah, when his eyelids touch, it’s like dynamite going off. He hasn’t had a date in years, but he’s saved the world something like a million times. Don’t bother looking him up online, you’ve never heard of him, and nobody’s ever talking about him. But he’s really cool, and he’s my best friend.

Ironic Girl, isn’t really. She just likes the name.

Jam On Toast Girl has magical gifts that warp reality and imply the existence of surreal and unruly gods. She’s awful sweet, but she’s kinda sorta a little crazy, which is always a downside when you just want to make out with somebody, or have a meaningful conversation or whatever. 

And then, of course, there’s The Smoke Signal Kid. But of course, they say he died, back in the Crisis of Infinite Conflicts, in 2005, when we were all younger, shinier creatures, still just sorta wondering how Lost might end.

2005. The year I met her. How funny that I’d think of that now.

20,000 volts of electric death in my hand. Pure electricity in a small plastic box. I put the metal nubs up against cold flesh, and I depress the activator.

Sparks surge forward, and I get started.

“If there’s one thing I can’t fucking stand in people, it’s a lack of cynicism.”

He screams so hard he’s spitting blood. Eyeballs look like they’re poaching in their sockets.

“Unbridled optimism untempered by a more stoic understanding of the real cost and weight of life’s events.” 

Lightning from a bottle flashes through him, tuning all his nerve endings into big bright bursts of illumination.

“I was raised in the interior of BC, where all the hippies went to hide as their philosophies fell apart, so I know bullshit when I step in it.”

He curses me without words, just a guttural sound echoing around in the torn-out parts of his throat; a ragged, helpless sorta sound.

“So you can spare me your sanctimonious speil about togetherness-and-understanding, and how sexy you and your little coven of wannabe werewolves actually is, when you get to know them, under all their tacky tattoos and imbecilic ideologies.”

His head goes back, and his neck breaks, and his heart explodes.
He never really understood what I was.
None of them ever do.

“You’ll never understand me,” I say, quoting one my favourite characters as he kicked in the face of one of my other favourite characters.

And it’s true. 

Three miles from the edge of the world, we ran out of road, and stood to make a stand. The air was thick, thick like soup, like a swarm of robot bees moving in a solid. Bio-mechanical mosquitos, programmed to annoy and destroy. 

My eyes glowed green anger. I was, in that life, Burning Boy, and my best friend was Tim The Guy Who Has Nuclear Dreams. They weren’t the best codenames on the box, sure, it was true, but we weren’t ever about being the best. We were about surviving. And maybe we weren’t even about that anymore.

Tim used his powers to hear the whispers of the dead and to use their secrets to unnerve the souls of the living, and I shot great beams of my furious emotions out my eyeballs. I carved clouds in half and set fire to patches of ozone way off in the distance. 

They thought they had us for sure, they thought this time we were fucked, but there was a catch, a flaw in their plan, a bit they didn’t see coming, and it was this:

we never really gave a fuck to them and their bullshit schemes. We were just in it for a laugh, we were just trying to keep the pages turning, you know?

So when those fucks got all serious and thought they could pin our hides to their long black iron prison walls, or whatever, 
We just laughed the shit off,
And folded the story sideways,
And jumped across the sky.

Across the mother-fucking sky.  

She comes to me like a spark approaching a sedentary pool of gasoline. 

I’m all of two inches deep, and darkly reflective. She’s a mere spec of energy, flying through infinite darkness. I’m a long and languid liquid, she’s a piece of fire. And together, we’re the heat of consumption and fury.

I can imagine her ignoring me, I can see her spitting in my face. 

She fucks my lovers like she’s ruining my memories. She sleeps with my friends, and she knifes my family in the night. She takes over my life like an invasion from an alien country. She cuts me up for dinner and leaves in a bowl on the floor, for the dogs.

She fixes what’s right with me, and leaves me limping.

Being with her is like falling up stairs, like the slowest, most painful progress, like fighting gravity and all my other instincts, in a blind, painful need to press on. I guess I sort of figure that if I can make it to the top of her, maybe I’ll be able to fall off.

If I could fall off of her, fall to my death, there’s no saying I wouldn’t become free.
In the process.  

She cuts me up the centre, looking for something to eat. She spreads me open and lays into my innards with a fork and knife. 

She takes me into her mouth, and I feel my knees go weak and my blood pump hard. She gets me all over her face; I drip from her lips. 

She can’t take her eyes off me, not even when she’s had her fill. She’s like a wolf, like a feral beast that has to eat well past what its stomach can hold, because she doesn’t know where her meal might come from. She takes on more than enough of me to be sick off it.

But this isn’t me complaining, this is just me, running out into her. She’s putting into me with sharp metal and a ravenous sense of desperation. She’s chewing on my bones, she’s got my veins and arteries caught between her teeth. 

Tied to a bed or table, like an offering.
She offers me up to herself, and she takes it all.

I take the release she offers, and just sorta go with it.
Everything goes black.
She licks up the inside of my throat, and spills my head across the floor.  

The first time I went to Spit, I was 3 months into being dumped. It was my first real step out into the world again, in a big public way.

I got to Spit, and I wanted to be a focus. I wanted some attention. But I didn’t know how to get it, and it felt strange to go out hunting for it.

 So I came up with a different game to play.

 I decided that I had some karma to burn off, Karma from relationships, karma from decisions, choices…

 So I figured I’d just be a background dancer, not a main character. Any time people are dancing in a story, the main characters in the movie, the book, the comic, there’s always a billion faceless people, holding the party up in the air by keeping their bodies moving.

 And I thought I might be one of them for a while. I might be a background character in somebody else’s dream.

 And that was how my first Spit went. I burned Karma as a background dancer. I wore away all my old bits, and I sacrificed myself for somebody else’s good time.

 Tonight will be something else.