She stared up and asked me questions, like she was singing lyrics to a song. 

What do you do during those times when you find yourself all alone in your house?

I pace, and I talk to myself. I feel guilty for pushing people away. I stare at the walls and I watch cartoons, and I sit quietly. I put on pornography and I read comic books. I eat cookies wearing nothing but a T-shirt on the couch. 

What do you think/do/say when you pass by a really attractive girl on the streets?

Sex, and murder. No, I usually keep my gaze straight ahead, trying to look like a man who knows where he’s going. Maybe I’ll smile, make eye-contact, give a polite nod of the head. Sometimes my heart, it swells up, like it’s sickened or bruised. My breath catches in my throat, and I wish I could just tell her how lovely she looks… and then she’s gone.

What do you dream about? What’s the most elaborate dream you’ve had, the one you can’t ever forget?

I dream about climbing up so high, that I cannot climb down. I look down on the city, and my body trembles with fear. 

When I was a young child, I used to dream that I was on the moon, trapped there with a giant, who was going to blow the world up. There were ruins of a great city, on the moon, and a bomb. And a giant was set to destroy the world, and only I could stop him, and I was too young. Too little. Too small. 

What will happen to you after you die?

I will turn off, and the lights will go out. I will be no more, and what was me, will be gone. Only the facts will remain. 

If you died, how would your followers even know?

I have followers who know me in real life. They follow me on facebook, and chat me up. If I died, my girlfriend would tell people, and those people would tell people. Maybe you’d learn the truth. Maybe you would not. Maybe I’d even be missed. 

What’s your favorite color?

Ocean blue; the colour of warm water. I like a bright forest green too, like when the leaves are flashing lights saying “go-go-go” at the start of spring. 

Is there somebody on Tumblr that you’re so fascinated with?

One or two. There’s some girls I know, on Tumblr, who am I obsessed with. A couple of guys who seem like they’d be real cool friend if we could all hang out. There’s a girl who is so beautiful it hurts me to know her, even online. And there’s you. I like you. I don’t know you at all, but you look so cute and you ask such interesting things. How could I not be fascinated?

Where do you live?

I live right next to the park by the ocean. I live in the South-Western tip of Canada. I live in a tiny apartment with my girlfriend. I live in a city that smells sweetly of the rain. 

Do you believe in the existence of evil?

I don’t believe in evil, except as a poetic ideal. It’s a metaphor. I don’t believe in the gods, but I know what they are; evil is the same. I think people can be selfish and cruel and unnecessary; I’d give an argument to kill a transgressor. But I don’t believe in evil.

Truth be told, I don’t believe in anything at all. My philosophy is that a belief is a dead thought; it’s the mind drawing to a conclusion and shutting down thought. And I don’t believe in conclusions. I don’t believe in absolutes. 

I don’t believe in fuck all. Just getting through the night. 

You asked how I can stay tapped into raw emotions so much, stating that you push people when you do it for too long…

Yeah, man. Me too. 

I’ve either always been a loner, or lonely. I’ve had huge conflicts with the women I’ve lived with, trying to make space to allow myself to write. It feels terrible to have a fight with a real person because I wanted to write bullshit poetry in my bullshit blog, but it has happened. 

I’m sort of an angry person, or that’s what people tell me. Sometimes I feel that way. Like the world just sucks and I want burn it down. And the people I love, I love them so much that I want to pull down the sun for them. And the girls I lust after who I can’t have, they keep me up at night, even when I’m sleeping next to the most beautiful girl in the world. 

Anyway, I don’t wanna brag. What you said is an awesome compliment. 

For the past twelve years or so, I’ve made sure that I’ve written for at least an hour, or a page, every day. I’ve pulled it off about… 60% of the time? Maybe? But then, y’know, 20% of the time I went for like, 6 hours, so whatever. 

Point is, I forced myself to write shit, not matter what, for years, so now I’m kinda used to just sitting down and opening a vein. I can’t edit what I do, not for the blog, not for content, because I never know what people are gonna like or hate. Pieces I think suck they love. Something I didn’t like, some random person really enjoyed. I can’t judge it, I just have to let it happen. And then I have to walk away from it. If they like it, fine. What’s important is that I was honest, and having fun, and writing something that I wanted to feel myself create. 

Sometimes I feel so upset, I feel like one of those people who experienced a great tragedy when they were young, and now are compelled towards actions of terrible violence, in order to stabilize their own emotions, and live normal lives. I think about those guys who called my friend a “faggot”, I think about some fucker who was mean to some girl just because he was bigger than her, and suddenly my hands are shaking and I just want to choke the fucking life of out of some scumfuck, to see his fucking face bounce off the pavement so he can such blood and teeth down his throat. I want to make the world a better place by hurting and killing people. Wouldn’t that be awesome? Wouldn’t it be great to be a fucking super-hero or something like that? 

But hurting people sucks. Fucking life sucks. So. You know. Write something. Write something better. Writing something to escape. Write to hear the clicking of the keys like water in a stream, and don’t worry about the words. Let the words worry about themselves. 

Shit. I dunno. But I do like thinking about it. 

“I was hoping you’d still be here when I woke up,” I said to myself, coming to in the big bed all alone. 

I woke up, with all my keys twisted into knots. All my coins folded into little bent bits of meaninglessness. I’d written a book of love-letters, but they all blew away in the breeze, and got carried off to snotty pretty teenagers who’ll never appreciate something like love until they’re too old be beautiful anymore. 

My best friend was John, the Locked door that lived across the hall. 

“You want to understand it?”

I’m imagining the sky caving in. I’m imagine if all that blue just collapsed down upon us, like a bunch of cement stones that could no longer be held aloft by pencil-tracings of belief. 

“You want to understand me?”

I’m flicking lighters, trying to light fires. 
If you cut my veins, I’d bleed black flames.

She’s somewhere else, waiting tables or waiting on me to suddenly appear. She’s sleeping in other beds and answering to other names. She wears make-up like seven different masks, which can only be peeled off underwater. 

She wants to be taken underwater. She wants to be held under. She wants to lose her breath. She wants to be breathless, so I hold my hand over her nose and mouth while we make love, and even when she thrashes I hold it there, and even when there’s panic in her eyes, I hold it there, and when I release it, she cries for three hours, and then tells me she loves me, pays, and leaves. 

If she was ever there at all. I notice things showing up in these hotel mirrors; fake lives and faux lovers that just whistle through the empty space like a masturbator’s conversation with the unknown.

She breathes easier when she knows I’m okay. 
So I lie to her.
Because she doesn’t understand how I get off on my own pain.
She doesn’t understand how much I love my stupidity.  

This thing you call “cosplay”… 
I’ve been doing it every day of my life since I was five.
Of course I always emulate my heroes. What kind of a life are you trying to live?

I might drunkenly answer questions on video tonight.

Questions about comics preferred, but not necessary. 

Yeah?

So, my lovely and charming girl, Noelle, of Ordinary Wonder, has decided to throw a little interview-attention my way. What follows is her questions, and my responses. 

1. You self identify as a Dadaist. Actually, as: “A literary thug and presumably one of the last of the Beatnik Dadaist writers” (via your facebook profile) — which I have to add, I found the claim to be charmingly pompous, but almost self-directionally pejorative, in an amusing way. What does being a Dadaist actually mean by your personal definition, and/or standards?

The Dadaists, to my mind, were the young men who returned from the first world war, having experience some of the most horrible forms of war known to man (trench warfare, gas-attacks), only to be horrified by all the art being created, which glorified war. Dadaism says, “this is not beautiful. this is not awful. This simply is, and even that is debatable.” 

I like that; things having room to move. Mutability. Adaptability. Being a dadaist means not just being in love with chaos, but also enthralled by it. Chaos is my muse, and the occasion of my dance. Dada is to art, as punk is to music. It is noisy, explosive, and never what you expect. It is random, abstract, and energetic. Alive. Dada is the beep-beep of the roadrunner as it defies all physics. Dada is, and isn’t, always. 

2. Was Dadaism a style/outlook that your literary style/artistic sense was inspired by, or did you define your sense of style first, and then recognize an affinity?

I feel like I stumbled into Dadaism through wikipediea, and comic books, and as I found it, it simple called out to me. It was like discovering your style as you flip through outfits in a store. Some things just stick. A few years go by and you realize, “I love this band.”

3. You’ve touched on the concept of dérive before, but could you expand on it a bit? Do you view your writing as a metaphorical/artistic equivalent?

The dérive is walking without an aim. You wander streets which are familiar to yourself, but from different angles of approach, making the mundane seems strange and unusual, so you might discover new things about that which is already known to you. 

In writing, this approach seems quite simple; you just write. I don’t care where I get to, only where I am. I take ideas I’ve had before, or I steal them from other people, and I alter my approach to them until they’re something else, something you’ve maybe never seen before.

4. Cake and Ice cream. They are reoccurring themes in your writing. Are these literal desires, or metaphorical imagery? What is it that you’re really hungry for?

I have a mouth full of sweet-tooths. Sweet-Teeth. Actually, that’d be a nice name for a blog. “Sweet-Teeth.” I like the colours and shapes of cake and ice cream. They melt like candles, releasing chaos. 

I am constantly hungry for sweet treats. I like girls in funny colours too, but I don’t want to confused these issues: I love sugary treats. It’s fully one of my challenges, one of my short-comings.

As I said last night, “I’m so glutinous, it should be a sin.”

There’s something about the icing of cakes that captivates me; the texture of something so smooth, yet so rough… And edible. So smooth and edible. Like a turbulent sea of waves, frozen in mid-motion.

5. What, if any, do you feel are the moral obligations of a writer to writing as a craft, society, and their self?

Well… I am a creator, and I try not to create any worlds I wouldn’t want to live in, at least in some way or another. I don’t know if I’m ever somebody who’ll use a lot of sexual-violence in his work, at least not the unironic stuff… 

I think you have an obligation to entertain, to tell the truth, and to spit in the faces of obligations. 

You write for yourself, or your muse, first. Worry about everything else after. 

6. Is there a greatest virtue/vice that an artist can possess? If so, what? If not, why?

Individuality. How else can you say what hasn’t already been said before?

7. What do you feel is your greatest success/failure as a writer?

This interview.

Success: my constant writing, my completed books, my comic book. 

Failure: my seeming inability to get my writing out of the gutter of amateurs and into the fairway of professional appreciation. I wanna know if I’m good enough to play with the grown-ups, y’know?

8. Seriously. What is your obsession with Grant Morrison? 

He’s very attractive, very funny, and writes like a mother-fucker. He’s like if Tyler Durden was into alien abduction and LSD. He talks like a madman, writes like a poet, and lives like a real man, like somebody who’s more interested in truths than dogmas. He seems entirely crazy and entirely sane at the same time, and I respect the fuck out of that balance.

It’s like Clarence Worley said about Elvis… “I watched that hillbilly, and I would wanna be him so bad…”

9. Where would you like to see writing as an art/craft/industry go in the future?

Up my ass like a bored thumb.
Down my throat like a handful of pills for breakfast. 

I’m kinda cold that way.
“I don’t really care who you’re fucking, unless it’s me.”

Abusing My Religion

I go to meet you in that bar down the street, where you said you’d be. I walk past all the regulars, and find myself a quiet table in the back, near the pool table, where three Jesus Christ lookalikes dressed in animal-print mini-skirts and matching tube-tops are hustling suckers. The Christs are all tall, angular creatures, with cheekbones like supermodels.

In the booth behind me, an old blind man is feeding insects to a large pet lizard. The lizard is blue, with blood-red eyes. The lizard seems friendly. 

I open up my laptop, and I start to write.

I was asked some questions lately, and I think I’m going to go public with them, just for fun. 

How was comic-con: busy in my store. I didn’t see many costumes, though one really cute batgirl came in. I fucking love girls in sexy Batman costumes. 

What comics are my favourite: Right now, the two comics I’m reading are The Boys and Locke & Key. I like adult comics that take place in the real world. I like gritty urban comics that take place in big cities, where the heroes smoke drugs and have sex with beautiful people. The Invisibles, Flex Mentallo, and Transmetropolitan are some of my other favourites. 

What do I do in my spare time: I don’t really think of time as being “spare”. I’m either at work at the comic shop, or I’m at work on the rest of my life. I write, read, watch cartoons, feed birds, look at naked girls on the computer… Sometimes I meditate and jog, but that’s only when I’m being a super-human. 

What annoys me: Insects. Hunger. Mainstream Normal People. Conservatives. Homophobes. Bigots. People who don’t read comics. People who talk to much/little. Tardiness. 

How many questions is too many questions: I like answering questions; I love it, really. Though I did recently get a big chain-letter of questions, which I’m not really responding to, because those kind of annoy me. I hate tagging people in my notes, shit like that. I just write, y’know? Can you dig it?

Quill, Pen, or Typewriter: Computer keypad. I am a 21st century boy. 

If you were a bug, what species would you be: Maybe a Bedbug, or a Humbug. I’d be a flu bug; I’d keep girls in bed and sweaty all day. (Lame)

What kind of warrior would I be: A warrior of words. I’d strive to save the day with rational thoughts, despite my natural inclination towards ass-kicking. 

A follow-up: I honestly do wish I could find more “alt-photography” and “dark imagery” that utilzied more non-caucasian girls. On tumblr it is about thirty times easier to find pics of white girls than just about anything else. It’s the same with skinny chicks; I post more skinny chicks than sexy thicker chicks, because those pics are easier to come by, I think almost just because of who photographers choose to work with.

So, my blog isn’t as diverse as it could be, it’s full of skinny little white chicks, but that’s just ‘cause they get used over-abundantly in the style of imagery I’m drawn to.

One of my favourite comics is “Wet Moon” which features a variety of ethnicities and body types, all sensualized in their own unique, personal ways. 

Actually, it’s kind of weird how ethnic classes go with that. I notice that all the time with porn. You can look up “asian” and “ebony” (so much classier than “black”, I guess), but there’s no listing for “white”. White is assumed, and abundant. It’s weird, this level of… cultural acclimatization and subtle racism that is apparent in these things. 

It’s funny because if it’s an ethnic thing, people get edgy, but they don’t mind other shit. If you’re say you’re into blonds, or redheads (both usually white), nobody bats an eye. But if you admit that you are aesthetically attracted to dark skinned women, then suddenly “ooooo, that’s a thing!” 

It’s sorta like how you can stare at tits all day, but if you point out that a woman has sexy feet, somebody’s going to think you’re a foot-fetishist. It gets so that in order to be “normal” you have to ignore things. It’s not perverse to be sexually attracted to bodies, especially for what makes them unique to the person they are! It’s awesome! 

Why do people really feel emotion?

Shit, do they?

I can’t speak for people; I’m sorta a Solipsist… so I can tell you how I feel, but I don’t really dig on assuming much else about anybody else, especially after all the drugs I took. Earlier in life. And twenty minutes from now.

I figure I feel emotion as an evolutionary adaptation. Love helps us breed and live together, and everything just spread out from there. Hate, loneliness, fear of death… I’m not saying love is all we are, or anything beautiful and poetic like that, I just think that’s a good place to start. 

And it’s a nice place to come back to.

We really feel emotion because we’re animals, and animals feel stuff. They like to cuddle and have their own space and eat until they’re fucking sick of it. We’re naked little animals, behind our screens, swarming with diseases and wonderful ways to spread them. 

She came first; she came gasping, she came hard. She came in through the front door, gasping and hard, she came into my life like a bomb going off just down the road. Yeah, the road trembles like a tongue in the midst of a lie, and fire snakes down the yellow line in the centre.

Before there was fire, there was a dream of warmth, but it had no shape no colour. And what is the colour, what is the shape, of fire? It is a living thing, a dance. 

Before we knew what we were talking about, we were still talking. We were typing before we knew what we were writing. We were being what we might grow up into, even before we knew we were growing. 

I saw what you were going to say, before you had words to say it. I could see it perched on the edges of your lips, on the rim of your parched throat, drained of liquids, drained of things to say.

I knew we were in love before I knew what love was. I just knew that being without you was something that hurt real bad. 

I was hoping you’d ask me a clever question.