I was reading about the Men’s Rights Movement this morning…

I grew up in the North, where violence against women is still pretty common. Big men, who are used to using their bodies to make their way in the world. This thing displeases me? Well, I’ll just hit it, until it acts better.

They treat their women that way. Their animals. They raise their children, and then their children grow up to do the same.

I saw it. I experienced it. My step-father was a mean little redneck who ruled our home with violence and threats. One time he attacked my mother, and I ran away. I was about twelve. While I was gone, he broke my mother’s finger, and when I came back, he said it was my fault. That her finger got broke, because I ran off.

And it wasn’t just my home. It was lots of homes. Every home had a secret ruler hidden inside. An angry ogre dressed like a bread-earner, though most of the time it was their wives who had the real jobs, and did the real work. 

I’m not saying every man in the North is a woman-beating idiot. But it’s more common than you’d think. Common enough to be called A Problem. 

It’s a culture of violence. Men geared to see women as property they deserve. Boys told that they should laugh about it. Laugh, when your mothers, and your sisters cry. Laugh as some strange man beasts their faces and cracks their bones. Laugh and find one of your own.

That’s what I think about, when I think the Men’s Rights Movement. I think about all the horrible violent acts I’ve seen men commit. I think about all the dead sex-trade workers in my town. I think about my mom’s broken finger, which is still broken to this day. We never saw a doctor about it, never got it set. 

The world is a hard, fucked-up place.

You gotta be ready to think carefully about which parts of it you want to fight for.

Life is so ongoing. 

I keep hoping for some resolution, like I’m going to find the right pair of glasses to wear on my face, and the world’s going to draw into focus. 

My heart is one of those grungy apartments. There’s dirty old take-out containers with half-eaten meals sitting out for the rats. There’s dirty laundry full of pocket-change and contaminated needles. 

There’s a song, a broken half-tune, on repeat, in the background of my mind. It craves appreciation and justification. All I’ve got is some day-old Early Grey tea, and some pot. There’s a voice inside my head that wants to be loved; I feed it broken lines of poetry and manic psychedelic visions. 

And young girls. Yeah, I feed that hungry engine young, pretty girls. Fingers and toes first, and then the rest goes down just as smooth. 

Tie me up and beat me down. You’ll never unlock the secret of my lips. 

Just what the world needs; another sadist with a heart of gold. 

Another justified revenge fantasy. “That guy was a bully. He hurt somebody, and it was wrong. Now he’s gonna burn.”

Do it. Arm yourself. Put on a sexy black coat. Grab that crowbar, from the back of the closet. Feel your fingers squeeze around it. Feel the weight, the kinetics of the thing. You twist your wrist, and eighteen inches away, this thing will knock out some teeth. Chip some bone. Fuck some flesh. 

That’d feel nice, wouldn’t it? Hurting somebody who had it coming?

You’d be so cool. You’d be so right. You’d be flying, above the storm. Beyond good and evil, right and wrong. Those are just faint, idealogical concepts. You’re something more. You’re a golden god, built out of living atoms set to tear this world apart. You’re beautiful, smooth, brilliant. Like lightning. 

And any who stand against you are dust.

Less than dust.

There’s only fire while there’s fuel though. You need something, somebody, to hate. A machine, or a wall, to rage against. Otherwise you’re just.. you. Right? A lost little spec, trying to do right. Commanded by blood and gravity and instinct. Programmed to play nice. 

I woke up with nails in my head and blood on my pillow. I woke up feeling frustrated and old and out of shape. If I was meant to be a cube, I am now a sphere. If I was meant to be strong and solid, I am now weak and frayed. 

I feel like a fictional character, waiting to be believed in. An ancient god, long forgotten, or maybe the background character in a big dramatic piece. Yeah, that’s me in the crowd scene. That’s me, set against the horizon. That’s me, one of the stars you see, when the shuttle rockets by on its way to space.

I want somebody to kiss these blood tears away. I want a sandwich and a vacation. I need a new suit, a new dress-shirt, and a place to sit, where I can get my head together.

I want to stop being so self-obsessed, and be obsessed with somebody cool for a while. Somebody worthwhile and distracting. I want to crawl back under my rock, and wait for its weight to crush me into the earth.

I wake up some mornings, and I just feel dirty and scared and useless. There’s no sex in me, no violence. Just a tired sense of abandonment. 

Like a heavy chain, I drag myself down, under the waves.
To think about things.  

She was my muse; she amused me, and she moved me. She made me want things. She compelled me to hate things, to want to destroy things. 

Yeah, she made me want to ruin everything in the world. For her. With her.

I see her from a distance off; she has sexy weekends with boys and girls I’d never want to stand to close to. She tells lame jokes and laughs at stuff I can’t find funny.

Sometimes I want her so bad it hurts, and I can’t tell you why. She doesn’t make me laugh, she barely makes me smile. She’s as much the mosquito on my camping trip, as she is the orgasm to my sexual function. She’s the whole in my canteen, that lets all my goodness leak away, unknowingly, down my leg as I climb the mountain. 

She was an ocean I wanted to get to the bottom of. I wanted to walk around in her darkness, touching her private, personal possessions. I wanted to be one of them; I wanted her to want to keep me around. I wanted to feel her fingers tie around my neck, as she pulled me down towards her.

She’s my muse, my absent lover; she’s one of those things I think about obsessively, when I should be doing something useful with my life. I should go for a run, feed some animals, write a letter to an old friend. 

But she’s on my mind; like fuel to a junkie’s wants. Like a fire that won’t stop burning.

I’m trying to put her out of my mind.
But she won’t stop burning.  

She was like conversational lubrication; she made my tongue slippery and my words slick. She made me feel like I was dripping with sweat, and oil, and murder. She made me feel alive, and a little dead inside.

I could make love to her, but I’d need a hammer and a sword. I’d need some backup, and a spotter. I could make love to her, but I haven’t the cash or the cruelty that she requires. I tell her I want to rape her, and she just laughs droplets of a stranger’s cum into my face.

Outside the fires are growing like weeds, like trees, like little children that want to go out running in the woods. Fires are growing and spreading like perverse ideas. Fires are spreading like her legs, taking on all comers, turning no-one away.

I try to remember what it’s like to be, not just alone, but abandoned. I try to find some strength in the emptiness she leaves me with. 

I get into the shower, and I start to cough. I feel like I’ve been sick for days. 

I turn my back on the water, and feel it warm my spine and my ribs, as it beats down on me. Hot rain. Cool acid. 

I cough, and I cough up snot. Big ropes of the stuff, sticky and runny and long. I feel so sick, so tired, so heavy. 

I cough and I cough. My lungs rattle like old metal doors in a storm. 

I cough, and I cough up goldfish. Big, fat little bastards, shiny as the sun. I can feel their tails, tickling my trachea as they climb upstream through my throat, and out onto the shower floor. They squirm around my feet, and swim off down the drain. Big, sad-eyed goldfish, floating away. Tumbling out through my lips, and off down the drain.

I feel terrible. My head feels like a cracked piñata. 

I cough, and I cough, and I cough, and I feel a kitchen sink start to rise up in me, its facet dragging on me inside, its taps spinning around as I heave it up out of me. It crash out past my lips and to the shower floor in a heap of sticky metals. I kick it with a naked toe, and the metal degrades, turns to rust, washes away like dried blood in a flow of warm water.

I feel fucking sick.

I cough a bit more, and I lose two ducks, a gallon of milk, ten tin toy cars, a dozen plastic army soldiers, and two-fifths of my soul. 

The warm water washes it all away.

We came out at night, looking for bitches to fuck up. We were multi-ethnic, multi-sexual… hell, I’m pretty sure Mary had two cocks and a cunt up under her skirt, and that’s when she was all alone, which she rarely was.

We crawled out from between the cracks of the buildings like black mould, spreading insidiously. We crept like spiders on their bellies, and we tumbled through the night like balls of lightning spinning and spinning and spinning around. 

I wanted to be so fucking cool, but I had a flaw, buried deep inside of me. It kept me small and pathetic; a key trapped in my lock. I tried to use things to dislodge the key - sex and drugs and food and obsession and religions and public service. But I remained, somehow, locked out of myself.

We broke into hotel rooms like you might break a young thing’s heart. Or maybe it was the other way around; we broke young things’ hearts like we had a stolen pass-card or a tool-bag of slim little hooks and picks which were just perfect for gaining illicit entry.

“Yeah, you like it when I force my way in?” I said, feeling the wood of the door-jam giving way as we stepped inside.

I’m hungry. I’m at the bank because my girlfriend is at home sick, and I need to put money in her bank account to make sure her rent check doesn’t bounce. 

“Do you have her account number?”

I don’t. I have her debit card, but to my mind, that shouldn’t matter. “I don’t need her account number. I just need you to put this $400 into her account. Her name is…”

“I’m sorry, but I need her account number.”

“You have her account number. It’s right there on your screen when you look up her name.”

“But I can’t do that without her account number. For privacy reasons.”

My hands start to shake. They always do, when I get into a conflict. It’s where my stress goes. I just got dressed and walked down here for the singular purpose of depositing cash. I didn’t even bother to worry about it, because I’m depositing cash. I don’t need to know anything, I’m not affecting anything. I’m just putting money into her account, so that a check won’t bounce. 

In my head I’m thinking, listen, if you don’t let me deposit this, then she could lose her home, right? And then she’ll probably lose her job, and then she won’t need this bank account, because she’ll have no money. So maybe, since it benefits everybody except me, for you to take this money and put it into her account, maybe you could just trust me, and take my cash, and give it to your registered customer, so as to keep this whole little pantomime of a social system rolling along. 

Long story short, or whatever… They take the money, and tell me that they’ll do it this one time, but in the future, I’ll need the account number.

I smile, and thank them in my most polite-&-adult tone of voice. 

She tied her fingers in a knot around my throat, so sick of all the things I had to say, she was. 

She pressed up against me in the dark; she impressed me with her physical form. “You must love yourself very much,” I said, my voice one of those hushed whispers people use when they’re trying to hide something, like their level of involvement or commitment. 

“In front of mirrors, sometimes,” she admitted. 

I’m mad for crazy little sluts like that. Dangerous girls, with vengeance for appetites and big mean thoughts for fuel. Girls who fuck and talk to much. Girls with weapons for hearts and angry-fanged monsters for cunts. You know the kind, once they get under your skin, you can’t ever get them out. You wear them forever. They wear you down.

I want her to love me. I want her to leave me alone. I want everybody to just leave me alone so I can try to work on looking perfect for them. I hate them so fucking much, I wish they’d just love me or leave me alone. I can’t take this pressure, the pressure to perform, to placate that eager dog-like look in their fucking eyes.

I can’t be anybody’s friend today.

She scares me. 

She scares me, and I don’t like it. She makes me want to go off and be alone for a while. I don’t want to play well with others. I don’t want to daydream. I don’t want to just be myself. I want to be somebody else for a few hours, somebody who doesn’t think my thoughts or have all my other crap to deal with.

Yeah. Even this is a bit too much right now. 

Sometimes loveless relationships wander around behind me in the store, having dispassionate arguments about nothing.

“Shut up,” the boyfriend will say.

“You’re an idiot,” the girlfriend will say.

They mutter half-questions about movies they can’t remember. They try to figure out details about things they don’t really understand. They bicker, publically, about money, and family, and how unattractive each is becoming in the other’s eyes.

I hate them. I really do. Their lovelessness is like a cancer in my day. I want them to shut up, to break up, to fucking die before they procreate.

“Why do I let you treat me so badly?” I heard a girl say sadly once.

“Because you’re stupid,” he replied.

A bullet to the back of each head. Nice and clean, almost surgical in its simplicity of approach. 

I went out dancing with lesbians, and had a real bad time. I’m not sure what I was expecting. 

I bounced around the cement walled happening like a pinball, rebounding off of people and situations, trying to find some place to breathe a little acceptance and closeness, but all I got was alienation and something that sounded an awful lot like “please don’t touch me.”

I wish I had a cigarette to put out in the palm of my hand. I’d stab you right in the fucking eye. I’d burn myself right in the soul. 

“It’s so seductive when you understand.” 

Yeah, that’s about it. 

I could be entirely seduced by somebody who convinced me that they understood me.

Do you ever wonder what to write about? I get so sick of… describing women brutalizing men, and drugs and cars and mutant powers… But it’s all I know. I feel like I want to capture something sometimes, like a moment or a person, but then I just blather out the same old shit in a different colored tongued, all the languages of a slurpee machine… 

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.