Flipping through channels, looking for something to watch, or something to be. A new identity, or some clever character I transform myself into.

There’s a gang of Psychic Kung Fu teenagers on Channel One. I don’t know how they got their powers, but they’re being trained by a wise old Chinese guy, who’s teaching them to focus their deadly powers with Zen lessons and physical combat. 

They wander around the bad parts of town at night, spray-painting their names as graffiti-tags, scoring drugs, and generally just being bad-asses.

Over on Channel Two there’s one of those franchises about revenge. A guy and his girl were killed, just so a mob-boss could raise the guy from the dead as a sort of undead avenger. Naturally, it all goes wrong. The man who chooses vengeance can have it, so long as he can take the burning.

Yeah, he burns, every step he takes out of the grave. But if he ignores the pain, he can kill every one of those fuckers who took his life from him.

My remote is broken, as are my fingers and my eyes. 

I don’t want to watch these shows. I want to write them. I want to find the lead actors and smash them in their all-too handsome faces. I want to rearrange the plots until they’re just meaningless frames of sexy people sashaying across the screen. 

On Channel Three, my biography is playing in slow-motion. Three days later, and maybe I’ll be finished typing this post. Maybe I’ll have somewhere to go. Maybe I’ll have done something impressive.

Maybe this is all there is.

Look there, do you see her? She’s the last of a warrior-breed, the last of the real people. And she’s walking towards her death.

Hard desert sands are crushed under her every footstep. She wears thick-soled boots, and clothing that looks weathered into armour. Sandstorms have worn her skin tough. Her eyes are narrow little slits of darkness. 

She rarely speaks. 

She carries a gun, a revolver, that holds eight bullets. Each bullet is made from the fragments of a giant’s skull. The bullets are bone white, though shine like silver when sunshine strikes them. The bullets are poisonous, and can fired by no other gun, than the one that she wears in the holster on her hip.

She’s hunting. 

Something killed us, all of us. Something came to earth and slaughtered mankind like we were a hive of insects getting up to no good. 

Now she’s the only one left.

And she hunts those that destroyed us, across the hard desert sands. 

She has never known a lover.

And her heart is as hard as iron. 

She’s a fierce thing, she is. 

God my brain is getting confused.

The lights are flickering like a dying fire in this house. Rats chewed through the wiring, and now all day snow falls on the roof, melts, and drips down the walls in the form of grey water. Whenever the water finds a wire, there’s a buzzing, and burning smell. 

Maybe some day this whole place will burn down. That’d be nice.

I’m living in a cloud of smoke lately. Everything seems obscured, and far away. Voices always echo, like they’re somewhere out of reach. I spend a lot of time, talking to myself. 

My imagination has grown stagnent and dead. I have nothing read but an improperly translated version of the Bible. It has no words that use the letter “M”. It’s not a very good book, but it’s all I’ve got.

There’s animals, not just rats, but other creatures, living in this house with me. I hear them creeping about. Spiders the size of tennis-balls. Feral beasts with jagged hooks for claws and beady black buttons for eyes. 

I arm myself with disinterest, and I try to sleep, as much as I can.

So, like three-thousand words to go, and I’ll have completed National Novel Writing Month for this year. I’ll have won it; whatever that means.

I’m sort of having trouble finishing up. I feel like I’ve reused the same words too many times, and I just want to be done. But I still really like the form of the book. The characters are fun, and I think it tells an entertaining story.

I might try to self-publish, like through Amazon or something, when it’s done? I dunno. I think it’s good enough to do something with, and I don’t know if I want to just send it off to another publisher, and wait to hear back for months and months, when I  could just throw it off into the world, and start working on something else.

I have in fact, already started working on something else. That’s why these bloggings/updates/whatever are so dry and real-life, instead of violent metaphors about sex and stuff. 

Guh. I want to go outside and feed birds now. My bum is sore from sitting and writing. And I have an important lunch meeting today too! 

Guh. Tired. I should do something else now. 

Writing is sorta like making love; I can’t worry about how I’m doing, I just have to go for it, and whether or not I’m “any good” all depends on how much you enjoy spending the time with me. 

When you’re doing it just for yourself, it’s just embarrassing masturbation, but when you do it to share something special with somebody else, then for a few moments it sorta feels like the most important thing in the world.

For a minute and a half, Ernie stood there on the street, staring at the front page of Thurday’s Globe, displayed in the street-side newspaper-box, unable to take his eyes from the large, close-up photograph of his perfectly limp penis.  

Ernie spent the next day just floating around, sometimes literally.

He knew he couldn’t go back to his apartment. He didn’t know what he’d say to the reporters, and he was uncomfortable with having his photo taken. Ernie also knew that he didn’t want to see anybody he knew; no family, or old friends. He didn’t feel like he could put his current experience into words, and even making eye-contact with strangers was making him feel like an alien freak.

Instead, he just wandered around. He walked around suburban areas for a few hours, just keeping his head down. He knew he should be thinking about his situation, but in fact, he was trying not to, and instead focused on lists of girls he wished he’d kissed when he was younger, and bullies he wished he’d hit back. By the time the sun was setting, he was breaking the nose of Josh Wiebe, all the way back in the third grade. Then it night became to come on, dark and cold, and when the wind came up sharp, Ernie couldn’t help but remember what it was like to be a few hundred feet up in the air; weightless and free.

And just like that, he began to float.

It wasn’t like before, when he’d soared up into the sky like a rocket. Instead, it was more like walking on air now. Like he’d become less solid, and the wind had grown more so. He was stepping up on the breeze like it was an invisible path only his shoes could find.

And then the walking became something else, a sort of effortless gliding. Ernie thought of butter on a hot pancake, the way the bottom of the butter melts, and then the whole thing slides across the pancake’s surface. He was like that, like melted butter just sliding down the side of something smooth. But he was sliding up. Up and on, into the night.

Though not too high. About two hundred feet up, it wasn’t just cold, it was fucking cold, and Ernie though he could see frost starting to form on his clothes, which may or may not have been true. Proper cruising height was between sixty and a hundred feet; high enough up to not be spotted, but low enough to be physically comfortable.

After about an hour of floating around that way, he landed in an alley, and then went and purchased a large cup of hot chocolate. Then he back to the alley, and, holding the cup carefully with both hands, he ascended into the sky once more.

Once he was in the sky though, kinetic motion was working against Ernie. His passage through the sky was so smooth and effortless, he could almost forget he was moving at all, but the beverage never forgot, and every time he tried a to bring the cup to his lips for a sip, about twice as much as made it into his mouth would wind up on the street below. One nice old lady had a new hat ruined, and a homeless man spent a week trying to convince his friends that’d been attacked by a duck with diarrhoea.

The best part about making love to her, was the way she cried. 

She entered my bed like an invading force, or a force of nature. An earthquake comes knocking, knocking at your door. A storm rattles the window, and forces cold wet drops of rain across your pillow. 

She cries cool wet drops across my pillow. She yowls like a cat and wimpers like something small and lost. 

She clings to me. To the idea of me. To my flesh and my bones. She holds me close, like she’s a hungry little fat kid, trying to swallow a whole popsicle in one go. She wants to wrap her tongue around me, yeah, and feel me start to dissolve. She wants me in her mouth, and down her throat. Splattered against her thighs like a painting of roadkill. 

Now me, I didn’t want to go blind, I just wanted to see her as she really was. She drew me in with kisses, and doodled my outline on the floor with the tip of her knife. “Now,” she said, looking down at me, her knife in her hand, “it looks like somebody died here.”

I wrestled with her; with the idea of her. Possessing her, pounding into her with furious insights. Understanding and enlightening her. 

She left town on a Freudian construct of images; a train through a tunnel.

She left town, and I kept her number close at hand, tattooed to my heart. 

She comes to sit with me for a while. She comes and sits beside my cage. She rattles on my chains, pulls on their lengths. She watches me, like you might watch a fish, or something you were going to order for dinner. 

Yeah, I’ve done some bad things. That girl, she really liked me, and I couldn’t have cared less, so I made her let me jerk off on her face, and then told her to walk home like that. And she smiled and did. We never spoke again, which was probably for the best. She sort of disturbed me a bit.

They found me, cracks of cement caught between my toes, blood leaking from a thousand holes drilled with garden shears. They found me caught between a lie and hard place, stabbing myself in the back like masochistic masturbation. They found me, but all they found was the meat-suit I wear. They never really found me out.

I never got kissed in high school, unless you count that one time on that greyhound bus, which I guess I do, but it still never seemed to matter. Kissing a girl is still such a weird way of obtaining something, Permission, perhaps. Or getting just a taste of something else.

I wanted to write something you’d notice; I wanted you to sit up and notice when I came in. But… not yet, okay? Not quite yet. 

I’ve been listening to William Gibson, talking about writing.

He’s one of my heroes, y’know? Because he’s an amazing fucking author, and he comes from Vancouver. He write about drugs and punks and cybernetic realities and virtual landscapes… 

He’s a funny looking guy, balding, with crooked teeth, and he’s got a funny accent. 

I don’t think I’ve ever met him, though I know he does chew some of the same turf as I do. The same book stores, the same streets. I get the impression we even hit on the same girls sometimes; punky, strange things, with metal in their faces and ink in their skins. Tacky, but we all have our tastes.

I’d know him if I heard him though. William Gibson has a very distinctive voice, and I’ve listened to him, reading Neuromancer, so I have pretty good notion to what his verbal communications would sound like in the real world.

But the best way to ruin a good morning, is to sit around comparing yourself to those you respect the most. I will never be as good a writer as William Gibson is; that’s just something out of range for me. 

Yeah, I look at the writers I love, and I try to be like that, but I know I cannot. Gibson, Vonnegut, Neil Gaiman, Warren Ellis… 

The trick, I’ve been told, is to figure out how to be my own author. Write my own stories about my own lame shit, and let other people decide if it’s any good or what it’s all about, or any of that crap. 

So, that’s what I’m trying to do. We’ll see if I ever get anywhere with it. 

I’m a time-bomb, waiting to get off. 

She’s got big goth circles painted around her eyes, and she’s got a porn-star’s vacant stare plastered across her face. She’s not smiling, but she’s welcoming. She’s welcoming me in, into her life, into her type of trouble. 

Have you ever dated a troubled girl? I got a phone call from the asylum one night; she said, “they’re trying electroshock on me now,” but she sounded so far away and fucked up that I couldn’t even be sure it was her.

Yeah, I’ve had lovers with shaved heads. Girls who panhandled. People who had nowhere to go, if they couldn’t go there with you. Souls that lacked direction. 

She winds me up, sets my clock, and licks my thermite connectors. I buzz in her hands like a box full of bees. 

I let her strip me naked, and slip away between her fingers. I don’t feel like something that can be caught or grasped, today. I feel sort of adrift and hungry. 

Sometimes I would imagine removing the mask of the world, and revealing a new world on the other side. A better, more purposeful world, full of incredible individuals who would all work to make their world a better place. Things could improve all the time. Lies stopped being told, and stairways to the stars were constructed. Everybody could wear a jet-pack. Strange new alien worlds are discovered every day. Magic was everywhere.

Other times I would imagine peeling of one of my lower masks, the mask of the physical body, revealing my energy form within. What was it, a strange insect monster with fuzzy antennae and great vicious mandibles? A wailing beast with a million mouths and a billion arms, all railing senseless against the universe? A beautified, angelic version of myself, in perfect physical shape and mentally flawless in every way?

I tried to imagine what my soul might look like, if I was to believe I had one.

I let my mind drift.

I’m in love with you. 

Isn’t that what you’ve been waiting to hear me say? Now that I’ve gotten my teeth fixed? Now that I got a better job and a nicer looking car?

I want to sleep with you. I want to sleep beside you in your bed, like your cat, like an extra pillow, like a childhood toy. 

I want to be close to you, like underwear, like a diary page stained with tears and thoughts. I want to be close to you like right under your tongue.

Isn’t that what you wanted me to tell you?

I’m in love with you. 

Four days to go, and okay, I totally bailed on NaNo this year. Like, completely. And… well, I think I’m willing to admit now that I’ve been using “writing another novel” as an excuse to avoid looking into trying to polish-and-publish the book I’ve already written. 

So yeah. I keep getting kind of sketched out too, ‘cause there’s a ton of really nice people following this tumblr account who are always saying really nice things about the silly stuff I scribble with my mean little fingertips… And it’s like, what do I want to do with that? I know I wanna be a “poet”, kinda always have been in a beatnik sorta way, but like, how the fuck do I break out of this comfy little apartment I’ve created for myself? 

I see what others did to thrive and survive, and I’m like, “meh, fuck that. clearly i’ll have to do my own bullshit in order to get by.” But what’s that gonna look like? 

Anyway. You know, this is just shit I mull over when I’m sitting around and I’m a little too blocked to proceed. Ah, you know what? I also wanted to be honest. Everybody, I fucking bailed on Nano this year. Totes. I didn’t come close to my expectations, mostly due to a lack of commitment and pressure from other, seemingly far-more-important, parts of my life. 

So yeah. Artistic Production Guilt! I feels it. But you know, I’d hate to look back on November as “that month I failed to write a great book”. I met somebody really cool this month, and had some really intense experiences. So what if I couldn’t get into some stupid book I was doing as a stupid little exercise. I think mostly I’ve just been given me some time down from DD so I can approach it again, and you know what - ah, fuck this.

Sorry. I don’t like to do these introspective reality-based posts too much, but sometimes they feel sort of necessary. I’m not all smutty violence-laden innuendo, as much as I’d love to be. Eh, just be glad you didn’t have to suffer through the ennui of my 20’s. I was such a miserable cunt back then. But I’m sure I had my reasons, or something. 

Anyway. It’s Saturday morning, and I’m laying down a sword of acceptance on certain issues. I’m going to stop breaking my heart on one project, and go back to tossing my heart into another. Writing-wise. Or, I dunno, maybe I’ll just fucking blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

“I need to fix myself,” I said, drifting across the table like heavy smoke. “I’ve found this flaw in my makeup, and it’s keeping me small.”

“Like a fish in a fish-tank?” she asked me back. “You can’t grow any larger than some ratio relative to the space you’re enclosed within?”

“I fucking guess so,” I replied, staring at the spaces between the spaces between my fingers. A decade into a dead-end. A bunch of stray manuscripts clouding the room like a fog’s been rolling in for a year or so now.

I hum like an old radio. “I tried to use sex and drugs to fix myself, to give myself magical psychic powers over space and time. I just got tired and sore. I got sparkles all over my skin, and sticky smells too. It was nice, I’m not saying it ever wasn’t (excepting of course, when it wasn’t), but you know, here I was, here I am. Same self, overs and overs agains.”

“When do I get to move on?” I asked. “I’m not talking about the death of life, I just mean, like, when does something else happen, and I can feel like I’m not just echoing down an empty hallway in a home built for nobody to live in?”

She glances up at me as though I’ve distracted from an orgasm or a kill-shot. She smiles, and I wince, ‘cause I know that kinda thing makes her happy, and I figure, so long as I’m distracted by this bullshit, one of us might as well be.