Angst

Existential angst. Fear of living, for what it might do to you. God only knows what will happen! The deepest wounds, the greatest happiness! Joy so strong it threatens to tear you right apart, sorrow so low it seeps in to the marrow of your bones and makes death seem welcome… it’s all one, the pain and the delight. Heavy duty stuff, that. Your brain will squirm under the weight of it all.
Don’t hold yourself back, dive in to it, damn you! Fuck the consequences. You’ll never get anywhere if you keep sandbagging your life. Building little lines of defense as if you could hold back a wave that defies your understanding, haha, good luck with that, old boy. It’ll wash over you no matter what you do, and you should be thankful for the fact. All that defensive behavior will just drive you in to a corner you can’t get out of, and the wave is coming… traps in every corner, every corner a trap.

There is no way for you to have beauty if you fear ugliness. You can’t live if you fear death. You can’t climb the mountain if you’ve never been in a valley. Stating the obvious, am I? Is it so obvious? Maybe it is, but human beings are really great at ignoring the obvious. And even the obvious, in its insidious way, has a thousand little permeations that will trip you up if you think about them too much. Stop thinking, let it happen.
Let the wave wash over you, though it may be full of grit and gravel. It’ll roll you tit over heal, smash you down on to the hard sand, suck you back down in to the water. You’ll struggle up out of it, the worse or the better for wear… but in any case you will be alive!

Drunken Soul

Walking along, on and on. Tottering on the razor’s edge, staggering, step after wavering step, falling down, down… no matter, you’re not going to give up now. Not ever. It’s your particular way to stagger. You’ll stand the pain, if you should fall on the razor’s edge. You’ll get cut, like a hundred times before, but wotthehell.
Cut to the bone, but you have to stand up. You have to show the world you can take the pain. Indomitable will, and so on. You talk to your drunken soul: you goin’ to give up now, you lazy little cunt? Down to the last minute, down to the last second, down to the bitter fucking end: keep your head up. Walk proud.

The Sink

You decide to hit your head against the sink. You are very drunk, but the pain is nevertheless exquisite. You do it again, and again. She will never come back… again. Is that blood? Yes. Again. Something cracks. Is it the sink, or your head? You aren’t sure, you are extremely drunk, and the blows to your head aren’t helping either. Again. Your vision blurs… at last, you think, some results. Again. The sink cracks. The landlord will simply have to replace it. Again, again, again… again! My God, the pain! Get it done! Again! She will never come back! Again! You pass out and fall on the hard white tiles.
It was one of those cry for help things.

No Filter

Y’know, when I smoke a cigarette, I roll it myself. Just the tobacco. No filter. And I roll that little mofo fat, as fat as the packaged cigs everyone smokes. Yeah, you guessed it (well, probably you didn’t, because you aren’t quite sure where this blog-post is going yet, and you don’t know a damned thing anyway), the ones with a filter. I know a few people who roll their own, but they roll ’em thin, and with a fucking filter. Each time I see how they roll the little filters in, that they bought extra, I have to laugh.

Dammit, if I’s gonna do drugs, I’s gonna do ’em without a God damned filter. Fat. And, believe you me, tobacco is a drug, baby, one of the most addictive there is. I’ve kicked tobacco twice, the second time for 14 years, and what am I doing now? Smoking a damned cigarette. Enjoying it, too. Tobacco tastes good. Especially with coffee in the morning. Or with wine in the evening, or… you get the picture. Of course, when I get drunk and smoke one after another, my mouth feels like an ashtray the next day.
What does an ashtray feel like, actually? Hmmm. In any case, not good. It’s then, drinking my coffee on the morn’, and (what irony) smoking a cigarette, a nice fat one without a filter, coughing, that I think: why are you doing this? Well, my inner voice says, because it tastes so damned good, in spite of everything.
So, what is the point? It’s this: I want to enjoy life, even if it is not healthy. Life itself is not healthy. After all, it ends in death, and what could be less healthy than that? Nevertheless, I want to enjoy it, and that means I want it unfiltered. Pure. Let it roll over me, knock me down, infuse me, fuck me over, pick me up, toss me on the mountainside in the snow, pick me up again and let me fly. I want it. I want it bad. I love it. It’s beautiful, even when my mouth feels like an ashtray.
No damned filter, please. So many people I’ve met filter their lives. They steer clear of anything that might hurt them, and thus they limit their lives to necessities and banal shit. And when, in spite of all their efforts to the contrary, they encounter heavy duty stuff, they simply tune it out. They do everything they can in order not to feel the pain. They don’t love, because love is dangerous; they might get hurt. If in doubt, take some antidepressives, is it not so?
Now my inner voice says, you do that too, don’t pretend you don’t. You don’t like pain, c’mon now, admit it, you superior little fuck. When you are unhappy, you drink. Well, I answer, it’s true, I don’t like pain. I don’t like to suffer. But I do love, and if it doesn’t work in the end I always face it, because I feel I have no choice, because I still possess at least a trace of self-honesty… don’t I? The inner voice grumbles, and says well, a trace, a trace, mind you. Well, better than nothing, I say, and besides, you know as well as I that I often revel in pain. That’s what melancholy is all about, and I think it’s really too bad melancholy is hardly accepted in todays society. Why can’t people just feel like shit, when they feel like it? Because it hurts, you fool, as if you didn’t know… my inner voice mutters on, but I can tell it’s resigned.
It knows me too well to argue any further. Fuck you, I say, giving it the last stab. Even when I drug myself to stop the pain, I do it conscientiously, without a filter, to get the full effect. I don’t go to a psychiatrist to ask for drugs to stop the pain, I prescribe for myself, and when it doesn’t work, surprise surprise, I face the shit I’ve staved off long enough to allow me to deal with it somehow.
You’re just buying time, it says, in a last effort to bring me to my senses. Just like everyone else, it says, just like everyone else… I take another slug of ouzo, light a cigarette, and tell my inner voice to go fuck itself.
I already am, it says. Fucking myself, that is.

The Dragon of Love

It’ll burn you. Burn the flesh clean off your bones. Bake you so hot you can’t think. Burn you until you start to feel the heat at last. You thought you were hard boiled… hah! You don’t know a thing! There’s nothing that love couldn’t weigh up. Irony? Cynicism? Rage? Murder…? All nothing against the dragon of love. You’ll burn.

You thought love was a sappy thing, a sweet sigh of surrender in the darkness? Meet the dragon. Love is a warrior, an assassin, a knife in the back. The sweetest pain there ever was. Love is the biggest fucking bomb in the universe. A raging berserker. It’ll kill you. All it needs is a glance, and it’ll kill you. You haven’t the slightest chance even if the dragon of love is just a little green iguana like the one in the image above.