Been and done.

Note: I'm not even certain that I will read this when it's done. This is catharsis and madness. I'm doing this simply to see if anyone accidentally subscribed to this and whether or not they'll pay attention. Humor me, bitches.

The Never and the End

It came and went as if there was something meaningless staring through the slots of a profound portrait. This unknown listlessness buried itself in the empty cavity where my soul once sat and gossiped with the ether. In the end, the promise of respite and understanding were little more than scraps of ash and vomit on the cobblestone but at least some of the ride saw me on top. Thus, in this state of disrepair and abject confusion, I merely sat and wandered into the service entrance for our back alley psychological abortions.

The night was all the regular players plus a fresh face or two. As always there were large mammals and medium mammals, hairy mammals and loud mammals, beasts and birds, stars and sky, and the moon as the eternal reminder that a little reflected sunlight can make the insufferable day worthwhile. Time and alcohol raced to see which could get the first kill, but knowing that time wasn't real and alcohol an ally, the fear of what might be and what had already passed went unrealized. The night simply was with all its noise and beauty wrapped into a little cylinder for more convenient consumption. Walls screamed and passed away, the air burned and baked, and the water would take the life out of a drowning man, but this was how the elders found their place. Without my youth, I needed a new land to settle and suckle upon, a country for wise fools, an estate for the betrayers of the past, a manner of speaking that let it all go.

Satisfaction came in waves, short bursts that roared and receded, leaving behind a blank slate no matter how many fortifications were placed to save the errant structures of this little play. The night was quickly coming to a close, another night where I wouldn't see the sunrise, but really just another night. Standing, I was a body made of mistakes. For all of those decisions, the worst was to stop living in the margins. When I asked for freedom, the choice was gone. Though subsistence was without the merit of stability, its flaws were exactly what was most worthwhile. It was the knowing that nothing was important above and nothing terrifying below. This was the wisdom the methuselah forgot, the forbidden scripture that passed like a whisper on wisps of smoke trailing out of the mountain man's camp, pushed on by the singing from the gypsy caravan, harnessed by the red man's pipe. Now we are without song, tied to homes and follies. Much has been gained, but it's what came and went that makes it all the harder to revel. Where went the beauty of the weird that left us satisfied and foul, smooth and ostracized, greasy and pleased? The real question comes out with blood and spit: Which died more, me or the dream?

NEAR-METH EXPERIENCE

The following guest post is a bizarre dope-fueled music-geek fantasy, as imagined by Gabriel C. Zolman of THE AMEN CORNER in his obviously copious free time. Meanwhile, catch the good Bishop over at Gabriel's site (confused yet?), for more sundry sacri-licious fun.

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INDUSTRIAL BLOCK PARTY

The following is a fantasy for nerds. It started as a complicated joke on a message board, and devolved. I make no further apologies, apart from the acknowledgement that a.) this sort of thing would get me shot over at my own site, and b.) this is what happens when you're a rock journalist for too damn long. Oh, and it's also what happens when you hang out in message boards. Sorry.

Anyway, it goes like this:

Trent Reznor is in the corner, moping and brooding—yet the chicks are just all over him. He only wants to be left alone, and yet cannot seem to keep himself from being constantly fellated, despite his grouchy protests. Marilyn Manson, being the accomodating fellow that he is, gladly offers to take the ladies off his hands (and cock)—that is, if he’s absolutely sure he doesn’t want a hummer from him as well.

In an opposite (yet equally dank and squalid) corner, Al Jourgenson is ranting madly into the air with his cowboy hat held high—alternatingly frightnening and inspiring all around. He stops his tirades now and then to mumble that he’s sober, but can’t stop nodding off between assertions. Every so often, he banters phenomenology and existentialism with a pale and pasty crew of drunken, stone-faced Germans—who are mostly made up of Einsturzende Neubaten alumni, and perhaps even some members of KMFDM (however, in all fairness, most of them are outside by the grill, setting themselves on fire with those Rammstein guys.

Any surviving Skinny Puppy members are shooting up in the bathroom—scribbling insanely on the wall in blood and puke—after having bought their drugs from the dope weasels in Chemlab down the hall. Members of Frontline Assembly fistfight in the dancehall with those mopey VNV and Apoptygma guys. Assorted nerdpersons from Front 242, Clock DVA, and such are there, but won’t get off their LAN lines in the kitchen to say hi.

Foetus is watching porn; Bile keep chiming in to ask if he would like to see something more “hardcore.” Meanwhile, Killing Joke’s Jaz Colman is arguing with Genesis P-Orridge of TG and Psychic TV over something rather lively; they each take turns walking outside to chant forbidden names or foreign swear words. Godflesh simply blew the party off.

Sorry you missed it? Don’t be; the entire thing was picked up via Martin Atkins’ webcam, and might surface as a Pigface disc next year (if Cleopatra Records doesn’t beat him to the punch).

)+(

NAPEEKIN

Somewhere between all the whimpering and "Why not me!"'s, the divisions were becoming clear.

This, the capitol city of basement debachery(?), the house of a thousand quirks, the fabled land where etched upon the gateway is scrawled, "Abandon all hope ye who enter and get no play."

The barest, water wing equipped members of the 'seperate but equal' luke warm gene pool could find themselves hilt deep in the finest thigh velcro many counties had to offer, or at least a fine selection of virgin slayers.

For so many lucky, hapless bitches of fate, this was Elysium.

Yet the veteran here was forever to fail unless his coin was selected from the lottery and then still only if the number's echo made its journey unimpeded by generic pulsing techno beats, the stench of unwashed goth ass, and the flicker of propeller mimicking light sticks in a morose reflection of so many faces' beauty that lasted only until the moustache strikes one's view. As the evening progresses, the haves and have nots stake claims in heir respective territories, the former fading into so many one shot stands, the latter scrounging for the last scrapings of substances with the potential to dull the mind enough into convincing them that they were of the nobler class.

My companion and I, knowing our lot and having direct knowledge that no intoxicants besides too many sodomites' private reserves lay untapped, we did as those rebellious souls quelled before ever having the opportunity to raise a call to arms: we lifted our chins and resolved to watch an action flick. Sowewhere during the feature, the subtitles began to blur. Flashes of buckshot and horserides meandered through the entirety of this haggard creature sprawled across some five or more chairs.

My fellow journeyman had since found greener pastures (or at least a more comfortable place to bed). I was alone. I had found to my reckoning. A fresh, yet cliche, title screen came to life beyond the snow and the ocean of the drop cloth. Something clicked. Time was taking a real form again and the fact that I had passed out in a hotel conference room materialized in my spine. It was time to move. The warmth of the sunrise in the shadows of the film was responded to by a rush of pressurized ocular bleach that would make a boddhisatva curse all existence.

Yet with this gift came the greatest gift of all, the Zen moment of insight that had eluded my unyielding grasp in all of this mess of corsets and poorly colored vodkas, the pinnacle of all binges of body or thought, the healing that poured from one spring for all: breakfast at Porter's.

Bishop Les Femur