11:02, Sunday.  First day of October and I’m sitting here wondering what I should be doing.  Because there’s always that feeling, the suspicion that there is some one particular thing that would be better to use up this time in doing.  That one task, or that one goal that is more worthy of the irrecoverable minutes that keep slipping by.  No matter how hard I stare at the clock, I can’t make it slow down.  I can’t read into the seconds and discern what they want from me.  What do they want?  What would fill them with justification?

That feeling of wasting time sneaks up on me occasionally, and frustrates me.  What is that, wasting time?  I’m not sure I know what I mean when I feel it.  I talk to myself, trying to instil some kind of motivation to do ’something.’  But what?  What is better than what I’m doing, at whatever given time?  As if there is some objective ranking system that, once consulted, will provide me with a conclusive answer.  Where is this yardstick?  Who is holding it?  Certainly its not me most of the time.  Things I want to do, in the moment, are often the ones that I turn around and feel like I’ve wasted time on.  Am I bred this way?  Is it society, or just my family that’s made me into the permanently inefficient creature that I feel like I am?

What are we all working towards?  That is the common denominator, that I am always supposed to be working on something, or toward something.  A goal, many goals, dozens of them, handfuls of long term, short term, financial, physical, fiscal, business, career, hobby… goals.  Swarms of the fuckers.  So many goals in fact that were I to by some miracle actually achieve one, I’d have amassed so many more in the process that I would be numb to the accomplishment.  I’d be so caught up in whatever else I should be doing that I’d forget that at one point, I wasn’t where I am.

I can’t remember sometimes.  My mind is geared forward.  I’m aware of the present, and yet only inasfar as it applies to the future.  Is what I’m doing now going to net me some profit in the future?  That is the question I think everyone is constantly asking.  Subconciously, but continually.  Its like breathing these days, we can’t live without it.  Living in the moment, enjoying what you have is laziness, smug self-satisfaction.  Forget that you worked to get where you are- that really isn’t important.  Achieving goals is not the goal.  Working on goals, that’s the obsession.  Like a train that builds its own rail, we never get where we’re going because there’s always a new chunk of track to chug into.  We don’t even get to stop at the station and take in the view.  Always got to have our noses to the stone, driving new spikes into the ties.

Where does that leave us?  Rats in the wheel… slaves in our own terrible schemes.  Those abstracted systems of business, of wealth and success.  We count out our worth to ourselves in arbitrary numbers that mean exactly what we want it to mean- no more, no less.

Is this why I feel so lost sometimes, because I realise that there are no destinations?  I seek madly for a finish line, a goal, one that is inarguable, and what I find is that I get into my head that the only concievable end is to arrive at the absolute pinnacle of whatever the field is.  To be the best.  The very best.  Only then can I stop, justifiably.  And that simply won’t work in this world of one-ups-manship.  Its all reletive anyway- and some bastard will set their sights on me, if I did manage to claw my way clear of the rabble, and beat me.  Then, where am I?  Back in the wheel.  Back amongst the rats.

Maybe the flaw is me.  Maybe my own self-appraisal is broken, I can’t make myself feel like my own work is worth something just because I say so. But I’m not sure which is more arrogant, feeling like I’m not a product of my society, or feeling like I am, and know it, and don’t care.  Should I seek for the approval, or… at the least a reaction a goddamn flicker of an eyelash out of someone else… Should I concern myself with it at all?  One tiny ripple in the stagnant pool of this world would be something, it would be something I could hold on to, remember, and use to tell myself I do exist, I do matter.  Or is that insecurity?  Which do I choose?  How can I live, unrecognised, in a world that constantly tells me that what I say doesn’t matter?  That unless I do what everyone else does, I’m not right?  How can me doing what they all do matter?  Wouldn’t it matter infinitely more if I ran counter to the flow?  To interrupt the current and splash around in that stream would at least be interesting.  How can repeating the same fucking thing that hundreds of other mindless automotans have done before mean anything at all?

11:28, almost tomorrow… just like those goals.  Tomorrow… so close, and will never come.  Almost tomorrow, and no closer to my answers.

If everything is so ephemeral, if labels are illusionary and an after-thought at best, why do I toil so endlessly to create for myself a descriptor? An identity is a label. It identifies me, it represents me, ‘re’-presents me, when I have yet to present myself. I have been spiralling, or at least twirling round on the spot for a rather long time now, trying to put some sort of cohesion into an understanding of who or what I am and simultaneously building an image of who or what I want to be. Build an image. Fabricate an illusion. To what end? To what end and purpose do we ever label things? I believe, as I am sure I have written before, that labels, genres, classes, whatever, render the infinite multiplicities of reality down to a kind of pattern, or more basic entity in order to ease the task of comprehension.

Half the time, maybe all the time, what we call understanding is actually an act of destruction of whatever thing the person is ‘understanding.’ This forcible categorization of an organic, unique entity, to become one of a group of similarly reduced entities is destructive indeed. Rather than examining a thing and understanding its individual characteristics- one will simply look for familiarity -and once found, disregard the rest. In so doing, the fact of the entity’s uniqueness is obsfucated, forgotten, and eliminated.

So why in the hell am I trying to do it to myself? How am I supposed to know who I am when I have yet to stop becoming? I realize I can’t know. An identity is only what I’ve been- what I am is far too fluid. That ephemeral nature of anything applies to me also. Why would I want to distill the life out of me by identifying exactly who I am? I have realized that the quest I’ve been on to find myself runs quite against the spirit of the principles I have established in my writing, in my life. Is it so hard to conceptualize myself as an ever-changing creature? All at once everything I am, I have been, and will be depending on when one takes a look at me. Identity is a tool for after I’m done being. Identity is who I was.

The joy of life is the freedom to change. To give up that freedom by identifying who I am ruins the potential to be anything else. Whether this will make life any easier to live remains to be seen.

Yeah, I am.  I am actually alive, kicking, breathing, fucking, but not writing.  And I feel bad for that, I really do.  Its all that game’s fault… well, mostly.  Is it the fault of a black hole that the spaceship gets sucked in and crushed into the infinite?  I don’t know, but that’s rather what I feel like.  My time keeps getting slurped up into that vacuum.  But anyway, I’m trying to regain some sort of control here… fucking addictive number counting!!

Its kind of depressing when you come back to a blog and have to spend half an hour clearing out the 100s of spam comments that have infested the place.  FUCK!  Like cockeroaches in the walls… termites… they’re everywhere.  Like sand in your crotch.  Only its my blog, and not a crotch.  Yeah.  No don’t make the comparison dammit!

I don’t even know who I’m writing to at the moment, and don’t give me that “A writer writes for himself” spiel.  Doesn’t wash here.  I am sure I’ve said it before, but a writer writes for an audience.  A Zen monk doesn’t need an audience, he meditates quite happily to himself and for no one else.  Me?  I’m an artist.  A performer, and I NEED my audience.  So we’ll see if I can build a new one on the ashes of the old… assuming none of ye old folks come back– which I sort of doubt.  But who knows, if I’m still here, what’s to say that you have deleted me from your RSS feeds?

I’m hungry and cold.  I’m sitting ‘outside’ in my garage, which is a kind of creative sanctuary.  Its a different place to sit at least, than my desk, at my main machine, which is so uber and powerful and full of gaming potential… So I’m out here with insane keyboard-driven instrumental progressive metal pumping pretty loud, without air-con, in the middle of Sydney winter (which can be cold!) writing what appears to be an ACTUAL blog entry!  Something random and meaningless for you people to read so I can confirm my existance.  The problem is I do feel like I’ve really dropped out of my social network on here (haha see the irony? social ‘network’ on the ‘internet’ hardy har har) and that is what I crave.  I do like the relations I have with people around me, for better or worse, they really help describe who I am.  So as horridly meaningless as WoW can be, there are a lot of people there to talk to.  Not about anything important mind you, just talk.  And I suppose that is what’s important.  Being by talking?  Pretty deep for a video game, I know, but you get that from me.  Anyway.

I have things written.  I like the ideas in them, but I don’t know where to put them.  See, I still like the idea of being published, as opposed to this self-publish thing, but who would house such personally important thoughts?  I need far more discipline than I’ve been utilising lately, I think, to pen something substantial enough to actually get printed.  Discipline.  Ha.  Its like a swear word, one that has religous connotations you know?  A sacred word… well.  Maybe not.  Maybe I just don’t use it much.  Let’s see if i can learn.

This world is spinning wildly out of control- and that is nothing new. Action, reaction, cause and effect, no guiding light influences the course of humankind, no external force shunts and harries our path. Those which we would bestow with power are but figments of our collective imagination, not real at all, or entirely real, in that we exist in a world of imagination. Nations, religions, economies, gods, devils, celebrities, politicians, none more real than the next, and each exerting more control over humanity than the humans themselves. Imagined constructs, hallucinations maintained collectively by millions, billions of people, to excuse them from thinking.

What the Catholic church has been, capitalist business is now. The over-reaching standard of what should be, below every fundamental of life that our modernity relies upon is underscored by the illusion of motivation generated by a system imagined into reality. Cyclical, collossal, it gyrates perpetually- inherant to its being is consumption, assimilation of what is useful, annihilation of what is not, through sheer ignorance, blindness, refusal to acknowledge that anything outside its own purview even exists. Sociopathic non-entities control our lives. A corporation would murder its kindred and eat our children, and think nothing of the act. Heinous acts of destruction are its bylaws, its fundamentals, and they are nothing but chimerae. There is no thing that is Coca-Cola. No body that is Microsoft. No block of stone or chunk of flesh or pool of water that is Time Warner. These things are fabricated. We are told they are there, like God, and we accept this as true. We must, because there simply is no option.

I have no sympathy for a business. I would not cry to watch one die, I could not! It was never alive in the first place, and cannot die- just the humans fervantly worshipping their deity wavering, cracking, running out of sacrifices to maintain their demonic overlord until it is wiped out by another more steadfast, resourceful group of zealots. The name disappears, to be replaced in name by another name. Nothing changes but the name. The devotion is the same, the delusion.

They are parasites, these corporations. We have breathed life into them, and they suck the life out of us. They rip out of us the flicker of humanity, stripping us of our basic peculiarity that makes us human: creation. Business does not create, it revolves. An ouroboros sucking its own tail down its throat in an insane circle which will never cease, only grow thicker, hungrier, more impossible to escape. To abscond is to shatter the being, to starve it of itself, and watch it dissolve. So they blind us, shroud our heads in layer upon layer of delusional advertising, stuffing every channel of perception with garbage, noise to keep anything else from penetrating. Like strapping a star to each eye to distract them from anything else, everything else. So innundated with this deluge of undiluted filth, our conditioned, our crippled minds are not allowed a moment’s respite. The process of reception robs our faculties for creation, even interpretation is not allowed. Everything is as it is presented, we must believe everything we are told, we must swallow the smut and faeces that is fed to us, for that is all these things can produce. They sit on our faces and shit in our eyes, and tell us its two for fucking one today only. Today only! Buy now! Believe it, buy it, forget tomorrow so we can say it all again! Buy ever more, work ever more to produce more of what you can’t use to make money to buy more of what you don’t need so they can put ever shinier ever faster ever more useful bullshit on the shelves in the aisles on the screen in the air. Everywhere. And whatever you do, don’t stop to think about it.

Just buy.

Just need. Not want, need. We aren’t responsible for our needs, no one is. Need must be filled. Need must not be denied. Need must not be examined. Need is want we don’t want to admit to. Humans do not need, cannot need, that is what makes us human. People want. Animals need. To live only with what we need is animal. But where is the limit? This superflux grows top heavy. The boundary to absurdity draws ever closer, and the structure will inevitably fall. As a tower, with a hundred floors, each collapsing downwards into the next gathers weight, momentum building to bring down the next floor with even greater force must eventually run out of floors- the whole thing will eventually hit the ground and destroy itself.

The system devours itself. Already the consumer, the individual is the minor role. Businesses feed on each other- whoring their own bodies to keep themselves alive. One business advertising another on its own skin, its flesh rent in twain by the tattooists needle. Drilling new channels into our consciousness by inventing new technologies, to fill with even more filthy demon-spun lies. The simple individual is already long stretched beyond his means, credit and debt extend his ability into the abstract, the imagined, and his only escape is death (which is a hard time for any family. Have you thought about the financial future of your family after you die? You should be. For only three dollars a week you can secure their future…). Life is no longer affordable, as it has been defined by this neurosis. The house the car the phone the computer the television the boat the investment property the stock portfolio the Swedish furniture the German electronics is all designed to be unaffordable. The price has nothing to do with the value. The price is always always, just over what is affordable. And you always need it. That is the fundamental. That is the doctrine. The mantra. You need this.

Lies.

No one needs a thing. Everyone wants everything. The one thing, if it can be called that, which no one wants is to think. Time, perhaps. Peace. Anyone who wants that would have it, as I do. Stubbornly, steadfastly refuse to need everything all the time. Think. I dare you.

Take a step back and watch the millions throw away their self-control like those who step into the carnival ride, spinning ever faster, an insane revolution that crushes each one of them against the walls of their prison. Their system, their diety, is their co-operative hallucination, spread like a virus through every orifice of our bodies, corrupting every cell and mutating like a cancer. Watch as they destroy themselves with the routine, the revolution, the centripitol forces squeezing the life from their bodies. Inescapable routine. Today to pay for yesterday. Spend what you do not have in order to gain what will kill you. Inescapable while you need it. While you believe in it.

What happens when the ride hits terminal velocity? How fast does it have to go before your bones are liquid? Before you flesh becomes energy, atomic? Will I be able to survive the implosion? I smell the catastrophe on the wind, and only hope I am still alive, still awake, when it happens.

I am wrapped in an aural cocoon in the belly of this giant silver intestine, hurtling along the track towards my destination with all the agonising slowness of a glacier. My heart thunders in my chest like a hummingbird the size of a helicopter. The anticipation! The choking power of my desire silences every competitor. My thoughts leaping one after the other from my mind, are scything through the dark night like spears forged of light.

My body is filled with longing. Desire inflates my muscles to the point of explosion. My skin screams for her touch and cries out memories of yesterday. Everywhere her hands have touched is swept with waves of needles. My fingers ache with emptiness. I shut my eyes and try to rein the stallion within, but am no match for the power of my love. The attempt is half-hearted, admittedly, because there is no true desire in me to slake the pull towards her, only to endure. To outlast circumstance, and prove fate. I clench my jaw; it seems as though my voracious skin will tear free of my flesh and go racing ahead to reach her more quickly.

It seems unfair, at times, to focus my powerful desire on her, to target this girl and unleash the unrestrained force of my heart on her. Like pouring the atomic fury of the sun into a single light bulb. I feel as though I would do just that, by placing my hand on hers, my lips to her lips, she would be consumed by the inferno I am stoking within. Even by merely locking my gaze, arcs of electric energy would burst forth from me to find purchase in her eyes. But hold my gaze she does, and my hands, and wrap me in her arms and draw me even closer. She accepts the challenge that is my love, and the fire that I bring.

Happiness ripples over my skin like cool waters of absolution. I smile as though I am already in her arms, the tide surging forward to spill from my eyes in tiny waves of infinite ecstasy.

Control. Is there anything more attractive, more inflaming than a woman in control of her own cunt? I thought as I stared at her. I wasn’t her only admirer either. She sat alone for now, across the bar lounge from me, sipping chardonnay and reading something. Beneath the calm demeanor simmered the great sexual heat, ready to explode forth and consume the next man she chose in a visceral, orgiastic conflaguration.

I could see it in her- I was unfairly advantaged of course, I had been watching her for quite some time now -but every man in the room was compelled to allow his eyes to rest upon her for longer than normal. We could all detect the something, the something in the way her lips brushed the glass that her fingers encircled so intimately. Something that made us scream to be touched by the those same delicate fingers. A subtle, one piece black dress left enough to the imagination to allow us to fantasize far ahead of ourselves. No- she wasn’t like the obvious tarts who put their goods on display by donning too little fabric. It wasn’t exactly her body on offer. It was the energy. That enigmatic female energy that emanated from a woman’s crotch, and filled her with radiance. The energy that lent them preternatural strength up to and during orgasm; the energy that overwhelmed them and whipped their spines and forces screams from their lungs. The energer, the fire- just below the surface.

I watched her carefully enough to notice how occasionally and very briefly her eyes flitted up, to ensure she was being watched. The delicious elfin smile, a tiny provocative grin teased her lips upwards. The imagination ran wild. Total control. So unlike a man. She would not ask for what she wanted. It would be offered to her by one of us. She would not have to lift a finger. She held a power over that which we craved, and that awareness made what she held all the more desireable. Any woman possessed the ability to incite a man, but those who understood us, and our addiction, our carnal needs, their allure was tenfold. The temptation was incomprehensible.

I tried to douse the excited tingle in my stomach with a freezing belt of martini, but to no avail. The plunging V of her neckline stabbed me in the gut and the shadows arresting my eyes left me wanting more. Teased by what I couldn’t see but knew was there. I was forced to bore my vision straight through the fabric, past the lace, and dove greedily into the tight, round flesh beneath. I could almost feel her warm breasts against my cheeks, I could almost taste the equisite delicacy of her nipple on my tongue. It tingled. And she, she had not done a thing, she was just there.

Being here as she was almost every day, waiting nights, I supposed, for a worthy suitor to approach. She did not always deign to take one- not every day. I was not the only one who’d noticed the habit either. There were those who were here watching her regularly, and those who came to try their hand more than once. Some were successful repeatedly, others were not. She was a clandestine celebrity. No one talked openly about her, that I could see, though the bartender always delivered her at least one glass of wine without charge. I suspected that he knew enough to realise she was keeping handfuls of men here watching and drinking for far longer than they otherwise would. Much like me. I chuckled and sank the rest of my martini. I preferred vodka, it always tasted cleaner.

After some indeterminate length of time (I always felt lost in a sort of limbo while I observed her) a man approached her. I could feel the whole room tense, like taking a collective breath before leaping off a precipice. I didn’t hear their conversation, that wasn’t the point. Whatever they were talking about resembled in no way what they were saying. All that meant anything was whether he sat down beside her or not. He did. She had snared him, like a hypnotized tiger, the predator sat beside his intended prey as meek as a kitten, trying to quell the deluge of adrenaline that was exploding in his veins. She surveyed him coolly throughout.

I imagined her beginning that way in bed. Cool, non-chalant, even dispassionate. Lying on her back with the man’s head in her hand, firmly lodged between her legs. Observing his technique? Making comparisons? Or just revelling in her power like some lascivious despot. Very rarely did I manage to conjure an image of her actually being fucked by her chosen partner. Fucking him, yes, but not being fucked. She was always on top, in command. The man helplessly looked upwards at the diabolical beauty of his invulnerable queen as she used his flesh to achiever her own private nirvana. Her eyes were always closed. When she came, he inevitably would; all his fantasies going off like a geyser.

Being controlled was the fantasy. Being used. Men have always been in control of women. Society indoctrinates it: to be on top is to be in power. Always taking the pleasure from a cunt, and leaving. Leaving a puddle of semen, and leaving it behind. Always the stronger. Always fucking something weaker than yourself. Taking what is desired, and being free to move on. The true desire of mankind is to fuck an equal. To fuck and be fucked simultaneously, however impossible that may indeed be, a woman in control is a step away from the norm. Flawed but fulfilling to a man. To experience the opposite of control has some merit. Indeed, this very experience may lead to a reconfiguration which allows a man one step closer to egalitarian intercourse. A genderless sex which implies no control or roles to play.

This equality is not what she allows. She, I know, fucks like a man would, for herself. Even when pleasuring a woman, a man is pleasuring himself. Masterbating his ego by achieving the mark of male heroism that is the female orgasm. When a woman clims atop our rigid cocks to bring the orgasm on herself, we are stripped of the masculine. She is no longer waiting for us to hit that perfect spot, she is actively bringing it out herself. She takes control of her own cunt- away from us. She desires the orgasm as we do, as a man does. Where the woman will wait, she never does.

Ultimately her control is no more true than ours- than mine. I am, we are, helpelssly drawn here like so many horny moths to her salacious flame. And she to ours. In controlling her cunt, she has lost control of herself. An illusionary control that I crave in her to be rid of it myself. I know it to be false, and can’t bear the lie. Fucking whoever she wants is no power. She is out of control, forced to return here day after day, to fill her cunt with flesh- and let no one deeper than that. She must satisfy a craving she cannot sate, and cannot escape.

Blind to her fault as I am consumed by mine, we suffer. She drowns the pain in endorphins and sweaty screams, always hiding from the fact that control is not about who you fuck, but about who you do not. But wrapped in our cocoons of novocaine, we cannot be reached. The deepest intensity I have known is sex. The darkest secrets I know are within folds of skin, shallow, only just beyond the surface. The only pinprick of feeling that pierces the fog of anaesthetic is the brief moment we call an orgasm. A dull imitation of genuine feeling, of deep perception. Of body mind and soul, I have yet only discovered the first. The latter remain as mysterious as the cosmos, but I try to pretend otherwise. I decieve myself. I live in the lie I see perpetrated all around me by every man in this room as we all gaze in wonder at the false idol seated across from me. What she offers is not the meaning of life.

There is more, I am resolute. I do not question it. But I can’t get to it, I can’t understand it, and that rankles. I feel deprived, I feel crippled. A sort of incomplete being in an emotional coma, that is unable to feel anything beyond what my body experiences. My corporeal existance so overdeveloped that I have lost a sense of the inner being, the spirit that dwells within. Anyone can come, who can say they have touched their own soul? Who can say they have reached another’s? I cannot even say I have mastery over my body, not hardly. My addiction to my own hormones blinds me to itself, and I am lost in an endless cycle. Spiralling downwards away from freedom, into the pits of debauched pursuits of pointless physical reactions only a step removed from knee-jerk reflexes.

I feel there is something abnormal in me. Either I am an invalid missing some fundamental characteristic that proves me something more than an animal with the instinct to reproduce, or these ideas are a cancer spreading through me. They grow and compound on themselves until I cannot escape my questioning. Am I insane? Somehow flawed into thinking I should be more than I am? If all humans carry this inescapable instinct to fuck one another, does my objection to it in me make me something other than human? Sub-human or super-human? I certainly do not feel super. I feel weak, I feel incapacitated. All I can do is lament my torn resolve. On the one hand I am the animal needing to feed on the flesh of another, seeing what I see and lusting. On the other, I am disgusted with the preoccupation. The schism is widening.

So she sits, oblivious to my trauma. My love for her breeds self-loathing in waves. It is not love. It is lust. False lust, indoctrinated into my rhythms by decades of immersion therapy. I feel victimised by an emotion within me not of my own making, followed by the repugnance it fosters. Where is the key? What is the answer? How do I balance the pleasure of sex with the need for truth? Not knowing, to not understand myself nauseates me. What other purpose can I truly serve, if I cannot even comprehend what it is to be me? To be human? Am I the only one who is even trying?

No… no, I know that I am not the only one. That much I do know. And yet that one struggles not with it. She knows who she is and I admire her conviction. I fear the conviction that I once held, which was bound by niavety, and am therefore terrified of faith. I cannot tolerate faith because I am driven to understand. Faith does not require understanding, in fact, truth is the anathema of faith. Once understanding is achieved, there is no room for faith, only for acceptance. I seek that knowledge. I seek an explanation, and cannot abide faith for it has fooled me already. Yet is serves me no better to distrust that which I cannot understand, when I understand nothing.

So I remain motionless, staring at her, and seeing myself reflected back in all my ugliness waiting for understanding to come so I may accept, or for the courage to again have faith.

One year. I stared down at the palms of my hands and followed the deep lines criss-crossing them. I imagined similar lines crossing my face, deeper now. One year deeper than they had been when I first came to this place. I hadn’t seen my face in that time, but I imagined that below the beard, they occassionally buzzed off, the lines were deeper. I looked at my hands, I traced the lines. These same fingers, I thought. What pain they had wrought. What agony. And now? No different from any other man’s. No different now to the hands of the man I’d killed, nor to those of the man who’d kill me. I’d lasted one year- that was more than I had expected. But another twenty-four? That seemed highly unlikely to me. I imagined what the lines would look like in another quarter-centure, and did not like the image. One more year, twenty-four more times. I frowned, and the lines deepened.

One clean year. It was my AA anniversary, an entire calendar year since I’d first said "…and I’m an alcoholic," though that wasn’t my only addiction at the time. For a whole year I’d gone to meetings, support groups, therapy, and hadn’t touched a drink or drug since the beginning. Now, I was free, clean and free. I exercised; I was in great shape. Really great actually. My body had gone from wasteland to temple. I poured work into it, into myself. I was strong, fast, and always getting better. I was up to three miles of running every second day, and an ever-increasing weights regime on the off days. I played basketball and volleyball and did it well. I drove myself to win. The competition was exhilerating. Competition with others, with myself; victory, defeat, the love of accomplishment gave me reason to be. The need I had a year ago was wiped out. I could focus now- on my training, pushing it farther each week, closer to perfection. How close could I get in another year?

I looked into my daughter’s eyes and saw one year of life reflected back at me, and I smiled.

One year was a long time. The longest cycle I had in my life, and we’d spent it together. For better and worse, we’d stuck it out together, and that very fact pleased me as much as her company did. Together we’d faced all the regours either of our routines had to offer. Each seasonal shift we’d taken in stride. The things that were predictable, the things that weren’t- they all came and went and we endured. More than endured, actually thrived. Our relationship had blossomed as we two as individuals had. Working from each other, in tandem even while apart. One year, and it was only the beginning.

One year with a 28.7% growth on last year. An overall profit margin of 27% and stock running at $109,200. Last year’s growth had been higher, so we are slowing down. The advertising this year had not provided as much return on investment, that was clear. That leaves the options of continuing in the same channel, but increasing the expenditure, or crossing into other channels of media to disseminate to a wider population. The profit margin had slid a little too, around 4% which was surprising and disappointing. The average sale price had risen, which meant we were trading more, but making less. Suppliers were charging us more for their more expensive goods, and we could only raise the retail prices so much. That would have to be re-negotiated. Make a note to examine more closely the new products this year, and their margins. Maintenance costs had not changed, but next year will require a shop refit, to the figure of some $20,000. Staff expenses had increased slightly, due to the age of one employee entitling her to a pay rise, and the addition of a casual during the holiday period. That increase had only been around 4%, a good return, given the sales they had made throughout the year. A total of $400 of stock had been lost to theft. Always a disappointment, but not a high figure. And the loan was being steadily paid off. Next year would be the last year to make payments, and would therefore allow plans to move forward for a second store being acquired.

There are currently 119 posts and 813 comments, contained within 9 categories.

I can feel her memory crawling across my skin everywhere she touched me.  Over every inch of my body, our explorations left no zone virgin.  Everywhere she echoed on my skin, an embarassing reverberation I could not silence.  Like a snakeskin she clung to me, uncomfortable, ugly, with a new coat of scales not quite ready beneath.

Over her, I told myself.  You’re over her.  But what the fuck does that mean, over?  I don’t pine for her daily- haven’t for a long time.  I want other cunts to sheath myself in.  I even want another relationship eventually.  But I’ve been alone months now; I’ve never known what alone feels like.  Without comparison, original solitude is irrelevant to the isolation I know now.

And so my mind reaches back to the one untouchable memory.  The passionate debauchery that was our domain- our only one.  The single thing that lent me an identity to her- my only uniqueness.  And now, hard in my own hand, the only thing I want.  Flesh.  The flesh of a human palm is so vile in sad, pathetic substitute for the floral splendor of a woman.  How those folds of dark skin mock my loneliness.  They alone in my memory, hers only, that part of me.  Though I would seek to be rid of her, she has something of mine I can never reclaim.

So conflicted, I confuse my own rhythm.  Can I use her now or not?  Is her body fair game for mental fuck hunting?  Or is she the sacred first?  Can downloaded imagery ever compete with true memory?  Why do I have to do this in the first place for fuck’s sake.  Why is it all so hard?

Flirting with dangerous reality my fantasy probes a darker taboo.  Her flesh that was mine and mine alone and never again has been tasted by another.  The intensity stiffens as I up the ante.  The pulse quickens as I watch her fuck someone else.  Why?  Because its the only thing left.  Nothing else is undone.  Nothing else is dirty.  Nothing else is true.

To my regressive obsession I returned, coming time and time again.  There is a space created by intimacy, by sex, by fucking.  There is a space left entirely void when she the creator leaves.  That space aches like an amputation.  The ghost remains, only she can feign satisfaction that was true, but isn’t anymore.  Used to be is better than never was or will be again.  The mind priviledges memory over its own well-being.  Fantasy is safer.  Memory makes coming easier.

That space was hers, it could not be helped.  She made it, everything in it came from her.  Even all the furniture I bought had been picked out by her.  There is no avoiding this circumstance.  I accept that- though now I realise it didn’t have to be this way.  For now there is change.  Now I find someone who has taken over that space.

Taken it, and returned it to me.

Content and Happiness really are the anathema to writing.

This is not an iced coffee. This is a chilled, caffinated, creamy orgasm. On a day so naturally glorious that a meteorlogical description made of mere words is a travesty against the divine, the cool milky nectar soothes my almost parched throat. I nestle in the eaves of the cafe. Outside, technically, but shrouded so in shady shrubbery so cool I could stay here forever.

Suspended in the no-man’s limbo-land of mid-afternoon, I am free. And a little too content to pen any nasty, barbed thoughts. Euphoria is a different fuel with which to write. Melancholy, anger, depression, frustration, hate- these are all high-octane. But euphoria… Euphoria makes me want to set the pen aside, and drink down this tall, frosty glass of life.