Ah, fuck. Here I am.

This isn’t the me you “me”d before. Except… no, you “you” me, and I “me” me. I suppose it’s only acceptable to “me” another when you’re like: You’re just like me, Randall. Except…. the yous and mes are just reversed, but in context, like, the big picture homburg– OO…. why can’t I em dash anymore. What has happened? Why is this so? What is this place?

Alas, the em dash is dead.

I used to give myself chills. I was nobody for so long, creeping out of black corners to finger toast from other people’s saucers. Occasionally, I’d finger a biscotti, and some excitement would cause my chillness to expand to skin, and maybe I’d glow for a second, reflected in the plastic of the biscotti em dash that’s how I knew it was biscotti em dash (effective?–) sparkling akimbo off a peak bent in gold text. Except… It’s not biscotti I like, it’s biscoff. You know the disappointment. You do. It’s the almonds.

Almond disappointment. This year has been that. Crispy freshness that shivs your gums like coral against your pale white flesh, conjuring thoughts of microorganisms left to multiply in the dermis. And then… that dry soggy almond. It’s a paradox, that almond. It’s chewy like balsa wood, and just folds into itself. It’s gum suddenly, this almond. Almond gum.

That’s been this year, minus a glowing starhot goddess I fell in love with. That’s been every year really, typically minus the glowing starhot goddess.

I folded in on myself as life chewed away. The best I can hope for is to slide in between a couple of molars and rest for a few weeks EM DASH perhaps slip into a gum sleeve between tooth and pink, like a hot nasty cursive bit of sex mail slid into a red envelope, except instead of perfume saturating it, it’s coffee stank (because in keeping with the extended metaphor, this IS life’s mouth we’re in) EM DASH until one day, life’s dry and cracked tongue catches the hook of a lip of a bit of me, now stale and wet and almondy, and slides me out of the flesh envelope.

SURPRISE MOTHERFUCKER! ALMOND! It chews and I fold, and it chews again, trying to catch me at at angle that will form some crack to obliterate me, and yet, I fold. I deft the rule of six folds, or is it seven? I fold infinitely. It swallows and I stick in the throat.

This is why I don’t like biscotti.

It, life, wakes in the night, gasping, and suddenly it knows I’m still there, like moss in a well, and everything just rolls over me, but I hang there in the throat, irritating it. It coughs, it gags, it sleeps and I remain.

You may have noticed some thing about me lately, beyond my absence.

I’ve been on a quest for rhythm and it has taken me to strange and visceral locales. I’ve sipped dirty water from the crater-pores of a star wretch, splayed out in the galaxy’s desert. I’ve stuck my finger repeatedly between the gears of a giant clockwork elder god who hiccups every time I throw off the pattern. I’ve smelled odd scents and let my hands try to find them. I’ve felt strange grit beneath my shoes and removed them to let my bare feet find the texture. I’ve rubbed against strange granites and molested odd marbles. I slept next to a woman whose creases looked like bismuth crystals at their deep vertices. I didn’t touch her, we merely slept in each other’s vicinity by accident. I noticed the crystals by accident, and departed on purpose.

When I last left this man that I was and will soon be again, he was sad and wretched. Haggard, this fuck. I assume he was lost, but the man that used to keep track of me finally shut up one day, and I’ve been unable to press me for answers. I suppose it’s like what Dusty said about Darth Vader. Sometimes you have to punch the guy to get the nightmares to stop. Like the black dog, you punch and kick and gouge and scratch and bite until the dog makes those dog sounds you hate hearing. You realized it’s just a dog, and you’ve hurt it badly, you see the terror in its eyes and you realize as ferocious as it was in your nightmares EM DASH tearing your lips off your face while you feel its teeth bashing into your own, tasting its dog breath mix with your blood as you scream to the no one that is there in your nightmare with you EM DASH it never made you as terrified as you just made it. One day, you’ll kill all your nightmares, and you’ll suffer through their death throes. You’ll listen to their little gasps. You’ll flinch as blood bubbles over tears where the last reserves of their lungs struggle through the gore to reconnect with the air of outside. You’ll collapse in the filth of it all, this murder play staged for your psyche. You’ve killed all the things except yourself now, and try as you might, you can never strangle yourself in your nightmares. The other denizens are gone, the shadow in the garage, the shapeshifter, the werewolves, the xenomorphs, the black dogs, Darth Vader, the giant Candyland pieces…. bits of them lay strewn about your childhood home as some of them deadtwitch in their own gore. You are the only nightmare left in this place. Not even the you that wouldn’t shut up when you were close to thriving, close to diving, close to surviving, has survived this massacre.

One day, that guy just shut up.

I still see him. He bears the bruises I gave him. They won’t heal. He’s got those sad eyes that are really just thick plastic contacts hiding the terror he really feels for you. There was no intervention. I didn’t sit across from a pen and pad on a couch. I just ran, and when he told me what I was running from, I told him to shut the fuck up and I kept running.

It was there, running, that I found the rhythm. And that’s when I gave myself chills.

Psychrock is great, don’t get me wrong. I love epic rock and cinematic soundscapes to fill in the void, but the real drug is the rhythm, the pulse, the slap of rubber against concrete or rock. Repetition. Randomness. I am a god treading continents, but microscopic randomness abounds beneath each footfall. I am treading this path alone and without. No one, ever, in the history of all that is, will ever tread this path the way I am, the speed I am, the stride I am, connected to the same time threads I am. I am a beautiful and unique snowflake——-nah, I’m not. I’m ugly, random, and gorgeous. I strike terror in the mold. I move through crowds of copies, unique and powerful and awful and godlike.

Once I found the rhythm, it was easy to manipulate the wave. And then came color and sound and understanding. And then came lasers, and Wankle rotary engines, and spam, and theramins. My dreams turn to my old friend, and while it’s still up for debate as to who betrayed who on that gorgeous, undulating battlefield of flesh and hot breath, he is a nemesis in that inner universe, and I see the same terror I saw in Vader’s eyes, in the dog’s eyes, in the eyes of the voice. I wish I could talk about anxiety and fear and depression in a way that others would find familiar, but in the end I understand that not all of us are ugly, random, and gorgeous.

The family secret is that perfectionism, as a natural variant in behavior in the lines that have collided to make me and my parents, grandparents, etc., has, by accident created an unintentional consequence. Like those flowers that grow their pistils and stamens numerous and short and secrete their nectar deep in the flower so that the bees have to work to get at the sweetness and thus spread more pollen, inadvertently create the clever bee that learns to bite into the base of the flower from the outside and get to the nectar without touching a bit of pollen. This perfectionism has led to what appears on the outside to be procrastination. This inward insistence that no path forward is worthwhile unless it exactly matches the expectations. It’s not that I’m quiet, or afraid of being seen or heard in public. In fact, I love attention. I love performing, but I need the stage to be set as it was in rehearsal. I can’t improv for shit, because improvisation requires manipulating the wave in a way that may forever and irreparably harm the one rhythm that it took me so long to find and attach myself to.

—

Ah, there it is.