The Curse of Noonday's Muse: Exile on Canvas

(Note: This is raw, adult, and slightly terrifying. But I need to do it, for reasons I’m not exactly sure why... I suppose the ready-snark-fire internet at large will see it as some lame TMI attention grab, but it’s not. Years ago, just after I was last trapped in this place, in proper settings I was told my shared perspectives lent context and healing to others.   So maybe this is a chance to do some good.

I am digging and clawing and fighting.  I know others are involved here but they will get their due in time.   There have only been a few people I’ve known who were courageous enough to face and talk about it… I apparently am the only one stupid enough to put it on the internet.  If that forever brands me as a freak in the land of snark, or shoots down some future prospect, then so be it:  take your best shot but know it won’t be anything I haven’t heard before, and I’m pretty thick-skinned so I really don’t give a shit anyway.  And if you’re the kind of judgmental coward who won’t examine the soul of another man’s shoes, then fuck you.

At any rate, if/when this syndicates to Facebroke, it may explain where I’ve been, and maybe serve as a final opus there for a while.  I don’t know.   I love and admire you all, even the oddballs I barely know.   Life is a wonderful thing.   Especially when it drives one to desperation and out of it.

It’s not done. I have so much to add, and so much to get through, but snippets are fleeting and it’s hard to stay at a computer all damn day like this.  If/when I can add to this, it will be done. In the meantime, there's no sense running from or trying to hide it anymore).

Judge not, lest ye be judged yourself.

Also, I am my own judge. And executioner.

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June 9 2010:

A few years ago I read someone say online: “Being on the run in your own damn town is no way to live your life.”  If I recall correctly it was autoextremist.com’s Dr. Bud who said it; attribution is important because that phrase instantly stuck with me as a sort of marker for future reference, as if to say out loud “Note to self:  That line there?  Don’t cross it.  Or at least be damn well aware of what it means if you do."

So here I am: crossed well over somewhere past midnight, holed up in a rated 1-star hotel similarly clinging to its own life somewhere in Frankfort. The half-wreck of the 14-year-old car I half-stole to go nowhere brought me here only after trying to kill me (heh, irony). My adorable children and lovely wife and all the comforts of what I should be calling My Own American Dream are something like 7 uphill miles away (you’d think I would know exactly because I just walked it in the blistering midday heat last week, but it turns out blisters and heat stroke aren’t good for counting those last few tenth-miles): exiled. Not by My Dream. Or from it, even. Exiled by and from what I can never be sure, exactly. But here I am in another all-too-familiar dream come nightmare. It’s the opening minute of Zooropa, or the driving agony of The Big Come Down: the visualized sound of an all-too-familiar dread which looms, even as you keep it locked up in a chest buried under life’s evolving roller coaster... but only for so long. Which is a bad spot in the first place because when you least expect it, a train goes runaway barreling down the valley and awakens the ancient one buried within and below.

Time for another reckoning.

I have struggled my whole life to face it. And conquer it. And I don’t know why I’m writing this. And I don’t know who is going to read it. And I don’t know what good or bad will come, but fuck it – train wreck or not you have to hit bottom before you can look up.

Well, I certainly feel like a train wreck, but I’m not sure if this is the bottom. Shit.

So again with the fuckery of chance: I’m just going to ramble. Nobody is making you read this. But courage takes many forms and maybe – just maybe – something good can come from this electronic mental upchuck. Frosty mug of Ipecac, or Draino? Time to take the plunge...

June 9 2010

Suicide is a wonderful muse, for she makes a person fiendishly creative.

It’s true. I've thought of more ways to kill myself than I can (or should) count. It’s grand fun, and you can categorize it: Wanna go out in a delusional fireball of glory? There’s a whack for that. Send a final message? There’s a whack for that too. Exit stage down in shame? Whack! Need to go quietly? Messily? Mysteriously? Leave a body? Bear no trace? Oh perish the thought, you say you have no idea - well then, would your hypothetically preferred implement of evacuation be mechanical, vehicular, chemical, medicinal, combustible, or perhaps via traditional or exotic weaponry? Shall it be staged as an accident? Homicide? Recorded as credit to Darwin or a legend of impulsive Redneckism? What kind of collateral damage is (or not) acceptable? Is a sensation of great pain and physical suffering in your last conscious moments desired or to be avoided (your answer to this will generally outline the role that fire and/or certain chemicals may play)?

I could go on, but you get the idea, and somewhere some stupid lawyer is probably already planning to implicate me for something.

The funny thing is I can continually be creative on this because I’ve enjoyed the flipside luxury of failing at it - many times. Or you might prefer to say, I simply didn’t try hard enough. It doesn’t matter – the point is, if you give someone the motivation to think about suicide and egg them on to try it, you might find a snappishly stubborn will to live which births nearly endless possibilities. One might even argue that serial killers who “brand” their work are merely suicides who failed in an altogether different and infinitely heinous manner. (I personally think most people are afraid to talk about suicide because they all too often realize their own possibly murderous culpability, but I digress on a tangent for another day).

One personal failure will forever stand out in my mind for no other reason than the divine, fluke intervention that thwarted it at the last possible moment; I’ll say nothing more other than in spite of its reputation, the Dan Ryan Expressway saved at least one life because something knew I am instinctively too unselfish to take others with my own. So for that one I call a mulligan. But the other attempts? Failures, every last one of them. Which is the beautiful, twisted irony of suicide: the only people qualified and courageous enough to face and understand its tortuous forms are the ones who haven’t mastered the craft, and should therefore, possibly, be excluded from its discussion, "just in case". At least that's what conventional wisdom says... too bad people forget that suicide defies convention.

Several years ago during a particularly emo online moment, I wondered “if I were to swallow Ipecac and Draino at the same time, which would win?" And it became a personal example of a rare throwaway quip that boomerangs into repertoire. I think it sums up the personal struggle of so many people so very well: One the one hand, the antidote Ipecac is life-saving, but only through no small amount of its own distress; in this manner it becomes life its very own self. On the other hand, Draino: the sure-fire way to dissolve one’s mortal coil from the inside out, leaving others to mop up the goo.

It's no less than an ultimate test: which philosophy reigns superior by rendering its effects first? Which is worth pursuing? A suicidal person is basically told to put up, shut up, swallow the Ipecac and suffer the regurgitation – to keep on going, come what may - for life’s own purposes, whatever those are. Draino is painfully messy, but a one-and-done deal in comparison. If one should be convinced that life is worth living, why not leave life to chance, to prove itself? A suicidal person considers the odds no more seriously than a person buying a high-jackpot Powerball ticket on a whim.

Then again, if I'm living proof that said whims don’t always work as imagined, there are plenty in the ground who might argue with me if they could. Hell, maybe they are – that could explain something.

For the record, I am not suicidal at the moment, and this is not a cry for help. It’s a very darkly humorous but hopefully frank look at the logic of suicide, from someone who has considered it... and probably will again. But also from one who has –thus far- managed to get by on nothing more than sheer will, grace, stupidity, love, and luck. Not always my own, of course. But I'm still managing, the best way I know how.

But it’s no fun to be cursed by such a twisted muse as Suicide.

Because, humorous though she may be, she is a rabid bitch of clawed tussled fur, and also relentless.

You can dodge her for years. Outsmart her a time or two. Draw allies to your side (who better be well-qualified and wholly sincere, for Suicide has armies of spies, corruptors and infiltrators at her command).

You can do all that, and win the battle. And the next one. Keep it up, and she might even let you think you won the war.

And so you’ll be going merrily along your way on a good sustainable clip, learning to brace yourself for the peaks and valleys as Life Brand Ipecac ebbs and flows through your existential being to purge the ills. You temper your expectations and do the best you can. You learn from your mistakes. You learn to be happy with your lot, and do what you can to improve it, thank others for their help, and return the favors however you know how.

Retirement from Dark Creativity was never so sweet.

But there’s always a dull, blemished corner on the picture you’ve painted for yourself, of your life and your accomplishments, and the gilded frame of context you so meticulously construct and filigree to place it in can try to hide it, but ultimately distract from that corner for only so long.

And then something happens. The stress, the poisons, the sickness, the situations, the intangibles, the viruses, the maintenance, the slog… it piles on and builds up and bear it with all your might but, inevitably, you finally slip and all at once, the Ipecac isn’t up to the task, and the suddenly dusty frame and trite picture grabs your attention with that damn fucking corner that won’t let you out of its sight. You’ve just rediscovered that which cannot be unseen. The Goatse of the mind...

Her ally's job done, your old friend Muse arrives at your service and demands that you fix it. It beckons, that dark corner of regret and shame, and you are trapped. It must be fixed, damn the cost.

You focus, smite all common sense, slip away and thus to exile.

TO BE CONTINUED...