Night of the Dead Living

I. I Never Buy Canvas.

I live in New York City, where everyday there are people who up and vanish, leaving their entire lives in piles next to garbage cans. In these piles of life crumbs I have found every possible canvas I could ever dream of: mirrors, glass table-tops, slabs of marble, entire doors, pieces of plywood that are bigger than my entire apartment (serious). So when I pop into the art supply stores to buy a brush every so often and I see canvas sold by the foot for $150, or whatever the Hell a BLANK canvas goes for these days, the thought of buying that along with my $3.99 brush just seems not only extraneous, but just plain wasteful of the bounty of booty waiting on the corner like someone's life as New York City spittoon remnants. Even buying brushes at an "Art" store is just kinda... icky to me—but where the Hell else does one get brushes when the hardware stores are closed? Am I right, folks?

This piece I have listed here is on one of my current favorite found canvases, which are pre-printed paintings on ACTUAL canvas, maybe they're from IKEA or something? I don't know, but they're fabulous for many reasons, the first being that I don't work well on unused canvas, I don't know how to navigate all the bumps and divots of the cloth and it drives me crazy. So problem solved when the canvas is already, like, shellacked with a big fucking sailboat print, or in this case, a hi-res picture printed on canvas of a solid blue sky with a single fluffy white cloud floating on the right side. Well, I guess somebody lost their inner fluffy cloud because I found this in the basement of a friend's apartment complex where they store the stuff that is too big to throw out on regular garbage days.

via www.etsy.com

My latest work!!!

My Marlowe Collection is inspired by Heart of Darkness and the accompanying Francis Ford Coppola film Apocalypse Now. Based on a style wherein modern military meets tribal warrior, the collection reflects man's constant brutality, either toward each other or nature... and mostly it just looks really fucking cool.

This piece is the top part of groundhog skull with the lower jaw removed. The holes drilled for the chain were made with a 1/8" diamond-tipped bit and are extremely precise and circular. Also, they are very level so the skull hangs flat even though one of the pictures shows it slanted, which was just how I was standing and holding the camera.Only one tooth has been painted, the remaining right front fang which is painted primary red in acrylic. The skull itself was dipped in black latex paint after the teeth were removed for maximum coverage. Once the paint was dry I replaced the teeth which are in place very tight and will not fall out from regular wear. The red stripe down the front is also acrylic.

The skull hangs from a 30" stainless steel dog-tag chain.

via www.etsy.com

NOICE!!!

INFP - "Questor". High capacity for caring. Emotional face to the world. High sense of honor derived from internal values. 4.4% of total population.

Take Free Jung Personality Test
Personality Test by SimilarMinds.com

I don’t see the world when I open my eyes.

I mean, I can recognize shapes—shapes of humans, trees, the sidewalk, buildings—you know, I don’t stumble around bumping into things, not like that kind of “don’t see things”—but the world, that thing out there? It’s just a giant screen. And whatever is going on in my head is so vivid—it's like...
you ever heard of that thing they used to do in Dallas called Disturb-A-Thon? I think it was part of that whole Church of the Subgenius cult kinda stuff—anyway, they would have this party called Disturb-A-Thon where you walked in and it was basically just this Dantean, multi-level party where, like, right when you walked in there were dicks sticking out of walls with people shoved against them either sucking or fucking these bodyless cocks like flesh ornaments, then walk into one room and a guy who had had his leg amputated mid-shin level would have his stump shoved in some guy's ass and he'd be fucking this guy's asshole with what remained of his leg while that guy would be fisting a girl whose face was getting fucked by another guy, then the next room would be people jacking off onto tiered women stacked up on an elaborate three chair setup that was built, like, specifically for this day so women could be stacked up getting jacked off on, and another room where people were cutting each other open and holding the wounds over little laboratory setups of beakers and Bunsen burners, cooking this mass of blood and eating it, doing tastings; and into each of these rooms was some projector setup of a snuff-porn collection played on loop where it was videos of guys jacking off together and as they started reaching climax they would bring razor blades from... wherever—off camera somewhere—and they would split their cocks at the tip to about middle of their shafts so they would spray blood and cum onto each other.
But this...
this is what the whole of my vision is like. Just this beyond awful scene with even worse things projected over it.
That’s what it’s like…
well, a piece of it anyway—I mean, all of my senses come in like that. And no matter how hard I try to bend the antennae or reset it or break it open and look inside at the wiring, all the signals just come in...
just...
fucked up.
All of ‘em…

All of my senses are like hard-drug amounts of distortion. Depression catches every single fucking stimulus you receive and just paints this…
like…
fantasmagoric nightmare over everything I—and not just the images, I mean everything. Smells come in fucked up—sound. Oh God, sound is…
I mean sound is like knives—like fucking knives. I mean, you ever walked down the street and every voice you heard felt like it was cutting you? Every single voice—and it’s not even, like, in my head, ya know? Different tones, highs and lows…
they cut me in different places. Time. Oh my God, I’ll be walking—well, the only place I ever go anymore is to my friend Danny’s which is maybe, maybe a 15-minute walk—like if I stop to look at the sale table over at BookBook or get run over by one of those assholes in the bike lane on Bleecker or something—and sometimes when I get back from there, from this maybe 15-minute walk—I’ll have been gone three hours. I will walk in my door after walking 15 minutes and three hours of hard, internal head-time—THREE FUCKING HOURS—of awful, nightmare paranoid, like “why can’t I stop following myself” sort of thinking have gone by…
you know, it, it’s not…
it’s not a fair trade. And I get in my door and I’m fucking exhausted. And all I can do the rest of the day is just…
stare.

And that's definitely one of the hardest places to ever be in, because when you can't do anything but stare, the reason is that if you move you are going to make movements right to killing yourself. Like... your mind paralyzes you because it has stopped trusting you, and even you know that were you able to get up you'd walk directly to the knives or the pills you could OD on or whatever. So when that paralysis gets you, you just have to sit still.

I bought her a knife for her birthday—a butterfly knife—the kind you can flip open with one hand—they’re illegal in most states I think—and I had the words “CUT ‘EM ALL” engraved into the blade with two interlocked hearts following it. I had it done at one of those stores in the mall where they sell graduation gifts and things, and high school rings and silver frames with people’s anniversaries carved into them and stuff, so it was funny to pull out this box and give it to this lady and search through a catalogue for the right font to put on this illegal knife and she thought it was really funny and sweet so that was cool.

CUT ‘EM ALL meant that she could kill every other girl—every single one of them in the world—and I wouldn’t give a fuck because I had her. And at that time I did mean that. I would of sat back like an emperor just watching her gut every woman that came near me, drinking wine and laughing the whole time.

This was how I felt, I mean, it might sound trite or whatever, but it was that kind of love that—well, not the love itself makes history—but it was the kind of love that makes historical decisions happen—and love does open you up like a drug you’ve never done before because it gives you the perspective of—especially if you’ve felt that everything was pathetic and not good enough for you your whole life and that you always had opting out in the forefront of your head because… just because you knew that not enough options were there for you. That… that the laws of the physical world were…
they were too...
too limiting for you to ever find anything enjoyable, like looking through the options of offered classes in college—and not even that they were all taken already—but that not a one of them interested you at all and you felt this your whole life, like all of the options were so pathetic and that life was one big-stretched-out-fucking-infinite compromise because the options you thought were available, well…
there weren’t even the physical means of achieving, so you just went on forever disappointed in the whole world because living was compromise. Every minute you stayed here you were giving into something that you hated, sort of like that whole…
I forget who said it now but something about the worst thing in the world being apathy in the face of evil and…
and I wake up everyday and see this whole fucking endeavor, this whole fucking…
all of my options are evil—and that taking myself out of this terrible, evil place is the only minor thing I can do to show that I don’t agree. That I don’t think this is right. And that by not making myself complicit in this criminal terribleness all around me that that’s me putting up the best argument that I can.

Then you find love, like that big, historical-decision producing love and you feel like you finally have an option that you—not only can you tolerate—but that you actually want.

But then you’re really fucked because you’ve been eying the knives and the shoelaces and the plastic bags and the chemicals for so long and you’ve got them all laid out in front of you everyday—like this is how you get yourself out of every situation—and then finally after however many fucking years of not being able to tolerate anything, you get this thing called love dropped on you and you finally might want to stay but you’ve built this house out of killing yourself and you’ve built your future out of killing yourself and you’ve filled your savings with killing yourself and this is what your cabinets and refrigerator are filled with and your bookshelves are replete with killing yourself—fuck, I don’t know if I have one author on there whose prerequisite to make it to my bookshelf wasn’t them killing themselves—and then all you know how to do is to build a better death. To keep looking for the point where you think is the crest of the wave before you pull the trigger—not like you’re waiting for the point when you stop having fun because you never have fun—but you keep looking below to see the point when pulling the trigger is going to have the greatest impact, because your life is what you’re offering as your protest against this nightmare you wake up to and go to work in and head home and try to make disappear everyday, so you gotta make that moment fucking count—it has to—it has to count for something or else people are going to put all of their bullshit onto your death and they are going to make hideous interpretations and give wailing eulogies because they feel sorry for themselves, for their loss and not for the fact that you had to live this horror of a life and wait out this terrible horror for however long you could until you determined when it was that you could prove your best point.

Well…
it is proving a point.

It’s proving the biggest point.

That you don’t agree. That you are not giving your approval by putting up with any of this, by being complicit in all of this sickness anymore.

You offer yourself in effigy and when you do, your death gains this weight that adds more to your life than living it out to its last breath ever could.

OUTSIDE & IN

 

My Brazilian modeling campaign...

 

I don’t live out there. I don’t even know what that means. I don’t know what it means to get away, I don’t know what it means to feel good, I don’t know what it means to have fun. I have no idea what any of those things could feel like.

I don’t. So, “feeling better?” What would “feeling better” even feel like?

I think if I were more responsible I'd have written down all the things I needed to do before I cut my own throat open or whatever it is I'm going to do and...
Not like...
chores, or "get that mole checked out" or whatever, like, the things you know one was supposed to do with a life in a lifetime.

I mean, so I have them there to remind myself, ya know, "Not yet, Buddy, you haven't read Madame Bovary," or whatever you haven't scratched off on this list of yours. And you should have these things on you so you can ask yourself these things for when you’re there having the staredown with every fucking pointed object in your apartment—yeah, like have them written down, in your pocket, ready to go, ready to read to yourself when these things are happening to you—or when you think they are happening to you—you can never know exactly when it’s one of these things, though, and you can’t live your life like you’re on the brink of one of these things, or the opposite of that, like you’re perpetually “having a moment” or whatever you think it is in your life, like with your camera out like something historic is happening around the corner from every time you take a piss—you just can’t do that, like, ready to snap a photo of every fucking thing that comes your way…
or, or maybe that is what you’re supposed to do—maybe you should document the whole thing, like, fuck it, just get everything down and sort it out later.

Or—and here's the most likely one—or, you don't mean anything, so go ahead and turn yourself to dust because your moments are nothing, anything you could ever write down is nothing and if you're someone like me with all this fucking garbage piled up in yer head then your existence is not only ruining you but everyone you come in contact with—yeah—like you've got this poison handshake and you just go around infecting everyone with this completely rational bleakness that's as catchy as a song, ya know?

So, the most responsible thing I'm doing is probably to keep forgetting to write down that list...
not that the possibility of Flaubert in my imminent future is going to keep me alive but I think you know what I mean...
but...
I don't think I remember things anyway, not like, the way that, um—I have fixations, I don't have memories.

So today, let's just take right now for example, here's what I got and it just keeps playing over and over in my head, she was playing with the cum on her nipples, like, dabbing at it with her fingertips and then licking whatever would stick on there and then doing it again and looking at me but not doing it for me, just…
just more because it was there and this is the kind of sex we were having that day. She was wearing my hat and my sunglasses and that was it and her skin was red and she always had bruises on her from the last times we fucked so she was covered in bruises, but, like…
sexy bruises, you know? Like, they were in the shape of my hands and my mouth and she wore them like…
like some kind of credentials for...
it gave her meaning is what it did. It gave her some kind of carte blanche to have people looking at her like she just got fucked and to have my dental imprints in her skin and the shapes of my hands as her bruises, like…
like those nature shows where they tranquilize the animals and then tag them, like that except she enjoyed wearing my tags—my bruises, my teeth—and I liked wearing hers.

We had ID’d each other and it was fun to go places and feel wanted by other people but to show off our belonging to each other in the form of broken blood vessels and torn skin—I guess a lot of couples are like that—but she needed people to know that she was getting fucked and that she was getting hurt when she was getting fucked, and it was like…
like going to the store just after you’ve had sex, like right after you’ve cum. You’re both kind of giggly and sweaty and you both feel like you might still be naked but you know you’re not, but you feel naked and the guy's still half-hard and he can feel his cock leaving, like, leftover cum drip-spots on his jeans and the girl’ll lean into the guy's ear and whisper something like, “You’re dripping down my leg,” and he’ll look around to see if anyone notices?

I don’t know…
that’s the first thing I'm thinking about today because...
because I don't know why...
because why not?
Yeah, and then she was playing with my cum that she was covered in from her chin to her cunt and finishing whatever she could get up with her fingers like someone cleaning a plate of a dessert, and she was talking about how it tasted that day and we heard the roommate’s boyfriend, like, making a sandwich downstairs or something, and we had to wonder if he had been there the whole time, that whole couple’s dilemma of, “Were we too loud?” “Is that rude?” “Do we care?” kind of routine, and it was…
it was the only kind of good memory I have of us—which is violent and possessive and full of violent sex…
and even the memory is tinted blood red…
and I think that was the only time she ever felt good.
When we had those moments, when she noticed that other people were noticing her, and when she could prove to the world that she was worth getting fucked and hard and by a dude who looked like me. Like I’m all Rhett Butler or something, ya know that part?
“You should be kissed and hard, and by somebody who knows how,” or something like that…
but that’s one of those things that makes that a movie that is forever and essential and one of the have-tos of life is that it has lines like that in it that articulate those perfect, complex emotions with lines that there aren’t single words for…

And, sure, that’s fun…
but I never felt good while that was happening—well, I felt fine during the sex but right after I went right back to fixating and obsessing. And having this memory doesn't feel good, and that's probably because it's not a memory, like I said, I don't think I have memories. Memory—remembering—it implies something that you (I) would have control over and these things I have, they control me.

It's more like this, that scenario I just told you about, this is what I'm going to be wearing for the next hour, two hours—who knows? But that's the feeling of it, not of this thing that I hit play on and can watch and then walk way from whenever I want.

So now, the more time I get from everything, now these memories that are having me, now they're just obsessions covered in fixation and me remembering feeling obsessed and shitty years ago even though I'm having a fixation of sex that was fun, but this fixation gets to swing me around and slam me into things—it's like a fight in a Bogart movie and I am not Bogart and he's just having his way with me and slamming me into walls and knocking furniture over and I'm just going wherever the fixation is going to push me and now—every year I don't get further away from these things—I mean, time doesn't heal shit.

Like these fixations are this cloudy bathwater, right? And the more time I get, all that happens is that the bathwater gets murkier and moldy with all of these God damn fucking obsessions that can't drain fast enough. All I got is more bathwater to drain except it never goes away all the way, it's just spiralling, spiralling, spiralling and it can't drain fast enough to not be filled up with more and more obsessions so...
I'm just an accumulation right now. And I'm stuck in this draining dirty bathwater because the obsessions are pouring in too fast for me to get rid of, so I'm obsessing about obsessing seven years ago until at some point these fixations have to drown me.

                   

I just always wished for someone to come along and ask me the right questions.