PARADOXIA
Page 13
A vampirism I was reluctant to admit to, even when exposed to the dying remains of my latest kill.
I started to get frightened of my own libido. My sexual urgings, ravenous desires, a beast forever banging on the door. Continuing to seek out nameless, faceless strangers. Hoping to find one, ten, a hundred who could quell this sickening hunger, quench an unbearable thirst. Who could abate this exhausting search for other, another, more.
I was a sexual predator, consumed by the need to feed. To feed in. To find someone, anyone, something, anything that could feed into me what I needed. The need became an impossible irritant. I was looking to possess, to consume what they possessed that most reminded me of myself. That most reminded me of an inextinguishable luminescence, that radar of a dead star whose ghost shall never cease to cast shadows. I was looking in vain for myself as I willingly disappeared inside of others.
Of course, to fill the void within only the self will suffice. We reach this realization only after we’ve stuffed every hole, every orifice, every opening with an indiscriminate array of pointless junk. Wreckage. Waste. Human offal. And still hunger remains unsatisfied, especially when the object of desire is forever in flux. Gluttony is never satisfied, whether it’s for sex, food, or drugs. It begs to be fed an enormous amount of useless stimulation, information, trivial soundbites, random affections, unrelated facts and figures. Forgettable fucks.
And the more you’ve had … the more you want. An endless cycle of multiple frustrations. Where nothing seems to satisfy. Not even in dreams.
And my dreams were full of blistering hallucinations on an epileptic scale. A crash of limbs and legs, crusty with the browning blood of a transgenerational orgy. Where hundreds of bodies flail wildly in slow-motion like a bad acid flashback marrying Bosch to Bundy. Bruises and scars rippling like varicose veins under black light. The returning ghosts of all those I had sexed began reemerging like a flash flood bursting the memory banks.
History, reduced to thousands of snapshots rifled through the air like a broken filmstrip ripped through an ancient projector forcing the mind to work in multiples, tripping over images begging for recognition. Begging for deliverance from the place where time smolders.
I longed to escape the perimeter of this fleshy prison, to disappear into milky nimbus, blurry-eyed, light-headed. Longed for a permanent amnesia, a catatonia which forgoes responsibility, the enemy of freedom. Wanted to erase dreams, memory, vision, to ultimately forget every word, every face, every nightmare. But I couldn’t. I can’t forget. I remember too much. Remember every detail, nuance, am forced to repeat even the most repellent occurrence. My sanity insists upon it. Insists upon expulsion. Purgation. Insists I wring from every cell the poisoned thoughts, polluted deeds, malicious intentions that would, if not puked forth, riddle me with disease. Sickness. Death.
And I feared that death picks up where life left off. An endless barrage of unbearable obstacles. A godforsaken terrain where lost souls find even less mercy. A shattered dreamstate where every somnambulant second is plagued by the nightmarish preoccupation of one’s own fears. A bleak panorama where not even death offers any release, for what you wrought will come back to haunt. As if the struggle never ends. As if there is not now, nor ever has been peace. Peace being foreign to my nature. The nature of the fucking beast.
I feared the repercussions of hundreds of thousands of lifetimes sweeping through a sea of history, threatening to drown me. I was married to the invisible anniversaries which celebrated the accumulation of everything I was, of everyone I had known. Of everyone I had been. And it still wasn’t enough. I felt somehow removed from my own experiences, as they washed over me, blurring the interpretation between reality and fantasy. Past and present. My life and the thousands of others I had consumed both in daydreams and nightmares.
I had to deprogram myself. From myself. Had to reinvent rituals of purification. So full of the vagrant pollutions of others. It was time to detox. Not only from alcohol, sex, and drugs, but from the needy leeches who looked to me to swab their sores. Detox from my own needy lechery. Had to locate the center wound and cauterize. Undo the original sin, the origin of my sickness.
Had to learn to replace Them, It, Want, Hurt, Anger, Sorrow, Loss, with Power, Healing, Wisdom, Fulfillment, Satisfaction.
I decided to lock myself in. A forced segregation. Sabbatical. A retreat into myself. My selves. Play hide-and-go-seek in the looking glass. The mirror angled at the foot of my bed. Twisted reflections bouncing off into infinity. Obsessed with my image, the myriad of distorted figurines who danced in front of me in rapid succession, every feature exaggerated, every slight imperfection a new delicacy. Glorious wonder at the body’s capacity for renewal. Regeneration. Every self-induced orgasm an exercise in life extension. My narcissism unbound, marvelling in delight at the sculpture of the female form.
I began to realize exactly how much of my energy I had been squandering on other people. On men. Men who would never understand that I would always want more than they were ever capable of giving. More than what was even fair to demand. More than they would ever be able to give, even if they knew how. Because I didn’t need them. I needed myself. To reclaim myself. To reclaim my capacity for pleasure. I was simply using men to stimulate myself. To stimulate that necessary adrenal rush, that ultimate kick, that heavenly high, that blinding white light that accompanies every orgasm. Those extracelestial explosions which cascade in ripples, reminding you that you are truly, truly alive.
And that surely you must also die. And is death not the ultimate orgasm, a return to that otherworldly ether, whose very origins were indeed a Big Bang, the ultimate explosion, the supreme chaos, whose resonance is the vibration we constantly seek to reproduce in everything we do. In every breath we take. In every orgasm. Faked or not.
I was always vain. My vanity saved me. Kept me sane. Kept me from falling overboard. I suffered from extremes of passion, insatiability, gluttony. But I always knew when to pull away. Pull out. Knew how far I could go before being swallowed, before sinking into the pitfall of self-loathing, addiction, depression.
I was surrounded by manic depressives who battered themselves with the nearest available weapon. Vodka, Scotch, beer, coke, dope, pot, pills, poppers, uppers, downers, in-betweeners. All of which I too indulged in. None of which I ever gave myself over to. None of which ever applied the stranglehold.
I have lived surrounded by entire communities drunk on oblivion. Drunk on death. Drunk to avoid the nauseating confrontation that pits the user against that which they abuse. I was drunk on fuck. Drunk on the charged electricity coursing through the vortex between muscle and bone, expanding inches, feet, miles beyond the skin. Stimulating an itch in inner space. I was strung out on the elevation of blood pressure, the escalation of heart rate. Shallow breaths that starve the brain of oxygen. Suffocation. Hooked to an extraneous power source which I bled like a cipher from the souls of unsuspecting victims.
Afterword
by Thurston Moore
Lydia is the nicest girl I know.
She’ll swallow yr boy psychosis and translate it into some ambi-sexual alchemy.
She’s sweet.
She will eat you and inject yr DNA into her brain and figure you out.
She’s strange and dirty; but it’s only because you are.
She wants in. That’s because all boys want in.
She’s the only girl I know who not only gets the message but decodes the motherfucker, rewrites it from a wholly unified perspective, and delivers the report back to yr house. Which is naturally consumed in flames.
She’s fucked up.
She’s so fucked up she can glean goodness from chaos.
She loves a good ending.
She knows that orgasm is Apocalypse all the time. And it’s already too late.
She knows how to have a really good time.
She can spread joy.
She’s gorgeous.
She can lure fascist beasts to honey with a
whiff of her thigh.
She can eviscerate them in their own hideous pools of selfish shame.
She can feel you, and feel no shame.
She can love you.
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