succumb

Please let me step into your office?

Sir, what is your message?

“It is quite simple. You are not going to get anything here. You are wasting your time. Pack up and go! That is my message.”

Its Saturday morning and I’m woken up by this high-pitched moaning, sounding like the pleasant combination between a cat in heat and a pregnant walrus. YEEAHAHAHAAIPP…YEAAAHAHHIAAPPP….what the fuck?....I go outside my room and into the courtyard and there is this robbed eighty something year old sadhu with face paint, a walking stick, and a begging jar, wailing incoherent shit eleven feet from my permanently open windows—its probably six thirty in the morning. I can see you but you can’t see me…I can touch you but you wouldn’t even feel me…I just look at him with a twisted look in my crust-covered eyes with half my mouth open, shaking my head, as I walk outside to the bathroom. I’m just waiting for you to really let your guard down. He continues to wail. I go to the bathroom, brush my teeth, come outside and he’s still standing there, wailing at me and all of Kathmandu. You don’t even know the danger that your facing…I’m going to empty you and fill you in with me… I go back into my room—he continues to wail. I wait another 10 minutes and the ceaseless wailing becomes more irritating than an ingrown toenail. I decide to place some rupees into his jar in the hope that in exchange he will let me sleep. I can smell you from here. I pay the man and he wails about eight more times and leaves after probably five more minutes. Thank god, it’s a relief to know that now there’s only motorcycles, trucks with incessant horns, barking stray dogs, jungle birds, and howling lust filled monkeys to prevent me from sleeping…pleasant Kathmandu mornings…

I wake up on the floor covered in sweat and feeling as if my physical body has been torn to pieces. I don’t know where I’ve been or how I got here. All I know is nothing makes any sense. There is only one solution. I gather up all of my valuable possessions, a few pair of clothes, some random assortments I could have use for on the open road and head out the door. Those around me dazzled by the spectacle of television (wall)—too distracted or too uncomfortable to ask me what the hell I could be doing. I leave the house, never once looking back. My sunken, tear stained eyes, strained from what must have been several hours of pure chaos and confusion appear as bright warning signs to any passerby on the street—stay away. A voice in the back of my head tells me to push on despite the fear gnawing against me. It then calls out to me, telling me to enter that one doorway I’ve seen but never approached before. I reach the door and just as I’m about to break the padlock this disturbing feeling as if I’ve been here before and I’m making a big fucking mistake runs up my spine…

The day passes into dusk, work is over and I’m bailing outta Southern Patan (Pulchowk) and into Thamel for a night out with some comprendes. I grab my bike, cover half my face in cloth, and shield my ears from the chaos with smooth musical vibrations. I’m right up behind you kid. I skid out, swerving my way through pulsar & F-Z motorcycles with forty-five million people arranged on a single ride—the cops with white traffic gloves seem to have no objection. I’m so close I can taste you, so fucking close I can feel you breathing. I watch as the ex-pat and wealthy Nepali neighborhood of Pulchowk mutates into the chaos that defines the valley claustrophobia of Kathmandu. Street dogs chase after a pedestrian, tearing him to shreds after he trips on a flaming pile of street trash set a fire by a fat woman, wearing an unnecessarily exposing sarai. I think to myself, “jesus! Isn’t anyone going to help this guy?!” The dude was literally being eaten alive by these vicious creatures—barbarians! No one was coming to his aid.

My hands are on your shoulders. I then realized that I am actually one of those people who could potentially be lending a helping hand but just as soon as this realization hit me I saw a sign for golas (South Asian snow cone type desert) and forgot all about my humanitarian efforts. After consuming said desert, I tossed my empty cup dripping with the milky remains into the same flaming pile of excess human waste that the man had tripped over before the dogs got a hold of him. My nails digging into your precious pearl skin. There was a severed hand and what looked like an eyeball or something to accompany my delicious treat. I’m not quite sure what happened to the rest of the man’s body. Open that door and I promise I’m going to be wearing your flesh on my face. I hope he made it out...I get back on my bike and head for the bridge to cross the Bagmati river of shit and fumigating toxic waste.

“I have nothing to give; you have nothing to take. If you continue to sit there, you are wasting your time.“

I break open the locked door NO! HAAHA OH NO! YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE DONE IT with the violent thrust of chemical disintegration singed through with a crisp burn of a metallic torch, annihilating the rusted padlock…I deeply inhale and hold my breath as I take the first step into the icy slicked passage way. FRESH MEAT. The spins from the wallpaper pattern fragment my shelled cage across the wall and I float gently to a staircase where I begin my descent. My tongue is filling in your hole. I second guess myself and miss the first step and begin tumbling down a mirrored rabbit hole into a cataclysmic oblivion. I crash and face plant, rolling over onto a bed of nails that manages to only lightly penetrate my skin by a fraction of an inch. Aside from the prickling piercings, I manage to let go and unconsciously drift into an ocean of slow splashes, spilling this odd hairless creature onto an endless body of sand devoid of life. …My knife is in your spine. Smooth pebbles and a trembling crescendo of chimes fill the air. The water recedes and the sand filters through a pin-sized hole, as it slowly whirls through the vortex with everything else. You belong to me you’re MINE, you can never leave here… A dissolution of the scenery and I’m back where we started. Suddenly thick razor sharp suction cupped tentacles erupt through the floorboards, bursting through the creature’s chest, splattering blood and intestines across the rotted wood. Its balance is lost from stepping on our own slippery remains of the fumigating organs and it falls off the staircase completely, dropping into the pitch black abyss. We land with a thud, sending a mushroom cloud of dust into the air around it, me, and us. Ashes, Ashes, we all F

A

L

L

DOWN.

I slip my way through U.N. relief vehicles, emaciated dark skinned sweaty men in button down shirts that belong in the 1970s with way too short shorts carrying oogle eyed Japanese tourists with twenty thousand cameras along on a bicycle rickshaw painted with bizarre Hindu religious symbols and other oddities such as a spazzing goat vomiting flowers over dancing children…Oh No, Don’t make a sound! DON’t DO THAT OH NO DOES IT HURT!? I almost get plowed over by a turquoise camouflaged amphibious assault vehicle that aggressively roars off the road and flattens about fifteen shacks in the slums by the river while families run SCREAMING with condensed vibrations of terror that swallow like chunks of food you didn’t bother to chew properly. This won’t be over quick and I promise you will feel every fucking moment.

Protestors clash with the riot sqqquuuuaaaadddd. The institutionalized gangsters begin to blast the masses with teargas and rubber bullet bundles of love. Blood from the oppressed blackens across the surface, making the road double slick for my treaded tires. The teeth of the worms grit sharp while firecracker gunshots reflect off each other in a 360 degree spectacle of animalistic turmoil. You peel so smoothly. I spray and spread you before me. The city erupts in heated violence while the chemical waste in the bagmati is set a flame to milk the atmosphere of its greed and social disease. Bring you eternally to your knees. The military vehicles pour into the slums, followed by citizens of every caste to counter the political terrorism, armed with everything from crowbars to gurkha knives. I know you can’t hear me anymore but I’m inside you now. I change the song on my ipod because I don’t want to listen to Sepultura, a Brazilian metal band popular in the 80s and 90s. Sepultura, to me, can be categorized as having a distinctive thrash metal sound. This sounds amazing at first—the guitar riffs kick your adrenaline in, providing a releasing surge of aggression but my issue with this genre of metal (pantera, slayer, sepultura, and so on) is that the riff triggers an emotional response in the listener but it rarely takes you anywhere beyond that first push of the button. The vocals consist of a single emotional tone that flatlines after sometime and you really can only listen to a few songs until you notice that the feeling lose momentum and it just becomes a “cool” sound rather than a deep personal connection to the music and artists. Now, Slipknot, who is often inappropriately labeled as “nu-metal” offers a more experimental approach to metal, incorporating a turn table DJ, a sampler, and three percussionists to establish a more creative depth and layered sound to their music. Most importantly, the lead singer is capable of producing perhaps some of the most melodic vocals you will hear in any genre (see Stone Sour’s “through the Glass” for an example of his range when compared to his work in Slipknot). What distinguishes Slipknot from other metal groups are perhaps the emotional peaks and valleys the music takes the listener through. If you pay attention closely, you will find that nearly every song operates like a wavical chart with abrupt but perfectly timed smooth shifts in emotional tones that send you on a roller coaster of rage, hate, love, struggle, perseverance, depression, loss, regret, salvation, and nearly every other element that defines the human condition. My favorite example of this radical shift is perhaps in the middle chorus of the song “No Life” off their debut self-titled album in 1999. However, people often discredit Slipknot with a superficial glance due to their appearance consisting of grotesque horror moviesque masks, which make them appear as an immature “shock rock” type group. Personally, I believe the depth of their sound credits a second listen, whether you are a self-proclaimed metal head or not. I recommend the bonus track “Child of Burning of Time” off their 2009 album, “All Hope is Gone” for those interested in a lighter sound and “Diluted” off the self-titled album for those looking for a track to rage to. In recent news, you will see that Corey Taylor, the groups lead singer, was invited to speak to graduates at Oxford University in England.

“The one thing you have to do is get up and go. I have nothing to give. There's nothing to be given.”

The crowd battling with the riot gear robots seems to have garnered momentum until someone with a flaming torch accidently ignites his frizzly hair and those around are forced to put out the screaming civilian’s charring scalp. Your skin is tight around my body and stretches very poorly. It excites me. The policia take advantage of the surgeless crowd’s distracted energy and charge forth as a single organism, unleashing a hailstorm of black nightsticks. Cracks, brick shots, splats, bracks and shatters overwhelm the audio field…I’m all out words from here on out….Glue heads take cover as the flames from the river snake onto the shore line and send a small hut only ten meters away from my backside erupting into a fiery explosive ball that illuminates the darkening sky with a smooth ferocity. You are…my first…but you will not be my last…once is not enough. I need to feed. The shrapnel from what I assume must have been an unstable slum meth lab or something blasts me in the back of the ribcage and along the side of my face, sending a shockwave that jolts me off my bike and ejecting me head first into thick chunky gravel. Slicing off like the scabs from a crusted chemical burn. Cars ram into each other, windows blow out, little kids scream, and gravity loses meaning, as we all float in suspended animation before time recovers from the skipped beat and drops us to the floor like twenty three tons of lifeless shit. We fill our mouth with mud, we love the taste. I start pulling thick metallic pieces out of my leg, squirting a variety of human fluid about two feet into the air as if I hit the pulmonary artery or something. I drag myself over the remains of the shattered commercial infrastructure while the venomous rage of a city on fire hits the final threshold, signaling the point of no return we all knew was coming. We are now one and we will never be alone. We will never feel incomplete again… You know, in the Middle Ages, if you were “possessed” they used to take a corkscrew and rip open the top of your skull to release the “demons”. The patient usually died. I think now they just give you Ritalin or a straight jacket if you don’t like playing house, doctor, teacher/student, cop/citizen games...Re-wire my circuit board the thing is fucking broken. I can’t put the pieces back together and the whole thing is a clever but sick joke I’m playing on myself.

“I have nothing to give; you have nothing to take. If you continue to sit there, you are wasting your time.“

Arise. Flickers of lights and exploding flashes of magnesium damage the inner flesh of my retinas. Sight without eyes, as nothing more is required to exist here. I can smell the flesh of this cold pale body encapsulating me while it rots limply on the damp moldy floor. A broken remnant of the phoenix’s past. I crawl out from inside the corpse, bursting through the stomach, deeply slicing my skin on the broken serrated rib cage of the lifeless tomb. Unraveling within it. My left eyelid gets caught on a fragmented rib, ripping a quarter section of my face off down to the chin, permanently exposing my upper teeth in a gnarled harlequin smile. I would scream if I had a voice but only piercing silence follows an inner deformation of schizophrenic madness. A ringing rises through my ears and rollercoaster falls while my eyes stretch past their elastic capacity, stretching my optic fibers beyond their breaking point. A loud snap echoes through the darkness. I succumb to the wrath of my feelings but never once to regret. The air is steamy, dark, and ugly and I can’t sense a thing, crawling hands and knees across broken glass while the wounded slits grow deeper, the snot dangles longer, and I choke on my own vomit. Sticky, sticky, sticky—my esophagus begins to putrefy into interactive anger for the blinded cogs of internal ignorance.

“Everybody hates me now, so fuck it

Blood's on my face and my hands, and I don't know why

I'm not afraid to CRY

BUT THAT’S NONE OF YOUR BUISNESS

Whose life is it? Get it? See it? Feel it? Eat it?

Spin it around so I can SPIT in its face

I wanna leave without a trace

Cause I don't wanna DIE in this place”

…The fire ball from the riot is an exit wound on the heart of the political clash. Applause, pause, and rewind for a crippling self-reflection, just take in the awe of self-destruction, as we mindless parade our wounded heroes around, showering them with ribbons before sending them back to the clusterbombs. Cackling skeletons in stars in strips, burning down Hollywood Boulevard on Christmas Eve or July 4th. Turn down rodeo and pull the trigger double time on Santa Clause himself. Lay waste to the motherfucker. Turns out it was just some poor guy in a suit, who would’ve guessed? Reap it. This irrelevant to what I was writing about before. Maybe take this out or leave it in?…proof reading is conditioned bullshit subjected by the higher authorities to control, manipulate, and plot against you…trust no one… The tactical police hoses have been turned from the hordes of protestors onto the contagious American Eagle shopping mall, which has been set a blaze. No more white skinned models advertising to impoverished emaciated brown people. The monstrosity of eighty tons of steel and thick glass appropriately looms over the sheet metal slum prisons that house fifteen people in a three by three shacks. I cannot separate myself from you despite your rot, you wear so well & I feel too soft inside your warmth. These things make sand castles seem like permanent settlements. (fuck) The police seem to have taken complete control of the situation since people are more occupied with dragging the wounded and lifeless away from the meth lab hole that silently resembles a nuclear fallout...I pass an abandoned newspaper stand selling Bollywood hotsheets, presenting celebrity break ups and detailing the drama of various actors and actresses lives. I think the magazines and newspapers that detail celebrity break ups are an important pillar to the foundation of human civilization. I think they appear superficial on the surface but when I THINK you look deeper you uncover a stunning portrayal of human SHIT psychology WHO FUCKING CARES?! Why are you reading this shit not that shit, shit? illuminating how material success, world wide recognition, and a life of I’m AUBOT TO SANP YOU MTOHER FKUECR unchained hedonism only leads to a path of crumbling psychohumanistic defeat, often perpetuating a hypothetical post-modern illusion utilizing statements with overwhelmingly and I’m ABOUT TO SLIT YOUR FUCKING THROAT WITH THIS FUCKING KNIFe unnecessarily large LOOK AT ME words leading to a transcendental philosophical understanding of the matter which fails to I MATTER recapitulate itself in some deeper SO I CAN LOOK GOOD worldwide recognition that running YOU FUCKING SUCK on a track lets people get somewhere and creating a gap in the mind body relationship and at what point does this whole thing just I AM SPEACIAL MORE THAN YOU become an entire waste of time and you realize that you are understadinglyinging a bunch of bullshit for the sake of entertainment, which you try to justify by running in place sanjn not efsd able to sdjf thinks bout sjdxfj I said it makes sense to follow the linesd;j asd and I canft seme to mkep or keep a atisht cefa…Its just colorful or it sounds catchy but its about as meaningful as the relationship between your hand and your asshole. I’m exposed and its very clear to me the window is now closing on this failed experiment…thank fucking god and please fucking kill me just please fucking kill me pleasue fucking kill me I don’t want to do this anymore every fucking face stuck in them just fucking kill me. Exscuse me I’m trying to talk here, would you mind not interrupting? Thank you…anyways, as I was saying, celebrity magazines become some sort of an excuse for middle class FUCKCK DSFVD YOUR OPINON ON THE MATTER. WHO FUCKING cares about running bullshit intellectual circles around your head without ever arriving a single fucking useful point? Overanalysis to avoid facing yourself and admitting you have a fucking problem you can’t see truth and goddamit im going to end you.

“People ask me "Why the hell are you talking always? When I say I can't help anyone, [they ask me] why the hell are you here?,

I blindly crawl, slipping and falling, puking, and bleeding. I curl into a trembling ball of tense contortion, crushed by uncontrollable thoughts I can’t reveal to my inner purity I've locked away and subjected to torture. There are no lights here but they go off anyway, the camera fades, the piano softly weeps in, and the credits roll just as they’re supposed to. But then something happens not planned in the script. The screen stutters and the plastic film layer on the projector catches fire and begins to melt due to the growing heat from the center of my forehead. The stage falls apart and I’m awake, sucked out of my skull, but very much awake. The lights that don’t exist turn back on, illuminating a stonewall climb morphed out of the formerly wooden staircase that my scorched eyes perceive with perfect clarity. I scratch and claw my way to the surface; breaking fingernails clean off on the stone surface, wearing the tips down to the bone. The slight fumbling madness of inner filth fails to recapitulate itself in the never sealed eyes of eternal redemption plastered across a deceptive symbol of human perseverance. Spare me; center it in my fucking chest cavity and drill through my teeth for no reason other than to seethe in that sickening grind. It’s the voice in your nightmares coming through, reminding you and the world that you will always be nothing and no one. You aren’t going to make it and everyone is going to be there to watch you fail and die without empathy.

“The one thing you have to do is get up and go. I have nothing to give. There's nothing to be given.”

Deep days with slow soft spoken people remind me there is an unfolding unity expressing itself within and without this mind…I’m (SIC) inside but the figures chained against the wall reveal to me that there is a emotional continuity here that Get the fuck away from me transcends the need to splatter mosquitoes against a politically mapped out wall. I’m sitting here waiting for you to cross that threshold to reveal to me the contents of your perspective, dying to listen when no one else will, aware of the depth, admitting it, when no one else will, asking for help, surrendering when no one else will. Waving a white flag in a darkened prison cell. The needle muffles my voice and I succumb to my neurotic scalpel…Smells like the fuck standing in front of me uniting the noose from the climbing rope, waiting to be strung up by it on a rainy day floating in steam when no one can see me sneak my way to the top of the rock and finish him off once and for all. My heart is seething and the veins are pulsating, please just get away from me. Stay the fuck away. Stay the fuck away. Stay the fuck away. LiBeRaTe! lIbErAtE my psychosis I don’t want this anymore. I’m all above it now…Relax. Its going to be okay, see, I told you…No worries, deep down, really deep down, everyone is a good person. Compassion is our true nature. I believe that in order to find peace we must start with ourselves…Be the change you wish to see in the world…Even if I burn away…I won’t take you with me…

I walk my bicycle away from the brutality of the Himalayan apes, despite almost being sucked out to sea by a riptide of rebellious vibrations. But finding my way back through this mayhem leads me to believe I may never return home again…I will always be home inside you…You belong to me..i will tear you apart, I can recombine you…I continue along my way into Thamel, passing children below the age of six eating out garbage piles across the street from car dealerships and other symbols of…industrial achievement. Use the word “vibrations” here for some reason…

23 somethings later I’ve finally breached the surface, exhaling that first smoky plastic breath of caustic erosion that led me down there to begin with. I hear a growl that vibrates the cave around me. A black snapping tentacle gets jammed in the self-sealing door behind me as it locks shut. The tentacle snaps off and crumbles into sparkling dust. The door violently rattles behind and it sounds like a herd of stampeding elephants are descending down the stone staircase. Something is still down there…

“I do not give a damn for you; I know you are doomed. If you think something is going to happen, and sit here day after day, week after week, year after year, waiting till kingdom come, even then no kingdom will come. Go where you will, and do what you want! I tell you very clearly, loud and clear, in clear, unmistakable language, that there is nothing to be communicated now or at any time.”

I regain my vision and regrow my fingertips, stepping into the scene of—whatever, does it matter at this point? People unconsciously bounce their demented, fear panicked vibrations off my scars while the hypperreal model of simulacra spits liquor in the face of clarity. Abstract descriptions don’t really do this justice but I refuse to change, watching bullshit flutter in a full frontal spectacle. Bagpipes ring out in the distance accompanied by four stringed distortion and I just want this to stop. I come across an old friend and its as if our faces are both south ends of magnets, repelling off one another with excruciating force. We both speak out of confusion, paranoia, and something other—whatever—but all I hear is my own-echoed inaudible reflection. I can’t speak for my friend but its clear to me now that everything ends.

“Fix my problems with the blade.

While my eyes turn from blue to gray.

God, the worst thing happened to me today.

But I guess I don't care anymore

GAHHH”

I arrive home and the magnetization effects continues to linger, creating a wall between even my family and I. Everyone’s voice is muffled by the overwhelming silence and I can’t read lips. I also am oblivious to whether or not they are feeling this same effect but disillusionment with human interaction seems to be slowly flooding my pores and there doesn’t appear to be a way out of this. I’m crushed by my own force each time I reach out. My family retreats to the screen, realizing I’m lost in my own place. I start crying to myself but it only makes me feel worse. A declaration of dissonance fills my headspace and I’m lost as the blood fills my eye sockets, blinding me from what I once knew. I begin to cross the river to where I will remain for some portion of eternity.

“Everything is okay with me. If you have a million dollars and eight girl friends, that's okay with me. If you are lonely and disagreeable and penniless and dying of cancer, that also is okay with me. I am perfectly happy with everything as it is. I am happy with misery, poverty and death; I am also happy with wealth and psychological fulfillment.”

I sit down in a restaurant to eat alone and everyone keeps staring at me. I’m feeling my skin boil as my brain melts. Hives grow from my body and I begin to choke on my tongue. The people around me pull their half-smiles back and scrunch their eyes, as if I’m some sort of attention whore biding for their approval and to them “its just—uh—pathetic. ” Snap your head back—vibrations. Licking my neurosis. They say this in front of my face and now I can’t tell how much of this is my own paranoid delusion and how much is honesty leaking from the unconscious. Oil flows through my jugular, polluting the physical mechanics of this body. Everything creaks and cracks. I ram my thumbs into my shut eyelids, begging my mind to hold on at least until I can get outside. I go to stand up but I’ve already lost control. This cage is trying to weld itself shut but I pulled the plug and now I have no ground, the world spins around, falling apart, while statues turn to life and pluck citizens off the street enlisting them into political retaliation against those who retaliated because of retaliation and…uh…we don’t like them fuckers thar so recycle the cycle of cyclical perpetuation …

“I am really surprised -- in spite of that assertive statement, you hang on here. It is your funeral. You are chasing something which does not exist. There is nothing to be transformed, nothing to be changed, nothing to be understood . So long as you want to be like me, you will remain what you are, asking the same questions. You will get the same answer -- the one answer for all questions is "Stop asking questions!"

Everyone in the table in front of me is humiliating me in front of my face using veiled language and sick exclusive snickers pushed towards my direction. Or am I imagining this? !!!Psychosis!!! or I’m reading minds and I honestly can’t tell the difference, HONESTLY I CAN’T. DO I SOUND LIKE SOMEONE WHO VIELS THE TRUTH? I start to analysis my childhood and the events leading up to this moment, unable to find what went wrong, clutching and releasing every Freudian theory to explain why I’ve been absorbed into this black hole. Everything is subliminal and the divinity breaking through feels like hell as I bleed to death from the snake end of a rope combined with the cultural poison I can’t stop huffing. The venom spills all over my shirt. My legs are lead and my breath becomes stuffed suffocation. I’m dying here and it feels fucking horrible. Its time to panic but I’m already under attack. I begin to shed weight like clothing, watching as wet slobs (like your lips smacking together) of fat and muscle rot off my body and I’m filled to the eyelids with embalming fluid..drip…drip…drip...An explosion of prickling tension violates my internal system, throwing my awareness into the ceiling and pulling me further away from who I am. It screeches and claws its way beyond my forehead, as I feel insects gnaw under my skull, chewing away at the pus filled grey matter. I’m pulling back, not wanting to share where I have been. I begin to scratch apart my skin, cringing as my nails scrap against exposed bone but the pain only makes me dig into my head deeper. I become numbed, cold, and separated from everything around me. I turn blue and pale as my limbs succumb to frost bite, leaving me to decompose on the stone tile floor. I press my face into the mold and a stinging poison begins to burn holes in my teeth and tongue. Chunks of my mouth come apart and melt off onto the floor, followed slowly by my tongu...I’m trying to stay calm… My veins bulge and erupt beyond, bursting through my skin. My breath shoots through the roof and my heart begins to throb past the threshold and it threatens to snap straight off the arteries. My bones crumble under the pressure of the pumping blood and I feel the muscles stretch beyond the breaking point, ricocheting with a violent snap that sends my physical support structure to the floor. I’m completely paralyzed, as my spinal cord has dislodged itself. My vision is blurred. Life has become a horrific haze of haunting faces spitting in the desolate remains that fill my grave. A rift in space time breaks through and I sink into the floor where I drown and gurgle off my own saliva, while the world watches and the gap widens between you and I. It fucking rips a hole through my neck and my clarity falls apart quicker than whatever I can say as I try to give words to this unconscious evil that bleeds inside me and I’m sick of moving through this hell I have created for myself, lost in some sort of impenetrable shell of hatred while I live in fear of opening up to those who deserve trust. Paranoia remains locked in the crease, staring me down while I break my finger nails off in my stained teeth. The insects lay eggs under my skin, which hatch in an frenzied explosion, sending thousands of jittery little sharp jawed critters all though and over my body, chewing their way through the remainder of my flesh, gnawing my soft flabby body down to the bones…

“Nobody Stop me

I wanna slit your throat and fuck the wound

Push my face in and feel the swoon

Dig Inside, find a little bit of me

The line gets crossed when you don’t come clean…

Hate ain’t enough to describe me

Somewhere between screaming and crying…”

Its funny because you tell me you understand, but do you really, like really? Because I don’t think you’re really getting the picture here and I’m calling your superficially constructed sincerity into question because it would require you to really fucking lose control if you could understand and I just don’t see how or why anything like this or that could be possible for the plasticity in that corner of the room. Reaching out to people I ignorantly decided to trust, watching my amnesty in turn stab me in the back. !!!Neurosis!!!...is fun! Will you people just get the fuck away from me. I don’t want to be near you or smell your shit and deal with your enjoyment. I’d rather seethe in misery and rot than be free and clear…sexually transmitted information…

The egomaniacal wrath of my past, hating and hurting the ones I loved most, boomeranging right back into my throat. I absorb the shockwave and everything crushes and cans into itself for me to swallow in a nice tasty implosion of rage—a big fucking pill with no water while hordes of strangers take turns stuffing my head under a plastic bag, sealing it tight just to make sure I don’t get out too easily. I go to an anonymous room of recognizable strangers, sharing fucked up shit across a round table, only I’m thirty years younger than everyone in our circle of desperate trust, how the fuck did I wind up here? This woman’s father blew a hole through his head with a .12 gauge and now her son is driving down a spiral straight through an iron maiden—in between she and her husband salvaged themselves. This other woman, first time here, breaks into tears and asks us if anyone else feels this way…silent nods and bitter vibrations of the suck tear you down. This other kid tells us how she runs, hides, and prays for the lashing to stop, finding crystallized shit under the mattress. He’s telling us the scene had changed, something about probation while this other dude is shaking, asking why the panic attacks won’t stop and how he can no longer get a benzo script to quell the clenching. Old man over here was just released from the mental institution—needed something to do I guess in between the vocal hallucinatory drama.

Eggshells! Eggshells! Eggshells! Shattering beneath my feet and I’ll set you off like burning cigarette ash in a powder keg. Sensitivity and the pressure is building to a piercing volatility. Babbling shit just to avoid saying what we feel inside. Covering my masks with more self-inflicted violence than you can fathom. I can’t separate myself from what I’ve done and now it just sticks like…uh…like..yeah…just like that…it sticks like that. I kept it hidden but now I’m letting you know. Please shut up. HAHAHAHAHAH. If we were to go any faster this would shatter your teeth like glass—maybe stained glass, the one where Jesus is walking with the cross and the bleeding crown of thorns. Pleasant stuff.

The feelings rise up inside pulling me apart and dissecting organs, peeling the skin back starting from the chest without anesthesia. I’m moaning in my bed just wanting to disappear off this earth off and away from this curse. I hear the voices coming from the room next door and I’m convinced they are watching me through the tiny wooden slit that separates my space from theirs. I can tell they are just haunting and mocking me for the sake of their own amusements, sending me into a deeper spiral for masochistic pleasure. I try and hide under my covers but I realize its not use as they are able to read my thoughts. I think empty threats to scare them away and they only react with laughter, humiliating me deeper. JERRY! I attempt to let go and be cool and I’m only met with more of the same shit as they see through the façade. I finally walk outside, burying my trembling features, eyes pulled in deep, visibly strung out and shaken…There is no one outside. I knock on the room next door, the door pops open and there is no one inside. I go back inside to my own room, crawl into bed, pull up the covers and everyone starts laughing at me again…Two days or two nights later, I don’t know which one, things are too distorted at this point, I ignite my inner scalp and spend four hours monitoring an argument between several different personalities that are biding for control over my facial features and emotional states. I do this by rotating mirrors; each reflection holds a different person or part of one at least. I just sort of watch this and try to figure out which one is me and who is who in this demented carousel circus of mental sadism I’ve voluntarily chose to unleash upon myself. Devils prodding through my skull, demons holding me on the rack, scarping my bones with razor blades and blah blah blah…

Talk to me about this Jerry. You can trust me. I am here to help.

Yeah right, just like the friendly fucking neighborhood police officer.

“The one thing you have to do is get up and go. I have nothing to give. There's nothing to be given.”

I see this man while riding my bike down the heart of Kathmandu near Ratna park. He has elephantitis on his left leg. I couldn’t get that good of a glance because the city street was really busy and I didn’t want to get into an accident since people don’t really pay attention all that much here to safety precautions. Your Blood on my fist. The man’s leg was easily three feet in diameter and he was sitting on a flattened cardboard box begging for people to place change into his tin jar. His clothes were rotted and I can’t imagine he has anyway of walking or living much longer. There is another man another hundred yards down the road with leprosy whose legs are being visibly eaten away. Hi, Jerry. How are you? That gun is looking awfully nice, yah? I feel sort of sick. I keep riding, people are walking by, some give money, some just walk, cars keep driving and life happens as it does. Another hundred yards a family, another twenty, an old man on the verge of death, twenty feet to my left there is another slum and this sort of keeps going on like a cyclical revolver, firing a round off into space with another beggar to take the former one’s place…There is this park in Boudha tucked behind some monasteries that I would walk through on my way to school. Its covered in trash and the smell makes me want to vomit or shit on a hostel floor in Thamel. There are a couple of drug addicts who live there and always seem to be in some other place, mentally. They usually lie half naked strung out in the sun waiting for something or someone, I don’t know….Toothless grins, glazed eyes, rising hands to the great red orb above…Nothing happens…I have become you and you me—our purpose is complete, our meaning validated in blood. Swirling colors attempting to free their souls from the lost depths of humanities fleeting moment…

…So I guess I saw all that and decided to tell you about it so you can create this image of what my life is like and think to yourself, jee whizz I’m sure glad to be living here and not there or maybe vice versa if your like that or maybe nothing goes through your head and if that’s the case consider yourself lucky as my fictitious descriptive distortions may as well be from that of another dimension of time and space. Do I seem like a person you should listen to, let alone trust? Maybe your answer is, yes. I know that’s what I would say but that doesn’t count because I know me and whether or not I’m trustworthy, but you don’t know all that and its best to be skeptical about these things because there are a lot of fucking weirdos out there and its important we judge and separate and deny and push away and condemn and despise and illegalize and criminalize and fragment and repulse and alienate and isolate and rip away and close off and institutionalize and deem insane and retaliate against and ignore and hide and conceal and mock and humiliate and call crazy and ignore and arrest and execute and crucify and rape and murder and torture and violate and incriminate and accuse and bully and fight and despise and hate and one up and trash and talk shit about and batter and abuse and manipulate and deceive and lie to and punish and discipline (other way around) and brainwash and chain and repress and oppress and mutilate in order to protect ourselves…Hey man, no problem, its all in the family anyway…

…After all, those who we don’t understand or don’t immediately fit our narrow linear perception of reality—I mean, if the way we conceptualize the nature of existence, self, god, ego, identity, sexual orientation, race, nationality, ethnicity, rationalization, pain, pleasure, and purpose aren’t re-aligned in a manner which immediately conforms to our conditioned expectations said people could be emotionally or personally upsetting to our fragile insecure shell. The essence of their existence is flaw but I’m just fucking perfect and the message of the day is those who live in glass houses should not throw stones, unless you have the biggest fucking stone around and if you don’t, do whatever you can to find it. Kill every single one your neighbors you love so fucking much to find it. Scratch and claw your way to the top and make sure everyone around you ends up fucking dead and the kingdom of heaven will be the foundation of a thousand conquered corpses who just sucked so much compared to you.

“I have nothing to give; you have nothing to take. If you continue to sit there, you are wasting your time.“

Ripping the layers off an onion may cause you to cringe and sob but never loose sight that it has no core—it’s a hollow dig, leading you right back to the surface of a bullshit reality where robotics rule and the artificial intelligence can’t seem to understand why the nuts and bolts have shifted after a buzz saw to the cranium. Just burn me to the ground as I never existed anyway and this hole in my chest refuses to stop bleeding. I stagger and stumble regardless, realizing that to end it here wouldn’t be wrathful enough. A vendetta has been building up in the buried coils of my spinal fluid. A flood is coming despite this being entirely my own fault…

I’ve arrived in Thamel. I walk into a hole in the wall restaurant with a bunch of TVs replaying the riot scene I just survived but someone changes the channel to some update about the Royal Wedding 6,000 miles away. I’m finished.

Filtered rage expressing itself through deep-seated paranoia and a stuttering weakness causes a black and white kaleidoscopic vision to overwhelm my experience, similar to the patterns you get when you dig your fingers into your eyes and hold them there for around ten seconds. Smells like burning plastic to me. Sit down on the couch and enjoy your stay in Alien Dreamtime good sir.

Question: If you were to sum up your teaching in one phrase, what would it be?

Answer: “The phrase would be "I cannot help you………What makes you unhappy is the search for a thing that does not exist. Happiness does not exist at all. Similarly, there is no such thing as enlightenment. You may say that every teacher and all the saints and saviors of mankind have been asserting for centuries upon centuries that there is enlightenment and that they are enlightened. Throw them all in one bunch into the river! I don't care. To realize that there is no enlightenment at all is enlightenment.”

So much of life is just filled up with boring mundane trivial activity that requires the intellect of a vegetable to achieve. When I look back at the moments where I felt the mystery of life had been restored, it was always whenever I managed to break the routine, the structure, and the banality of conditioned habit. This catharsis always felt like a miniature (sometimes major) re-birth or at the very least—a death of the internal rot that I felt had been consuming my state of mind. However, after travelling for nearly an entire year, I see there is something deeper here than needs to be addressed. It is an internal, psychological liberation that I am after and it is undoubtedly irrespective to my external situation. However, the two seem to link one another up (i.e. you leave the room and something mentally changes)…However, this is neither sustainable nor leading me to a deeper human release into the beauty and magic of life that I’ve felt so many times before. Granted, everything changes everything but to expect travel and revolting against the routine/habit to permanently liberate you is naïve. It seems like the only way out is through, meaning to just endure and bare the pain and rot of structured draining existence is the way to burn through the mental clogs into sublime bliss. Acceptance of the moment is key.

I got a large tattoo on my ribcage the other day and it hurt like fucking hell, like getting a cigarette burn for three hours straight in the same place—literally, as the ribcage is an extremely sensitive area. The skull may be the only worse place, according to my tattoo artist. Anyway, the pain was unbearable. However, towards the end after around three hours, something happened. I just managed to let go of my psychological turmoil over the pain and just allow it to be there. I don’t know how I did it and I’m not sure “I” really did anything, it just happened. The pain remained there but it just didn’t really matter. It was the same pain but my mind wasn’t reacting to it anymore and that was the true liberation—not the ending of the physical sensation—just the acceptance of what is. This just led me to think about how so much of life is just accepting what is and realizing that it is through that acceptance we find liberation, which is all anyone, in my opinion at least, truly wants. Yeah, you might want the car, the girl, your family, food or whatever but the reason you want those things is because they provide the release from aversion of negativity (getting what you don’t want) or the end to the craving caused by desire (not getting what you want)—both of which are states of liberation—happiness, fulfillment, and release. Its that balance and feeling of totality—that’s the meaning of life—to experience that is truth. However, the thing is you can’t do anything to get it or remove something to uncover it. You just have to accept everything, say yes to everything from the utter depth of your core. Because by wanting or not wanting you only throw yourself more off balance…Even when the pain is there its not the pain that hurts, it’s the lack of acceptance that hurts. When you learn to accept the pain, it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t feel good, its just there like some object in the room. Its just there. Suffering is. You are. Life is. I am. You can’t go much further into detail. In fact, a lot of people might suggest you already went past the threshold there…

A swoon follows and I collapse. I am sorry I can no longer stay with you…you are too sticky…I need…another…I must feed on the spawn…there’s one now…soft and supple, smiling and bright…Time is held in abeyance, the globe revolves two times the normal speed, the page turns and no one seems to care or notice. Are you ready for round 2??!! Please don’t keep me out in the cold, please let me into your home…I am so cold and lonely… The game moves right along as planned, the dominoes keeping falling, and I bet you have no clue which one I am…talking to you in my sweet innocent, delicately dressed up style, choosing not to show my true colors to protect you just for that perfect moment when you turn your back on me, as you just did now…oh exscuse me sir, I hate to bother you but please won’t you let me step into your office?

I wake up on the floor covered in sweat and feeling as if my physical body has been torn to pieces. I don’t know where I’ve been or how I got here. All I know is nothing makes any sense. There is only one solution. I gather up all of my valuable possessions, a few pair of clothes, and a few random assortments I could have use for on the open road and head out the door. Those around me dazzled by the spectacle of television—too distracted or too uncomfortable to ask me what the hell I could be doing. I leave the house, never once looking back. My sunken, tear stained eyes, strained from what must have been several hours of pure chaos and confusion appear as bright warning signs to any passerby on the street—stay away. A voice in the back of my head tells me to push on despite the fear gnawing against me. It then calls out to me, telling me to enter that one doorway I’ve seen but never approached before. I reach the door and just as I’m about to break the padlock this disturbing feeling as if I’ve been here before and I’m making a big fucking mistake runs up my spine…

“I fail to defend myself

A weakness of innocent retaliation

And crippled by the lies that I tell

I broke from my cell and now I just quiver and shake on the cold broken floor

Creating this psychotic description of hell and fucking lyrical remorse asking

Where will I go

Who will I be

When will this blindness

Allow me to see

I can’t keep fighting these nightmares

Keep shaking this fright

I got nothing and no one while it just eats me alive

Taking part in a crucifixion straight from the inside

The question burns right through me…

…Begging and pleading always asking me why

I sink to the ground, burn and flatline away

While the voices in my head repeat the same fucking truth of what more can I say?

I didn’t chose this and now my mind is closed, cold and stiff

Nowhere to go

Nothing to be

And now I’m just deaf

While these visions haunt and torment me

Mocking all that I know and everyone I can’t be

I escape to the past as you just laugh in my face

Rot in your reflection

Life in dissection

And I can’t seem to break past this illusionary infection

This sickness breeds straight from the start and the answers are clear

I can’t feel a thing

I can’t tell shit apart

I can’t breath the open air

I can’t reveal my heart

What the fuck happened and the questions remains

Where will I go

Who will I be

When will this hatred exit

And allow me to see

A clarity

A moments rest

A world bred for those put together

As I rip this anger right off of my chest

Enter a well deserved peace

Ending this hell on Earth

A release from this endless curse of psychotic re-birth”

Ending Lyrics and Story By Jerry Walsh