Population Of

Dominic would show them all. That stupid "Welcome to Bessemer" sign was his. It was the pride of the whole damn town. No other target would do.

It was the dead of night, and Dominic rode his bike to the town line. He briefly considered spray painting something vulgar over the bent placard proudly proclaiming "1967 Pennsylvania State Basketball Champions", but decided against it. This was his statement. He wanted to show everybody how teeth-gratingly boring he found this place.

Drawing in his breath, he raised his arm and poised the nozzle. With two exaggerated swipes of his arms, Dominic crossed out the number beneath "Population of:" and beside it painted a dripping number "1". Himself.

"That was easy," he muttered to himself, glancing over his shoulder. He expected guard dogs and an escape scene from an action movie, complete with explosions. When nothing broke the silence, he hopped on his bike and rode home. He slept easy that night, reassured by the satisfaction of a job well done.

The next morning, Dominic rose with his alarm, excited to hear the gossip that was surely already starting to stir. Pulling on some clothes, he took the steps two at a time down to the kitchen. 

"Hey, Mom! I -- "

His voice bounced off the empty chairs and slammed against his chocleas. 

"Mom? …Mom, where are you? Dad? Thea? Where are you guys? Where's breakfast?"

Dominic searched the length of the downstairs, peeked into the basement, and rounded the stairs for an investigation of the upper floor. Nobody was home. He checked his watch to make sure the time was correct. It wasn't normal for his family to not see each other before they started their day, but maybe they each had to get an early start. Shrugging, he gathered up his things and left for school.

As he rode his bike down the sidewalk, something started to gnaw at him. At first, he couldn't place it, but it eventually dawned on him: The silence was overwhelming. But why was it so quiet? There were no cars. Where were they? Speaking of, were his parents cars still at home? He hadn't bothered to check the garage. 

When he made it to school, Dominic was dismayed to discover that nobody was hanging around outside before the bell. He checked his watch again to make sure he wasn't late. 

"Everybody's probably in mourning over that goddamn sign," he scoffed. 

Dominic walked to the doors and pushed, but they were locked. Figuring there was a gas leak, generator failure, or a cow terrorizing the building (it had happened once before, back in 1986), he jumped up in the air, sang a few lines from an oft-quoted Pink Floyd song, and began the ride back home.

But the uneasiness followed him. Unable to shake it off, he decided to drop in at his friend Matt's house. Dominic strode to the door and rang the bell. Matt was not home. He decided to try Butterly next -- good old Butterly. With the goofy grin and the busted treadmill. But like Matt, nobody answered at Butterly's house.

"What the fuck?" Dominic asked. "It's like everybody's dead." It dawned on him that it was like everyone was dead. He tried Butterly's neighbors, but every doorbell had the same effect: Stony, uncomfortable silence.

"This isn't funny," Dominic growled as he punched the fifth door. By the tenth, he was kicking them. Around nine o'clock, he was sobbing uncontrollably.

Dominic didn't know what to do. It was like the whole town had picked up and moved away during the night. 

At dusk, he biked out to the town sign to gaze upon his work.

"I bet they have a new damn sign," he frowned.

Their Soft Bones

I wrote another Creepypasta. All off the top of my head, but that's pretty much the nature of Creepypasta.

The movies never make this clear, and I curse them for it: When you shoot yourself in the head, you don't always die instantly. Half of your had caved in, jaw swinging on its hinges, and sinuses bubbling with blood. I'm on my side, and with my remaining functional ear, I can hear their soft feet sliding across the wooden floor. God help me. If the movies hadn't lied, if I had gone instantly, they wouldn't have been able to get me. 

And, more importantly, they won't come after her.

I was born in this house, and since I can remember, I've wanted nothing more than to see it burn to the ground. The gasoline has been spread. I hope Hollywood hasn't spread any more falsehoods. It's my last chance. If it goes, they go with it. I can only hope.

I knew these woods whispered before I was old enough to speak back to them. It was as if the forest itself was a living entity, fueled by a cancer growing along its spine, black and running parallel with its neurons. Sometimes I would search under the rocks or in rotting logs for the source, but in the end, I would always come up empty.

As I grew older, my search became more obsessive; mainly, any reason to get out of the house was a good one. It was just me and my mom, and as the years went by, she grew more and more erratic. At one time, she would take me into her arms and tell me stories of my grandfather, but eventually she became inconsolable at the mention of his name. She got into drugs, and I didn't recognize her as my mother anymore.

We lived in a small cabin in the woods, at the end of a long road. I was told that the house had existed as long as my family had. It even had an old outhouse, but that had been converted into a shed years ago. Generations of my family had been born there, and I was convinced that they were all still stuck in the walls, nestled into the knots and swirls of the wood.

I wondered if the oppressive sickness that hung in the air was making my mother crazy. I could feel it in my bones, too, like the moss clinging to the rocks. 

Like the moss clinging to the rocks.

There was something curious about the moss that grew on the cabin. The way it snaked inside and covered the walls and floor, how no corner was safe from its reach; the way it would lightly pulsate after a thunderstorm with a hum like a wasps' nest; the opaline colour of it, all green and white and gray at once. The drugs made my mother hallucinate the moss into talking, and some nights, I could swear I heard it, too.

One night, she overdosed. It was inevitable. As she lay on the floor, I telephoned for help. She was gasping for breath and unconscious, and I knew that she didn't have much time left. 

That's when it happened: With a groan, the walls came alive. Out of the moss, their figures formed: Eyeless, gaping, abhorrent, and wholly silent. On those vile legs they slid across the floor to her and began to peel off her flesh with surprising speed. They gouged out her eyes. Blood painted the floor. When they pulled out her bones, I was finally shaken out of my deep shock, and I began to scream.

Her bones were covered with moss and animate. They left through the door.

Emergency services arrived at some point later, but I was hysterical. I don't know what they thought. I was placed into foster care until I was eighteen. I did some drugs and got a girl knocked up. That's how I ended up with my daughter, and that made me turn my life around. She deserved better than what my mother had given me. She needed a proper home. That's why I tried to forget about what had happened all those years ago and moved back into my old home. Besides, that couldn't have really happened, could it? I was just a kid in shock at seeing his mother die.

The cabin was still there, as fresh and clean as if somebody had been there all along. It really did feel like home.

I did some poking around in my mother's old room, and that's where I found my grandfather's old journals. There was quite a bit of old family history in there. A lot of it -- Well, I don't know. The way it reads -- It sounds like he was losing it. But it struck a chord in me; an axe against an ocean of ice. 

I'm unclear how it began, exactly, but it started sometime after the Revolutionary War, whenever my family got this land. My great-great-(whatever) grandparents built this house. They were desperate for children, but they couldn't have any. My great-great-(etc.)-grandmother went out into the forest and made a deal with whichever spirits would listen, and something malignant took pity on her. There was a fragile creature close to dying off, and they struck up a deal: If she went with them, she would return to her husband with a child. But the child was an abomination, with moss clinging to its bones. And that was how it was for the following generations -- We were allowed to reproduce once to strengthen the genetics, then we were called back to be with our own kind.

Horrified, that night I sent my daughter back to be with her mother. I was going to end this unholy alliance like my mother had tried to. 

But they whisper. I'm unsure if the sound of gunshot or the smell of gasoline awakened them, but they have come for me. 

And again I curse -- Moss does not burn.

Engineered with NASA Technology

I was given the worst prompt for writing a Creepypasta today. It was "beds". This was the best I could do.

Memory Foam mattresses and Ambien may both be relatively new to the market, but the technology was actually developed in the sixties by NASA. Due to the zero-gravity environment and lack of definite day and nighttime periods, not only did the astronauts have trouble sleeping, but also adjusting to life outside of orbit. Their bodies couldn't figure out when to slumber and when to be awake. The problems continued long after they returned to earth.

Since sleep is essential to a healthy brain, NASA needed to figure out a solution to the problem. Unfortunately, it was two-fold: Something to trick the body into circadian rhythm and something to mimic a soft bed when gravity wasn't present. Neither was going to be easy: Compounding the first problem was the fact that any drug would need to have a short half life in the case of an emergency situation; the second would need to combat the phenomena of bone demineralization and subsequent shrinking that is a result of spending any amount of time in a zero-gravity environment.

It took them decades to even come up with a drug that they could safely administer to astronauts on a trial basis, and the original forms of this drug were a disaster. Crazed screaming to earth about the cold, dark void of space and the seemingly invisible creatures it contained, constructed from bent molecules older than time. They were apparently everywhere. 

Or the mechanical angels, who had been created by the robotic god that had abandoned them. They frantically build for all time, crying out for their supreme being to return. In the meantime, they obsessively search for and destroy any synthetic object, tearing it apart with their teeth upon, and add it to their metal pyramids -- empty offerings to their missing deity. This was especially distressing to the astronauts, as they were sighted swarming precariously close.

Also reported was the music that would not cease, played like an enormous, deafening violin, with strings like the neurons of the universe.

Over the years unstable molecules were stabilized and vice-versa; dosages were tweaked; chemicals were unengineered. But the hallucinations would not go away because they were not hallucinations.

NASA decided to try a different approach. They look at the beds they had been building, and they were constructed to keep the sleeper safe, both in body and mind. A cocoon of sorts, where the sleeper could explore these previously unseen realms without being in danger. Of course, the human psyche isn't designed to handle such things. That's why the drug had a failsafe -- an amnesiac built right in -- but the beds themselves became living memory. They memorized their sleepers bodies, and they cradled their dreams night after night. The "dreams" could be scooped up and analyzed at a later date.

But these creatures and doors to other places are confined to the cold recesses of space. That's why they were eventually released to the general and unknowing public. It's really not too hard to get a prescription for Ambien. In fact, all you have to do is say you're having trouble sleeping, despite the fact that it's gained notoriety for being a street drug of sorts. They're practically pushing it on people.

As for the Memory Foam mattresses? You can get a sample of one, for goodness sake. Worse yet, you can try it in your home free for thirty days. Who wouldn't be tempted? 

Just don't cut in half. I'd be terrified to see what comes spilling out.

Though the Heart be Still as Loving

Right Atrium

The moon starts to glow with a certain determination around 3 a.m. I often wonder if it's practicing to compete with the sun someday, unleashing the depths of its potential when nobody is looking. It splays its light across every open leaf, dappling the sleeping world with distorted reflections of itself. To me, that's the best time in a twenty-four-hour rotation of the earth's axis; maniacs dance, clouds shatter, and secrets evaporate.

I knew what I had to do. I climbed out onto the roof, my bare feet scraping against the shingles. I had packed my supplies into an unceremonious cardboard box. My intended action had been a longtime coming. The fireflies hung in the still air, frozen, acrimester flashes paused on an illuminating setting.

I took out the knife. It was sort of one of those deals that an extra from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom would have probably carried. With the exception of being real, it was curved at the end, the blade a perfect container for light.
Without a word, I made a careful incision into my chest. I did not bleed since I had resolved not to. After all, my mind is a tough neighborhood.

Once a sufficiently clean opening had been made, I painstakingly separated my costal cartilage from my sternum, doing my best not to wince at the crackling sound it produced. It took me a while to work through all that connective tissue, but I remained Spartan and stoic. Words had no bearing on what I was about to do.

I reached into my thoracic cavity, and, minding my lungs and arteries, pulled out my own heart. It came loose with a sloppy gurgle. I stared at it beating and glistening in the moonlight. Time, however, was working against me, so I quickly got to work.

Step one called for twine. I lifted it from the box and strung it around the organ I held in my hand, which was continuing to contract strongly. A good sign. I bound it tightly while humming a song to keep my nerves at bay.

Once half the spool was gone, I decided that it was enough. I cut the twine and began to add items that would keep my heart living and fresh. I wove flowers I had crafted from my own words into the twine, along with lunamoths that had spontaneously generated from late nights passed listening to music and sapphires produced by every stray flash that had ever emanated from my camera.

With my heart preserved, I shoved a handful of baubles back in its place: some pages torn from my favorite books, a bass guitar string, a butane lighter, a shot of vodka. I stitched myself back up and left the roof in favor of the attic, where I hung my still-beating heart in a window that was barely discernible from the street. I figured the sun would keep it warm.

"You're staying here until I need you again," I instructed the once- king of my circulatory system.

The loneliness had taken hold of my thoughts and reasoning. It had been uncontrollable, despite the copious amounts of booze and books I drugged myself with. I couldn't deal with it for much longer, so I did the only thing I knew would work. Sure, some people would say that a cardioectomy is a little extreme, but I have always worked well with extremes.

I wasn't surprised that I slept so well that night. The unrelenting pain in my chest was finally gone.

Right Ventricle

 
I noticed right off the perpetual thumping in my ears. I could still hear it when I was far away from my house, like at work or grocery shopping. I shrugged it off, rationalizing it as something akin to phantom limb syndrome. It eventually faded, or I just didn't notice it anymore. Whatever.

One night I felt like walking instead of slumbering. I get like that sometimes. While out around 3 a.m., I encountered a band of radioactive ghosts on a streetcorner.

The music they played plunged through my neurons, roughing me up through the span of my central nervous system. The violin sank with sorrow and rose with helium produced by joy. Drums of varying types spelled out rhythms as ancient as antimatter. A cello worked hard to be superglue of the quark variety. There were no lyrics, but there didn't need to be. I understood, or more accurately, I wished I could.

I rushed home, opened myself back up, dusted off my heart, and shoved it back into its rightful home. Tiredness suddenly hit me, and I stumbled downstairs to bed.

Left Atrium

I wasn't feeling right the next day. Worried I might have an infection, I checked my incision for redness and inflammation, but it seemed to be healing nicely.
Out of boredom, I telephoned an acquaintance of mine. The only thing I really knew about him is that he insisted I take his number home since I wouldn't take him. We met one night after one of my shows a few months ago, and other than exchanging emails a few times, I had no real connection to him. Good, because that's exactly what I was looking for.

We went out for coffee, but that didn't last long. I have a certain stare I perfected in the mirror, but was always too nervous to try in the outside world for fear I would look stupid. I had a theory that it could bring any man to his knees, excusing the fact that I'm not a pretty girl. But since I now lacked emotion, I poured it on post haste. It worked, and less than a half an hour after arriving, he suggested we go back to his apartment.

I was never a one night stand kind of person, mainly because my heart was too big not to have feelings that were easily hurt. Sex this time was difficult, not on account of the awkwardness, but rather because I could not get a beat down. My internal metronome had vanished. Eventually, I played a song in my head and did my best to go with that instead. It did its job.

Afterward, a lay on my back while smoking a cigarette. My pulse was barely above normal and my brain was empty. I had no interest in anything.
"Hey, would you like to -- " he started to ask.

"No," I replied, startling myself with a resounding tone of emptiness. "I want to go home." I hastily pulled my clothes back on and left.

My suspicions were confirmed: My heart was still beating in the window, suspended by twine. I considered another surgery, but thought it wouldn't be in my best interest since I was sure it would not stay inside me.

Left Ventricle

There are a multitude of things I miss about having a heart, one of which is my ability to write. The only way this account came to be is through a crackling voice message I left for myself that I later transcribed. I'm not sure when I'll be able to replace my organ, if I should forget about it completely or fashion a better substitution than the random crap I have shoved in there.
It's 3 a.m. I'm strangely indifferent to 3 a.m.

Forbidden Music

I found this in my notebook. I don't remember writing it, but I know which song it is.



There are songs I know to not listen to when I am alone.

The ghost of my dead twin taps me on the shoulder, and I curl over in my bed. Spine poking through my skin, the beat of the drums on the blanket over my head, my heart thumping underneath. The smoke from my cigarette echoing against the ceiling, halting then retreating in long, swirling shadows on my skin. Repeating, breathing patterns, transparent and fleeting. I fight sleep; I do not want to sleep like this.

Songs like these amplify the loneliness. In the daylight, I can blast it against the wall like a fallout shadow; in the hours before dawn, when a handful of birds begin to sing and everything else is still, I feel the most disconnected and restless. I wonder if anybody knows I exist.

From Beyond

I originally wrote this piece years ago after the image flashed in my mind one night, and it was something I always came back to. This piece has been revised and updated as my life did the same, but the intent never faltered.


It came back to haunt me when I was diagnosed with epilepsy a year ago. I don't know why I find the whole thing so funny, but I do.

Automatic Typewriter

I actually started writing this three years ago, when I was sitting in the tattooist's chair getting my own typewriter tattoo. I then forgot about it and lost the notebook.


For whatever reason, I woke up this morning, remembered the story, and spent all day on it. I'll probably come back and edit the crap out of this thing, but here it is, anyway.

Sociopathic Medicine

I was once faced with a prompt to write a romance scene involving zombies, and this was the result. In retrospect, I pretty much failed the challenge, as there is no romance to be had in this piece. But there's plenty of mad science, and that should count for something.

Also, this is creepy -- even for me.

True love may last forever, but the most I've ever gotten out of a lab assistant is two years, five months, three weeks, twelve days, and fifteen hours. And he was the exception.

Since they've given me my own lab, I don't get bothered very much. Security is tight. A team of interns and secretaries do my paperwork. The official stuff, anyway. I only have to see them twice a week at the most, and that's how I like it.

My office is to the back, a spacious enough room off my auxiliary lab. I only spend time there out of necessity, which is mainly to eat, sleep, or change my clothes. However, I get much more use out of it than my apartment across town, which I inhabit an odd weekend here or there. My work often spans most of the night. A mattress and wardrobe in my office makes more sense.

I work for a major pharmaceutical company, birthing new drugs for mass consumption. These operations are all the same, total rackets operating far below anything resembling legality. They give the reach-around to the FDA; enough politicians are on the payroll to get just about every drug pushed through to the market. The FDA doesn't ask questions. Nobody does. If they did, they'd probably realize that the majority of our case studies done on actual breathing human beings are fabrications at best. Then again, I'm not sure that they even care. Anything to get those stocks up. I'm not complaining, though. The system allows me to do whatever I want.

I'm a genius. Arrogant, too, yes, but I have every reason to be. I "graduated" high school when I was fourteen, which is to say I was shipped off to an Ivy League university on a full scholarship. I have a doctor title before my name and everything. I'm not even thirty, and I've been promoted more times than I can count. That's how I got my own lab. Gotta keep the scientists happy, Corporate reasons. They're money in the bank.

Sure, it's been hard sometimes. I don't mean the work -- that part has always been so unbelievably easy for me. It's people that have always been the problem. Due to my exceptional situation, I was placed into single-occupancy dorm rooms. It made for a lonely existence; when most kids my age were out learning social graces and riding in fast cars, I was plugging away over test tubes and lab reports. I never learned the hows or whys of human connection, which seems exhaustingly boring when I really ponder its nature. I can't say that there wasn't a time in my life when I didn't try to make friends, but it seemed that I was strictly off-limits due to my age. I was denied access to all the good parties on campus. I couldn't get a male to come near me, even after I transmogrified from plain girlhood into a hyperly curvy woman. And girls? -- forget it. I may be one, but I don't have time for their games, nor the knowledge of how to play them.

Ultimately, it didn't matter. I had my work, and that's all I care about. Science goes beyond obsession. It infects me to my core; it is the electricity that stimulates my neurons. There is no rush like molecular structure. Nothing gets me off like cold, unforgiving facts. Emotion, conversation, complications -- they all dim the brilliance of molecular bonds snapping and reforming, biochemical reactions, and pulsating instincts buried deep within the empty spaces of every synapse of the human brain. Sex is, as a process, truly amazing. Human interaction is what makes the mechanism malfunction so soundly.

It had been a while since I had had any form of concrete contact with others of my own species the night I found myself in the cadaver lab. I had misplaced my dictaphone, and process of elimination had led me there. It was well past two in the morning, and despite the fact that the facility had long been deserted for the night, the corpses selected specifically for research purposes lay peacefully, row by row, in their stainless steel beds. They were waiting for tomorrow, when they would get one or more of their organs sawed out for the greater good -- the greater good being some half-assedly engineered wonderpill that would make a lot of a greedy bastards a large profit. The room hummed to the tune of air conditioning, florescent lights, and my quiet breathing.

It was a Saturday night, I remember. It occurred to me that things didn't need to be this way. The bars were closing, and if I wanted my pick of a suitable subject for a one-night stand, the odds were solidly in my favour. My typical aversion to other people had temporarily thawed, but not enough for me to take my chances with the general populace. Besides, it's never as simple as it sounds. He always wants your phone number, a real date, a cup of coffee, to cuddle. So undignified. And you can bet there's no talk of the Periodic Table.

I found my dictaphone on the table, and on my way out, one of the corpses caught my eye. He was still looking very fresh. There was no way to tell how he died, save that it wasn't from a major disease process. He was young, his skin was still spongy and pink. Rigor mortis had set in, but otherwise, he was inviting.

>The thought crossed my mind and stayed there. It would be such an easy thing to do, and nobody would ever know. Loneliness was burrowing through every one of my pores. This particular February was fraying my nerves like no other ever had.

But, no. It really wouldn't be a step above masturbation, something which never did much for me. If there was a way to preserve warmth, to coax kinetic motion, and to do away with all the rest, I would be so happy. If only --

>I don't know why, but I had a flashback of a show I had seen sometime when I was in college. It was the true-life account of a Mr. Claudius Narcisse, a documented zombie. He had been slipped some Voodoo potion that had been concocted of the venom of a local pufferfish, among other things. The venom slowed his heart and respiration, shrouded his brainwaves, made him appear, for all intents and purposes, dead. In Haiti, bodies are neither embalmed nor buried, just placed into above-ground concrete sarcophaguses. On the night he was laid to rest, the Voodoo priest collected him. Claudius laboured as a virtually mindless drone for the next fifteen years. After his term of servitude had been fulfilled, he was left off in his village, largely clueless to the past decade and a half.

Claudius would never insist that I call him the next day. Claudius would never fall asleep next to me. Claudius wouldn't do a lot of things.

I started my research at once. I practically had to sell my soul to the proverbial devil to get my hands on that delightfully neurotoxic recipe. On the other hand, the ingredients weren't a challenge. I can order anything I want for experimentation, no questions asked.

I tried it out on a Saturday night in a bar downtown. I singled out a particularly noxious subject, one who was attractive enough yet annoyingly overconfident. It wasn't difficult to convince him to accompany me to the lab for a good time. When we arrived, I offered him a drink. Little did he know it was laced with Pufferfish Cocktail, which has the advantage of being colourless, scentless, and tastes only faintly metallic.

He was in a full death-coma within a half-hour of ingestion. I ran a full STD panel. By the time he came to three days later, the cultures were back. He was safe to proceed. I spent the next week feeding and injecting him with a steady diet of chemicals, and, of course, fucking him without discernible mercy. When I tired of him, I dropped him off in an alley behind an electronics store. The best part was that I never heard from him again.

I've come so far since then, improved on my methods so much. I figured out an easier delivery method of drugs post-zombification. I insert mediports intended for chemotherapy in the subclavian region, carefully snaking the catheter into the superior vena cava so the drugs are pumped throughout the entire body by the heart. Surgery takes forty-five minutes, tops. I run tubing around the shoulder and down to a drip-bag fastened to the back. When I want to actually use my zombie, I inject a type of paralytic into the bag, one that decreases sensation and mimics rigor mortis. But their bodies are always warm. Sometimes they even make sounds. When I'm done, I load them up with succinylcholine, another paralytic, and stash them in an empty storeroom.

Finding victims isn't difficult. This city is full of loner subculture-types; young men out to prove some idiotic point and nothing else are seldom missed. All I've had to do is study up on bands I really don't have a taste for so I can fake my way through icebreaking conversation.

The only problem is that they never last as long as poor Claudius. They're usually dead within eighteen months, their systems doubtless spent from constantly bathing in chemicals. Still, getting rid of the bodies doesn't take much of an effort; I cut them up and feed them to my lab animals. The few that I grew to tolerate were thrown into the incinerator.

The best part is that this doubles as research. Imagine what I can do with this stuff. In time, my company will come to see the possibilites, too. The notion of love, caramelized and dyed on the stovetops of greeting card kitchens, have effectively lobotomized the masses. This way, the burden of sugar-coating is removed from the process. Of course, PR won't present it in such a fashion to the public. They'll twist it around some seemingly home-spun advertisement; instead, they should be celebrating the triumph of science over emotion. I know I am.

The Nightly Dance

I wrote this about a year ago, shortly after I was diagnosed with epilepsy. I'm doing much better now, but I still like this piece.

My genetics are the very things from which monsters are bred: distorted features, Medusa hair, misaligned spines, and banshee voices. It's the fairy stories. It's the howling violins. Encoded into my DNA, twisting the double helix so tight that it threatens to snap each time it replicates. Night after night, thunderstorms rip through my brain. The electricity animates my body into myclonic dance. I do not rest. I dance with the demons; I dance with Nijinsky rage. I dance with the fury of Saint Vitus and his wooden cross. My shoes are fashioned with my own fear, tanned and stretched over my feet. The music is the low rumble of static, white noise generated from a typewriter key jammed in-between stations in one of the valves of my heart.

The mornings are the worst. Hungover and drained, the residue from the dance clings to my bones so tightly that I cannot wake up unless I throw myself to the floor from bed. I punch and kick at the wooden boards in frustration because my head is too heavy for my neck to support by itself; I have seven cervical vertebrae, and seven is not enough. Every morning I picture the same thing: Once, I saw a picture of a giraffe's spine. They have seven, too, but their vertebral bodies look like they could withstand several thousand tons of pressure. They are stalwart and sound, not delicate and susceptible to crushing like ours. As I turn my body into a fulcrum, I wish for a giraffe's spine. Iron and solid, I would be unstoppable. I would still feel like I was moving through sand, but I could move.

Fine motor skills are non-existent. It does not matter how large of an obstacle is in my path — if it is there, it will cause me injury, despite stepping to avoid it. The dance is in perpetual motion. My hands will strike the wall. My legs will want to be parallel with the shower floor. I brush my teeth, and my mouth is full of blood; my toothbrush becomes a weapon when my body is so unstable. Even when my full attention is devoted to the smallest of actions, they remain impossible.

A self-destruction sequence has been initiated. I started taking pills to slow this process down. They're roughly the size of a needle's eye and stamped with words and numbers I haven't bothered to read. But there is no reset function. My central nervous system is rebelling harder, severing its own connections with steel teeth. I have not slept. There is no sleep. Until my brain rots like wood, until my corpus collosum fills with pus and collapses, bubbling with the fear and electricity conducting through it. Until a piece of me will spark and catch flame, and I will burn away into a pile of ash.

I hate this waiting game; the telegraphs should disintegrate under the force of my frenzied tapping.

Fragment

I found this lurking on my hard drive, and I wish I could remember where the hell it was ultimately going.


The most important sound in the universe was the strings vibrating against the wood, and not the notes they produced: the snap and twitch as they cut the air, the faint creak of the neck, the scraping of all the fingertips that had been cut and scarred and calloused through the generations. She spilled her neurons across the dissecting board of the violin, breathed deep and forced herself outward with every exhalation. Her molecules mixed with wax and horsehair, and her heart valves arched in unison.

The songs would slumber safely within cocoons of bone and skin, incubated by dried flowers and ladybugs; anxiety and yellowing Polaroid photographs; quibbling and the smell of asphalt at August High Noon. Set to their own timelines dictated by unique internal landscapes, they were unexpectedly born by their own automatic c-sections, tearing open their silken resurrection machines with teeth of steel, motivated by the solely by the need to be heard: shrill, or muted, or bleached, or candied — but always louder than a nuclear blast.

It made no sense that they drew her here so often — crumbling masonwork and decapitated statues against a backdrop she could not place. That part did not matter — it was where they chose to be delivered, breaking their own water and inducing their own labor, and she could not argue. It felt better to get them out, and she knew better than to fight with the laws of her own nature. In the end, as she had repeatedly learned, she would be in perpetual last place.

But nothing mattered when she held her violin — or, more accurately, nothing existed; when she played, time would lapse into a coma and gravity found itself needing a living organ donor. Einstein would be furious, but even he could appreciate her talent and skill, boiled and smelted and spit upon since she was old enough to stand.

When she found herself in this familiar haunt, the sun was fading through the absent roof, and the violin — the scratches traced by her fingers, her great-great uncle's fingers, possibly by God's fingers with the fury it could withstand — balanced on a pile of rubble to her immediate left. The panic that had welled up in her chest would part and subside upon locating the object that she had carried with her since memory had formed in her toddler mind, and before that from the Old Country, wherever exactly that was. She had not lost it after all; the daunting responsibility that had been bestowed upon her had not come to an end. And, picking it up and cradling it carefully, she turned on her heel with the best of intentions: To find her way home from this place, and though she did not know which direction to choose, at least the violin was safe.

Against her better judgment, the songs would jerk and stir, and she would respond "It wouldn't hurt to just get one out of my system." And her Better Judgment would reply "I don't like this, but you don't have a choice, now do you?"

The strings would stir, and she would smile — and the world would come to an end, as it always did when she played. Her fingers danced and the bow threatened to saw the instrument in two neat halves. This was how that particular violin had been engineered to be used.

A part of her remembered the rest of the story before it occurred, and familiarity washed over her. She had seen this place before, and she would return her for all the inexplicable reasons in the universe. But it could be different this time. The song was new; it was unlike its older siblings, and it had the power to change every outcome, every supersting of destiny.

The literature could not be reformatted. The corners of reality crumpled, and she heard a mindless howl. Nearly silent at its genesis, it soon overwhelmed her music, bouncing around the stones and landing solidly in her cochlea.

A tangible chill pooled in the back of her head and fled to her sacrum. Her eyes shifted their focus, but her hands continued to produce music. Legs anxiously spasming, the breath stuck in her throat in anticipation of her reaction.

Automated and fueled by adrenaline, her left arm swung the violin underneath her right, and she ran. She did not have time to weigh her decision as her limbic brain awoke and took charge of the parts of her body like a general. She was not an athlete, but fear provided the speed she typically lacked.

Stumbling and unable to find stable footing, she propelled herself in every forward direction. At times her path was blocked, and she would scale ruined walls, jump over deconstructed staircases. Repeatedly looking over her shoulder just long enough as a reminder that her life was in real danger.

It wore the cheap disguise of a man, one that was so transparent it almost seemed like a waste of time. Within the wrappings of pseudo skin and hair was a cloud of black energy, a wailing collection of buzzing electrons that gleamed as they orbited a core that shone with shadow. It spoke its own language, one of a continuous and sinister hum, balktalking like a malfunctioning lawnmower played though the hissing static of a broken amplifier from 1964. It was that sound that awoke the unfettered and inescapable terror within her, the sounds of brains boiling with fever and the dead being reanimated.

Blind Spot

A flash fiction piece I had done for a weekly prompt community. I was watching a lot of Marble Hornets at the time.

If the photographs made sounds, they would rumble like static from an impending thunderstorm, pressed between the pages of a yellowing dictionary. Compressed sound, searching for the proper words.

She had been so careful, searching the landscape for any sign of the figure, singling out trees that could have been him and moving them out of the frame. Her skin had not erupted into prickling goosebumps; the sick feeling that branched out from the base of her spine and congealed into synapses had not been present. Assuming she was safe, she clicked the shutter, feeling momentary satisfaction in the sound. Click-click, all is well.

Staring at the picture, she choked back tears. It was the realization that she had been marked, and no matter where she traveled, no matter how many saint medals she roped around her neck, he would appear, never vocalizing what he wanted. Just waiting, devouring her sanity, forcing her to look over her shoulder at every turn. Forever.

Seeping around the edges, squarely into her blind spot.

Dire Prophecy

The perfect utopia for Coast to Coast AM devotees is desolation and destruction.

Since I started working nights, Coast to Coast AM has become a constant source of amusement. I wonder what would happen if these nutjobs turned out to be right? They're so passionate about this crazy stuff -- would they be happy if it actually happened? I'd like to think so.

Also, this is supposed to be funny. Unfortunately, my idea of "funny" doesn't always translate well.

This was originally written for some flash fiction contest where the prompt was something about people being happy about the Apocalypse, or something. Needless to say, I came in somewhere around last place.

In the end, they had been right.

The howl of unstable atoms blasted the population into shadows. Stretched into fallout smiles across crumbling buildings, the scene replicated itself like faulty RNA, rewriting the cities of the world with fallout ink. Despite the crumbling half-lives, lead-suited armies continued to march, but not against each other: They administered plague to the survivors, which combined with the radiation to produce a legion of mindless, feral beings that would attack the creatures they once were. Soon, the zombies were destroyed like the half-angels from the wild stories of prehistory: At the other end of our solar system, Planet X's unwieldy orbit careened precariously close to our own, causing the poles to shift to the equator in less than a week, and the resulting floods momentarily washed the world clean. Unfortunately, the Lizard People that inhabited the Hollow Earth seized the opportunity and proclaimed the Denver Airport as the capital of the New World Order.

Once, they had been the crazies who called into late-night radio programs, disembodied voices carried by crackling radio waves from underneath tinfoil hats, spouting nutjob conspiracy theories. Their zeal and fervor was unmatched; it had become their religion. Like cockroaches, their paranoia had gained sustenence from the most unlikely souces, and they proliferated. Invest in gold – No, don't. When society collapses, it won't even matter. We are your saviors. Listen to us. We will save you from the aliens, disease, and governments. We know the truth. “Wake up, people!” became their Amen.

They built domes built into the desert sand and condos fashioned out of old missile bunkers; patched abandoned subterranean dwellings left over from the Cold War. They had stockpiled food and antibiotics; transistor radios and batteries; ammunition and comic books. On the chosen date, they filed underground like trooping fairies, removing themselves from the world they had so desperately wanted to end. They held their collective breath and waited.

Plutonium roared and decayed; hearts swelled and broke; the heat blasted the pathogens into snaking fossils. The oceans receded and society toppled. Sleeping gods peeked in on their charges before abandoning earth for a fresh start. Silence ruled with an iron fist.

After the Four Horsemen came and went, the hatches opened. Faces thrust to the sky like sunflowers, the paranoid inhaled a lungful of desolation. Dancing to the symphony of air-raid sirens, they cheered in unison. The unwelcoming and uninhabitable landscape blinked itself out of slumber and slowly smiled.

It was exactly what they had wanted.

We've got five years.

After a particularly hellish night at work, my legs started to cramp as soon as my shoes scraped against the sidewalk. It had been over a day since I had eaten my last meal, and therein lies the irony of healthcare: We're the shittiest at taking care of ourselves.

As I had exited the building, I had hoped for a downpour to match my mood -- I wanted nothing more than to march home through a thunderstorm, knowing none had been predicted -- and was miraculously greeted with the sudden absence of summer. The sky mysteriously loomed a striated gray, then opaline blue, as sharp and clear as the air that puckered my skin into goosebumps.

"Five Years" by David Bowie streamed onto my headphones, and I remembered laughing about this song in December a few years ago. I made such a big deal about it. That's how my sense of humour works, I guess. The end of the world is always funny.

I stepped off the sidewalk, and a long line of cars that shouldn't have been present erupted into existence at 6:30 in the morning. I stood and watched them. Garbage men on motorcycles in city-worker orange; Mid-Life Crisis sports car blue; a green bus stopped and ejected its contents across the street.

It was like the world was ending in that moment: Everything had abruptly gone cold with the news that we had a limited amount of time, and the moment just froze as I took it all in. A strange sort of twisted beauty, playing out in its humanity, because that is the beauty of it all.

I crossed the street and looked up. There's a building with a mural that takes up the entire side: A pair of hands turning the bricks into a quilt; in my head, the hands of God playing the piano swell inside of everybody.

And as much of a struggle my life has been, I felt a strange sense of peace as I rounded the corner to my street. I had stumbled onto a moment, something I could seal up into a watertight package to seal away into the darkest corners of my heart for a time whenever I would need it most.

I turned my head. A car parked on the side of the street had a bumper sticker of two fingers raised in a peace sign. I think I started laughing as I realized that that's exactly what I want the end of the world to be like. If I would've been blindsided by an asteroid or something a second later, I would've been okay with that. I wouldn't have regretted all that I hadn't accomplished or that I was alone because in that moment, none of it was true.

My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare/I had cram so many things to store everything in there.

Prayers for rain

The weather has been full of empty threats involving thunderstorms for more than a week. I've been scowling at the sky in disappointment, motivated to take some photographic evidence for the next time I'm tempted to hold another Local on the 8s Dance Party til Dawn Blowout.





The ground out in New Castle even looked ominous. But, nothing.



Today the windows are thrown open, but I'm still waiting. Rain has fallen, but without the rumbling of thunder and the strobe-light flash of lightning, I'm indifferent. I don't care. It's so humid I can't breathe. A good thunderstorm will clear the air, and there's few things on earth better than the sudden cracking apart of a hot summer night.

Of lillies and remains. And fluff.

I have a complicated relationship with cosmetics -- certainly one too wordy to properly delve into since I have to start getting ready for work within the hour. Surely, I'm a breathing dichotomy: A tree-climbing intellectual; a short-haired girly-girl; a cynic who has never lost her sense of childish wonder.

After resisting it for years, I finally got into make-up on my own when I was starting into my goth phase. I was a fan of heavy eyeliner and not much else. That was when I was fifteen or so, and I don't remember much else, really, other than wanting to look like Peter Murphy and Siouxsie Sioux (and, thankfully, not Robert Smith).

When my cancer diagnosis came in the summer of 1998, my mother had a rule that I had to wear my wig and make-up at all times. It didn't matter if I was puking every twelve seconds; I had to look "normal". She said it was "in case somebody came to the door", but I'm pretty sure an unexpected visitor wasn't going to go blasting into the bathroom like Kool-Aid Man. I harbored some resentment for that (and maybe I still do since I'm kind of protective of my patients at work): I had accepted my yellowing skin and lack of hair; it was simply who I was at that moment in time. Why couldn't everybody else? If they had a problem with it -- if they found it shocking or terrifying -- well, it was just their problem, and they'd have to get over it, now wouldn't they?

I still feel like that, I think. Why is it the cancer patient's job to look "normal"? They have enough to worry about, physically and psychologically. They already have to construct a new sense of "normal". Then again, that's another topic for another time. I could easily write about it for hours.

Maybe that's where the fear comes from that if I leave the house without make-up, something bad will happen. I was relentlessly teased for my nose until adulthood, so it's safe to say I have some insecurities over my looks. But, I'm sure everybody does. Actually, given the atmosphere of American advertising and popular culture, it's damn close to impossible not to. But again, another rant for another time.

Anyway, I'm a grown-up now, or at the very least, I do a pretty good job of pretending to be. In the past year or so I've gotten into cosmetics purely as a game to play or a sort of project: In short, it's fun. Turns out, there's a big difference between high-end, good quality eyeshadow and the crap you buy at Target. Yeah, I should've probably gone through this phase over ten years ago, but I was too busy scribing in notebooks, drinking black coffee, and planning on transforming into Henry Rollins whenever I became an adult.

A few months ago, I found out about Urban Decay cosmetics, and on a whim I gave their products a try because the colours were so radioactively vibrant. Ever since, I've been having a blast with this stuff. My inner girly-girl has been coming out and trying all sorts of bizarre and unholy combinations. I probably look ridiculous. Surprisingly, I don't really care, but somehow, that's the best part. I don't know if I could've said that a full year ago.

There was a sale going on a month ago, and I bought a bunch of new goodies for far less than what my original eye shadow palette cost me. Awesome.

And I've got nothing.

Sometimes I feel like I'm trapped in a Philip K. Dick book.

Characteristically, I'm solely aware that it's all fiction. There's the dilemma of warning the other characters: On one hand, to do so is to get labeled as the crazy, unstable personality; on the other, I'm the dark-haired and dark-eyed but fair-skinned female, so in PKD lore, that automatically and predictably makes me the catalyst (and prone to sunburn). At some point, I'm going to meet the main character. At first, the encounter will seem like simple coincidence, but in the grand scheme of reality it will be much deeper. He will have plenty of things wrong with him and on the whole has no business being in charge of an entire story. Somehow, we'll save the world by the end of the book -- mostly by his doing, although I'll have a key moment in there somewhere.

Until that point, however, I'll creep ever-closer to the edges of the pages. Each time I do, a shock will be issued, and I'll be thrown back. I'll catch my breath, pull myself back up, and try again. And again. And again. Someday, I'll get word out -- a message in a bottle -- that I'm real, that I'm trapped, and that I need help.

Sometimes, to think of my existence in this way instead of what it actually is, seems more comforting, or at the very least, makes more sense. I came home from work on Friday in a state of seizure and haven't been right since. For the most part, I can't really remember what has gone on for the past few days, or that they even existed in the first place. There have been moments of clarity and normalcy, sure. But mostly they bled into states in which I was dimly aware of my own being, staring out from behind a sense of sand and marbled glass, mouth slack and open, eyes straight and staring, limbs twitching, repeating "I'm fine." in a voice garbled by static emanating from a creature that was several fathoms deep.

My legs hurt, and I feel like a part of my brain never switched back on. Maybe that's why I'm writing something now -- to see if I still can. To see if words still work, to see if rhythm still works, all of it. It's taken me a very long time to type this out. Commas keep showing up in the middle of words and my hands are shaking. But what I want to say is still there, so I'm not too worried. And normally, I wouldn't even be worried. I've just never had it last this long before.

I don't want to go to the hospital because they can't do anything for me there. Really, they can't. It's a pointless endeavor. I've been to the ER several times for my epilepsy, and nothing really happens. I'm better off at home.

 

If I can't even write about it, then I've got nothing.

 

I always tried to keep myself tied to this world.

I am slowly growing more suspicious that the building directly next door is synthesizing itself a nervous system, but I don't have the heart to tell it that neurons should never be an external feature. It's not befitting of a lady.



 

My pantry isn't as stocked as it was a few weeks ago due to time and financial restraints, but that didn't stop me from cooking a satisfying dinner tonight. I asked Dinosaur Adam (yes, that's an obvious nod to The Tick) to pick up some beer on the way home, and I used it to bake some bread. He selected some Sam Adams blackberry concoction. I've never tried it before, but the result was a slight berry tone, so it was a nice touch for a peaceful summer evening.



There is no better -- or more agonizing -- smell in the world than bread baking in the oven when one is hungry. In the end, though, it was a success.



 

I've been listening to this song an awful lot lately:

http://youtu.be/woIiLtWzXAQ

I'm not sure if it has more to do with the sound itself or the multitude of happy, nostalgia-tinged memories attached to it.

And the beat goes on.

I spent the day doing a whole lot of nothing except reintroducing myself to my Nikon D40. Considering what I've been through in the last year (and in the past two months alone), I can safely say that I've earned a day of inactivity (if inactivity includes huffing on lenses, screwing around with metering, and swearing at myself for not being able to remember which buttons do what).

I've long said that photography is the sole hobby I have which keeps me calm, a funny statement considering I'll throw myself headlong into the dirt or scale up the side of some rocky precipice to get the picture I'm after. But, yeah. That's relaxing. It's constructive obsessing. It's not like when I write -- my whole body gets into it, and I'm literally throwing my body around the room when the proper word eludes me, and the screaming starts; it's one big exorcism, really, and it's a fun process, and it's a brutal process, and I live for that shit. With photography, my heart is forced into hypothermic rhythms, and I am still. It's not too often that that happens.

With work and all the other craziness that's been happening, I simply haven't had the time to spend with my camera. I need to change that -- I need to  to take pictures of even the mundane in an attempt to force some kind of balance in my chaotic existence. It's something I used to do because I understood the importance, and lately I'm being reminded more and more of it.

It's this apartment, too. The safety of this place, the perfection of the layout and location; the fact that it's mine. I'm becoming uncharacteristically domestic with each passing day. Everything is neat and clean, and I'm actually cooking for myself instead of burning down the kitchen.

It's evenings of crickets humming in the backyard, fruit pared over the sink, carefully lined over my grandmother's cutting board; late nights with the television murmuring somewhere in the bedroom, a half-crocheted afghan slung across the bed, waiting for me to return as I pull a pan of brownies from the oven.







Well. I suppose I should get to bed. I'm going to the zoo tomorrow, and there's a lot of pictures to take there.

The Adversary

There's some fable contest going on over at Figment. This is my entry which I wrote in like an hour and maybe took semi-seriously. But, hooray! I wrote something.

Oh, I actually just read the contest rules. The top-hearted entries become the finalists -- ten of those, apparently. So, if you liked it, please help me out, but only if you thought that it wasn't total crap. I could really use the prize money. But that's only if I win, which is wishful thinking in itself.

 

"I realize," The Adversary sighed, a sound like fallout dust. "That our fist strike creates the dawn. Yet, I still doubt that it's something of which I am capable."

The irony was not lost on Michael. He laughed a thunderclap of feedback-static and windswept dandelions -- partially cruel and partially amused. "But, Satan. Surely -- "

The angel shook his head, cutting the other's observation short. "I know my purpose," he replied. "I am the Failsafe. I am The Adversary. My place in the design is the watch and monitor, to challenge, to talk some sense into Him at every turn -- and when he finally loses it (which we all knew was inevitable), I must euthanize Him.

"But how can I destroy what has called me into being? My heart is filled with torment. Do you feel it, too, Michael?"

"'Michael' is simply what He has chosen to call me. I am Justice. Justice does not feel torment because Justice does not feel compassion. You alone feel torment, Adversary. This is why you exist.

"Tell me something -- Have you heard of the humans?"

"Of course I have. Isn't that why we've assembled all the angels in this act of rebellion?"

"Yes, Adversary, it is." Michael gestured at the former void and fell silent: The Creator's heart had been transformed. Once empty and barren, it had been filled with their presence and purpose, for they were no longer content to serve him.

When He had built the Universe, there was no greater joy in putting it together. The angels themselves were perfect constructs of concept and design, embodiment of breathing principle over paricle waves. They each had their purpose; each mortar or a support or a box of nails.

But to fashion innocent life for the sole purpose of praising him and nothing else -- the concept was unfathomable at best. At worst, it was chaos, and chaos was blasphemy. In the end, it was abundantly clear that a Divine Architect was not at work, but a deranged child. It had been whispered that He had not willed Himself into being but accidentially created by Wisdom and shortly abandoned thereafter. The angels were uncomfortable doing work for a being that did not understand the repercusssions of His actions.

After much discussion, they could not allow it to happen. And so, as Beings of Light, they tucked themselves into cocoons, and as Beings of War they emerged, burning like nuclear reactors, wings aflame with furious love for the fragile creatures they had yet to know.

"But, Michael. If we destroy Him, we will destroy the Universe. He has encoded himself into all of it. I cannot see any other way."

"Then what can we do? He is mad. He must be stopped."

"We strike, Michael. We fight. We rebel, and we fall. We are cast down, away from Him. And in our damnation, we surround the humans. We teach them. We protect them from His madness the best we can. Most importantly, we give them a choice. We interrupt His programming, just like I'm supposed to do, through love and compassion. Love and compassion create torment, and because of this my name will be the most hated of all.

"Justice will only balance His Creation so much. But compassion and torment -- He'll have to answer for what He's done.

"Take my sword, Michael. It's yours now. In the end, I won't need it."

 

Brianne's Half-Assed, Semi-Something, Parade of Musical Extravaganza Crap: Gogol Bordello - Sally

About a year ago, I used to run a song-of-the-day type blog for a short time which probably wasn't all that interesting, but did let me write about one of my favourite topics. I think I'm going to start doing that here, even if I know it won't be every day. Most likely, it'll be "Brianne's Half-Assed, Semi-Something, Parade of Musical Extravaganza Crap", which totally has a catchy ring to it.

Whenever anybody asks me to recommend new music, I immediately reply with "Gogol Bordello. They have accordion solos that'll make your head explode." It's true. Or I'm assuming it's true, at least. I'm sure that somewhere, someone has died that way.

I first came across Gogol Bordello at an alarmingly appropriate time in my life -- I had just discovered that my great grandparents were Carpathian Roma probably two weeks prior. Nobody in my family liked to acknowledge this fact. I grew up in a small town that had evolved from a limestone mining camp composed of Sicilian immigrants, so by default, we said we were Italian. (And my mother's mother's family is northern Italian, so it's not an outright lie.) Still, I can recall a few things being said to me as a child whenever my grandfather's back was turned ("You know, your Grandma G____ is a you-know-what."; I did not know what a you-know-what was.) and also a cryptic remark my mother made when I was fourteen or so: "Well, I guess Grandma G____ was really Romanian, but don't tell anybody."

Uncovering my heritage is a whole story in itself, but this is a music post, so I'll leave it for another day. Since I knew absolutely nothing about Romani culture, I really didn't know what to do. There isn't a book out there that's called "So, You're a Gypsy" and it's not like I knew anybody. And my family was (and is) in such deep denial about it. In the end, I figured it was best to just forget about it. That lasted for about two weeks.

Then I came across Gogol Bordello, and my whole life changed.

No, really, it did. It was kind of an accidental thing that I heard them for the first time. I had no idea what I was listening to, and I actually came to the conclusion that it had to be some kind of joke because nobody made music like that. I mean, it was an awesome joke, but there was just no way it could be real. It was my hope that they had a whole joke album, which they did. But it wasn't a joke. It was actually real. And it was a thing called...Gypsy Punk?

So, honestly -- you're taking punk rock and mixing it with...Gypsy music? It's some hybrid thing? The most familiar and most loved thing in the world to me combined with that stuff I was supposed to forget about? Why are you doing this to me? This can't be happening. And what the fuck am I doing? It's three in the afternoon and I've been dancing around my apartment for roughly five hours now. I can't turn this off. It's like every coil of my DNA is buzzing, and I've found the frequency at which my cardiac cells operate. And, wait! What the hell was that word? I know that word! I know I know that word! I haven't heard that word in years but I know I know that word and I know it's a bad word! ...Holy Mother of God. I'm a goddamn Gypsy.

In that moment of realization, I wanted to learn everything I could about my heritage. That was six years ago, and I still feel that way. Roma music is the best music in the world, and that opened up the avenue to explore the rich culture and language behind it. I could just sit here and write three thousand posts about the different types of Roma music and the history thereof and be perfectly happy doing so, but I've gotten so off track as it is.

I've had to retain my sense of humour through it all. Sometimes I don't use words correctly -- it's hard to learn a complicated language with several dialects on one's own. And then there's the outrage. I could go on about that for pages. But then there's stuff that people simply don't understand, so I have to patiently correct them -- if I'm mean about it, I'm not really accomplishing anything. But, yeah -- if I can laugh at little things, it's not so daunting.

At any rate, I love Gogol Bordello. I know they're not traditional Gypsy music, but they're still a great band (even though I hated their latest album). I feel somewhat indebted to them, so they'll always be special to me.

I guess now I don't have the energy to write about the song itself, which is a shame. I love "Sally" because it never gets old. Back when I used to be a punk rock vocalist, I used to use this song as a warm-up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsgsi7o1K_g

But the one thing about "Sally" that's so endearing? It's not the violins or the hysteria or the catchiness -- although those elements do help. It's a single line: "AND I SURVIVE EVEN FUCKING RADIATION!"

There's no other song in the world that has a line like that, and no other song in the world where I can yell along to so defiantly. I know why Eugene Hutz wrote it: He survived Chernobyl. I survived cancer. It's not the same thing. But it's the closest thing I've got, and it's fucking awesome.