Of Mermaids & Malignancy

It has been a hopeless week I am climbing out of. I am still dripping wet with panic, but I am beginning to see a little bit of what people like to call the light at the end of the tunnel.

I am trying very hard to be an optimist, even though this tunnel is fucking never-ending. For over two decades I have been scratching at the surface. Like trying to dig out an escape route from prison using a miniature teaspoon. I don’t understand how people can tell me I have a pessimistic outlook on life when after so many years of disappointment and humiliation I am still here, fighting on, wasting ammunition on a battle where the outcome is never clear.

I am probably the most fucking optimistic person you have ever met.

The first sign to quit, after all, came pressing rather early, in kindergarten. But tumors get removed, and you limp on and re-learn your walk. The first time I understood that this might not be the world for me, it was when I was five or six and I realized, at last, that mermaids, unicorns and centaurs don’t really exist.

Ever since then, I’ve been trying to bring them back to life.
Maybe if we lump together enough tumors cut out from elastic flesh, we could make a mermaid.

They just wont leave you alone in this place. They will mark you with ballpoint pens, ripe for the cutting.

It may sound rotten, but when I was ten, I wasn’t concerned with the future, simply because I assumed the world would crumble to bits by then.

I am quite surprised, frankly, that we are all still here.

I wish we could talk, even though old lovers are of no use to me. What could you possibly say when you understand absolutely nothing?

I am trying to piece things back into form. Trying to heal this sickness, to scrub everything clean. I have even seriously considered quitting smoking. I like entertaining that idea, until the thoughts of my dwindling funds and nauseating duties to society pull me back to my usual pack-a-day habit. I have quit buying smokes, though. My room once more smells like it did in middle school, before I picked up the charming habit.

I wish it was still possible to build a tent from blankets and pillows to hide in. To build a fortress in my bed. It's funny how as beds get bigger, the options become smaller and smaller.

The morning news warns of an upcoming Big Bad, as a result of naughty play in Gaza. I almost can’t wait for the next war, Summer Session 2007. Carnage and carnations. Husky Eyes will be visiting soon. He may not be the most reasonable man, to come here, true, but if there is to be a war, I find nothing more fitting than for us to be sleeping together like we did during the last war.

Sex and war...It’s a little bit like asphyxiation and orgasms. When men feel that close to their final demise, to THE END, they come like they know this is their last chance, their greatest exit. Like they have to somehow push and live on through a wheezing, coughing climax, going into premature rigor mortis, cock-first.

Sex and war, liebe und anarchie. Kisses and katyushas, missiles and moans. That was summer, and I wasn’t even in the war zone for the better part of it all.

But even at a safe distance, it made me live intensely.

Now, in a time of national post-war coma and relative quiet(we are still at the gates of hell, its on every map) I am sporting a mysterious 38 fever that comes and goes, a guilt complex the size of the Vatican, and a long list of casualties.

No mermaids here.


It’s all a matter of trades and barters. Paralysis for action, panic for temporary love, silence for laughter because you’ve got naught better to do.