Portland, Oregon is a miserable goddamn town. A foul pit of quicksand that grips you the moment you slip and land there, eating away at your organs until you’ve turned to dust. Struggling will only pull you deeper, drive you to love madness, hate yourself, rip away at your own skin and spit out those old bones that once held you up, now too brittle to stand in the wind, like a tower of sand. The men are pedophiles, the women are whores, the children are stupid punks, the streets smell like hot piss at high-noon and everyone is out to slice your throat open while you sleep, take your hard-earned money and turn it into a bad habit—your very own vice, because that’s what everyone does here, once they’ve come into the gauntlet. Suits and students and pigs and preachers are no exception. Nose candy, racing machines, sex wizards, morning whiskey, blood ‘n’ guts ‘n’ shame junkies—it’s all here, in full, living color, just around every corner, at any time of day or night—like sending away Kix box tops and getting back real bazookas!
I’m a doomed writer. Nothing works, it all comes out the same. Sad shit, weird shit, awful shit, dull shit. It’s all page filler—pretty words and exhaustive details, designed to grab you, excite you and trick you into thinking that it all means something. I can tell you with great confidence that this is an illusion put together of glass strings, woven by the voice of clever manipulation. Somewhere along the wire, I find mysterious meaning in this weird calling— the gift of a wordsmith, hands blessed with a unique autonomy of their own and a thirst for creation that ceases only with sleep and death.
I am not even a writer. This instrument is electrified, moving along a dexterous track all its own. Give your praise to this pen for whatever sick poetry it may produce—I am only the vessel for its feverish workings—a dedicated host conduit, good only for a warm brain and muscles to let the ink go. I am not a writer, only a shell of circumstantial synapses, to meet my purpose as a scribe slave to some anxious pen, with too much goddamn nonsense to tell whoever cares to listen. It’s time again for coffee, for smokes, for the Next Best Thing...never mind the silly shitshow down the way—there’s WORK to do.
It’s a damn shame that I won’t get around to it today and I doubt that I’ll get to it tomorrow either. Some sick impulse tells me to procrastinate again. No sleep and binge writing when the mood strikes—overtones of misery and loathing, last minute panic runs to get your shit done between trips out for more booze, cigarettes, and senseless arguments with yourself, just for fun, in the presence of weirdos that will never understand your mannerisms. "Sloppy," they say. "How unprofessional," they say. "Those degenerate bums just want an excuse to burn the goddamn world down!" they say. I can’t pretend that I don’t agree, though. Sloppy, unprofessional, degenerate—my kind of people. A drunken army of loonies and hopeless reprobates, clinging onto the underbelly of some supposed "American Dream" that has still yet to surface. It’d be critically dangerous to the well-orchestrated system of self-made entrepreneurship, to let your kind in on the big secret: that any burnt-out freak with half a brain can do it...but, don’t tell the lowlifes—they’ll blow up the scene. Writers-for-hire, with no apparent moral compass, skewed ethics and nothing better to do than to stir up provocative commotion, among the hearts of those who feed us the sick subjects upon which to put words.
For this monotony, I’ve found a few temporary reliefs—rampant substance abuse, wild sex at bus stops, unhinged passion and weird music (to either calm the nerves or agitate them, depending). Throw in some booze for an additional layer of liquidity—a crucial evil for anyone who intends to "make it." Such sultry passages of ink spill away from these crooked fingertips, like a pen dancing to utter madness—odd attention to the fine detail of every magnificent stroke, a carnivorous taste for insanity like a fang-tip pen, coated in poison and ready to freeze its readers’ veins with venomous truths.
This obsession with the creation of macabre prose has become my sickest pleasure—a far greater rush than heroin, cumming in strangers’ mouths, coming near death by the misguided hands of a once-lover or than orbiting yourself at mach five...when it all gets too ugly, become a writer. At least then, your sad truths put into colorful poetry will metamorphose into a wilted rose, in the eyes of depraved and hopeless romantics—some tasteful veneer of pulchritude within the ruins of our own despondency. Another narrow glimmer of hope that, for just a moment, appears greater than the oppressive illness of the human condition—a smile in the face of pure darkness and the realization that you are powerless to its chaotic machinations, so you’d better grab a beer and get comfortable.
