One day I climbed down off my pole

All the time that I was growing up, the one thing that I’d craved from my family was reassurance. Just a basic, benign type of reassurance that everything wasn’t going to hell. However, my family consisted of the three least comforting people on planet earth. Wrapped up in themselves, I fell somewhere outside of their spheres of existence, and I wandered around in my own one, unsure and terrified, like a cracked and crazed version of The Little Prince, my planet populated solely by monsters, and all the monsters were me. And now, all grown up, I had stopped trying to cram things into my black hole. Instead, I starved it completely. This was a damn honorable way to go about things, if you ask me. Goddamn honorable indeed.

“Hey there, mister,” Betty’s voice came at me from the left, as she sat down in Dale’s vacant lawn chair.

I jolted out of my reverie.

“Where’d you come from?” I asked, as I hadn’t heard her coming.

“I just came out of the bathroom in back,” she said smiling.

“Did you crack the mirror when you looked in it?”

“I tried to avoid your mirror, sir. Wouldn’t want you to have to replace it and all.”

“Mighty considerate of you.”

“I try,” she smiled again, “Is it just you today?”

“Yep.”

“Dale doing OK?”

“Nope,” I said, getting up and going inside.

I grabbed Betty’s smokes and soda, and went back out, handing them to her. Evening was falling on us fast. She looked up at the stars. I looked up with her.

“Oh my Lord! Look, Zach! Do you see it?”

I looked up and saw what she was freaking out about. What had at first looked like a star, had begun traversing the sky quickly in one direction, reversing, and going back the way it came. It did this a few times, before it just plain disappeared.

“Did you see it?” she asked me, happily.

“Yeah, I saw it Miss Betty.”

“I sure wish they’d come and take me away somewhere else.”

“How do you know it would be somewhere better?”

“I don’t. I guess I’m just hoping it would be different.”

“So you’d still go, even if where they took you was worse than here?”

“I sure would. Just so long as it was different.”

She was quiet for a few minutes, and then started rooting around in her purse until she pulled something out of it. It was a dream catcher, and she handed it to me. I took it in my hands, turning it over and over again.

“For the nightmares,” she said earnestly.

“Thank you,” I answered as I put it in my jacket pocket, “I gotta get going now.”

“Where ya going?”

“The cemetery. That preacher’s son asked me to come to his funeral tonight.”

“Tonight? But, the preacher’s funeral already happened while you were in Galilee,” Betty said, puzzled.

“You sure about that?”

“Damn sure. I was there.”

“Well then, we’ll just have to see what he wants from me tonight.”

Betty grabbed my hand as I went to walk off.

“I’ll come with you,” she said.

“No.”

“Then don’t go.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said, pulling away and heading to my car.

I parked on a dirt mound, and made my way over to the cemetery by the light of the moon. I saw Jacob’s silhouette, standing over my grandfather’s grave. I walked over and stood opposite him.

“The funeral already happened,” I said.

“Zachary, I thought you might like to pay your respects, seeing as you missed the funeral,” he answered in his measured and perfected tones.

“I see, where is he buried then? Because right now, we are standing over my granddaddy’s grave.”

“Yes, I will take you to his grave in just a moment. But, I was momentarily intrigued by these…offerings?” he said, pointing to the decaying dead bodies of the creepy dog and damn near sixty goddamn dead crows.

“What, these here disgusting carcasses?” I asked quietly.

“Yes indeed.”

“I put them here, for my granddaddy.”

He cocked his head on one side, and then motioned me to follow him. We walked over to the new grave and were silent. Thunder sounded in the distance. Dry thunder rolling across the desert, making its way right to us.

“Why do you think your grandfather would have wanted you to leave those dead things on his grave, Zachary?”

“Because it is reflective of his philosophy.”

“And what philosophy is that?”

“That this world, this place that the human spirit finds itself in, is nothing but a stinking goddamn disgusting carcass.”

Jacob smiled at me, that vague and unsettling smile of his. I walked away, and heard him calling after me.

“I don’t think you are crazy, Zachary.”

I looked back over my shoulder, and turned back to face him. In the night’s shadows we were both faceless shapes.

“I wouldn’t hang out here for too long tonight, preacher’s son,” I said, “This is unconsecrated ground.”

“All cemeteries are consecrated,” he replied steadily.

“Not this one. This land has swallowed too much blood. If you wanted to consecrate it, you’d have to burn it.”

“I don’t think you are crazy” he repeated slowly as I walked away, “I know what ails you, and I can help you.”

I turned back,

“You should probably help yourself right now. Like I said, unconsecrated ground. It welcomes ancient footsteps, and what’s a little more blood?”

-------------------------------------------

So is Z dead?

Almost time :)

Buckle in, friend! :)

What I'm going to post from here on may seem disturbing, or it may not - depending on your disposition.

But, it is my testimony. And it is a story. And all stories are true. And mine will end as I wanted it to.

--------------------------------------------

Dear Gabriel,

I know the cost, and I can cover the difference.
Please take my intention to the meeting.
My word is my bond, and you can take that to the bank.
Taking out credit on the only collateral I have.

Take my word to the meeting, and I will sign the contract with
Óðin, and keep my word, and pay.

I love you.
- Zach

It's a trap

Love is such a beautiful trap.

Good luck with your search

Thank you!
I appreciate that deeply.

The farcical nature of all human interaction, the sheer dishonesty of it, the seemingly necessary manipulation and the glaringly evident petty self-serving origin of it left me feeling so utterly disappointed that I shrank away from it as much as possible.

I hadn’t always been like that. I had tried to reach out a few times, especially when I was younger. But, when you are drowning in your own insanity, no one was going to give you their hand. They become fearful – maybe fearful of what insanity represents, of what it could mean, of the possibility that it could be contagious, of the fact that it would require them to be uncomfortable, hurt or harmed in some way.

It is in this way that you realize that fear is far stronger than love, that it will overcome love and then you feel that because of this, love must mean nothing worthwhile.

What

“I love you,” really meant was,

“I love how you make me feel when you make me feel happy.”

If you scare them, however, that love will crumble in the presence of fear, and they will watch you drown and then blame and resent you for being in need.

And so love came to mean nothing to me, and the only time that I felt alive was when I was thinking about dying. I thought about it all the time, to the exclusion of everything else.

I thought about that 24 year-old girl in Japan who threw herself into a volcano in the 1930s, and the estimated 940 people who followed her lead until they had to close public access to the mountain two years later.

I thought about Quang Duc, the Buddhist monk who set himself on fire in 1963 in Saigon as a form of protest, and the two protestors who followed his lead and set themselves on fire in Korea in 1987.

I thought about the corpses that were found which had been cut, shot, poisoned and hanged because the person, having failed to die using one method, just kept fucking trying until it worked.

I thought about the old man in Australia who had built a suicide machine using plans he’d found on the internet so that he could kill himself on his front lawn to avoid being shut up in a nursing home by his family.

I thought about all the shoes and bags and briefcases that they found on the edge of the Golden Gate Bridge, tokens of people who had thrown themselves in but will never be acknowledged because they only count the bodies that wash up.

I thought about all the people who were currently eating pills, blowing their brains out and breaking their own necks in acts of ultimate desperation.
 
I thought about all of it, I thought about it from every possible angle, every single perspective. I absorbed it, I became it, I mythologized it and then I subverted and destroyed it.

But my own suicides were not like these. My own suicides were not poignant acts of desperation. Mine came from a place much colder, much darker, far emptier and completely bereft of feeling. I simply wanted to die because I didn’t have the heart to live and I suspect that I never did. This was not a human way to feel, thus I felt transparent and phantasmal. Thus I felt that no one could see me, that I was a ghost roaming the desert, the walking dead who just wanted to finish the job.

To get up every day and go through everything that you have to go through in order to live your life, there has to be inside of you a spark, an energy, a determination to just be. I could see it in everyone around me – they were fighting to be, sweating, toiling, trying and rejoicing, each of them, to just be. Their eyes burned with it and it in turn warmed those who felt likewise.

In my own eyes, however, what I saw was a putrefaction of that will. A perversion of the will to live into the will to die, by way of a freezing cold disdain for life’s stupid goddamn spectacle. I could be given to think, if I indulged in a little hyperbole, that there was something quite evil in that, in me. But I couldn’t repent, I couldn’t be sorry; I couldn’t stand to be at all.


--------------------------------------------

Wtf man. I can see you but
I'm powerless to interact with this in any way besides superficially. And words are worthless in the end aren't they.

Yes, words are worthless in the end -
but
"I can see you"
was anything but superficial.
Anything but worthless.

I thank you a thousand times for interacting at all - that will mean more than you know, in the end, friend.

Last Edited by Scarecrow Walking on 05/14/2021 10:47 PM

Indeed.

In the astral realm, a domain formed from collective presence of thought, conscious intent can be observed. Words in those circumstances have little to no meaning.

Words dilute thought into fragmented ideas that attempt to convince people of one thing or another, whether it be true or false is not important.

The more someone talks/writes, the more diluted the idea becomes.

Sweet Dreams

In the beginning, was the Word...

Words can create.
They can be weaponized.
They can be used to heal.
They can state intent.
They can bring that intent into being.
They can be binding.
They have power.

In my experience?
There are two keys to using words.

1. Be honest - brutally, self-defyingly honest.

2. Don't fucking waffle.

:)

It was true; I was beginning to lose any patience that I may have had. Lord knows, I had precious little to begin with. But, now it was completely gone. My nights were filled with so many hallucinations and specters, so many shadows and voices and nightmares, that by dawn, I had nothing left in me for anyone else.

At my worst moments, I actually had no idea what anyone was saying to me. Anything they said sounded like gibberish. In my better moments, when I could understand them, I cared so little for what they had to say, that I couldn’t stand to hear it anyway.

Still, I refused to take the medication. The side effects were unacceptable to me. Unless someone had experienced the displeasure of taking an anti-psychotic, it was impossible to describe how it felt. Yes, they would have helped me. They may have mitigated the symptoms which crippled me, sure. But, worse than the horrible physical side effects, worse to me than any of those, was the feeling that I was slower when I took them. I’d rather be fucking crazy than dumbed down, and I rationalized this by casting myself aside from other loons, by the distinguishing mark which was the fact that I was able to control my madness. I could see it, I could feel it, and I could make sure that I didn’t do anything too untoward. Maybe that was my biggest mistake, or maybe it was the only sane decision I ever made. Does it even matter?

One night, I found myself driving back towards that church outside of town. When I pulled up, the lights were on, but I heard nothing coming from inside. I opened the door gingerly, like one strangely does when one thinks the building is empty. I saw Jacob up at the front, bending down and looking inside the rattler cage that he had placed on the altar.

When he heard the door, he looked up at me and smiled, motioning me forward with his hand. I walked up to where he was, and took a seat in one of the folding chairs, leaning back and sighing.

“You gonna handle that there serpent?” I asked him lazily.

“No. No, I’m not,” he said looking back down at the cage, “I always told my daddy that he should be careful who he handed the serpents to…” he looked up at me again, “Anyway, that’s not really my specialty. I have a different calling.”

“That’s probably a good thing,” I said, my eyes caught by the crucifix hanging on the wall next to me.

I stared at it, and the more I looked at it, the more transfixed I became. Then a full on terror began to well up in me, a terror and a disgust and a horror, all focused on this cross. I got up and started to back away.

“Is the crucifix bothering you, Zachary?” he asked me sharply.

“I have to go,” I said hurriedly.

“I’ll come and visit with you in your home, then?”

I didn’t say anything to that, I just left quickly, got back in my car, and drove over to the witchdoctor’s house, hyperventilating.

I ran over to the porch, hoping to find the watcher there, as I was starting to find his unsettling presence to be the only comforting thing in my world. And there he was, listening to Blind Willie Johnson and holding a crucifix exactly like the one at Jacob’s church. He looked at me and said,

“Sit.”

I climbed the stairs and sat down, lighting a cigarette. The watcher looked down at the crucifix he was holding, and began to speak quietly,

“A sacrificed god-man who is resurrected, is a rite that is as old as time. The god-man is sacrificed, and he is eaten, thereby those that eat of his flesh and drink of his blood gain his immortality, and by the shedding of his blood, sin is atoned for. ‘Jesus said to them, I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me.’”

“Well, that’s horrible.” I answered.

“The god-man would partake in eating himself. In this way he communed with his people. Have you ever taken communion?”

“No.”

“Haven’t you read your bible? It’s really quite clear.”

“What, the eating of Jesus?”

“It would seem so.”

“I thought it was symbolic.”

The watcher looked back down at the crucifix he was holding.

“Is it?” he said, letting the crucifix fall inverted between his finger and thumb. “Is it, really? Or is it the same story told over and over again? I, Azazel, took on the sins of the scapegoats. Then, I took on the sins of the world. I partook in the meal of my own flesh and blood. I bled and died for the world. And I commune with the world when they eat of my flesh and drink of my blood.”

I hung the crucifix up in my living room that night, upside down.

--------------------------------------------

Stripper?

So good, you had to quote it twice X)

As a child, while lying in bed did you see a large hand coming towards you? What position was that hand in?

.

No.
As a child, I wrote letters to God, and He told me He was lonely.

Last Edited by Scarecrow Walking on 05/15/2021 08:33 PM

Since, I'm coming up to giving you the end of my story, my testimony I'm going to back up a moment, and give you the beginning of the end.

----------------------------

The Bone Yard


 
Somewhere to the left of the highway, a wooden house stood on arid land. When you sat on the porch and looked all the way around, you saw nothing at all.


 
You couldn't stand in the backyard, because it was filled with bones. Piled high, and in no particular order, some say there were bones to represent every creature on earth back there -- you could pick them out if you looked at them hard enough, and for long enough. At night though, when the moon was out shining on those old bones, they melded into a white sea, indistinct and troubling.


 
A witchdoctor once lived in this house. He would spend his nights calling out to the Devil, singing the Hymn of Lucifer:


 
He is the king of Hell
He has two heads
One is the king of hell
He has two heads...


 
No one lived there anymore. But a tall man was sitting on the back porch with an old record player next to him, on which Mississippi John played the Avalon Blues.

The man looked at the bones as the moon rose. Come on home now, he said quietly into the night, it's time to come on home...

-------------------------------------

The next few days saw Dale looking worse and worse, and eventually ending up in the hospital in Hermon with alcohol poisoning.

Betty and I drove down there to visit him. He lay in bed and stared at me and then started laughing. That’s all he did; he laughed, and I laughed with him. Betty stood by the window, fiddling with the flowers she had brought along for him, but which had wilted in the hot car during the two hour drive. It seemed far more fitting to me that flowers for Dale would be wilted, even if the significance would be lost on him, and I’m not sure it was.

When we got back in the car to drive home, I looked over at Betty sitting in the passenger seat. I put the car in drive, and I headed in opposite direction to home. After we’d driven through the center of Hermon, Betty turned to me, but she didn’t say anything. Eventually, fifteen minutes later, we got to our destination. I pulled up and parked the car.

“I’m sorry that there isn’t actually a movie playing,” I said.

She gave me an enormous smile and said,

“You remembered! I always wanted to come to…”

“I know,” I interrupted her, “Daily letters and drive-in theaters and hackneyed drivel galore.”

“Thank you, thank you,” she said whispered, looking up at the big screen in front of us, reflecting our lives, blank and motionless.

“Can we just stay here for a while?” she asked me.

“Sure we can.”

And I knew at that moment.

At the gas station alone, I was in a prime position to watch the approach of the fires. It began with a pleasingly orange tone to the skies above, and then the smoke started to drift our way. The smoke combined with our local dust storms to make it rather hellish to be outside at times, and so I packed up the lawn chairs, moved them inside and smoked, staring out at the swirling mess.

One day, Doc Holliday fought his way through the flying dirt and, still holding onto his hat, dusted himself off as he walked over to where I stood behind the counter. My stomach sank at the sight of him.

“Need gas?” I asked, hopefully.

“Son, you know damn well I didn’t come here for gas.”

“How about a Twinkie?”

“Nope, nope, seems to me like I wouldn’t have dragged my poor, sorry, son of a bitching self through this shitstorm of debris to come down here for a goddamn Twinkie.”

“Oh.”

“You know exactly why I’m here,” he said narrowing his eyes and fixing me with a glare that seemed to say, you wouldn’t be dancing around the truth, now would you? Women son, women dance around the truth.

“Yeah, I guess I do know.”

“You haven’t come to me and renewed that prescription of yours. From which I can deduce that you ain’t taking those goddamn pills. And when you ain’t taking your goddamn pills, I become vexed. I don’t like to be vexed, son. I don’t like it one bit, I don’t aim to keep it up. One of us is gonna have to break here, son, and it ain’t gonna be me.”

“Well, I ain’t gonna take them anymore.”

“We’ll see about that.”

“What are you going to do? Make me?”

“That’s what they’ll do in hospital,” he stated quietly, and walked out.

His threat hung in the air after him, and it made me sick.

----------------------------------------------

:)

Always sending vibes of victory.

That's because you're awesome :)

And I beyond appreciate it!

Good night, GLP - I'll see you tomorrow.

Dröm sött!

Goodnight OP :)

Interesting thread.

The fallen have many names each - some of their other names aren't fallen.
Complex, I guess, but it's like playing several roles at once.
Michael is pretty straightforward. Only ever one role, he told me.
But they do all have a role to play, and only one Being calls the shots.
It about turning this shit-heap into utopia.

---------------------------------------------------------

Good evening, GLP!
How are we tonight?

Thank you very much!

That night, as I sat under my kitchen table in the dark, trying to slow my heartbeat, there was a knock at my door. I assumed it to be Betty or Ethan, so I opened it without thinking, only to find Jacob standing there.

“Oh man,” I sighed.

“Is this a bad time?” he asked, pushing his way past me into the living room.

“I been dealing with the goddamn medical establishment today, I don’t think I’m up to dealing with the Church too.”

“That doctor been harassing you?” he sat down on my couch as he said this.

“Yeah. He’s pretty much harassed me since I was born. He’d have harassed and institutionalized me in the womb, if he could’ve,” I said sitting opposite him.

Jacob laughed.

“He doesn’t understand you, Zachary. He never will. He’ll just do you harm.”

“And you?”

“I understand you. I was like you once. Can I share something with you?

“I get the feeling that you’re going to share it with me no matter what I say.”

“Yes, yes I am. You see, I was once like you, but my daddy cast three demons out of me, and I have been saved since.”

“Three demons, huh?”

“Yes, three of them. And when I was free of their evil influences, I was also freed from the evil influences of the doctors and hospitals. I see the demons in you too, Zachary, I see them as plain as day. And I can cast them out.”

“I think I’ll pass on that,” I said, and he turned and looked at the upside-down crucifix on the wall.

“Are you sure you want to pass? Why did you steal this crucifix from my church?”

“I didn’t steal it. Someone gave it to me last night.”

“I saw you steal it, Zachary.”

I didn’t reply.

“And now you have placed it here, upside-down. Can you not see the Devil’s influence here?”

“Let me tell you a story,” I found myself saying, “I was born dying, you see. So my granddaddy promised me to Lucifer and I lived. Just like you do at church, I drank blood and I communed. You ever heard the Hymn of Lucifer?”

After I said this, we looked each other in the eye, and he got up slowly, gathering his coat.
I’d driven the Doc out of my presence, and now I would drive this goddamn preacher’s son exorcist out of my presence, too. He left in silence and I locked the door behind him.

Why couldn’t people just leave me the fuck alone? I wondered, as I went again to sit under the table and quiver with a nameless fear until morning.

--------------------------------------------------------