5447 visits since 03/07/01 -=Mail/MSN=- sprained_soul@hotmail.com -=Featured Link=- Listening to 11.975hz - The official webcomic of #a!. 09/30/06 Cocktail Time Kill. 12/11/03 Conveyerbelt dreamscape. 09/24/03 Studded leather Envy. 06/26/03 Your very own anything. 02/11/03 I am part Hamlet, part eunuch. 11/17/02 I liked you better when I didn't know you. 10/13/02 No one likes you and you're going to lose. 09/13/02 I'd sell my soul for a Klondike Bar. 09/12/02 From lonely to only. 06/14/02 Spoonfulls of sidewalk wisdom. 05/11/02 Spontaneous human combustion on a bus. 03/24/02 We are all there is now. 03/18/02 Know what I'm talking about? 03/11/02 I wonder what it's like to be dead. 03/07/02 Lights off, Insanity on.			Cocktail Time Kill    Sit and breath in "The Real Thing" ugly, the ugly between sleep and your job. Ugly naked strangers in far-away apartments, blinds drawn, lights on : unkind lovers with kinks you'll never understand - They are voyeurscope microbes seen from a patio without any furniture. Day after day spent living a slow-motion heart attack, coming to terms with a cuddly and kindlier death and lamenting every birthday card you threw away, every Christmas morning spent in an empty apartment, every New Year's Eve spent drinking with the TV, too much time to think and never enough to drink. Let's not forget that this is your life as it happens. It is a rookie female commissionaire working the streets and parcades that those with seniority don't bother going down anymore, it's bleeding gums, no health care, split lips and blood under the finger nails, it's a slept-in for final, it's a loved-one in ICU, it's intagible contentment, the want of your father to say he's proud, it's a personals ad with no responses for the past year, it's a foot race with a lava-creep, it's being snuck up on by an iceberg, it's a head full of Pharmacom data and no way to get it out. Every path you turn down is grey figures with shoulders or hips or ankles, a cloud of briefcases and tattoos. Strobe-light bunnies and dance floor chupacabras, all in desperate need of machine gun molestation. There's a Fifth Street and Main in every city just so one could feel familiarly out of place wherever one chooses to be, with or without people.An uncouth size-up and down glance lets you know that you're uninvited and why you're so alone. Next Street and 1st is more huddled seas of helpful realestatesmen and sandpaper gloved shysters offering free hand jobs. Next Street and 2nd is quiet and if you look to your left you can see the birthplace of the man who invented some such thing in good faith, his effort and desire to create would later be used to kill, subjugate or in some way keep the rabble in line. Postcards are available at the gift shop at the conclusion of our tour. Interesting side note : lawmakers recently honoured the inventor for his contribution to society and lawmaking by naming a bill after him. Bill C16, previously known as the neighbourly Patriot Initiative, the non-partisan, much touted, publicly loved bill making it illegal to close your blinds at nights. On the 3rd street corner a poor woman is offering to sell her baby, blood still on inside of her thigh and 70s flower-print dress. After much frowning and fretting and thrusting the baby outwards or upwards into people's faces, the woman gives up on her asking price and trades the baby for a smoke to a well dressed metropolitan man. He stands, wondering what to do with the strange little thing, tossing the thing back and forth between his hands, absently betraying his inner wondering of just how far he might be able to throw it. The man bespeckled in over sized but otherwise quite useless glasses shakes the infant a little which emits a unique and, for some of us, a bit too familiar rattling "clink" of dislodged parts and a voided warranty. Realizing he was given a broken child, he flings the thing, tumbling it sideways through the air and onto the front doorway of the downtown branch of the Ivory Tower Institution Ltd. Wingtips and stilettos so expensive that they don't even stain with the blood of the poor begin to work their way though the door, and during that moment I can't help but wonder what it's like to avoid avoiding one's own footsteps. And so there it was. A Weird, child like object, a scene out of China's back water provinces, twisted on the sidewalk and seen only as a commuter disruption.A city sanitizer strolled by with a broom and, with minimal blood trails and the smallest amount of struggling, sweeps the weird flesh into a black square bin and foams down the sidewalk with the same chemicals they'd lament the use of for oil spills. The City : keeps the train on time, and the trash off the streets. The fashion conscious but generally hapless man with a haircut that the British would be kind to describe as "poofish", openly bemoaned being duped for a rather expensive and imported Galois cigarette, while he pulled another from the pack. He would also later remark that the dress the woman was wearing bore an uncanny resemblance to a couch he once owned that he got from a salvage store when he was still working as a waiter in film school. You see, he was actually waiting for his Canadian government grant to come through so he could make his dream film about the subjective realities of being Terribly Boring. He would reflect on this on a decidedly trendy street-side cafe, where he sat with other self-described "malcontents", all owing themselves and their luxury to some obscure mark of accomplishment, like re-establishing art-deco as "The hot thing for this season" or being only men alive to successfully rape Sue Johanson. People often turn to religion or state service to deal with the complexities of modern existence, innately knowing that they're both byproducts of civilization itself. But the state of modern civil dwelling, or it's more marketable term of "Urban Lifestyle" is the apex of civilization, it's inescapable. The lonely road you walk, the isolationism - society isn't to be blamed - It's like that because you're unable to cope with the natural beauty of your own inability to exist like everyone else, it's your own fault, it's your modus operandi - And now there are no soundtracks left to score, there's no kings to hang and no priests' intestines from which to hang them. There are no rock stars and there never were any heroes, just like there were no saviours - just moments of trepid pause between exigencies and a broken-minded belief that human action and intent are fundamental forces that will somehow be rewarded or punished. That they're definitely not created concepts which bare no relevance to anyone but you, who of course is ineffable. Who'd have thought superfluous would ever describe your state of existence? You are Sun Records style lonesomeness, you are the kind of lonely you only heard Elvis sing about. Some blocks later, man is smoking, selling the chance to punch him in the stomach, a bargain hunter offers to pay him his amount plus, if he can kick him in the ribs while he's down. The gut-shot vendor rolls the idea around in his mouth, as if expecting that , like a good wine, some bouquet of reason will spring from the process and point him in the right direct. He agrees. They both agree. It's commerce in action. In each of us sit enough pain to be a humanitarian crisis, the only problem is that we're not likable enough, not genial or camera friendly enough to be a cause celeb. We are raised by a cathode tube and life-mates to the ether, the stack, the consumer electronic status symbol. I belong only to the back-lit love of the only thing I can trust, although it certainly does look better in the hands of another. The only peace I've ever known is a locked room, is a 4am sidewalk, is a empty bar's corner table. We are all uniquely damaged people raised by our issues, clinging together whenever we find the next stranger. Damaged people falling in love is like some kind of strange game of chicken, to see who will back away first, who will let their brokenness catch up with them. "I dare you to love me!" we scream, "If you don't then you must not be normal! Normal people are capable of love. I saw it on TV!" and for the dance to be completed the response rolls off immediately, reeking of instinctual calculation - "I'll race ever towards all things uncertain because I'm normal just like you." Obliviousness is the anesthesia of the masses, the sub-cortex explosion or euphoric pre-sense of rampaging endorphins and rioting serotonin can have no home among the disinterested. It's all different faces of "The Big Cope" ; Religion, ignorance, passive contentment, ambivalent disinterest, recreational drug use, cheap rushes, expensive all-nighters, the search for a victim and companion coat rack to hang your issues on when you get home.The need to feel alive is how you cope with a broken life that you were given without consent. Lives of another quiet dinner, another chance to sit and wonder what to do, another time to realize CSI is on and you've already set the alarm. How hard it must be to feel any sense of belonging to graph covered trains full of awkwardly slumping and strangely standing people. Unknown objects humming and speaking, covered and carbonized, cracking little lines show in their elbows when they move to flip the page on The Financial Times or the flyer for the local Cantonese grocery store or when they sneak thimble-cup shots of NyQuil to treat the same cold they've had since their wife left them. "Magical Green Liquid : Daily Problem Solution" - available anywhere VISA is accepted. Just off the side of the platform stands a woman with a sign, it reads : "I will make passionate love to you and for an extra $20, I will inform you what a mistake it was." The line of black and leather and thrift store chique - obviously almost all art school students - is almost wrapped around the block and snaking it's way into open traffic. One mutters "I will call my next painting 'I would stand on the middle of a busy city street to be destroyed by you." I momentarily think of joining the queue, but the woman is just too commonly gorgeous - I want a woman who looks like a crime scene. I commissioned a woman to make a box for me and I've had it hanging on the wall of my room ever since - Better to have it it near by and ready. One bottle of Tylenol 3, one quart of Weiser's Whiskey and one package of John Player Specials, all framed in wood, arranged in an unknowingly temping way and covered in glass with "Break in case of emergency" in bold red font followed meekly by "You can always walk away. You will walk away someday and I will always be here.DON'T PANIC." Panic is the welter-weight champ, it is undefeated, it is unmoving and unrelenting. Panic once killed it's former ally and friend, A Foolish Consistency, for fun, profit and to claim the title of 'the kobold of the little mind' which it begrudged it's comrad very much for having been anointed with in the first place. Panic is to think of slipping off the platform and under the train, or stepping into traffic. It's frightening, it's comforting, it's a reminded that you still have the guts to walk away at any time, but it's all just panic. It is not an emergency. The emergency will forever be with you, in your room late ate night. Perhaps I should have my commission redone to read "Break in case of brilliance." Brilliance is the dreadful rush and calm that comes over you, for instance when you've settled on settling your life. You write letters, pre-purchase the necessary supplies, light a candle, shave your head and withdraw "The Happy Dagger". And then the phone rings. You never turned it off because you never thought someone would try and reach you - you just assumed that the pure logic and of your thoughts and actions, the shining of your brilliance at that particular moment could somehow surpass time and space, making it's way to the consciousness of all living creatures who would of course, agree it's for the best and wish you well on your journey. The idea of someone rebelling against this would deeply offend you, especially since there's still five rings left until the machine picks up. You pick up on the third, as usual, and it is a man who's accent you're unable to place asking to speak with a person who's name sounds unfamiliar. Did your landlord already rent out your place? Is this a sick joke? I thought I was on the no-dial list? Is this the wrong number? We all owe our lives to someone who tried to find something that wasn't there, who wanted to take advantage, or who was just doing what they think was their job. We and they seem to dial the wrong number every day. We are everyone in our dreams, and some people who believe we're all one say we're everyone we meet. I am the NyQuil shooter on the train, I am the man being payed to be punched, I am the man paying to punch me, I am the woman who could care less for something that is thought of as precious, I am the broken infant being swept off the street. Hating the world and yourself is the same. Truth is, language can only go so far to describe pain, it's sorely inadequate at conveying our loneliness, our wanting, our needing. It's obvious none of us really like ourselves. You sometimes meet those people who insist they love themselves, that life is great and that if you just change the way you think, you can love life too. They're lying to you. It's just a test. That frantic insistence that everything is OK, and in fact, everything is quite great is the frenzied clutching of denial. They have lost their brilliance. They are panicking. I know this because I am, after all, the world.