11189 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.			Studded leather Envy I grew up in a suburban neighborhood in a small Irish town which, oddly enough, was named after an English city. The things I learned and adapted for as I aged were drenched in self-destructive undertones, permitting the slight and subtle transition from human to monster through a series of traumas that seemed almost tailored for a sociopath. So in retaliation I drop-forged my loneliness, so no one could withstand it. But there's always a girl. The great minds of philosophy, literature and science know that there's always a girl. If she was bad news, she wouldn't be that your car has been towed, she'd be that your expected child was stillbirth, she wouldn't be your last warning, she was your two minute warning. She's the one who got the snakes and spiders into my bloodstream. She had her own name tattooed vertically on her neck. She had gapped teeth and could spit beer ten feet. She could sing the national anthem to twenty-two countries in their native language. She wore neon green contacts because her eye color was that of gasoline on water. She once, in a fit of rage over him slapping her ass, took a swing at George Bush in a Mexican bar in Waco. She wore a diamond tennis bracelet to offset the outfits she got at the Salvation Army. She was infallible, inflammable, unforgiving and unbound. She was tangibly all things, like the capitalist version of the Tao. She had a voice like chocolate gravel, she looked like a lo-fi slow motion car wreck. The first time I saw her, she was doing an art piece on a coffee shop stage. A makeshift spotlight contrasted against the background of soft candle luminescence and explored her sinewy body like a long lost forever. The rain rapped on the thin chain store roof, but it all sounded like in your were in your grave while a smoking and annoyed could-have-been taught retards how to tap dance on top of you. It didn't take aback the hipsters one bit when she brought a man out on stage, naked but for a black leather mask and pushed him to the front of the platform, his shaking frame exposed for the world to judge. With no ceremony whatsoever, she took out a 9mm pistol that she had tucked in the small of her back and thunder-clapped a bullet into the crown of his skull, spewing grey matter and skull all over the unimpressed audience. There were heckles born of boredom or malcontent and more than a few dismissive yawns. "If I had wanted to get brains on my shirt, I would've driven to the south side, where true artistic frustration lives!" cut in one hipster, quickly followed by "So tame, so controlled so uninspired." from a girl in army fatigues. She put on a determined look, squared her shoulders and yanked hard on another leash lead. Another man shuffled out, naked except for a codpiece, she laid him down belly up with his head hanging on the edge of the stage, his eyes like old concrete. Amid some nervous chuckles and awkward glances She deftly cinched a 10 inch strap on over her legs and leaned over his stomach. The lights seemed to flicker and a warm sigh escaped the codpiece man as she kissed him once above his bellybutton and then she suddenly wretched for a second,putrescent yellow fluid flowing down on him from her mouth, and then she picked something out of the mess with her teeth. The spotlight was down now, but even mood light cannot hide the glint of steel - a razor sandwiched in her teeth. She kissed his stomach again and gently, with craftsman patience, began to slit his stomach, blood oozing out and mixing with her vomit. His eyes sharpened then, and looked not unlike cat piss in snow. She stalked upwards and places the head of the strap on at the entrance of the wound - people began to pay their tabs and collect their coats, some of them were still yawning and others were pale with a underlying psychological acknowledgment of their own previous emasculations. She hit a nerve with them, she had them scared and ready to jump ship. She thrust herself deep into him with one motion and his mouth opened in a primal but silent scream, he didn't even squirm though. Blood splashed out onto the stage, there was so much blood it began to seep out towards the audience, the pumping peice of plastic was slick with almost black blood, displacing more with each of her thrust. Soon I was the only one in the audience. Even the staff decided to go out back to smoke, make fun of one another and complain about how lousy a tipper an art-critic makes. She rolled the forgettable man off the stage and into a trashcan, his arms flopping about in that rag doll lifeless way before she returned to the stage and took a low bow. I did my best golf clap. She silently strode over to my table, a riding crop in one hand and a bottle of Jack Daniels in the other, which she brought to her lips while she deftly slid her cigarette to the side of her mouth. She whapped the crop down onto the table in front of me and hissed "So what's your story?" I felt like I was choking on motor oil. Shakily, it started to come out of my mouth, my voice low and broken, like I had survived my life on a strict diet of plate glass. "I've lived my life heavily and urgently as I could, I live with a sickness, that feeling in your stomach when friends go to a party without you. I've scraped by the crushing knowledge that the only thing I've ever been promised was death and taxes. I was born knowing I had no point biologically, sociologically or theologically. My story is what mothers tell naughty children to scare them to sleep." She drank deeply from her bottle and whipped it across the room,"And what did you think of my show?" "I think that these fundamental expressions put on display so as to elicit emotional reactions under the guise of art are just tantrums from unenlightened few for attention." She slid behind and ran her gloved hands along my chest. "Who are you to say something like that?" "I am not an artist. I am a pain addict. I can take all of your jabs and and shots like mother's milk, I am beyond you because you can't stop a man without the crutch of negative reinforcement. There is no positive reinforcement because you have nothing I want, you have nothing I need, you cannot comfort me, you cannot sooth me, you cannot stop me." Her hands worked their way around my body, she swung sideways and with a grunt, landed in my lap."You think so huh?" And then, days later, I was there with her on some distant stage in another city, on a lead, naked for the world. I breathed in deep, and she brought out her gun and put it to my temple, I felt the room contract with the audience - we all took a deep breath in. She pulled the trigger and painted the world with it's failure.