11186 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.			Conveyerbelt dreamscape    I took one last look at her, a long and obvious look, I wanted to remember her just like she was at that moment. Gentle - warm. I muttered "I love you" under my breath, slid into the next gear and passed the car in front of us. She slid her hand over mine and squeezed it around the shifter, I heard her whisper "I know" as I turned our car over the median and into oncoming traffic. I never thought the lights of oblivion would be so dim. That night's air was a pair of jeans taken out of the dryer 10 minutes too soon, it stuck damp to your skin and held the cold tight to the folds and bends of your body. There was that mystical sense in the air as well, so strong and apparent that if you caught a light just right, everything around it seemed to almost sparkle, to almost hum, to lick it's lips in anticipation, in preparation for an explosive something. We both knew the night was not about her or I, it was about us, utterly and beyond reproach about us. A stolen car is a passport to a world filled with urgencies, a new filter to unravel the mystery and romance of crime, a beckoning deviance, the excuse you needed to call your own bluff. The liberation of self through petty acts of thievery makes the world come alive and lend itself to the sweetest 50 miles on I-90 you will ever know. The top down, the radio up, the seat adjusted to cocoon, the look on her face. Seconds bled out into small black holes of memories and you could fully grasp that, in all harmonious senses, you were on the brink of every cliff of every dream you kept to yourself. Grudging acceptance led to careless abandon - you entire life will never again equal the sheerness of now, you will never wrap yourself around something so completely or recall with such unerring vividness the moment that just passed, the moment you live now, or the moment you'll live next. It was more romantic than letters home from war. The first sets of lights angled out to swish by us, and then there was - everything. A vast stretch of sideways blacktop, inertia and kinetics, nausea and hyper-awareness, quantum concepts bloomed wide and then burnt inside out, hair so on end it became a new part of your body, glass chips, paint chips, rubber stripping and a skreeching grind of flesh on something distinctly not flesh. A long and fully expected pause followed, welcomed by the crickets and birds as the cue for their time to shine. It was trauma so complete you stepped over and away from yourself, you panned out the camera on yourself, absorbed with measured completeness the severity of the situation. Your consciousness deliberated and pondered the event like it was something to be pined over, it lit up a cigarette, sat down in a chair, crossed it's legs and gave the whole thing it's removed but not overly analytical attention, like watching a child's 4th grade Christmas recital. A life spent under-achieving and squandering talents out of spite and retaliation, weeks spent without speaking, years passed without touching, all time bound up without knowing for certain if certainty is merely perception and interpretation. Mornings and evenings frantic in front of the bathroom mirror stabbing yourself, trying to get at the real flesh, the substance that has yet to be tainted, turned, gone rancid or beaten into molded scabs. A generation of people living through tyranny and serfdom, dragging themselves into and back out of failures, having more faith in intangibles and market trends then in self. A culture so abused for profit, a culture that can be bought out of a catalogue and delivered to you over-night complete with authentic scratches, rips, tears and signs of struggle should you request it, a culture rubber-stamped into oblivion, chopped up like a commodity and liquidated for our own benefit. An age of excuses, indignity and intolerance, where you have nothing left to lose but your boredom. A romance so perverted and tortured, it slumps and pulls itself by the collar, it crawls nakedly and begs passer-bys for spare change. These were the things we rebelled against so fiercely that it made death worthwhile, just to sample reality without their presence. I opened my eyes as she lit up a cigarette, her hand outstretched in a gesture of aid. I dusted myself off as I was pulled up, the passengers of the other car strewn about in that artistically weird placement wrought by car wrecks - or bombs. We held hands in the moonlight as we walked further down the highway. She was already thumbing down our next ride.