Different.

I should give her credit in that she didn’t walk up to me and start it right away. We were both curled up in the motel room, avoiding the stiff, embalmed bed (“Ew, smells like burbon.” “…can we not sleep in this?”) and slumping ourselves deeper into the crusty carpet around a shared bottle of Dr. Pepper and cheap Chinese-style meat product. RENT has it wrong, you know—bohemians don’t eat tofu and greens. We feast on what we are thrown or what we scavenge as we prowl through the jungles of this world, whether it be stale bread with catsup spread on it or a chunk of raw poultry. Whatever stops the gnawing wolves in our stomachs from eating up our ideas and turning that idiosyncratic light of ours to more mundane things, like why the hell we’re flat broke and can’t afford groceries. Sharks aren’t particular about what they eat as they ceaselessly swim; they just get what they can.

The cable box was out or maybe it was the TV itself—or maybe we were the defected electronics, and refused to fully turn on the tube. Either way, it hissed and crackled with electronic snow and spit out one or two random images to tantalize us. True to American television, they were mostly commercials.

Between a static-laced voice singing about imitation butter and a department store babbling about errors in orders, she put a hand on my shoulder. Lightly she fingered the thin web of cracks, frowning at the fading splits—they’re almost gone, you know. There will still be lines for me to remember them by, but the exoskeleton is almost closed. In a way, I’m contained again, protected, since they can’t split me open as easily or penetrate.

“Those people were real assholes, Olo.”

I nodded and looked to the door on reflex, checking to see if the locks were fastened tight, the windows closed, the drapes up and blotting out the scene within. I’m a sensible shark, you see—I always watch for the other predators when I slow down to rest for a bit. They can’t overtake me. “They were, Scoot. They just took…you know, and they sold it. Like it was something they owned, and not me.”

“All of us aren’t like that.” Husky tone; Scooter’s voice (it’s too late for anonymity, anyway) seemed to rumble up from within her like rock, rolling like boulders with certainty. She waved aside my ‘I know’ and sighed. “That ain’t it. I mean people who…well, share sheets. We’re not all like that.” Her hand travelled to my back, just below the neck, and patted the plating. “It’s different…I could show you, you know. It’s nicer with women, for humans and poleepkwa.”

My voice cracked like ice and shattered so that the sentence fell apart, the words like broken icicles at our feet. “W-what—no. Oh no…no no no no…” I shrunk back, wrenched her hand away—had it gone lower, snuck further down while I wasn’t noticing? No, but I wouldn’t let her. If I had to I’d scratch at the hands, use the little bit of self-defense and flee.

But Scooter was my friend. Why would she want to hurt me? The sardonic reply came quickly: Why did all of those customers want to hurt me?

She sighed, let go of me and slunk back. Her eyes—I couldn’t look away, not because they were angry, or because they were sad, but because they were sad and trying not to show it. The ice blue was melting, getting watery with the heat and tension of the moment and she turned, blinked back the gush from the melting glaciers. Raindrops, or lakes of ocean water that were separated from me by the small flaps of skin, slightly smudged tangerine. Nonchalantly her shoulders moved in a shrug that turned into a slump. “I guess I always choose the people I can’t be with.”

She was going to stop this…she was going to stop herself and retreat in inglorious defeat because I didn’t want to take part in this. When did humans do that? Never; never had they turned tail to me and fled when I whimpered for it to stop short. Instantly I realized how she must have been feeling—you’re high up on the roller coaster but derail and fall before going down the big hill. No safe rush, just the dull, sick swoop of your stomach dropping and the long plummet down, down, down, down, down. Just because I wasn’t comfortable…that had never happened.

I acquiesced. No, more then that: I agreed. That was the good in it; the vital difference that made it more then torture and, maybe…enjoyable. I chose to do it, not out of fear but out of curiosity, of companionship. The way sex is supposed to be chosen, I think, and it was all so different. So familiar and unfamiliar; the scraping of plating against soft human skin, not rough this time but infinitely more delicate, more careful. Gentle, because she wasn’t trying to hurt me. It smelled different, too—free of the stench of booze but smelling like fruit, whatever perfume Scooter wears...most of the people who rented me had been drunk when they paid for it; they’d probably had to prepare themselves with the actual act by drinking, matching the heat down there with the warm fog of alcohol so that it makes a shred of sense. Things were clear this way—it didn’t make sense but then again when does anything in my life, our lives, make sense? I’m sitting in a motel room with Dr. Pepper, for Vishnu’s sake.

La Vie Boheme, I guess. It still smells like strawberries.

Travel (Short)

I am travelling again, and watching the road streak by, feeling the distance between home and where I am now dissolve away. The car I’m sharing with my friend (who will be unnamed...sometimes reality sets in and I have to protect identities) is cramped, shuddering from the strain of moving forward and smells faintly of vomit. It’s like a small, mobile promise of the party to come. Just a few more hours, one more night of driving and praying that we don’t get pulled over by the cops. She has no driver’s license. We’re illegal here, my partner-in-crime and I; she’s guilty, I’m guilty of smuggling ourselves in this tiny, rave-marked car and for carrying the contraband we’ve got shoved in the backseat next to the worn, old rave equipment. It’s wonderful. Absolutely, refreshingly wonderful.

The complete foolishness of this—the rash thoughtlessness of it is invigorating. It’s stupid, yes, but how stupid can it be? Logic backs my actions…why would I ask for a ride back home? I couldn’t wait any longer—there are plans that are in the making. A protest-rave that needs to be planned and set up…I couldn’t wait, and it would have been wasteful to ask for a plane ride home. No, this way is best. I’ll be more, anyway, and people may see me: secrecy must be abandoned for the plot to come. It’s going to be great.

Daylight.

Today is a nice day, if you’re a nature person. I can see the sun hanging high overhead like a dragon’s eye, swollen and yellow. It crisply takes in the green of the trees; it makes the brown and black of the bark stand out in stark relief against the few patches where snow clings on for dear life. Sooner or later it’ll realize that its time is up and melt away cleanly, or maybe not. Maybe it’ll keep hanging on until it’s finally torn from existence by the glare of the sun.

Today is a nice day, if you’re a nature person. If you’re like me and crave darkness, cut into with neon lights like knives and seething with the electricity of desire, carefully balanced tension that glitters like honed steel, it’s horrible. Today is one of those days that prove to me that I cannot leave this world; as wonderful as our home planet sounds and as exciting as it would be to go there, I can’t leave Earth. When the sun goes down and it’s dark out it’s fine—I’ve compromised between worlds and can get both the sky and the ground in my life. Now though, in the brightness…Vishnu I wish that today would end already.

I can’t leave my raves behind—even now, I feel the absence of a bass beat thumping next to my heart and miss it terribly. Without the rhythm and the vibration of speakers I am hollow; without the flashing strobes I am hopelessly blind. To be surrounded by color, lights, moving bodies and the thick, steady beat-beat-beat-beat of the music is like a drug to me, and that fact is both horrifying and uplifting. Yes, perhaps I’ll give up another life beyond this atmosphere for a chance at techno and nightlife here, but I’ll make sure that the upper air trembles with my music. Others will carry on my story if I reach them and my story is worth telling; if it isn’t worth telling I am content to keep writing it and living it. Someday it might be memorable then.

There are a few hours left until daylight ends. There are a few more days until I can finally go home. I’m waiting.

Moths, Songs, and Raindrops.

Dreams are coming to me today; dreams that I can’t quite grasp now but that still stick to the back of my head. They’re like moths, chasing the beams of light from my eyes; bumping and flopping against me, their little bodies failing to penetrate the thick glass that separates truth and perception. Maybe when I put the blinds down and go to sleep, leave the window open a crack to allow the night air passage, the moths will get through…for now, I can only observe the ideas and write about the color of their wings.

It must be an exciting life, being a raindrop. You’re formed in the upper atmosphere—if I remember what Jill warbled happily to me, it’s the troposphere—and exist as a loose collection of ice crystals. You form slowly, gradually over time, fragile and yet undamaged because of the gentle quality of your surroundings. Fellow groups of ice shards bump into you and you grow, maturing and changing over time, maturing.

Then, finally, you get too big for your surroundings, too old and weary to the world that surrounds you and you begin to fall, fall fast. Your beauty dissipates; you warp and meld into yourself, structures melting and liquefying as the grayness drops away and the ground sneaks closer. Unseen forces pull at you and you stretch, falling down, down, down until you finally crash against the ground and splatter, far away from your home…

…it should be a tragic thing, the death of a raindrop, but people don’t cry over them. Maybe it’s because we know that the water isn’t gone. It soaks into the ground and nourishes plants and us, by extension; it runs into lakes and oceans and trickles under our feet, deep down in the darkness where rivers silently flow. But even if the rain gurgles in the river Styx, it always manages to make its way back into the sky again. It evaporates and drifts above the harsh, hard surface of the earth, leaving the pollution and the pain behind. It’s only then, when all the pain has bleached you clean, that the process can begin again.

I’ve been alternating between the raincloud and the falling for some time now, but maybe it’s time I went back to the earth again. Sherry’s mentioned classes in the District after Tanukashi finally takes over, and I’ve offered to help out. It’ll be nice to teach something…I think I’ll help with music classes and philosophy classes, if there are any. Probably not right off the bat, but later on there might be. We’ve got to establish a basis first; people have to have the words and the math before they can understand the rhymes and the measures. I’ll wait, and then when things calm down, I’ll be there to watch the newer, cleaner, more hopeful excitement. Who knows…maybe I’ll even help to cause some revolutionary thoughts. That would be something, wouldn’t it?

I wonder what it would be like to live as a song…translated, transcribed and endless, reincarnated through the vibrating discords of foreign throats, braying in unison and sometimes in different keys…

I just finished my first day of basic self-defense training, and I’m left with a sense of how small I really am. I barely reached the shoulder of the poleepkwa who was training alongside me; it’s safe to say that I was much weaker then them too. In a rational person’s brain, this would be mulled over for a while and a conclusion would be struck: “I should learn how to defend myself.” It’s easy, it makes sense, but I really can’t reach that conclusion yet. Maybe it’s my pacifism that’s making this block inside my brain, or maybe it’s fear. It could be half-repressed embarrassment at how vulnerable I really am at times…or it couldn’t be any of those. I’m not sure. The main thing is that it makes sense to the people who care about me, and they’re some of the sanest people I know. It makes sense to them, so I do it, if it’ll make them feel better. The world has too much worry…they don’t need to worry more. You don’t have to worry more.

That little revelation is one of the saddest and truest things that I have felt lately...people shouldn’t be worried but they are. They shouldn’t do bad things, but they do. Why?

Another note: chaos. I’ve been thinking about chaos and order lately—some of you know why, and please believe me when I say that I’m not worried; I’m not scared—and, like my old days in the basement, I turned to a book, and then turned inward for answers. What I’ve found is perhaps not the best explanation or the most logical one, but it’s what I’ve got for now. If you read this, it’s what you’ll have too, plus your own opinions of course.

What defines chaos? In the dictionary, chaos is “a state lacking order or predictability.” Order, it seems, is “a condition in which freedom from disorder or disruption is maintained through respect for established authority.” It can also be a command given by a general in a war, or a formal written letter stating requirements for commerce. Lastly, it can be a body of persons living under a religious discipline. This is interesting…can chaos be a religion all its own? It can be a god to those who wouldn’t have a god otherwise. Perhaps it can be everything to those who have lost everything…

Chaos, however, the idea of chaos, is by its nature indefinable. It’s unable to be measured or predicted. It’s a variable, endless and vulnerable, infinite and already dead. Living by chaos can be living, or it cannot be. You never know, and that’s the problem with it.
If you expect chaos, it will not be there, because it’s chaos, and it can’t be predicted. Yet at the same time it’s predictable in that respect. There’s no order to it, nothing that you can hang a resolve on or base one’s life around. It’s CHAOS—what we truly think of it is nothing but a shallow hint of what it really is. Perhaps a madman can truly tell us that it’s like, but it would be in a language we cannot understand. Come to think of it…that would be why he would be called a madman. That’s the danger of it; those who worship chaos might someday look at their altars and find that their god is dead, or not the god they were worshipping. Either that, or they look back from the altar to the world and see that what they are surrounded by is something they can no longer understand.