Soul searching.

“Is that...?”

“I think I'm hallucinating.”

“Impossible, I thought most of them were dead.”

“She looks enough like one, though.”

“At least one that hasn't turned.”

“Yet.”

“I'm scared, I've never seen one in person before.”

“She's so pale.”

“What's she doing here?”

“And what is that on her back?”

The topic in question was somebody who wandered into the village. A young girl who looked no older than her late teens dressed up in a rather extravagant manner. Pale enough that she almost appeared translucent, although you could only tell from her sickly, tired face. She was in an intricate black dress reminiscent of the Victorian age that covered all her bare skin save her face. There on her head rested faded blue eyes that were stuck upon the face of a porcelain doll, framed by her black bangs and long hair. She was a bit dainty, which seemed to undermine the amount of strength she seemed to possess carrying what appeared to be a coffin on her back.

Of course while that was odd enough, what struck the townsfolk the most was that she appeared to be a human.

“A crowd has gathered, it seems.” she said what appeared to be to herself.

“They detect the presence of your souls. You best tread carefully or get tread on yourself.”

“I seem to be the popular gal everywhere, I say.” She hesitantly looked around as the citizens of the small village looked at her. Some wearily, some perplexed, some curious. In a world where humanity has long since declined to the point of extinction, seeing the young girl could be interpreted as a lot of things. She was a rarity, a myth only heard in legend or fairy tales. She was an ill omen to some, seen as the harbinger of death. To others, she was money. To capture a long sought-after species that was widely considered extinct, scientists, alchemists, cultists would pay top coin to dissect her or study her. But none dared to try, because nobody knew if all the woven stories and legends were true about what they could do.

“It can't be a human.” one of the villagers said. “It's probably another doll, a homunculus.”

“She's a walking defacement of everything we believe in.”

“She could be a prophet.”

“Who knows? I don't want to ask her, her eyes scare me.” But the girl didn't seem to care for their expressions. They didn't have any. They weren't human.

“...a village of Shadowmelds.” the girl stated. “A misplaced judgment in safety to come here, I'm beginning to think.”

“You think?”

“Regardless, the trail led us through here so we might find some clues, one would hope.” The girl scanned her surroundings with her weary eyes. She was surrounded by a sea of black tendrils with white masks checkering the crowds, their voices becoming increasingly more frantic and nervous as they looked at her. Shadowmelds were nothing more than dark apparitions, gelatinous shadows that extended from the ground to a height of an average human. Their most distinct characteristic were their masks, vaguely modeled with human facial features to discern themselves from one another.

“I believe retiring to an inn would be wise, yes?” she uttered as she was growing concerned of the gathering crowd.

“Yes, make haste. We can gather information if one's showed up here there.” And so the girl did. The sun cast an orange glow on the village as it started to sink over the horizon. The entrance of the inn was a bar, where a wide variety of salty creatures and apparitions stayed. Drunk off of sorrow, the rabble-rousing in the bar seemed to get significantly quieter as the girl walked in. Demons and lamias and bloodthirsty horned minotaurs all stopped drinking and noticed the human walk in. Some averted their eyes. Some sneered. She approached the shadowmeld innkeeper, who was also playing bartender to the rest of the folk inside.

“I'd like a room, if you have a spare.” she said. The innkeeper couldn't speak. His white mask began to sink a bit into himself.

“Um. I'm not sure we serve your kind here.” he nervously choked up.

“I have money, I do.” she pulled out her wallet and laid a handful of bills on the counter. “Surely that's enough for a room, yes?”

“Uh... what about... what about that?” He formed a tendril to point at the coffin.

“She'll be staying with me too, yes.”

“Err, what's in it?” the innkeeper asked.

“That's probably best left unanswered, I say.” That didn't seem to make the atmosphere in the bar any less tense. A chair could be heard screeching against the hardwood floor as a tall and lumbering beast stirred himself from his seat to confront her. His musculature was similar to an enormous man, but he had the head and hooves of a bull. He was covered in ragged clothes in a somewhat vain attempt to humanize himself.

“I don' like yeh comin' here one bit.” he shouted as he approached her. “Another fuckin' bloody doll comes wandering in here. Does yer master think yeh're special enough to be sculpted after a human or wot?”

“I have no master, sir.” she rebuked.

“Who da hell are yeh?”

“Reo Sterling, sir.”

“What da hell are yeh?”

“If I told you I was a homunculus, would that pacify your insistence to pry information out of me?”

“Reo, watch your tongue.” The minotaur paused.

“Where'd that voice come from?” he slurred out.

“Pay no heed to it.” she muttered. “May I retire now, I've come far from the East and I would like to get some sleep for the night.” Her comment got the bar stirring.

“What, yeh came from thar? Yeh managed ta escape after wot happened over thar?”

“Yes.” she plainly stated. Another folk, a skittish fox stood up.

“I heard a chain of villages were getting burned down and working their way over towards the west.” He began trembling. “Y-you, you were the one who did it, weren't you? WEREN'T YOU?”

“Talk to me after you've crawled out of that mead-soaked hole before throwing accusations around, you pillock.”

“Reo, no.” Reo averted her glance from the fox back towards the beast in front of her. The minotaur huffed.

“I don' know where that voice is comin' from, but it's right y'know. Best watch yer lips around here, doll.”

“Can I just go to bed?” Both stood facing each other for a while. The minotaur stood a good three feet over Reo and looked as if he could crush her head with his palm, but she didn't move an inch. He let out a snort and walked back to his table and started drinking. She let out a sigh and grabbed her room key as she headed upstairs.

“Reo, you almost started another scene.”

“I will not be talked down by cattle, Mog.”

“Unless you want what happened at the other villages to happen again here, I would refrain from opening that big mouth of yours.”

“Hmph.” The coffin was propped against the wall. Its features could be barely seen in the dim candle-lit room. It was in the traditional hexagonal shape of an old-style casket while it had an ornate cross resting on the lid. The cross was affixed with slots for a handful of leather straps running through it to keep the lid bound to the casket. It's where the voice Reo was speaking to was coming from.

“And as if further wanton destruction of said villages wasn't because of a little strumpet who couldn't control herself, am I correct?”

“No fair, you know how I get when I'm around people.”

“Hence why you're in there, child.” Reo sighed and took off her boots as she crawled into bed. “Now I expect an eventful night, so I'm going to get as much sleep as I can at least before then, yes?” She blew out the candle and almost instantly fell asleep in her dingy bed.

“REO.”

“Hmm... wha... is it time already...?”

“REO GET UP.” And as Reo rubbed her sunken eyes to consciousness, she took benign interest in what was in front of her. The moon was shining brightly through her room, lighting it up more than her candle previously did.

“Well at least the li'l doll will be awake fo' when I rip 'er limb from limb.” The large minotaur beast was in her room, reeking of alcohol. Earlier signs showing he peeled off the door with his enormous strength and ruined the frame working his way into the small room.

“The things you sleep through, Reo. For Heaven's sake.” the coffin muttered.

“Do you mind?” Reo nonchalantly yawned. “A single night's rest is all I ask for, I do.”

“Yer a cocky li'l shit until the very end, aren't yeh?” the minotaur spit. “High an' mighty because she's modeled afta a pretty li'l human.” She pulled her feet out of bed and crossed her legs as she stared at the towering behemoth, his horns only a foot or so away from scraping the ceiling.

“So what is it that you want, Mr. Cattle?” she sighed. “I have money, yes. I have research notes for what I do in my line of work, yes.”

“I want to smash yer disgusting head in.”

“You do realize that we're in a land where everybody is effectively immortal, correct? Hardly anybody in this world has a soul to speak off, we're all mostly just walking corpses, I say. What good would it come from 'smashin' mah head in?'” She shifted into his rough English accent mockingly.

“I can't kill yeh, but it doesn't mean I can't make yeh wish yeh weren't dead and then stealin' everything but the clothes off yer back.”

“Well good, glad we got that cleared up. Most of my belongings are in that coffin, you see.”

“Reo...”

“I dare say, you should let me display my wares first. There's quite a hoarder's delight in there, yes?” The minotaur turned around and began unhinging some of the locks and straps on the coffin.

“What could yeh possibly have that I would even wa--” The minotaur was cut off before he could finish his sentence. And by “cut off”, his throat was impaled by a dark tendril as he started letting out a gagged moan choked with blood before more dark appendages reached out of the coffin and began ripping pieces of him off and pulling him in before he was enveloped entirely and dragged into the casket. The lid clasped shut as only the sound of the monster howling in agony and his bones crunching could be heard from the shaking coffin.

“No one is immortal when I'm around, baby cow.” Reo smirked. “Is it at least prime cut, my dear child?” The coffin stopped stirring and her room became silent.

“He struggled a fair bit for a single creature.” Mog muffled out, the sound of her mouth crammed with food.

“Well he is a minotaur. Many of them in our studies has shown them to be quite the lumbering beasts, yes?” Of course as she talked, she looked at the door. The jittery, paranoid fox was holding a lantern as he peered into the entrance to her room, terrified out of his mind at the sight of blood smeared and splattered all over the ground.

“I—I KNEW IT! SHE'S A MONSTER! I HAVE TO GO ALERT THE VILLAGERS BEFORE WE ALL DIE!”

“MOG.” But before Reo could open the casket, the fox bolted through the hall downstairs. “...so this again.” A sneer crossed the girl's exhausted face as she lurched herself onto her feet and proceeded to get ready to go downstairs.

“It's going to be trouble this time.” Mog stated.

“I'm aware.”

“You haven't fixed your cross yet.”

“I'm aware.”

“And you know how Shadowmelds get under a full moon.”

“I'm. Aware.”

When Reo went through the bar, it was empty. It was empty because all of its residents alongside the residents of the town were outside with torches. She stepped out the door, and there the mob looked her down. A sea of torches checkered with white masks and horns and other appendages loomed in front of her.

“THERE SHE IS, THE MONSTER!” the fox shouted.

“Do you folks really want to do this, I ask?” Reo sighed.

“IT'S NOT LIKE SHE CAN KILL US!” a Shadowmeld yelled in the crowd.

“Yeah!”

“We can't kill her either, though...”

“But we can rip her apart and make it impossible for her to pick up the pieces.”

“What if she really is a human?”

“What if the legends are true?”

“She's probably a doll, there's no way she can be a human.” Reo shook her head.

“I... gave up my humanity a long time ago, I did. But now,” lifted the casket over her head and slammed it in front of her. “If you heathens and ne'er-do-wells think it would be a wise investment to provoke me, I am warning you now: nobody here will escape without the stench of death following them indefinitely.” Of course Reo was preaching to a sea of corpses, creatures without souls and thus were immune to most standard threats of mortality. They could be battered and bruised but they would either reassemble themselves or they wouldn't ever truly die. It was the fate of all creatures in the land. But Reo was not a standard threat of mortality because she wielded the most significant danger to life.

“...”

“...call her bluff.”

“...let's tear her to pieces.”

“LET'S RIP HER TO SHREDS!” The crowd howled and began closing its ground.

“Mog,” Reo whispered into the back of the coffin. “Time to feast.”

“I'm not fond of Shadowmelds, but a meal's a meal.” Reo ripped the binding leather off the casket lid and swung open. It was pitch black inside, as if it was a door to the abyss itself. The last thing the mob saw was a pair of glowing red eyes and a Cheshire grin visible from the reflecting moonlight. And what they felt before fear and death enveloped them was the one threat to immortality; humanity.

“They actually got me that time, I say.” Reo's left sleeve was torn off, her left arm drenched in blood. “Shadowmelds are such wily creatures in a full moon.”

Reo hoisted the coffin onto her back and began walking through the burning village. Torches strewn across the ground, maimed giblets of things, black quivering masses of what used to be alive were everywhere. A trembling white mask laid on the ground, as if it was still alive before it was stamped beneath Reo's heel and shattered into pieces.

“Is that all of them?” Mog asked.

“One more, yes?” Reo walked over slowly. “Our little fox friend.” The fox was crawling away behind a storage shed in the village, his legs mangled and bleeding as he frantically backed himself against the wall, terrified of the young human girl approaching him.

“Y-you... you really a-are a human, aren't you?”

“I'm not, anymore.” she knelt down in front of the fox. “I'm what you call a corpse collector.” The fox's eyes widened as he trembled violently.

“Y-y-you're the corpse collector? THE CORPSE COLLECTOR? THE GRIM REAPER!?”

“Well I suppose 'the' is a more appropriate term, yes. I appear to be the only one at the moment, it seems. My job is to make sure that death still occurs in this disgusting world. I've been alive far longer than you have, fox boy.”

“...it's impossible. Humans were killed off centuries ago. If you're human, you should be dead!”

“Again, I gave up my humanity a long time ago, child. I will die eventually, when my source of nourishment eventually depletes itself in time. Which given that I escort the carrier of all human souls that once existed, could be quite a while.”

“Reo, why are you telling him this?” Mog muttered inside her casket.

“Merely exposition, dear child. There's not many people who will learn about the world that existed before this.”

“W-why me... WHY ME THOUGH?” the fox yelled.

“Because you can keep a secret, my dear.” a slightly solemn smile crossed her face. “The dead can keep secrets like no other, and soon you'll be dead too, fortunately.” The color left the fox's face as he began to weep.

“I-is... is everyone in this village dead now?”

“Of course, humanity is the threat to all immortality, yes?” She knocked against the casket on her back. “This abomination is the biggest threat to this world imaginable, so I keep her locked up in here, you see.”

“...what is she?”

“She's the first real human of this age, of course.”

“...t-that thing, THAT WASN'T HUMAN! Even I know that much...”

“She is the fate of humans who reap too many souls of other humans, they're twisted into what lurks in here. She has turned, she is what humans are now, which thankfully there are precious little of left in this world. I was hoping a human passed through this village at some point, but it appears my leads were cold.” She dusted her dress as she stood back up. “But it appears I've exhausted your time.”

“I'm... I'm not actually going to die, am I?”

“Oh you will, my dear. Be grateful, next to souls death is a prized commodity in this world. No longer do you have to be a breathing corpse, you can know rest like everyone else here does now, I say.” As the fox's panic began to bleed out of him, his eyes dimmed and his breathing ceased. Reo closed his eyes as she stood up.

“So there wasn't a human here, either, I suppose.”

“Nope.”

“I suppose we keep trailing our lead to the west and hope God smiles on us, yes?”

“Ironic that you of all people talk about hope and God, Reo.”

“Yes yes, I thought it was rather clever.” The sun started to rise over the smoldering town, but it remained engulfed in darkness from all the smoke in the air deflecting choking the light. Reo began walking alongside the dirt road out of the village to the west.

Wouldn't your family be proud?

This is what it's like inside the box. The walls are finally visible, I can't run outside of it anymore. That thing I've been looking for, that I've been chasing after is on the other side of this wall and I only realized that I couldn't reach it. I learned that these walls exist because I've finally run into them. This is the limit of what I am capable of in this state. There are no doors. The walls can't be seen by the naive dreamers or the hopeless romantics, they don't have the venom dripped into their eyes yet. There is a ceiling. I can watch the planes go by, watch the leaves blow. And I realize that is what I wish for. To be outside of this, either having some pre-set destination to look forward to, or to just drift aimlessly and let things decide where to take me. What I am here, is standing still, trapped. The only thing I can see the moon, and it's going to kill me. As the full moon wanes, that crescent scythe gets sharper and eventually it's going to fall from the sky and dismember me. Hopefully I'll be asleep so I won't have to notice a thing and that'll be it.

And that's what most people amount to. They realize that their dreams are on the other side of the glass and they can't reach it. They can't chase after it anymore because they're trapped, and all they can do is settle. Make do with what they're comfortable with. To sit inside the box just to watch the moon phase in and out while the planes fly by with the only mental manifesto being “good enough”. The best you can is good enough. And your “good enough” was not.

Your dreams and goals were a farce.

You weren't good enough for them and they were too good for you.

You're not capable.

You're not happy, you're content.

You're a dark soul who won't go outside into the dark because he likes the lights on.

You're a piece of scenery.

You're the one in your family they “had such high hopes for.”

You don't achieve, you settle.

You're no good.

You're a fucking loser.

We all stagnate like cobwebs on the wall, praying to go unnoticed until everybody realizes how much of a pointless sight you are before they dust you off, to sweep you under the rug. But I, we are too tired to move. We are too stuck to move. If our car gets stuck in the mud, we decide we just aren't going to drive to work today. What I can get by with, it's good enough. I wear glasses because I'm nearsighted. The glasses don't help. The only thing the future holds is dread, or it holds nothing. Thankfully tomorrow does not come today. It comes tomorrow, and as long as we can continue living in today we don't have to worry about tomorrow. That horizon, that sudden drop will show up. And we spend every opportunity waiting in fear when it will show up, yet ironically be surprised, woefully unprepared when it does.

The box will torture you. It will work for your needs. You can't hear the people out there, vocalizing their disappointment, their anger, their disgust. But you can watch them, and they're always watching you. Always silently reminding you that you weren't good enough to make it out like the rest of them. Some people learn to ignore it and just be content inside, accepting mediocrity, accepting that this was the best they could do. The rest of us, me, I realize finally here on the onset of my 25^th birthday, that I look around and I've spent most of my strength over the past year attempting to break out after finding out that I'm in here. It's not working anymore. I'm getting tired. I want to go to sleep and just sleep for once. Thought is for the talented. Thought is for the troubled. Thought is not allowed in the box. Those who think in the box will eventually pull the trigger. And if they don't, they just look up at the moon and wait for the thing to finally fall out of the sky. To live in the box is to drone on, to eliminate all thought to ignore the personal Hell you've created for yourself.

It's all your fault, no one else's.

Why are you still blaming other people?

Can't you just accept that you're defective?

That you're broken?

That this is entirely your own doing?

You built this yourself, stop making excuses.

Sit down and accept that this is it for you.

Because you can just be reminded later that at one point you told yourself that this was “good enough.”

Thank Muhammad for politically-correct homogenized semantics.

The other day I was in one of my drug-induced deliriums and from the monotony of working a delightful retail job that was slowly sending my soul into the abyss, and I failed to note what holiday Monday was. When I asked my father, he was angry as expected and said he expected a foreigner to ask that question, not somebody born in this country. It was Veteran's Day, of course. And I say: big fucking whoop to that. Now I'm being completely serious here; what have veterans ever done for me, huh? Fight for this country? Fight for our freedom and the glory of America? Alright, dandy. But why should I care? Stay with me, there's more to this.

I'm a man who has always found the concept of patriotism... peculiar, to say the least. Now with that said, some people are going to assume that there's some anti-American sentiment taking place here, and I would call you mistaken. There's merely animosity. Because in the big picture, absolutely none of this affects the average person. Those people who were over in the Middle East? Do you think they're fighting for a good cause, fighting for our benefit, for our freedom? That the terrorist threat would somehow crawl their way out of whatever cave they're huddled in at the moment and somehow through neglect of us lifting our almighty thumb would manage to find a way to dismantle the American infrastructure, to make sure that you, you and whatever backalley town or minor city you live in, end up threatened and your lives would be altered in any drastic way if these people weren't dying overseas? I mean yes they're dying for what can be perceived as a morally just and righteous cause, but is beneficial to you in any way? Probably not, other than a sense of pride that through whatever collateral damage we're causing policing the world that occasionally something good might come of it.

Now what about the veterans of yesteryear who fought for America when the country was legitimately threatened? Fair enough, they deserve respect for helping preserve the country in a dire time. But let's talk about general patriotism here for a second; I don't believe in it. Not to say that I'm not grateful for being born in this country where I'm given a good opportunity and an honest shot at making something of myself despite my apparent squandering of it at every possible turn because I have time like that to take it for granted. Or do I? Why do people call this the greatest country on Earth? What are they making comparisons to? They're comparing us through our looking glass of other countries. Most of us have lived here for our entire lives, some of us in a single state or only a handful of them. What arrogance does it take for you to say that we're the best when you don't know shit? There could a village tucked away in the darkest jungles of Africa where all the women have magically developed Saccharomyces cerevisiae in their tits and are lactating beer and are willing to have sex with you while their husbands are at work, and then you go to the bar after work where the husbands buy you drinks on the house and then ask you if you want to go home and have a Nyotaimori-styled dinner of barbequed ribs and bacon on their wives before you have sex with the husband the wife of course the wife again, only to go to sleep on a pile of sexy young Indonesian boys even though this is isn't anywhere near Australia but this is my fantasy so fuck off. And if a town like that exists, fuck country loyalty I'm going to Africa because that's the greatest city on Earth and none of your hollow patriotism will change that.

I approach this the same way I approach race and women: by mindless discrimination and hatred by asking one simple question; why are you proud of something you had no hand in determining? You did not choose when and where your dad decided not to pull out. The definition of pride in the positive annotation is a sense of satisfaction or pleasure from an accomplishment, achievement, or qualities/traits that you possess. So while you could technically be proud of being a woman, an American, black, etc... what have you done to earn it? What have you done to deserve it? It was given to you. Now there are loopholes here; you can be proud to be a feminist because that's a conscious effort to embrace particular ideals and philosophies, but you can be a feminist without being a woman. Or hell, when my dad brought up foreigners, I thought to myself “Well fuck, if anything THEY have a right to be patriotic or to say that America kicks ass.” I would believe them more than an American. They're more entitled to their pride because they earned their right to be here, they fought for it, they have somewhere else to actually compare America to in order to draw that conclusion. Most Americans can only reference what they know, which is extremely limited in scope for the most part. That's ironic to say coming from somebody who just made an enormous generalization about pride in nationality who doesn't even know what nationality he is other than “white” and “just enough Native American to get free money from the government but not enough to care about the culture”.

Which also comes back to one of my other points; you can be proud of or fascinated with a culture irregardless of whether or not your heritage has anything to do with it. I'm glad that Spanish people still speak Spanish even though when we're at work I can't understand a fucking thing that they're saying. And not just because Spanish food is delicious, either. They can be proud of their culture simply because it's not in its original context anymore; it's something they have to actively participate in to maintain instead of assimilating like the rest of the mindless beige and peach drones sprouting up in the country. It's not being handed to them anymore. There's a difference between that and race. Being black and proud strikes me as odd because there's little to no impression of actual African culture at this point; it's a subset of American culture, which aside from the police hating the shit out of you and being entitled to use the word “nigga” is by and large remarkably similar to standard American culture.

Of course at this point you can ask what defines American culture, and the fastest way to find out that answer is to attempt to live in another country, like somewhere in Europe, and just see how your mannerisms and personal priorities manage to be different than everyone else. And then you can be proud to be an American when you realize how shitty Britain's food is and how you want to shove some ribs into your facehole while talking about how much better the world is after we've been policing it.

Sometimes I wish I just reproduced by budding.

I've masturbated to some weird shit as of late, have I told you people? And I mean some seriously out-there kind of shit. Any sort of sexual deviant who has some perverse fetish, I feel I must apologize to you. Because at this point, I feel like that there's a good chance that I've probably been there. I might be able to understand. I might be able to understand why some people prefer 2D to 3D. I might be able to understand why lamias and centaurs are a thing for some people. I might be able to understand what makes a pedophile tick, regardless of how horrific it is. I feel like I might be able to understand S and M a bit more. Though I still don't understand why people are into scat or vacuum-packing fetishes, you people are fucking weird. But I might be able to sympathize. Because again, I've probably been there at this point. There isn't a picture on the internet my one-eyed monster hasn't looked at and there isn't an object in the house that hasn't had some rope arched over it at some point. And in whatever position imaginable, to boot. I can tell you that the onset of this discussion began after I had the really bad idea of jerking off while propping my back up against the wall upside down with my ass sticking in the air, and it ended about as poorly as you'd expect it to. I just sat there for a bit in that position in the dim afterglow. Blood rushing to my head. Breathing heavily. Covered in my own semen. Noticing I forgot to take my good work clothes off. “This is no way to live” I muttered to myself. Then I got on my computer at looked at illicit pornography of men and horses and the process of degradation began anew without a fuck given in the world.

Man, all this masturbating feels like a second goddamn job. Every morning and every night my little man goes “HEY MOTHERFUCKER, WE HAVEN'T HAD SOME FUN YET, LET'S CHANGE THAT” and I'm like “NO FOR THE LOVE OF GOD LEAVE ME ALONE” but it won't. I just want to live a normal life and have normal conversations with people, but the entire time I'm talking to a customer at work about where to find the men's shoes the only thing I'm thinking is “I wonder if she's shopping for her husband. I wonder if his feet are small. You know what they say about big and small feet. I might have a shot. I MIGHT HAVE A SHOT, THAT DUDE MIGHT HAVE A TINY PECKER AND I CAN NAIL THIS WOMAN IF MY FEET ARE BIGGER THAN HIS.” And she might not even be that attractive. I'm just desperate. I don't know why, it's not like I truly know the carnal joys of sex since I only had it once in High School and it was FUCKING TERRIBLE. The only thing I recall was me being drunk and her crying and me going “OH JESUS THERE'S BLOOD DID I STICK IT IN THE WRONG HOLE OH GOD I'M GOING LIMP WHAT DO I DO FUCKING HELL” and that's it. I've never had any particular inclination or positive experience with sex, so why the obsession? I find it incredibly peculiar that there are people like me out there who haven't had much or any sex at all in their lives, yet are complete and utter slaves to their throbbing libidos. This isn't just my attempting at rationalizing my inability to get laid, so bear with me there's more to this.

Hell, maybe it's more like a drug addiction. I don't know what that's like, either. I binge-drank for a while in my youth, but I quit that cold turkey. I took a lot of Vicodin just to keep the shakes and growing pains off, but again I just ended up stopping that. Like any good drug addiction, there are visible signs of an addict suffering from a relapse. Sweaty and pale. His hands are no longer soft and delicate from excessive use of lotion (which explains the compliments people give me). His pants look like he's smuggling a ferret in them and he's twitching enough to make you believe it. He has a borderline obsessive fascination with household objects a normal person wouldn't consider would make for good sexual stimulation, like the radiator or toaster. And like every good drug addict, he'll go to more and more excessive lengths to get his fix because normal shit just doesn't cut it anymore at some point. It does nothing for him. He and his penis have to go on a fucking jihad through the anus of the internet just to find an oasis of sexual deviancy that will be enough to quench his thirst before he meanders to the next watering hole. It never stops. He'll either die before he makes it to the next stop or he'll eat his own dick to survive and then he can wonder what the fuck he's doing in the desert before going home and MAKING SOMETHING OF HIMSELF.

You may note the excessive use of the masculine pronoun in this discussion. That is because this is only a man's problem. What? It is, don't give me that bullshit. “Oh, I think about sex a lot too” you women say. No, there's a fucking difference. You women have wants. Men have needs. Women are commuters through sexual perversion, men are hostages. I don't want these thoughts, they're like the asshole children you get in the divorce settlement that you know are lost causes but are stuck raising them anyway as they slowly leech money, happiness, and hope out of your body. It makes perfect sense, because there are a lot of instances of sex or masturbation or sexual perversion where it's a lot like a Las Vegas marriage after a night of binging. Then you relapse into proper judgment and you tell yourself afterwards “Well, it seemed like a good idea when I was horny” as the post-wank shame starts to settle in and you frantically close all the incognito tabs on your internet browser riddled with Thai prostitutes, bestiality and vore while you just sit there. You sit there, and you think about what you've done, and you think about how you'll never be able to have a realistic, healthy, normal sexual relationship with another person because they don't meet your ridiculous standards of having a literal horse's ass while they perpetually lactate beer to compensate for the fact that they probably look like some misbegotten Godless heathen that reminds you of the evils in the world.

Honestly if I could, I would do away with sex entirely in my life. Life would be so much more convenient if I didn't have to have sex. It means that I wouldn't have to worry about being in a committed relationship or that I would be pissing away my hard-earned money on prostitutes.  But I can't stop, regardless of what I do or what happens.  I could cut off both of my arms and I would find a way. And the fact that I can say that is horrifying.  At this point the thought of it repulses me because it's been tainted by so many extremities and factors. It is an impure, horrific, disgusting experience.

Until I get a chance to do it again.

Hate magnet.

So my car's a piece of shit, let's make that clear. It's a 2003 Hyundai Elantra, and if you know anything about cars (I don't), that apparently means that it was constructed from industrial waste and has about a lifespan of a fortnight. I think it's a suitable car for me because it looks like a fairly nice car but it runs like absolute shit, which is a perfect metaphor for the kind of person I am. I remember one particular ordeal where I was driving home at night and the radiator cracked while I was on the highway. It looked like something underneath my hood blew up, and going 70 miles an hour at night while this is happening when my phone just died had me swearing loud enough to be heard over traffic. As of late it was leaking oil underneath the car (another suitable metaphor for myself since I have a hemorrhoid), and after getting it taken in, they fixed the leak but ANOTHER leak showed up because of a faulty oil cap. I don't know if any of this is actually true and if I'm explaining it correctly because again, I don't know anything about cars and a gear nut could be reading this and have his brain melted in a way that nerds would have their brains melted watching an episode of The Big Bang Theory.

So it was taken into the shop again and I still had school this morning. So instead, since my dad's on vacation, I got to take his 1986 Camry to school. My dad's nickname for it is the “ghetto sled.” I don't know if any of you people have seen this car. Go google it, I can wait. Or I can post it here.

Mine looks worse. The windshield is cracked, and the paintjob is completely faded to the point that it looks like matte, which means it's like driving a bigger and even uglier Nintendo DSi. This car is the definition of a death trap. The doors are thin enough that I felt like if I kicked them hard enough that I could get my foot through them. That if it even grazed a big rig, it would be sucked into it and ground up into metal confetti. It feels like driving a sand castle, where the slightest contact with anything means dissintegration. And apparently, I'm not the only person who thought this.

While I drove to school today, I noticed something... odd. People were going around me. I checked the speedometer. “Huh,” I thought. “I'm going the speed limit. Hell, I'm going over it (unless my family's reading this, in which case I'm going the speed limit). Maybe I have a lot of smog coming out the back?” I rolled down my window to check, emphasis on the word “roll” because the car had those cranks that you turn. That is what kind of archaic machinery rests in this car. I never thought that I, that we would become spoiled enough as a technologically-driven culture that I could be capable of missing buttons that rolled the windows up or down. But... there was no smog. People were simply afraid of this car. I mean I couldn't blame them; I go to school in a town filled with rich and entitled white kids. If your car is anything older than a decade, then chances are you came from that fucking ghetto in Oakland and you were going to menace society with your car's sharp edges and flat paint job. I drove a car that was older than most of the people going to my college, by all means I shouldn't even have the money to be going to school if this tin box was the best I could afford. You stuck out, and people were disgusted yet strangely fascinated with you. It would be as if a black man went to Japan; people would be horrified that some Not-Japanese person is roaming the street, but look at him. He's a product of a lost era.

This discrimination didn't stop when I got to school, either. I got to school early, so the parking lot was empty. I wanted to park away a bit from the campus because of my shame that I'm driving this angular death machine, so I got my shit out and went to class. Now usually the parking lot's filled up when I'm going home because of classes later in the day. Around my car, was a perfect U-shape of empty parking spaces. ...nobody wanted to be near my car. Probably due to an insurance liability, but Jesus Christ. Not that I would know if they dinged it anyway, it doesn't have an alarm system. Or doors that worked. The driver's door did not work on the outside. You had to open it from the inside, which meant other doors had to be unlocked, and then you had to open the driver's door from the inside of the car. I cannot begin to explain to you how incriminating this looks in practice. Other people could because of the afformentioned empty parking spaces around me so that God and everybody could see.

Now despite all the shit that I've given this car, I enjoyed driving it to school. For one, there's a reason that this car is still being driven after 27 years, and that's because it actually runs like a fucking champ. What this car looks like on the outside is what my car would look like on the inside; it feels like driving on a baby's ass compared to my car that winces and screams with every bump I hit. And I say that not to imply that I've run over any children before, even though I would wholly admit to doing so otherwise. And secondly, you just feel happy driving this car. Humbled, even. Because it is a hate magnet. Every driver around you turns into an asshole when you drive this because they look down on you and they avoid you like your car contains a virtulent plague. All the hatred and frustration you feel towards people being assholish drivers, any possibility of self-doubt you have about your skills of a driver are out the window because you know it's everybody else's fault for hating the living shit out of you while you drive this car.

Though now that I think about it, that might be a bad thing since I would imagine in the ghetto this would reflect upon everybody until the anger just reached critical mass and they'd all start shooting and killing each other like a bunch of uncivilized niggers. ...actually given the presence and prestige of cars in the ghetto, I think I just might be on to something. I'll get back to you on this.

There's a pun about pulp in here, I know it.

We interrupt your boring lives for a breaking news story; I think my life's gotten more ridiculous since I've been on these meds. I would imagine that this would normalize my mood, which I guess it has. Hasn't done a damn thing for the events occurring in my life, and sometimes I almost want to believe that some of this is just some really awkward trip. I guess after my head ran out of creativity as of late, weird shit's decided to start happening to make the fictionalized life I've developed... look fucking normal. Let me explain.

It's been an odd couple of months or so because things have been normal here. I haven't felt any tension, I've been calm, I've been getting my life together. Things are peaceful. It's quite nice, and I know it's odd for you people to hear the word “nice” in the same sentence and positive context as “my life”, but it's true. But today, today was special. Because it's probably the angriest I've heard my dad in quite a long time. I'm just minding my own business being a recluse in my room and gushing over Anime DVDs because I like dick, and then I hear him yelling. And this is mean yelling. I didn't know what he was prancing on about, but I heard “GET THAT MOTHERFUCKER ON THE PHONE OR I'M GOING TO FIND HIM AND KILL HIM” in several variants and all assortment of charming nuances to his speech. He had the fire in his eyes. Or I would at least assume so, I wasn't leaving my fucking room when he's raging about like a sociopath.

But I was curious what was occurring. She said she had to keep quiet about it or something, I couldn't really tell. She couldn't tell. And my dad was yelling about what that boy made her do, and suddenly my blood started to boil and my protective sibling instincts started to kick in, and I started indulging myself in fantasies in finding this kid and slitting him up the middle with a boxcutter. And that says a lot about me as a person, nothing good I would add. When a 24-year old man is filled with enough of a preoccupying malice that he can direct legitimate, fleshed-out adult hatred towards a high-schooler that he wanted to end the life of in an agonizing manner, it says nothing good. But I listened a bit more, and from what I gathered it sounded like my sister was holding on to something a boy at school wanted her to keep safe. ...uh oh. Oh boy. Oh boy oh boy oh boy that's not a smart thing to do. That is a dark path to go down. And my friends, it is a dark path to go down. I won't say I've went down that path, but I will say it was easy to find people to give it away to when I thought I had too much, and I did at some points. What I'm talking about are energy cards for the Pokemon TCG, because people needed load up 30 or 40 of those motherfuckers into their decks to ever actually have enough energy to make the damn pokemon useful.

Or I might've been talking about drugs, okay I was talking about drugs. But still, the premise is the same.

I mean, this is a big deal. I never would've expected it from her. She's a 15-year old recluse who's on her laptop all day. SHE'S ME WHEN I STILL HAD SHAME LEFT. Granted I was doing all manner of unsavory things when I was 15, I was almost in disbelief that she wouldn't hold onto her integrity. Maybe she was bullied into it. Maybe she was scared and wanted people to think nicely of her for doing these kinds of things for them. Because she's naive and nice and dumb as a post. But I could understand entirely, things like this happen as a kid. You have to nip them in the bud before they become a problem, and giving the kid a stern talking to might set him straight. Which is nice for my father, because as he put it while he was talking to this kid, "I'm a crazy hard-ass Italian, I don't fuck around with people.” And he doesn't, my dad doesn't fuck around with people. My dad has lost jobs for getting into fights with people. One of my more vivid memories of my youth is when my mom is trying to back out of the drive way, he starts smashing in the side of the car door with a bat. If there are pissing contests of “My dad could beat up your dad” occurring, I throw my gloves into the ring with everybody else. I would find his overprotective behavior of his daughter admirable, and his actions appropriately badass if the man didn't put the fear of God into me like he undoubtedly put into this child.

“I'm not going to open the boxes, I don't want to know what kind of shit is in there.” So hold the fuck on, I haven't left my room yet, but we had shit MAILED to us? We had things in boxes mailed to us that she was supposed to hold onto? I mean, I just, I mean, I just... HOW THE FUCK DO YOU GET AWAY WITH THAT? What the fuck were we supposed to do, just let her go “Oh he's using our address to receive shit in the mail, it's okay right?” We don't even know what the fuck is in them. There could be a human foot in one of those boxes that's hollowed out and filled with anthrax, and that would be okay? Or it could be drugs or guns, that's probably more likely right, probably more likely. I overhear him mention that he doesn't believe that they're computer parts. Why the fuck couldn't he have computer parts mailed to his house instead? What are his parents going to do? Are they Korean and were they going to beat the shit out of him for cheaping out and not getting good parts to run Starcraft 2 and Dota 2 at max settings? Who the fuck is buying a lie like that?

So I zone out for a bit, and the whole situation seems to have settled, and I go out there to see what's up, before I can say anything I see them and the boxes are enormous. They're about two to three feet in height about two feet in width. I give them a push. They're heavy. I assumed my sister was meant to intersect them, but I doubt her capabilities to even lift them. These are heavy boxes. These are not computer parts. Now the thing that baffles me is that my house is small. It is a two-bedroom apartment where my sister's bed is in the living room. That is to emphasize how little of space we have here. ...how do YOU think we wouldn't have noticed them? There's no place to hide them. There's no place to hide them. THERE'S NO FUCKING PLACE TO HIDE THEM. WHERE THE FUCK WOULD THEY GO, UP MY FUCKING ASS? AND YOU THINK WE WOULDN'T ASK? THAT WE WOULDN'T QUESTION IT? THAT WE WOULDN'T QUESTION WHY THREE BIG FUCKING BOXES JUST SHOWED THE FUCK UP ON OUR DOORSTEP FROM CHINA AND THAT SHE WANTS TO HOLD THEM FOR A FRIEND?

...I almost don't want to begrudge her for it because that's just so fucking stupid of her. I realized why shit started rolling around in my room, why shit on my shelves start falling off towards my doorway. Because as the conversation between her and my father ensued, the center of gravity... was shifting towards my sister's head in the living room. And we got somebody else that didn't scare the kid to ask what was in there, and we opened them. You know what were in the boxes? You might want to sit down for this. I know I had to. Juicers were in the boxes. Yes, juicers. JUICERS. Big fucking appliances. So my sister and the kid came clean and the kid had apparently been getting this shit from China or warehouses or some shit I don't know and selling them to people. His family didn't like that, so he couldn't have them mailed to his house anymore. So we'd have this shady-ass kid showing up here to pick up his shit so he can go peddle it or sell it or something.

......Is there some sort of underground black market for smuggled kitchen appliances that I don't know about? You know, enough of one that this would seem like an adequate means of income? More maybe the kid was smart and he just found his niche, I don't know. I mean my question is, well, how the fuck would you sell it? You can't just show up on the street at 3am and go “YO NIGGA I GOT WHAT YOUS NEED HEUH, THIS SHIT BE TRIPPIN'. IT EVEN FILTERS OUT ALL DA PULP AND SHIT SO IT GOES DOWN SMOOTH, BITCH,” there has to be a market to sell this kind of shit to.

Instead of beating the shit out of him, I probably would've just told the kid that he would've been better off selling drugs.

Somebody catch me, I think I'm falling.

At this point I think I can safely and proudly say that I am no longer just an internet madman since that insanity is now no longer apparently confined to the information superhighway. That's fucking right, I spent a week in the loony house and I'm all the better for it. And I'll tell you folks something, that shit was a fucking learning experience no matter how you look at it.

Let's start off near the beginning, though. I am a man who gets spectacularly depressed for no apparent reason. It just happens in a seasonal fashion. I am a diagnosed Bipolar II person, which means whenever women now bitch about going on their periods get ridiculously moody and men don't understand, fuck you I understand. And I can argue that mine might even be worse because at least yours stops when your biological clock is up; there's no cure for mine. And at least your erratic moodswings don't (hopefully) make you suicidal. Mine do. I have thought about suicide enough that it's become mundane to me. When I get up in the morning, I think about what I'm going to have for breakfast, how the rest of the day is going to go, and how great it would be if I were dead. And don't give me that look. It's not like I actually considered going through with it, but the thought was always... well, there. It was a big pink elephant in the room that happened to be holding a noose going “I'M GONNA GETCHA EVENTUALLY, YOU LITTLE CUNT,” and I read that in the voice of an 1800s prospector and now you did too.

Now Bipolar is basically moodswings. Bipolar II is basically your moodswings kick your face into the mud and you hate yourself as a person. If I were to liken how it works, it would be like if I dropped a rubber ball off of the roof of a hospital, because we found shit like that fun growing up before we had the internet. We also thought beating each other with sticks was fun, but bear with me there's more to this. Now the ground would be suicidal thoughts and intuitions, and Jimmy's bed on the second floor would be the baseline since he's confined in bed that's a story off the ground, which makes sense because Jimmy doesn't know much of happiness since his legs don't work due to his drunk father accidentally backing over him in his youth and now he has terminal cancer at fifteen, but it works for this metaphor so get off my case. The ball would bounce, but every time the peak would be just a bit lower below Jimmy's view, coming a little bit closer to the ground with each bounce. And as the laws of gravity and God hating children dictate, that ball will eventually stop bouncing and just lie on the ground, and that's when I would've decided that offing myself would probably be a great idea. And I used the ground to depict suicide in this metaphor because Jimmy eventually just jumped out his window and painted the pavement with his cancer-infected brain matter, but fuck him because this story's about me.

I did not want my brain matter over anybody's pavement, nor did I want to confront my problems like a man, so I did the best thing I could do; I went to the hospital and told them I wanted to off myself and they should magic a way into helping me because otherwise I would walk out and jump off the top of the parking garage and leave them with a fantastic lawsuit that would probably cover the funeral costs for my family. Now you're probably wondering “Hey, if you're suicidal, why would you ask for help? Aren't you attention-whoring?” No I'm not, and here's why: people attempt suicide because they want help, they need somebody to catch them before they fall again. They frequently don't have any actual intentions of going through with it, it's just like they're playing mental chicken. That's just what psychology permits. People commit (keyword here) suicide because they no longer want to be alive. If somebody has honest intentions of their life, there's nothing you can do to stop them. It's as easy as going to your local Rite Aid, getting two bottles of sleeping pills, choking them down with liquor, and then going to lie down and float in a reservoir until your senses give in and you sink to the depths and achieve that eternal peace you've always wished for. Killing yourself is remarkably easy, it's a matter of having the stones to do it. Most people don't. I have attempted it before, and I did it without a second thought. And while the voice of logic in my head still told me it was a bad idea, I decided to get help before that voice was stifled by the erratic and rampaging emotions that ever so frequently seized control. I went there voluntarily. Then the Marshall asked me about how we should go about it.

“Well, the easiest way to get you into a clinic immediately would be a 5150.” she said.

“Which is... ?”

“Danger to oneself, others, or gravely disabled. Which means you'll be top priority to go to a psychiatric hospital and under a 72-hour hold.”

“Okay, let's do that.”

“Alright, you'll be under the 72-hour hold, there's no going back now since it's involuntary.” she said. This perplexed me.

“...but I came here by my own volition.” I stated.

“That you did.”

“So it's voluntary.”

“Yes it is.”

“But you just said that a 5150 is an involuntary 72-hour hold.”

“That it is.”

“...so I'm voluntarily admitting myself to a psychiatric hospital involuntarily?”

“So it seems.”

“...I must be fucking crazy.”

“Well, we have two places, you can go to Fremont Hospital.”

“Eh, there's a Taco Bell in Fremont that gave me dysentery once.” I say, as if there's a Taco Bell that didn't. “Where else can I go?”

“John George Psychiatric Pavilion.”

“Sounds fancy, where's that?”

“Close to East Oakland.”

I arrived at Fremont Hospital late Wednesday night. I was checked in by paramedics. Everything on my person was taken from me. This included my shoes of all things. Well, I could've had my shoes if I removed the laces. Having things that I could apparently strangle myself with was a no-no. They asked me several questions about how I was feeling, why I was there, and why in God's good nonexistent name would I have them haul me out there at eleven in the god-damn night. I was apathetic to all of these questions. They honestly didn't mean much to me. I was tired and finally away from my family, so I just wanted to go to sleep. Sleep sounded nice. Sleep always sounded nice.

That's what the suicidal thoughts were tied to; exhaustion. Never an adamant hatred for what God had against me, nor a tremendous sorrow for everything in my life that had gone unsalvageably wrong. Just exhaustion of every and all events. An all-encompassing and nihilistic emptiness, a long-sought silence from all the dogs barking inside my head. The sinister voices in my head that kept me tossing in bed until the sun rose, the meandering psychosis and paranoia that showed up and did whatever it wanted, that I could merely watch ruin my life and leave to have me scramble to scrape up the pieces. It's a lot like being in the backseat of a car being driven by somebody incredibly drunk, where there's nothing you can say to that person to make them stop driving like a fucking nut. So basically Tuesday and Thursday mornings when my mother took me to school.

So while I slept, I had a roommate. That was a different experience, I haven't slept in the same room with somebody else since the last time I had to share a hotel with my family up in Canada. I was paranoid, high-strung, and was terrified for my life because I was completely isolated from everybody I knew, and I had a man who was detained because of a trip on jimson weed spazzing out in his bed every five to ten minutes as my roommate. As would be expected, that first night of sleep wasn't as elegant as I would've wished for. Tomorrow though, I was able to get on meds. Oh boy oh boy, which meant meeting a Psychiatrist assigned to the hospital to keep everybody in check. Fun fact: did you know that in the entire Psychological line of professions that Psychiatrists have the highest rate of depression and suicide? And man I'll tell you, my assigned psychiatrist was no different. He always had that glassy-eyed and perpetually-ill look to his face like he had just gotten done crying. He looked like a Holocaust victim at Auschwitz that found out the porridge that just gave him dysentery was made from his family's ashes by the Hitler Youth. I mean I couldn't blame the guy; he works in a mental hospital where his job is to get a brief look into somebody's miserable life and due to his line of work, his only job is to throw pills at people until they are fixed. There's a good chance that he'll fail, and he'll see them come back to that wretch place again, still fucked up and needing help. Then he'll throw more and hope those work. He can't talk to them; that's what the clinical psychologists, therapists, and social workers do. His job is to listen to how miserable they are, and simply watch as his diagnosis inevitably fails to help these people. I would probably be back there again eventually if I became a Psychiatrist.

There were three floors to the hospital. The first floor is for the normalish people, the people who have had minor psychotic episodes in their life (as if such a thing exists) and are just in need of temporary care. The second floor are for the slightly crazier people, and the third floor is for the people who need to be tied down to their beds, because likely I would assume their meds would cause them to fly so high into the air that they would be dancing among the ethereally departed above the hospital. I was on the second floor, and there were some fucking characters on the second floor. Some of them were the kinds of people who made me feel normal. Who made me—an alcoholic internet terrorist who writes stories about his penis turning into German ducks fornicating—feel normal.

One woman was very nice and worldly; she seemed like a housewife in her late forties. She was technically homeless and was there for setting a grocery cart on fire and they were concerned for her mental health. I honestly couldn't see why, she seemed like somebody who just got arrested and was put here instead of a jail or other correctional facility. But have you ever had that moment? You know that moment where you're talking to somebody who seems completely normal, but then in the middle of the conversation, they just nonchalantly bring something up that makes you realize that something might be slightly off-kilter? When I was talking to this woman, she was talking about earlier events in her life about being a nutritionist, living in Virginia, and how she died a few years ago and was brought back to life by Michael Jackson and that she knew the world was going to end in 2020. I screamed internally “OH MY GOD I'M TALKING TO A CRAZY PERSON” and without changing expression simply replied with a “Huh,” and the conversation continued like I didn't even notice. And she brought it up in conversation so casually, like a past event someone witnessed that was interesting, but instead that incident was that time they saved Christmas with Bob and fought off a bunch of dick-waving vandals who had their donkey show interrupted.

“So how was your day, Lucas?”

“Oh man, I left Ace Hardware and got stuck in traffic, and while I was passing by a movie theater, I saw a dude fucking a dog.”

“Uh... that's fucking weird. Did he get arrested for bestiality?”

“No, because I immediately looked forward and I almost rear-ended a car being driven by a ninja. Also Tommy let me smoke this joint he had, he said it had some weird shit in it called LSD.”

There was another woman who managed to go around screaming hysterically about how her rights were being violated because she couldn't leave of her own volition. She also talked about being possessed by her departed sister named Miss Sally, and frankly I would believe it because I never felt like I was that close to evil. She was the sweetest woman normally, but when she lost it and started screaming, the only thing it served to do was trigger some semblance of PTSD I have and I would go into my room and cover my ears as I teeter back in forth like I'm petering off of a bad trip. Then there was a man who was the most hateful and bitter person I've ever met. He would openly tell people he was conversing with how much he despised them and how much they irritated him while everything he did sought to only benefit himself and to talk about his accomplishments. The best way I could describe the man was that he was Eustice from Courage the Cowardly Dog.

Another interesting character was a man named Miguel. He wasn't a crazy person though. He was just a fucking thug that got lucky dodging prison or a place like John George which was basically a throwaway dumpster for the relapsing nuts that the prison system got tired of dealing with. He tried breaking out. He almost succeeded. He broke down the door out of the containment area to the elevator. He overlooked the fact that the elevators could be merely shut off before he got into one of them, and that there was a stairwell in the opposite direction that he could've tried breaking into. He got moved to the third floor and continued to overlook this fact an additional three times before I assumed he was properly incarcerated and moved to a more suitable facility where he would meet Bubba the prison rapist. I don't think he was mentally unhinged so much as he was god-damn stupid, which doesn't seem like it would be an easy mistake to overlook.

Now, as a writer, I never really understood the magnitude behind the term “The Truth is Stranger Than Fiction” until I began to attempt articulating some of these events in my head. What occurred in that place was the sitcom Scrubs if it took place in a mental care hospital. “Some of this shit is ridiculous, nobody is going to buy this when I leave here. These people are fucking crazy, shit like this isn't a frequent occurrence.” Then I talked to some of them about my life and depressed the Hell out of them and realized “Shit, maybe I do belong here. Maybe this is something that does happen a lot.”

I think the oddest experience there was the fact that being an atheist—or at least somebody who really dislikes how God goes about his business—I met a lot of religious people in there that I conversed with about their faith. Part of me wants to go “Obvious joke about religious people being crazy goes here” but there was one person there who perplexed me quite a lot. She was a heavy-set woman with extremely short hair and a fondness for boots. I would make an obvious dyke joke because I'm an appalling human being, but stay with me because that's not the point. She was a perplexing enigma of a woman who liked to speak in riddles, and part of me initially wanted to say she was pulling pseudo-intellectual shit out of her ass until I talked to her a bit more. I've been sexually assaulted and personally exposed before. Talking to her was a lot like that, except it sort of ended up like those really fucked-up rape fantasies where the victim ended up emotionally broken and enjoying it. I felt like intellectually, I was exposed a great deal about my personal beliefs. It was a metaphorical dance of opposite beliefs that respected each other and felt remarkably at peace with the fact that somebody was very different yet so very similar to the other. Yin and Yang would be a good way to describe it. Hearing this girl go on about how her mother died and how there was some purpose to her life that she was able to adequately interpret through what a jaded cynic like me would interpret as nothing more than stretching coincidences and dumb luck was a bit jarring, because she was aware of it and didn't mind it either. And she was baffled by the fact that I could hold an almost solipsistic and nihilistic viewpoint on life, but simultaneously enjoy the fact that there might not be something more after I'm gone. My suicide was a good reason as to why that belief existed.

“You know, I was really out of it when I tried it eight years ago.” I said. “I came back, though. Did you know what I saw while I was lost? Nothing. No chorus of angels singing, no tunnel with a light at the end, no dastardly inferno and malicious evil, no transcendental ushering into the grandiose ether of reality. It was nothing. Not even calling it darkness would suitably describe and encapsulate the cold silent void that I saw.” And to me, that was nice. For a timid and meek person to be surrounded by raging noise and paranoia his entire life, there was something to me that was utterly beautiful about going to a place that was just silent and utterly devoid of anything else. That's why sleeping there was the best sleep I had in years. I was away from the responsibilities the disappointment the burden my life decided to give to such an unfortunate and ill-suited person like me to handle. When I slept, it was just no thought, just silence.

Life froze while I was in there because when I left that place after five days, everything went back to normal. Except I now was taking happy pills everyday to keep the dogs from barking in my head and I don't have to go to college for the rest of the semester, which seemed like a good decision for my family and I to make had I not made it on my own a month ago by going truant. I figured that maybe this was okay. There's a little bit of change, but not a tremendous amount. At least not yet. I didn't expect to go into that place and leave with everything immediately being hunky-dory. There's still work to be done, and I suppose it's up to me to make a plan for it. It's not like I could rely on God for that.

But If God has a plan for some people, I suppose not all of them will likely be good because the world would be probably be a happier place. Some people are just destined to have the deck stacked against them their entire lives, but instead of being pissed off about it I suppose I've learned to just accept it. Even God is capable of being a dick, but going around with a chip on my shoulder won't do me any good. This is the only life I have, and ending it to stick to the man that I'm not entirely sure exists just because he has it out for me doesn't seem like a safe bet. I can either go to that wonderful void of nothing and say “Well shit I guess he doesn't exist, I think I came here a little too early,” or I'll be in Heaven and God will say “I SAID I WAS GONNA GETCHA, YOU LITTLE CUNT” because he was that pink elephant in the room, and he'll pull a lever and I'll plummet into Hell to do laps in a lake of fire while my Sunday nights are used to act as Satan's personal bitch. Maybe fate has it out for me. The concept of “fate” has always been ridiculous to me. After talking to that woman, it still is. The concept of there being some predetermined destiny for everybody, that's something I think you should be in the crazy house for. Because you can say “well people can change their destiny”, but then at that point I don't count it as destiny because it's not predetermined if you can change it. That's fucking cheating. That doesn't make logical sense to say “There's this concept that this is unchangeable fate for people, but you can change if if you will it.” It's like that bullshit math teachers pull in Elementary School when they say shit like “You can't subtract a bigger number from a smaller number” even though you learn the following year that negative numbers exist.

But maybe I'm going about it wrong. Maybe I shouldn't be thinking logically about something like fate. I guess that's where the concept of faith comes into play, but piss all if I have any of that left. But I guess I don't find it as ridiculous as I did before. I haven't decided if talking to her has changed my life yet. I suppose we'll see as time goes on. Maybe like how I met somebody channeling her dead sister and how another was brought back from the brink by Michael Jackson, maybe this woman was directed by some higher power to change my life. Like Jesus or God, or Thor or Harrison Ford.