Renfield’s Syndrome

The morgue is pretty boring, except for the little sand dunes of dust on the floor. I'm out of breath. While I stop to fish for excuses about why I got here after all the action, a stake falls out of my duster, rolling into one of the ash piles. Now it's official: I am the worst vampire hunter.

Not like the Van Helsings. They're assholes, and what makes them even bigger assholes is that they're really nice about being assholes. The new one, Wilhelmus - every time we, y'know, team up, and I stake a vampire just to the left of the heart, he gets this weird half-smile and gives me the speech. "Paul, go under the sternum and jab upwards. So you don't have to force your way through the ribcage." I can't stand it.

I stick my finger in the ashes, then smell them. They don't smell like anything but ashes, but I figure it's kind of a cool signature move. You never know who's watching, huh? In this business, you get a lot of mysterious strangers spying on you from the shadows. Which is a terrible thing to find out about at 3am while you're pissing in a storm drain.

It was a stakeout, right? Apparently something was going on in Koreatown by the cannery. I mean, I guess it was. I'd been watching the loading dock for the past 5 hours, but all I'd seen were some teenagers huffing toner or something. So I get out of the car to pee, because, shag carpet in the van, ya know? You aim wrong and you never get that smell out. I go down the big concrete embankment, get things going, and, when the tank's half-full, boom, guy behind me.

"Enjoying the evening air?" He croaks it in like a Tom Waits voice, like piss over dry gravel. I kind of jump, but I don't wanna turn around with my pecker in my hands, so I play it off like I don't need to see his face 'cuz I'm cool too. My damn duster's all wet down the side now. His breath hits my neck, but it's cold. Vampire.

Now, I was on the verge of a panic attack, and my zipper was stuck. That's really the only way to explain why I'd say, to a complete stranger: "Not since you bastards killed my uncle." Look, I know. I know! Doesn't make sense in hindsight.

Okay, so I played the dead relative card too early. There are really only two ways you become a vampire hunter: you train from when you're, like, ten, just like those jackass Van Helsings. Or - someone you know dies, and you kinda fall into the whole cycle of justice and revenge thing. It's so cliché and dumb, but when you're at a funeral and an old lady shuffles up to you, hugs you real close, then whispers in your ear, "I want you to find the bastards that did this and kill them." ... I don't know, how can you refuse? You look like a total shithead if you do.


Thing is, I'm braced to get punched, kicked, or the ol' neckbite, so I do like this quick turn around move without even zipping up. I'm giving the guy my best kung-fu-I-can-kick-your-ass stance, which is really bullshit 'cuz I got kicked out of my dojo after two weeks when my check bounced. This vampire, he's a white guy dressed kinda business-y. Khaki pants, white shirt, cropped hair, and snaggletoothed fangs. The way he's eyeing me, it's hungry, and then he looks down at my junk. "My, aren't you a big boy." he says. I give him the once over, preparing to cock back my best haymaker and all of a sudden I realize he's packing. Plain as day, his dick's hanging out of his pants, too.


My brain starts cranking, and it finally chunks it out. That message board that tipped me off was right: there is some action going on here, but it's fucking gay cruising. I'm so embarrassed that I spout a line of bullshit about how now that I've got his attention, I want to save his soul with the power of Christ and lead him away from the path of sin and anonymous storm drain blowjobs. He gives me this super confused look, and after a beat I turn and just start running away as hard as I can, pecker flopping in the wind.


Swear to god, I'm gonna quit this whole game. Wilhelmus says he can get me a janitor job at his family's bakery, but I'm kinda iffy on it. I have my pride, you know?

World of Ruin

It only gets colder. I'll reassure myself that there can't be a colder day in this winter, that there's only a gradual rebirth into the golden land of Spring awaiting me after this little rough patch of absolute zero. But I can't even fool myself. The weather has me indoors, and it's doing more than just fever my cabin. It's leeching out the discipline I've been building in myself for the past year - I still work out, but my mind's fuzzy and I find it hard to stare at any problem without blinking and looking away. It's like my brain's wearing a parka made of fiberglass insulation. It took me thirty minutes to think of that simile, and it's not even good.

The dead of winter is the appointed time of my existential crisis. When all the holiday glow has subsided, when my hours at work get cut back, when all I can hear are the silences of my apartment, I turn inward. I've been working out for the past year now, and I've lost 25 lbs., become physically stronger than I've ever been in my life, and have developed a bit of steel deep within myself. But it's both not enough and too much.

I'm worried that I'm taking it too far. The testosterone fucks with my head and feels awful unnatural. It awakens some atavistic urge to callousness deep within me. If I go far enough, the physical changes will make it even harder to pass. But I need more power.

I need more power.

I don't know what sentence to put after that, so by necessity it stands alone. Written in a story, something so declarative would be pithed out after a definitive trauma. My village is razed by mercenaries while I'm out hunting. A drug deal gone bad leaves my girlfriend in a wheelchair. A bully pushes me down into the sand and I make a tearful, determined resolution. Best as I can see it, I'm reacting to feelings of powerlessness by finding a way in which to becoming powerful.

Super Sonic Speech Impediment

Holy fuck, I used to write some painfully long blog posts.

Sonnet 130, Translated

My bitch is ugly as shit! It's cool, though.

No Carrier

I miss my bike. In the warm moments of summer, it became a meditative oasis for me. Pumping through alleys and exploring the unexamined spaces of a huge city, I recaptured some empty part of myself. Without it, I feel a little bit lost. I detest people who profess a self-righteous affinity for biking, and maybe this post ought to inspire a bit of self-hatred. But I miss my bike.

The Fairbairn-Sykes Method

Some months ago, my sex drive spiked, attempting an asymptotic embrace with the y-axis. It was simple to write it off as an effect of  the testosterone surge from muscling up. As someone who's taken hormones on and off, it's awfully easy for me to assign an endocrine origin to my state of mind. Perhaps it was comforting to blame my feelings on some externalized internal source because of exactly how bad it got. I started thinking about fucking at unsexy times. I wasn't mentally disrobing people so much as psychically ripping their clothes off. The volume of my carnal reveries was a familiar relic of teenage boyhood, but their bestial intensity caught me off guard.

Now, my sex drive has fallen down a well. I've gone from onanizing twice/thrice a day to a single half-hearted go-round per diem. That I've even kept up at that is part habit, part addictive personality traits kicking in. Ever miss something that you just spent the last six months willing to leave? It's hypocritical to complain, but there was a vitality in that lusty tinnitus that I've been missing for a while. I don't know how to date, and every so often I lament the absence of romance in my life, soliloquizing in the small hours. Really, though, it's nobody's fault but my own. Princess Charming isn't just gonna ride up in her F-Body one day and take me away. Having a constant desire for sex has motivated me to actually try to get up with somebody.

This post will get published early Christmas morning, though I've been working on it for the past few weeks. I'm on the second year of my new Christmas tradition: watching the ultimate holiday movie, Die Hard. John McClaine is a Yuletide trinity, serving as Jesus (his stocking feet crucified on a glass floor), Santa (“Now I have a machine gun, Ho-ho-ho”), and Krampus (he kills a lot of naughty terrorists). But I'm kinda bummed, because I have no one to watch this Christmas classic with. So, next year, I will have a special someone to watch this damn movie with. Even if I have to hire them.

Live from the Lonely Moments Apartment Complex

I'm going to quit my kickboxing class. It's expensive, which is bad, but the bigger problem is that it's been leaving me feeling worn out. It's hard to do strength training and an intensive cardio activity at the same time, and I feel like it's been compromising my strength gains. Analysis aside, I'm conflicted about the decision. There's a sense of community unique to the gym, the knowledge that this person might punch you and you wouldn't even mind. That's tempered by the moments of awkward inadequacy, missing a kick over and over until somebody gives you the Check Out This Motherfucker look.  I have a relationship with my gym, and now I'm queasy about going for the breakup.

Indeed! This party DOES suck!

Every time I observe someone slightly younger than me who has all the talent I lack, it's like the pain of flossing for the first time in a month. The ache comes in waves, starting and stopping with a tempo that makes it impossible to concentrate on anything. Gore Vidal said, "Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies." It would reveal me as petty to agree wholeheartedly, but I think it's a bit late for that.

I'm gonna go ride my bike in commemoration of Halloween. Today's the 31st, so all of the good pre-moving junk is going to be out in the alleys. And, uh, even though I'd rather not admit it, I look forward to potential random encounters in the midnight hour. Not sloppy hookups behind an abandoned elementary school with sirs or madams dressed as Sexy Radiology Technicians (although I wouldn't be mad at that) - but the inexplicable stew that boils out of the pot when a city of costumed fools are let loose, sanctioned by the closest thing American culture has to Carnival. God help me, I'm itching to punch somebody.

The Promise of Roycemore

I think I have a fever.


Literature is beautiful to me because it exposes all of the paths that you could have taken but didn't, all of the people that you never had a chance to be. Or maybe that's pornography, I'm really not sure.

...

See, when your brain begins to overheat, you feel like it's making all of these brilliant new connections when, really, it's just flailing at buttons, trying to get anything to make sense.

Wall Ring

I'm writing a paper right now, or at least I should be. It's going poorly. The last few months have seen my life accumulate more responsibilities, and my ass is dragging from the weight. Every time I attempt to complain about my workload, I feel like such a shithead, probably because I am such a shithead. Nine credit hours at community college, around thirty hours a week at my fecal retail job, then another seven or eight at my martial arts class and working out. This is not a lot! And many other people have to endure much more than I do for the bare minimum of survival. I worry every day that I simply lack whatever hardiness is necessary to survive in the wild, and the constant hand-wringing is itself a kind of confirmation. Still, I can't admonish away my discomfort.

The one delight really getting me through right now is my body. After eight months of weightlifting and stretching and punching, I've finally started to become a little bit fearsome. I'm still fat, and I've only lost about ten to twenty pounds, but what lies beneath is as if hewed from stone. Probably the actual product doesn't stand up to the praise I give it, but it's my achievement. I enjoy using my new form, seeing the little ways strength and coordination ease my way through the world. Then there's the vindictive joy of slowly edging onto the cusp of conventional attractiveness. Despite the pain and inconvenience, I delight in the act of lifting the weight. It's such a private thing for me; until last month, I hadn't exercised my routine around anyone else in years. There are moments created when I lift of such austere, perfect, monastic solitude.

I read an essay by Henry Rollins where he kept lovingly referring to weights as "the Iron." He sounded like a serial killer. So I don't want to go too far out on that ledge, lest I fall into a musclebound disdain for all of the puny Micronians. But I guess I kind of understand why he gets downright religious about the topic. Unlike gender or religion or class, strength hasn't served to make me identify with others who share its marks. There's no knowing glance with the brick shithouse on the train. (Honestly, I'm always sizing them up, wondering if I could take them.) It's a private thing, a closed circuit communion with the self. Contextualize it however you want, because it's only your own experience that matters.