The funny thing about that grinning gargoyle bastard life is no matter how relentlessly you try to catch it, wrestle it to the ground and drive railroad ties into its maniacally flailing limbs, no matter how well prepared and meticulously planned your course of action is, life will find a way to plow right the fuck through you like a howling juggernaut engine born of misdirected karma, cosmic misfortune, and industrial sized canisters of bullshit. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

Twenty one years, I’ve been figuring it all out. Twenty one years, and all I’ve discovered is hideousness staring back from behind the stage lights. The peaks stink with malformed monarchs, leering lechers fulfilling adolescent power fantasies like self-motivated marionettes; the shallows crawl with tumescent, many-eyed monsters slavering on their own broken mandibles, stabbing and shooting and raping and mauling and mutilating other aberrations for the fetid table scraps rolling down from the top. For twenty one years I’ve been the shifty wallflower at this macabre masquerade, picking poisons and spitting venom at whatever skitters too close to me, trying to spike a punchbowl consisting chiefly of antifreeze and lime non-name brand Kool-Aid.

Twenty one years spent slithering over cracked concrete and shattered glass with other red-rimmed lost souls, calling archaic punk rock gospels of dissent into an apathetic nuclear dusk, running with thieves and drug dealers, pillheads and junkies and the psychological walking wounded to the crumbling edge of the abyss and staring resentfully into it like it won’t stare back. Twenty one years fighting monsters on wet sand, gnarled claws goring pieces from my body and my mind, shattering mirrors in otherwise absolute silence so I won’t get confused and swing at them later. Twenty one years of hurling cold, gelatinous plastique explosive at the creaking bridges I set to blaze.

Twenty one years spent calling washtub moonshine incantations at the teeming throng that watch as I burn at the stake. I’ve passed Go again, and I’ve yet to see a cent of my god damned two hundred dollars.

Twenty one years spent waist deep in hell-slime with nothing to show for it but a body full of scars and a weathered stack of thoughts stolen from the sinners martyred before I arrived.

Good grief.

Our world is imperfect, our desires impure, our motivations shaky and surreptitious. What a charming little prisoner’s passion play, murderers and fiends dressed in freshly shorn sheep’s clothing, cowering from the nameless wolf’s whispers behind a veneer of innocence, as if such a thing still existed as the fat grow fatter and we become wretched and emaciated on a diet of treachery, disillusionment and poverty.

It’s enough to make you sick. And yet still, I wouldn’t trade my cards for anyone else’s hand.

Playing paladin on the gristly fringes has a romantic appeal, in a way. There’s something fulfilling in remaining stalwart against insurmountable odds. A sick red satisfaction in wiping the blood from your lips and charging back into a melee you know you can’t win. The fruitlessness and futility is counterweighed by the flavor of righteous indignation. It tastes like angels, baking into the orange clay beneath your ribcage.

Every asylum has its medication, of course, and they have a whole slew of pharmaceuticals to take the edge off for us. Uppers and downers both literal and supernal. Prozac and Xanax and Vicodin and Valium and Lithium and, fucking hell, Robotussin; little performance enhancing pellets to pop and drop to give us an edge in the race to chase down the American dream. And it’s not just an American dream anymore, oh no; this shit has gone global. Let’s take this handful of magic and mute all those unpleasant little self-deprecating echoes. It’s better to play to an empty house than a coliseum packed with jeering groundlings, isn’t it?

… Isn’t it?

Cigarettes and alcohol, marijuana and cocaine, LSD and XTC and all those consonants in between. Psychopsilocybin to keep those gentle waves a-fallin’. It can’t be that bad if we can see the guiding force that spins the stars. Who cares what corrosives we have to pour on our neurons to do it? “It’s not like we only live once,” whisper the hopeful enlightened to whoever will believe them. Faith is a euphoric sort of virus, but at least illness makes us interesting.

And love. Love is the mother of all opiates. Well, no, to be fair, opium is the mother of all opiates, but it can’t hold a spoon-heating candle to love. Nothing is more romanticized than romance. It’s the glimmering, gossamer thread of hope that we all lunge for like lemmings, clinging fast as it slips our grasp and slides us closer to the surface of the burbling morass we spend most of our time pretending isn’t there. Bright eyes and trembling lips patchworked onto wisps of light, held aloft like a holy sigil to keep the demons at bay. The poets call it the answer, the skeptics call it electrical impulse and phylogenetic chemical reaction, and the Beatles called it all we needed. Clearly, Mr. Lennon, we also need a little Kevlar.

But after that first fix, we’re hooked, and the junkie shuffle will follow us until we melt back into the earth. God, that sweat is ambrosia, those panted pheromonal breaths like a little gasp of life, of the real, pure, eternally lauded empyrean existential ecstasy. We kill for it. Die for it. Behind every horror and holocaust, every religious crusade and mass execution, every splintered psyche and money-hungry maniac and skull-gazing sociopath, you can make out the swinging hips and flowing hair on the silhouette behind the curtain, walking away when it was needed most and leaving a trail of scorpions. What a fickle, opportunistic bitch. Not that I’m bitter.

And it’s not that foreknowledge will change a thing. You can huff and puff and piss and moan about the spirit-charring travesties of love, you can mourn the scars coating your back and brain, but no matter how deluded you become, you’ll see her again, painted white and immaculate and beautiful and wanting, and the frost in your chest will thaw into that familiar, dull ache and put you back to square one. There’s nothing truly random, after all. Everything is cylical.

There’s a reason the philosophers are dead and rotting alongside white knights and hanged messiahs.

Nevermind.