Intoxication...

There is a madness that creeps up on a man from time to time.
I can’t speak for others but mine resembles an affluent looking man from the 1860’s.
A tall black hat on his head.
A mustache bristling with charm on his upper lip.
Eyes that shine with a mischievous light and a quick smile that speaks of insanity.
It doesn’t take much for him to appear at my side.
That smile of his showering me in lunatic light.
His hand, firm yet friendly, outstretched towards me.
I take it every time.

All it can take is a word.
Spoken from soft lips. Wearing Whiskey flavored gloss.

All it can take is a look.
Seen through a spill of hair. Razor sharp with it‘s implication.

All it can take is a touch.
Light and electrifying. As fleeting as cigarette smoke.

And before I know it the red fog of his influence is upon me.
His madness.
My madness.
Our madness.
I embrace it.
Like a long time friend not seen in years.
Or like a lover pined for all night.
I let it crash over me and sweep me out to unseen horizons.
It is the truest thing I’ve ever known.

Conversations...

There is not one ounce of my person that believes in one ounce of the words you speak.
Simply because you speak in bulk doesn’t mean that the statements carry any weight.
You construct a hollow foundation held together by assertions of validity.
A frame work of convoluted and vague expressions stretched towards the world’s ceiling.
But as the winds blow and the rains fall your false edifice erodes away quicker than it was constructed.
A Freemason you are not. An ancient culture responsible for the Stone Hedges and Pyramids of our world, their skill and prowess, you will never possess.
You’re like a contractor who all ways places the lowest bid.
But please, tell me I’m wrong.
Use your inexhaustible stock of bullshit to build a wall that towers over me.
As I try to scale it the shoddy craftsmanship will lead to its collapse.
And there I’ll lay, buried under the weight of your empty words, unable to move.
Tired and worn down to my end from the effort I’ve exerted while you stand tall and breathing easy from the total lack of energy it takes to craft falsities.
This is how it all ways turns out.
You all ways stand the victor.
Even though I still hold your words in no regard and claim they have no power over me, I all ways end up splayed out surrounded by them as my only friends.
You may be a part of me, now and forever, but oh how I fucking loathe you.
I wish I could rip you from my bones and sinew.
Drain you from my heart and veins.
Pick you off of my skin and rip you out with my hair.
Take all of your insubstantial shouts and cries, all your worthless bleeding words and burn you with them.
I would speak at your funeral.
I would invite everyone we know.
Even though we held no religious beliefs I would find the biggest church I could.
I would lay you out in all your horrible and wretched beauty for all of our friends to observe.
Then, clad in all black, I would ascend to the pulpit, and read your eulogy.
Unlike your words, mine would hold a truth never to be found in anything you ever said to me.
They would be short.
For truth doesn’t need a full page of prose to affect it’s goal.
With my eyes clear and focused I would pay you your last respects.
“Here lie my emotions. Good riddance.”

Night of 10,000 Horrors.

“I want to know what love is” by Foreigner is currently blasting out of my computer speakers. The choir of gospel voices mixed with the oh so cool synthesizer riff is helping to sooth my jagged and raw nerves. If I had a pack of cigarettes right now I would more than likely have five lit up at the moment thus turning my mouth into a burning pit of smoke and fire that I hope would one day engulf all the people I hate. Unfortunately I have no cigarettes. I do however have quite a tale to recount. You may be asking your self, “Mike, what could have been so bad?” I will alleviate your fears somewhat. I was not kidnapped. No one was murdered. Well, no physical being was slain but my ability to get an erection may be in dire jeopardy. There was torture though. Ungodly amounts of torture spanning the entire spectrum of human pain we are familiar with. This may not be for the weak of stomach or frail of mind. My friends, we are about to dive head first into a putrid soup of Pomade, Pabst, fat girls testing the limits of fabric and questionable vaginal secretions. I present you with the harrowing tale of how Kehli and I survived a Revered Horton Heat concert.

I got off of work early and met her at her condo where we decided that food was in order before we embarked on our evening of Psychobilly. If we had known what awaited us I think instead of coating our stomachs with over processed food we would have instead fortified our persons with armor to protect ourselves and weapons to cleave and split flesh. Once we arrived at the venue we met up with a couple friends and caught up a bit on what had been going on in our lives respectively. Jokes were made. Feelings were hurt. Laughs were had. Everything seemed fine. It was a false sense of security brought on by the confidence that we’d been to many, many shows and this one would be no different than the slew of others that came before it. Oh how wrong we were in our surety of ourselves.

It wasn’t long before the lights went down and The Necromantix came on the stage. I’m not going to go into any detail about their set or their stage presence, which wasn’t anything special. If you want to hear what they sound like then look them up. I will tell you that the first part of their set was taken up by Kehli and I running social commentary on how women in the Psychobilly scene like to test how much strain poka dot and leopard print fabric can withstand. NASA has nothing on these women when it comes to the sheer amount of punishment they dish out on their apparel. If NASA hired fat Psychobilly girls to test out shuttle materials by making disgustingly tight skirts and corsets out of them we’d be able to launch those fuckers right into the Sun and they’d come back peachy keen. It was pure luck that no one suffered a laceration or dismemberment from a burst garment as is succumbed to the natural laws of physics.

I must back track for a second. On the car ride over to the venue Kehli had shared with me a story of a sad soul that had decided to try and court her in the bar where she works. In their conversations she had let slip she would be attending the Revered show. Wonders of wonders occurred as he exclaimed he was going too! Isn’t the world a magical place? Anyways to make a long story short, which she didn’t when telling me all this, there was going to be a very good chance we would see him there and I would have to tank for her and give him the old brush off. If some of you aren’t familiar with the concept of “tanking” for someone then it’s probably a good indication that the people you hang out with are ugly and uncool. “Tanking” occurs when you must step up in a friend’s defense to either help them avoid danger or direct unwanted attention from the opposite or same sex away from them. This can be done by either pretending to be with the person or by simply telling the other party to fuck off. Sometimes a good open handed slap to the mouth is all that’s needed. I have employed all of these methods at one time or another. Tonight I was leaning more towards vulgarity and blatant violence if presented with the opportunity.

Now back to Kehli and I being caddy bitches. As we were tearing people apart and giggling like school girls I caught sight of a man who appeared to be in his thirties and looked like the end result of an experiment where top scientist placed Meat Loaf (the singer), Brett Michaels and a healthy helping of gravy in a high velocity chamber and turned it on high and let it run until the atoms of all three were melded into one train wreck of existence. I pointed him out with great excitement. As she turned to where I pointed her face went white and she looked back at me with somber eyes that spoke of infinite gulfs of sadness. She told me that the walking incarnation of gravy and bad decisions was none other than the man who had been trying to seduce her at the bar. My mouth dropped open in shock. Out of all the people there I had managed to pick out the very subject I was meant to tank. I knew my enemy. My hand tensed in anticipation of the slap down I was going to dish out if need be. Oh, I forgot to mention, he was wearing a hat that resembled one of those Taco Hats you can get at some Mexican restaurants. You know, the ones made of tortilla chip material with salsa in the top so you can eat the hat right off of you head? Google that shit if necessary but the point is that for the rest of this piece the man in question will be referred to as Taco Hat.

After a very rude bout of laughter concerning Taco Hat and after exhausting the supply of fat girls around us we turned out attention to the bartender behind us serving drinks to the masses from behind his little counter. Now I’m going to tell you this, we both loved that man. He gave us both a reason to believe in the human race again. We spent a large chuck of time, and I mean like most of the set, crafting his life story from the time he was a small boy to the time where he became the well adjusted man he was today. With tears of love leaking from our eyes and our stomachs aching from the sheer joy of his life the Necromantix finished their set.

It didn’t take much time for the Reverend to take the stage. If you’ve never seen the Revered play then it’s too bad for you. I can’t explain it to you. Go on Youtube or something.

So the Reverend fires up the set with a couple songs back to back. Over the course of the first few songs Kehli and I had to do a weird kind of dance which consisted of us looking around in all directions until one of us spotted Taco Hat. The other was then alerted and then positioning occurred so that his line of sight to her was blocked. He eventually made his way towards the front of the venue and we were able to relax. That is until the first fight broke out. Right in front of us at the bar where our most perfect of beings peddled his magical drinks of Whiskey and Shasta Cola a fight between some guys who all kind of looked the same erupted in a flurry of over the top punches and drunken stumbling. The Revered and most of the crowd was oblivious to all of this as were the security guards on hand. I moved in front of Kehli ready to take a sweaty ham fist to the head if necessary. You see, she needs her face, its how she makes her money. I on the other hand get by on my overwhelming wit and charm so having a busted up face isn’t the worst thing that can happen to me. The fight was over pretty quickly and the rabble rousers were taken from the floor. Just as we settled into our respective spots another fight broke out behind us. This one was between a very large man (fat) who didn’t take kindly to being touched by anyone, as evidenced by him shoving around a female security guard, and a kid with a chin strap of facial hair. This fight was very awkward and was over when the large man was taken outside. Again, all of this was ignored by most of the crowd and the Reverend.

Things finally settled down and we were able to enjoy the show. That is until the Vault of Terror was opened upon our unsuspecting minds. The first in a long line of many inflicted pains was the sight of a very attractive woman. This was something to comment on as she was one of the handful of good looking girls at this show. Her beauty was marred by a douche of a boyfriend who reminded me of those people who ask to bum a cigarette. You’re running low but you decide to be nice anyway. You pull out your pack of seven dollar American Spirits and the asshole has the nerve to say something like “oh man I hate Spirits! But whatever, I’ll smoke it.” Oh really fuckface? You have the nerve to make a stink over a free cigarette just because it’s not your favorite brand? You asked and then when you where given you were a dick. There is a place in Hell where the souls are ripped limb from limb by a giant Whale with a Scorpion tale and pinchers. Once the arms and legs are torn from the body the Whale then stings the person repeatedly in the face until it’s just a glob of meat. Then, it happens all over again. That is where people like this guy will end up.

We got over this blow to our senses quickly with help from another attractive woman who entered our frame of vision. The girl with the douche for a partner was replaced and forgotten and we set our sights to watch our new lady do her thang. Unfortunately the Universe is a fucker and her thang consisted of fondling and making out with every living organism within the reach of her serpentine arms. We watched in mute horror as she kissed and grabbed the ass of the guy with the chip strap facial hair who’d gotten his ass handed to him by a fat guy. Then she moved onto making out with a stick of a woman in a really ugly dress. A triple kiss followed with two other women and there was a lot of grinding and groping happening all from different guys. Our visage of loveliness had turned out to be none other than just another N.E. Portland door knob. The blows had come too fast and hard so when a guy stood directly in front of me and made out with his short, fat and unattractive girlfriend all I could do was weep.

The show was coming to a close and Kehli had managed to rouse herself to action. She made the move and took me with her as we moved up a little farther to try and get away from the group of guys who’d fought each other but now after a lot of close face talking and hugging were all friends and the ugly people making out around us. We couldn’t move up too close because Taco Hat could be seen pogo’ing around like a dickweed amidst the throng of drunken dancers. Coming to what was thought of as a safe spot we stopped and smiled at each other in triumph! Oh, but life loves to take you down a notch when you think you’ve got the upper hand.

Off to our left our once beautiful woman turned whore staggered into view. I turned my head just in time to see her fall to the floor in an alcohol induced haze. She was wearing a dress. A short dress. The dress rose up as she fell down and in an awful moment I starred into a Lovecraftian abyss of female reproductive organs. To compound my mental anguish instead of rising up from the floor instantly she instead smiled up at one of her male fuck dolls and spread her legs even more. It’s unsettling when the abyss looks back at you, recognizes you and marks you for later conquest. I’m not sure how much time I have left on this earth but the rest of my nights will be filled with the horrible realization of what awaits me in the darkness after life.

After this incident much of the actual show is a blur. You’re mind can only take so much punishment before it puts up a sign that says “Closed for the Night.” I remember yelling at one point in a language I didn’t know and that has probably been extinct for a couple thousand years. Kehli says that at one point she looked at her feet and she was standing up to her ankles in what she guessed was Unicorn blood.

I guess what I’m trying to say in all of this is that the show itself was an amazing thing full of great music and a great sense of love from the band. The crowd however was one of the worst things I have ever experienced and any innocence I had left has now been murdered, raped, stabbed a bit, raped again, burned, raped more and burried.

We exited as soon as the music was over and hurried to the car where we proceeded to blast Atmosphere and get as far away from the seething horde of drunk and horny meat sacks as fast as we could.

“Hell is other people.”

No shit.....