Oh, and Nick Cave. Yes.

Just like the stars

Things are going well tonight, right now. I have many problems, and I'm probably going to be depressed about all of them in due time. But right now I'm watching Stranger Than Paradise and I'm lying in my bed and I have some whiskey and there's this girl I really like and things are good. I have no idea why, but I felt like sharing that with all three of you. I actually like having such a small audience, though. Nothing I say really matters at all, does it?

Hail Eris! All hail Discordia!

Okay, children. Today, I'll be telling you all about your very special friend, an insane lady called Eris.

Eris (or Discordia, depending on whether the weather be weathered or not) is basically like a mind-blowing genius with a terrible case of ADHD. She truly, honestly loves each and every one of us, down to our last atom, but she gets distracted, and she has a vindictive sense of humour.

She operates a lot like this: Your brain contains roughly a hundred billion neurons, all constantly sending messages via unique pathways that are formed by your experiences and your genes. Nature and nurture. There is not a single human being on this planet with the same neural pathways as you, because no other person could possibly have had the exact same genes, or the same interpretations of the same experiences in the same order. You are a snowflake, blah blah blah.

So, what exactly is necessary for you, in all your beauty and glory, to exist? It's simple. First, you need a planet. It needs to be the right size, made up from the right stuff, orbiting at the right speed, at the right distance from a star of appropriate weight and size. A few thousand factors later, you might have a planet capable of supporting carbon-based life. All you need then is that magic spark that spawned the first amoeba and a few billion years of evolution, and you'll have the human race (provided nothing goes wrong, of course). From here, it's easy. Your exact ancestry, as well as that of everybody who has ever made an impact on your life, and then every one of the billions of moments you have experienced up to this point. The product of that is you, with your thoughts and your emotions. Your quirks and everything that other people cannot stand about you.

Now, what are the odds of that?

I think calling it a hundred billion to one would be optimistic. And that, children, is how Eris works. Out of an infinite flux of possibility, out of all that could have been, this manifested. The intricate, delicate pattern of your brain, and every cell in your body right where it belongs, performing a task that was never given to it. Even if that task is cancer, what are the odds?

That is Eris. That is Chaos. Sometimes good, sometimes terrible. Sometimes almost invisible, sometimes glaring. But the pattern is there. The perfect balance between order and disorder. From infinity, we have arisen. I do not claim to understand this pattern in the least, and I cannot even tell you with any measure of surety that it really exists. But it makes sense to me.

This probably seems so garbled and inclusive that you won't even read half of it. I apologize for that. Sometimes it's difficult to make my words come out right. Malaclypse the Younger explained it better in Principia Discordia. If you'd like, I can e-mail it to you. If not, then I won't.

Anyway, listen to The Drones. Really.

Sweet sound of relief

I'm far too tired to make the effort of thinking of some clever, witty way to start this post, so I'm afraid this will have to do. I feel good about life at the moment. I haven't slept in a while, and I can feel that it's going to happen tonight. Tonight, I am going to sleep like a corpse, and my brain is far too exhausted to bother me with all my usual trite bullshit. I am tired and numb, and I like it. I especially like the fact that I won't feel at all like this when I wake up.

Jhonen Vasquez said that sleep is the enemy. Even though I have nothing but admiration and awe for the man's work, I must respectfully disagree. He looks upon it as wasted time, but I think that's a slightly morbid outlook. I love my sleep. The entire process is just so appealing. I love selecting the music I'm going to fall asleep to (Eels, tonight), I love reading (Hannibal by Thomas Harris – my third reading) until my eyes go on strike and make everything fuzzy, but most of all, I love switching off the light and sinking, sinking, drowning in myself. And the best of it all is that when you wake up, you might just as well be someone else.

But now, after saying absolutely nothing, I will leave you. The goddess is calling. To you, my audience of none, I bid farewell. I shall return to continue my melodrama in this empty theatre. The ending is going to be spectacular.

Insomnia and religion do not mix well.

Can't sleep. I guess I should keep myself busy, lest I start listening to myself. That always ends horribly. So, in an effort to reinforce the levee, I have returned to my old ways and started a blog. But I'm far too tired to write anything cohesive, so I'll just post something I wrote for class last week (the lecturer hated it, so it's either shit or brilliant, I guess – I'm not really an objective judge here, but I'll go ahead and say it's shit) and then I'll be off, looking at your profiles.

Ewige Blumenkraft

"I am Chaos, and I am telling you that you are free."
– Principia Discordia

Blue smoke curls up and elegantly dances its way to the ceiling where it spreads itself out and dissipates. I am lying on the bed, naked, watching it while Nick Cave croons so beautifully. I take a drag of the joint and hold it in as long as I can, letting it fill me, before exhaling slowly and reluctantly.

It's two in the morning and I'm dreadfully awake. Far too awake, far too alert and far too sober. So I'm lying there, trying very hard indeed to fall asleep, when I become aware of a faint buzzing noise. I look around and, failing to locate the source of this impertinent impediment to my precious slumber, I sit up and examine the contents of my bedside table. My cell phone turns out to be the culprit, vibrating anxiously in the drawer. I pick it up and look at the screen.

Incoming call, number withheld.

I look at the digital clock in the corner of the display. 02:12. I suddenly feel a dreadful wave of anxiety engulf me, as if I know on some instinctual level that this moment is crucial, that it means everything. Shaking, I take another stiff drag, and I press the button with the little green phone.

"Hello?"

Nothing.

"Hello?"

Still. Nothing.

"Why are you calling me? Who the hell is this?"

Then, abruptly, as if it should have started a good deal earlier, a high-pitched drone becomes audible. The noise is so high-pitched and sudden that I start and jerk the phone away from my ear with such force that I lose my balance and fall sideways off the bed, disturbing my ashtray and twisting my wrist in the process. I manage to hold on to the phone, and I return it to my ear to find that the droning noise's pitch has lowered considerably. It is no longer near as unpleasant as it was before, and the way in which the sound seems to undulate, rising and falling gently in pitch and intensity, seems oddly soothing to me.

Perhaps I fall asleep. Perhaps not. At two in the morning, nobody is really awake. Either way, I lie like that for a long time, with the phone to my ear and a dead, half-smoked joint dirtying my hand. If I'm not asleep, I'm damn close. I remember reading a book once wherein it was explained that we are all asleep, that this is simply a mad man's dream, and that we know nothing of true reality.

And then, out of the blue, my stomach begins contracting with a vigour that it has never shown before, and I find myself sitting up and rolling myself into a ball, biting my lip to avoid crying. It's a stomach ache, nothing more. Just hold on. You're fine. I sway back and forth to the rhythm of my music, playing softly on my computer. My eyes are shut tight, and I can feel a thin trail of blood running down my chin from where I bit through my lip. My cell phone, forgotten now, has fallen out of my hand onto the floor. For a while, nothing changes, and I think for a moment that I will be okay. The pain in my stomach seems to subside for a second, just long enough for a breath, before it returns with a terrible vengeance and begins spreading through my body. My heart is about to give in, my lungs are sails on a steamboat trying to keep up, and all my limbs fall limply down. Useless. Then the pain reaches my head.

It feels as if the pressure in my body has been increasing steadily this entire time, and by now I could swear my skin is about to tear open at any moment to relieve this terrible burden. When the pain enters my head, it seems to start fading away in the rest of my body, as if it has found what it was looking for in my brain, and all its energy is being directed there. After some time, God knows how long, it is beyond pain. My head, my thoughts, my very existence is being dominated by an intense, overwhelming white energy. It consumes me, becomes me. I realize that it is stronger, older and wiser than I am, and not necessarily malignant; slowly, warily, reluctantly, I relinquish myself as I drift deeper into this beautiful, glorious, benign entity (for it is all those things and more, as I can see now – it can only have been my struggling that caused me to suffer so). I give myself to the Chaos.

My eyes spring open violently, and I can feel the old, raw energy coursing unchecked through my very marrow as my body convulses and jerks. Suddenly, I am everywhere and nowhere, and I see everything. I can feel the first spark of life blossom into existence, and I can feel the last give out desperately. I am shown things that I could never put into words, things so delicate that, if they were ever quantified by something so comparatively pitiful and banal as human intelligence, they would become trapped by our narrow ways, they would crumble at our very touch. They would wither and die. I am shown the Sacred Chaos in its entirety, with its fine balance and its elegant, infinitely intricate structure, and I understand. At long last, my eyes are open. Finally, I can see.

Then, just like that, I am me again.

I am naked on the bed, my whole body slick with sweat. Exhausted. Breathing like an engine. Fever like a volcano. I sit up and hold my knees to my chest, trying to breathe calmly. After some struggling, I manage it. I quiet myself. I can feel my heart slowing down to a healthier pace, and my body begins to cool down. I close my eyes and count my breaths. In. Out. In. Out. You're going to be okay. Just breathe. Listen to the music.

When great Satan's gone, the whore of Babylon, she just can't sustain the pressure where it's placed. She caves.

I find myself singing along softly, out of key, struggling to keep up. It's better than staying quiet, though. Don't get me wrong: what I experienced was glorious, beautiful and divine in the true sense of the word. I just need to stabilize. My body is almost back to normal by now, but mentally, I am a discordant wreck. Begging to be salvaged, saved, put back together. So much for sleep.

It becomes even cooler, and I uncurl myself and pull the blanket over myself. I switch off the bedside lamp and turn around. It becomes even colder. I begin shivering. I become powerfully nauseous almost at the same instant that a headache the size of a whale begins wreaking havoc in my skull. I am going to vomit, soon. I open my eyes and feel around for the lamp. I switch it on and see nothing. Blind, I stumble out of bed and fall over something almost instantly. I pick myself up wearily, and I make it to a wall, which I use to guide me along the thousand miles to the bathroom.

I fall forward, groping for the toilet. I sit here, in so much pain now that the tears roll freely down my face. I'm leaning forward when I suddenly become hot again, unbearably hot. My breathing becomes heavier and heavier and soon I am making retching sounds and spittle , tears and blood are all dripping from my face.

I can feel something growing in me, longing to be born. I cannot say where it originated, but soon it is filling me. It courses through my veins to my lungs. It fills them, growing, becoming stronger. When it is ready, it shifts and moves upwards, outwards. My lips and my tongue move of their own accord, and it is not my voice that comes out when they do. It sounds like a voice older than time, greater than the cosmos. Patiently, solidly, it says two words.

Ewige Blumenkraft.

And like that, I am released to fall weeping to the bathroom floor. It has begun.

                                 I
                               can

                        see the eye
                     up there above
                   me watching it all