Free books for the masses

Hey! My author friend Lizbeth is running a giveaway again! If you are a member of Goodreads, you can enter to win a copy of her book. And if you like dark fantasy and erotica, boy, are you in for a fucked-up treat. 😈

To go to the giveaway, please click on this link.

Reviews for the Theater of Dusk taken from the giveaway info:  

“...If you like dark, mysterious and slightly disturbing things, this is the book for you. I cannot be happier that this author and I crossed paths. This collection is a mix of dark, mystery and a little of the in between. It's a mix of emotions and darkness. Darkness that wraps you up in its tight-fisted hands and pulls you in close to kiss you so passionately that you go stupid. You forget everything.”

“This little read takes the reader by surprise. In its entirety this book is filled with darkness… We become each character, however horrific that thought is, and realise that love does not exist. …Each short story takes you along a road of self-discovery and the reader can recognise elements of the darkness within the self… I would recommend it to anyone prepared to brave the deep.”

Good luck! Giveaway runs until the 10th of November. I hope you win, it'll be an amazing belated Halloween gift. And while you're there, check the other giveaways too. Lots and lots of books of every possible genre available. Enjoy your browsing!

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How to protect your heart from breaking

Kill desire and you should be perfectly safe. And dead for that matter.

If there's one thing I despise about desire, are its highs and lows. First you get kicked sky-high and then you fall. If desire isn't met, then you should prepare yourself for some really nasty withdrawal symptoms.

Whenever I truly desired someone and it wasn't reciprocated, I suffered. They never knew, of course. Only I knew how much it cost me. I've always been proud and unwilling to chase, even if I was going crazy. I never chase. I speak, and if the other person is not interested, it is what it is. In my case, it is heartache and suffering until desire subsides again and I go back to my routine, feeling as exhausted and disillusioned as a junkie going cold turkey. Life is what it is, and I am what I am. I don't hold it personally against anyone. I have enough feelings for ten people. Sometimes I also feel I have the bad luck of ten people. The mysteries of attraction are not for the sane or the weak-hearted. Thankfully I am neither. So I'll just eat some chocolate and sleep and not ponder further on what I can't solve or understand. Right? Right.

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A universe in my head

Lately I am trying to walk as much as possible. It keeps my murdering impulses in check. It also keeps my tummy in check. I exercise for an hour, then return home and stuff my face with food and chocolate. It feels great.

While walking round and round a small football stadium I have in my neighbourhood, my mind races. The rest of me refuses to run. (If anyone asks me why not, I tell them with a deadpan expression my religion prohibits it and secretly laugh at their confusion.) So while my body does its thing, more often than not my characters and heroes are doing their thing too. I watch them converse, or re-play scenes in my mind's eye and discover details I wasn't aware of. I host entire worlds in my head, complete with people, places, history. I know details so intimate and personal about my heroes no-one else knows. And the moment I'm gone, they'll be gone too. I am their access point to this world. Unless I discover the secret of immortality, that access point will inevitably be revoked. 

I recently watched the 2nd season of Sense8. It was a fantastic experience. There are moments one of the protagonists is in danger and the entire cluster gathers behind them to help and support them. That's what happens with me too every time I'm distressed. I run to my heroes. They are always there for me, there will always be there for me. It's a bond no-one can understand. 

Sometimes I talk to people about incidents I am writing and describe what happens. It really surprises others that I treat my heroes as if they are real. To me they are very real. I just happen to be the focal point of their existence, the place they exist inside. I could be a nebula instead of a human being. It wouldn't have made a difference to the people I host. And that's not because I can't tell reality from fantasy. I can distinguish it just fine, thank you very much. Reality is the boring one.

A friend told me it would be amazing if fantasy heroes were the ones to choose a possible author to host them and not the other way around. If you think about it, it makes sense. I would have chosen a person with similar idiosyncrasies to host me if I was a fantastic being. For all I know, I may be hosted by one such, and right now they are busy writing about my life. There's no way I would be able to tell. I would be sure I am real. I mean, I AM sure I am real. Aren't you?

So I walk around and an army follows me wherever I go. I love them more than anything. They are the transcendence of my mind and flesh. I will age and die, they won't. They are the best parts of my being, my agony and pain turned into gold, the distillation of countless lives into the best of all possible worlds: pure ideas. The poetry and transcendence of our very existence. 

I wonder if the universe provides extra protection for writers, when so much more than just a single life is at stake if something happens to them. It probably does. (See? Chocolate always makes me optimistic. 😁 😝)
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What I need asap!

I need men who are unapologetically feminine, witchy, kittenish, silly, sentimental, lovers of high heels and experts in outrageous make-up. I need women butchers and wolves and Valkyries, planners of pandemonium, movers and shakers. I want to see people who defy every gender characterisation stepping forth and making this world a better place by destroying every notion of normality, sexuality, appropriateness and categorisation. Fuck this world, fuck society, fuck normal. We're the demon lovers of those witches you did not manage to burn. We're their familiars, their cats, their succubi and incubi, their toads and sprites and their fits of madness. Fuck this world and pass on the rainbow, bitchy, fairy ammunition. We'll infiltrate this brothel of a dimension and make you desire us, fear us, worship us. Do you hear me? We'll make you wish you were us.

If you belong to my cult, here's visual material for your needs. Let me begin with a male model and continue from there...

https://www.facebook.com/valentin.van.porcelain/

https://www.facebook.com/MahafsounArt/

Now this guy can be found here...

https://www.facebook.com/marcin.nagraba.artist/

And this guy can found here.

https://www.facebook.com/tintiucmichael/

Yes, male, or rather agender. Taken from here.

Photo by girltripped.

Rain Dove, female model.

And as I said before, let the wonderful freaks come to me. Let them come out of their closets and rock my world. I need them more than ever. This world needs them more than ever. And anyone who has a problem with that can go get stuffed.
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Everyday madness

Art taken from here.

You wake up, after bad and not enough sleep, because the latest addition to your cat population is a completely blind and very sick kitten. He cannot see or smell his food, so when he's hungry he meows and wakes you up to feed him. You already have serious trouble sleeping and staying asleep and the kitten does not help. It's not his fault, of course. So antibiotics, eye ointment though he has two red holes where his eyes should be, mountain tea compresses for the eyes and the mucus crusted nostrils, the works. Blah de blah. Or bleurgh de bleurgh, depending on how sick and tired you feel. He looks like a very ugly blind fly with black stripes, and you want to cry for how pitiful the poor thing is. At the same time he's so happy to be safe and constantly fed he plays like crazy and knocks his head against various surfaces. Usually he's trying to locate a kitty tit inside your mother's hair or somewhere in the vicinity of her ear while she watches TV with him on her shoulder like a bizarre black-striped blind parrot.

The tiredness and heavy head persists throughout the day, the weather is hot and humid, you alternatively vegetate and snap, give photosynthesis a go and wish you could drop a silence bomb to make everyone around you shut up. In a typical ADD style you jump from one task to the next feeling sick of everything. People in Facebook have written you personal messages and you can't be bothered to read them, let alone answer them, and you eat lots of food and sugar. A small mountain of sugar in the hope you'll keep your head out of the muddy sea of static electricity that's covering you up to your ears and makes your surroundings incoherent and moving in slow motion. You can't think, can't concentrate, and wonder what would be better, shooting someone full of giant holes or putting a single bullet to your head and enjoying some good solid rest. 

Your social life is a thing of wonder. You meet up with people once every blue moon and either absorb the wrong type of energy and therefore spend the rest of the night farting, or your meetings develop into impromptu therapies. You pull out a magnificent variety of bullshit from people's (etheric) bodies, from nails, pieces of metal, rotten lengths of cloth, ropes, chains, vortexes, caves, statues, immaterial technological constructions that float on the astral level and get attached to the gifted ones when their defenses are down, to entities, thought-forms, demons, you name it. More often than not, you know it's futile. For every one thing you remove, three more come to take its place when that person is vulnerable, and there is no end to the work you do on yourself, or the excuses humans use to fuck up. But what can you do? Give up and go home? And do what? Once more fail to sleep? Har har har. 

You remember the conversation you had concerning an abyssal female creature not unlike Tiamat, part whale, part dragon, part what we later on came to call a mermaid. She is not a maiden with a fish tail any more than a hell-hound is a fluffy chicken. She is the size of a building, terrifying like a storm, as majestic and wondrous as a bottomless ocean. You called Her the other day because She was the one best suited to help in a therapy. The friend who's undergoing the therapy asked how you managed to get in touch with Her, and you wanted to ask that friend, what do you mean how? You just thought of Her, and She responded. You don't need to make a mirror from a special alloy the hour of Saturn using candles from pigeon fat and the blood of the virgins. Gods, demons and other entities reside within as much as without. You just give them a shout and they pop up for a conversation. More often than not, they're happy to help. It doesn't even matter if they are figments of your imagination or real. If they cause results, then they are as real as they can get.

Now, if only you had some idea what to do with the matter of finding a new job, everything would be peachy. 
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The ocean of lost souls

 

Septicflesh/ Jon Simvonis: Portrait of a Headless Man. 

I have been busy doing what I can't refer to here. And what is just too mundane to write about. I know you are reading this blog because you're certain that any moment now, I may bare more than just my soul. You hope you may glimpse a tit. Instead you get cat photos. Such is the unfairness of life.

Well, my friend Jon Simvonis has been busy too. Unlike me, he has something to show for his efforts; the staggering music video of this post. He's responsible for the visual part, which is a feast of industrial SF horror and black slime. You see Septicflesh have been busybodies, and they pushed out yet another deliciously wicked baby called Codex Omega, which you can listen to here and grab here. If you want to begin your day with a torrentuous hail of unearthly growls married to brutal death metal onslaught while the orchestra of the damned performs in the background (using entrails for strings, dragon skulls for percussion and bladders for wind instruments), now you know what to do. It's probably what demons listen to while tearing the souls of the sinners to bloody shreds. It's certainly what I'll be listening to in order to deal with bureaucracy or depression.  

So September is here and I'll be soon looking for a job. I have a good feeling. I swam a lot this summer, and the sea has a calming effect on me. I don't know why the majority is afraid of the deep. There is nothing more tranquil than swimming in very deep sea. The open firmament above, the abyss below, and me balancing on the fine line of the horizon. Effort is reduced to a bare minimum, movement is unrestricted, relaxing, almost poetic. It resembles flying while wide awake. Let's not forget it was the ocean that gave birth to life. Like any other primordial element, it should be respected. It is the closest we have to the womb of creation on this planet. 

Do humans respect it? Ha. 

Do I give a shit about humans? No. I mean really, look at that and tell me why I should bother.

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Old loves coming to visit us again

Kahlil Gibran

THE GREATER SEA

(from 'The Madman', 1918)

My soul and I went to the great sea to bathe. And when we reached the shore, we went about looking for a hidden and lonely place.

But as we walked, we saw a man sitting on a grey rock taking pinches of salt from a bag and throwing them into the sea.

“This is the pessimist,” said my soul, “Let us leave this place. We cannot bathe here.”

We walked on until we reached an inlet. There we saw, standing on a white rock, a man holding a bejewelled box, from which he took sugar and threw it into the sea.

“And this is the optimist,” said my soul, “And he too must not see our naked bodies.”

Further on we walked. And on a beach we saw a man picking up dead fish and tenderly putting them back into the water.

“And we cannot bathe before him,” said my soul. “He is the humane philanthropist.”

And we passed on.

Then we came where we saw a man tracing his shadow on the sand. Great waves came and erased it. But he went on tracing it again and again.

“He is the mystic,” said my soul, “Let us leave him.”

And we walked on, till in a quiet cover we saw a man scooping up the foam and putting it into an alabaster bowl.

“He is the idealist,” said my soul, “Surely he must not see our nudity.”

And on we walked. Suddenly we heard a voice crying, “This is the sea. This is the deep sea. This is the vast and mighty sea.” And when we reached the voice it was a man whose back was turned to the sea, and at his ear he held a shell, listening to its murmur.

And my soul said, “Let us pass on. He is the realist, who turns his back on the whole he cannot grasp, and busies himself with a fragment.”

So we passed on. And in a weedy place among the rocks was a man with his head buried in the sand. And I said to my soul, “We can bath here, for he cannot see us.”

“Nay,” said my soul, “For he is the most deadly of them all. He is the puritan.”

Then a great sadness came over the face of my soul, and into her voice.

“Let us go hence,” she said, “For there is no lonely, hidden place where we can bathe. I would not have this wind lift my golden hair, or bare my white bosom in this air, or let the light disclose my sacred nakedness.”

Then we left that sea to seek the Greater Sea.

You can find the book here.
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Fragments from an old letter to a friend

Picture source: http://miss-mosh.deviantart.com/gallery/

Been re-reading old letters I wrote. Nice to see not much has changed. Irreverent, angry, anally obsessed and funny.

"Yesterday I had some large beans cooked with tomato in the oven for supper plus five eggs for dinner. The result is that today my ass levitates at some centimeters distance over the chair due to continuous and continual gas production. I look like a levitating Indian fakir. It’s ominous. I have farting spells that last for several seconds and change tone, tune and temperature at my nether region. Their result is usually clinging around the proximity of my ass as a cloud of fluff and instant death. I am forced to change my surroundings every time I am struck by this nasty muse’s endearments. In fact every time I release one of those I start running and never look back, propelled by the gas as much as by my legs. Seriously, if we ever find ourselves in the same house I’ll let you know in such a case, so that you don’t switch on the lights. If you do, they’ll find both our corpses next day in the ruins, blackened and burned beyond recognition. :P The joys of single life, farting as much as you please." 

"I want to go to heavens and butt-rape every single meddling deity that was ever born in the collective unconscious with gigantic, whale-size dildos with spikes, then take a shit and smear it on their faces. I want to organise a party with the heads of those deities stuck on poles greeting my guests, blue tongues lolling and eyeballs dangling. I want to commit acts of violence on their hides that no intelligent race across all galaxies has ever conceived. And I’ll be laughing constantly while reminding them every bad thing that has happened to me and the ones I care about.

There are days, or rather, moments in a day I am content. Not happy, but content. I can even glimpse a shred of meaning in breathing in and out. But most days are disheartening and infuriating and exhausting. Still, I refuse to give up. I’ll stay till the last credits to see what this fucking idiocy of a movie called my life was about. But whoever is responsible should beware, because I am getting my spiked whale dildos lubed up and ready even as we speak. I’ll kick their asses so hard they’ll spend the rest or eternity exchanging postcards with their missing behinds which will have landed in the farthest end of the other side of the bloody universe. I mean it and probably can do it." 

Ah, the arrogance of some deities... ;) And some butts.
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