Man In The Radiator

       art by Masahiro Ito      I have nothing left I feel is worth saying. I oftentimes worry that the well of feelings and the words I have to poorly and spasmodically articulate those feelings has long since dried out. There's nothing left to say, there was never anything to say about myself or what I feel or what I think. Why should there be? Why should there have ever been? What am I to anybody or anything? Nearly every single time I put pen to paper or decided to endure the struggle to actually type something out it only ever feels like an attempt to inflate my woefully nonexistent ego. Like anything rattling around in my tired and, at this point, too old head is worth anyone to know - I'm just fooling myself. My words and my thoughts and my ideas deserve an audience? Permeance and preservation, even? I don't think so. I was not made for an audience. I was never under the belief that anyone out there would even care.  I was not made for anything at all as none of us

Dream of the Barbed Wire People   The following is a short story I began writing about two months ago following a vivid and incredibly graphic nightmare I had. Upon waking I forgot most of the dream, only small snippets of visuals and scenery, but the  feeling  of fear and panic and genuine discomfort stayed with me throughout most of the day to an incredibly strong degree. I wish I continued writing this story the day I started it as I now have very little recollection of where it was going or what I planned for it. But I figured I might as well take another look at it and here is a sort of "second draft" of what I originally wrote and what I think will be the first part of a short story.   Art by Hellish Razor.  Part One :        Doctor Severin was finally able to put me to sleep. After sessions of intense hypnotherapy and routine adjustments of strange, unpronounceable medications in unmarked bottles as well as his supervision over my sleepless body over several nights, it

       Yesterday afternoon I was sitting in a small, extremely depressing café area that was part of my partner's university, waiting for her class to end. The place was swarmed with the same copy-paste modern university student that continues to fuel the ever-present sense of doom and despair and hopelessness I feel for the future of the human race. Try as I might to be totally unaffected by the future of humanity, to view it as all one big meaningless dirge into the grave with nothing mattering or lasting or really being of any long-term significance whatsoever - I just can't turn my feelings off, I can't numb myself to it anymore, and I can't find a way to not feel intense dread for the future. Deep down I know that it is within my own power to make something worthwhile of my life, and I have surprisingly succeeded in certain ways and achieved aspects of a life that may be worth living according to my own terms, but I also am well aware of how little control I have o

I am not sure why I am making this, none of it really matters all that much to me, but I felt a rather overwhelming and terrifying feeling throughout this day of a nagging fear that I am not doing enough. A feeling that comes and goes, really, but today it was especially disruptive and fatalistic feeling. Time feels insignificant and yet extremely overbearing with how limited life truly is. Normally I wouldn't care about such things, normally I would just find comfort in the thought that I am not part of this fetid population for too long and will die leaving no trace and enter into a great nothingness - but things are different now and I have found myself valuing my life. Often times that is a wonderous, strange, and unbelievable thing...other times it feels like a curse and everything becomes too heavy to bear. It will pass, or I will be numb to it and succumb to apathy about my life. But, for now, this place will collect what little I can offer up about myself and my "creat