Dissolution and putrefaction, prevailing Aesthetic experience,
The splendor of the obscene and inhuman;
For what matters the death of vague human beings
If thereby the individual affirms himself?


You kids need to find hobbies. Apparently a skeletal handful of people still stalks my shit, and as this medium is far more impersonal than the bat-shitting well of sorrows that is LiveJournal, mouthing off here is somehow liberating.

I think I'm doomed to hold the rest of the world, females in particular, in increasing disdain until I die of alcohol poisoning or a drug overdose. I maintain that you have never had and still have not the faintest notion of who I am. The affinity for the type who listens to The Birthday Massacre religiously, wears Lolita dresses, neon extensions, and vinyl boots, and posts only fat girl angle photos or pictures of her ass and/or cleavage is like a slap in the face. Who the fuck do you think I am and how could you ever reconcile this with me. My hatred for almost everyone mounts until I'm nearly sick with my own disdain, eternally oscillating in some limbo between sardonic narcissism and abject self-loathing, rotten to the core.

I hate self-professed ‘metal’ chicks even more. Girls who try to look like vampires and pick up black metal guys at shows. Chicks who profess that they ‘live for gore \m/’ and are ‘brutal’ because they watch Hostel and Wolf Creek. No, you don’t love death. Beyond the cartoon Hot Topic skull wristbands and watered-down artistic portrayals that litter your MySpaces, faced with the prospect of people being harmed, you cower and cry into your boyfriend’s shoulder and choke on your own compassion. Or you turn to some practiced scowling disdain, because omg, you’re hardcore, you thought Saw was cool. I’m not making claims to any of the qualities above, because I honestly don’t give a shit, and when you have to assert that you possess a particular quality, that’s generally a giveaway that you don’t actually have it, but no. Do you know what I used to fucking do? I used to work in a fucking morgue. The only reason I abandoned that is because I realized just how much schooling being a medical examiner would entail, and I didn’t want to be chained to a textbook, mentors breathing down my neck, and thousands of dollars for the next ten years. I went down to the autopsy room one day, just to have a look-see, and since no one was on the slab, the pathologist I was with opened the freezer for me. Vaguely distinguishable in the dark were three or four body bags on separate gurneys, and he unzipped one of them just far enough to expose the old woman occupying it. The scent of whatever was seeping from the back of her throat because her mouth hadn’t been sewn shut yet came to me slowly. It was close, but drier and more hollow, for lack of a better term, to what I smelled every day as I took my coffee break outside the lab. That smell lingers in your hair and pores for days. Save for the occasional excised colon, the stench of the formaldehyde is more oppressive than the actual smell of death and rot. It conveys a sense of feebly preserving that which is long gone and somehow insulted in the efforts to keep it like some biology class experiment. When a cadaver is autopsied, the brain is required by law to be kept for a certain period of time – I want to say a year, but I honestly don’t remember – in the place where it was removed. I was just fucking around one day, sifting through some of the organ jars that were lying on the shelves in the narrow hallway/closet hidden off to the side of the pathology lab, and pulled a brain, dripping with formaldehyde and its own residual cerebrospinal fluid, out of one of the canisters. Chunks of brain tissue slipped between my gloved fingers, falling back into the jar or onto the counter wetly, and larger sections of the cerebrum became malleable and began to break apart. I said something to the effect of ‘Oh, shit,’ thinking that I had royally fucked up, when I heard the pathologist behind me (the same one who had shown me the old woman. He also patted her face affectionately through the canvas body bag, but that’s beside the point) laugh a bit nervously. ‘That happens all the time,’ he said. ‘Brains are preserved in a higher concentration of formalin than other organs, and it makes them more susceptible to deterioration.’ Less concerned, I continued to study the brain, feeling more of it squish and fall apart in my hands; and all I could think was that someone’s entire hopes, dreams, loves, consciousness, and final sensations were crumbling between my fingers. I’ve only told a couple of people about this, and they’ve all looked at me like I’m fucking insane, but a few days later, the corpse of a stillborn infant was brought in for autopsy. Its (I don’t know what the gender was) parents were meeting with a group of pathologists later that afternoon to discuss the procedure. When I pulled the cadaver out, I was surprised in that it wasn’t really even a whole specimen. Instead, when infants are autopsied (and I can guarantee you that bereft parents never get told this), their entire alimentary tract, with liver, kidneys, etc., hanging on by sinew as well as it’ll stay together, is pulled out in a single chunk and placed in a jar of formalin. The brain is thrown in there somewhere as well, unceremoniously bobbing somewhere near the bottom. I pulled out the organs and brain, balancing each in one hand, and they literally fell to pieces. I half-jokingly wondered if the parents would be told that the intern just tore up their baby’s remains; but most of all, I felt that this was the closest one could get to being God. (I didn’t have the Ted Bundy reference handy at the time, I guess.) To take something so delicate, so abruptly torn from life, and destroy it in my hands.

/anecdotal crap

And back to popping painkillers so that maybe, for once, I can go to sleep before six in the goddamn morning and have some fucked up dreams that I actually remember in full so I can write again.

Totis rege formidonum subebunt. For all must submit to the king of terrors. I know. I translated it myself.

And while I'm being all gay and underhandedly self-promotional, I should probably mention that someone at the morgue asked if I fainted at the sight of blood, which I didn't and to this day do not know how to respond to.


"Nothing. I am SO exquisitely empty..."