Sketching Mad I and II.
Charcoal on Paper.
It says "Sure it's art and fuck you for asking." Yeah, I know. Still, it's a part of my history and desperately real try as I may to deny the self-pity. Here's another version of the same sketch:
And this text. Well I have never had the courage to upload it nor even really considered it. But I have opened myself so in these web-pages already and i think that the completion, or rather, the origin perhaps, lies within the next raging words.
It is hardcore stuff full of sex and violence and most of all rage. I swear continuously. Profanity is just another tool to me. Invoking the most powerful things that we can conceive - sex and God. Also I should say that I received so much kindness during these the wildest and saddest years, that I do not mention here. Some of the women that loved me did so with a kind of purity that may come only to those whose lovers' only pursuit is self-destruction. Who knows.
PAUL RANTS... HIS OWN HARDCORE HISTORY:
I
have a huge swelling feeling growing in the back of my head, reaching
forward in grasping fibrillated and soggy claws. I know this feeling,
frenetic as it is, coiled and sprung and filled up with sand. It is MANIA
jumpstarting my head and collapsing into itself like a singularity or
a sandcastle or a limestone blow hole. I love it and cherish it at the
same time as despising it and feeding it my wants and desires and lust
to make it bigger and nastier and more of itself as it swells.
There is nothing to it but what I have invented and scoured from the crusty
sides of my eyes but it exists with strength and yes futility that I can
not help and can almost touch. I AM filled up with it though in twitchy
and hyper accelerated mannerisms and cigarettes smoked too fast with dark
music always always in the background.
And I’m so tired fucking sick of it wish it would go the fuck away
out like I always dreamed of being able to control it and switch it on
to the times when it’s wanted and fun for one and all. Wish I could
eat but can’t huh that’s prey for my meat than the other way
around, and it hurts me just to keep breathing sometimes when it’s
sharp and red so red like a blow to the head huh.
Oh yeah ah huh right now for fuck’s sake. I must say this I have
to spit it out though I don’t know that I really want to see it
all laid open like a finger on a slide.
I was committed first time in - voluntarily no I sure didn't want to go
there. I asked the psychiatrist filling in forms if she wanted to have
sex with me and took off my shirt and lay on her desk and told her secret
things about the stars. I couldn’t accept it because I believed
that I was smarter than the people who committed me, and I still fucking
do. I did put blades in my arms and I did want to die far more than I
wanted to live I did cut In school when I was twelve years old I sat in
class and cut my fingers with a pocket knife. “Paul, what are you
doing?”
“Is this some kind of fucking trick question?”
These things are real, they exist in my messed up and inaccurate memory
but they ARE still there.
And for a moment a singular pervasive short-lived killing moment memory
floods every sensation that I have. Twitch lurches across my face like
a wire hook. Brilliant so bright but hard to see. I remember I do some
weird party no idea how I got there kissing and groping some old woman
while huge old men did lines and watched me with ugly wasted eyes. Running
thru the forest afterwards blood streaming down my face didn't know where
I was how I got there it was the middle of fucking nowhere and it sure
felt like the end. Beaten to a pulp but wild with energy and painting
my face with fingers full of blood I felt like I had slid into a Bosch
painting. I remember my face swelling I think some guy had hit me with
a BAT. They stamped on my head while I lay in the road and fractured my
eye orbits apart from other things I had deep black under my eyes for
a YEAR.
And I stood in the trees in the woods spinning around and around and laughing
before I sat quietly by myself found my knife tried to write my name in
my arm with cuts. Woke up in the dark with ANTS in my wounds everywhere
my face swollen up like a sick balloon. No idea where I was; none. Started
running and kept running. Memory fades in haze. A few days in hospital
the normal kind I walked to the bottle shop every day with IV shit sticking
out of my arm.
I remember oh yes different time (time is a sickness) I woke at the beach
some kids standing over me saying LOOK AT ALL HIS CUTS before I pushed
them away and vomited into the sand.
Found some girl some night and tried to show her I could draw by smashing
a bottle and carving a face, my face, into a table in a café. I
put a beard on it and it looked like Jesus and I fucking laughed so hard
and laughed and laughed.
I stood in the street and hit the wall with my hand until I could actually
feel it; I think I broke my wrist not sure it stopped me from being able
to play guitar without being drunk for a long time and of course drunk,
drunk, drunk I was most of the time anyway.
Ah yes oh, helpful POLIcemen to whom I would not give my name; I told
them I was Zarathustra a Nietzschean reference I don't think he GOT. They
chased me down the street and I couldn’t stop laughing until they
all crashed me to the ground and I punched one with my broken bleeding
hand and spent some time screaming in a cell and throwing myself at the
walls.
They let me go somehow and at court I got to plead INSANITY which I also
thought was pretty fucking funny or rather do now as I could not raise
rage from my heart, black blackest humour finally swamped by massive doses
of anti-psychotics
Broke my guitar and held it like a baby in the street for hours and wept
and wept and wept.
So many girls I could never EVER remember they were going to rescue me
each one - had all my catch phrases worked out "wake me when the
war is over" and something about drowning men and a head full of
Shakespeare quotes. I couldn't believe they worked every time but OH YES
THEY DID. Sometimes I could not make love to them I was too drunk I think
who knows more ritual phrases morning ones were “where am I?”
followed by "who are you?" (Insert snarl/grin/panic.)
I started drinking one afternoon was sure I didn’t go out or see
anyone but woke up in a pair of dirty women’s underwear.
I was at a palatial house with a goddess and threw up in her spa. Don't
know her name I don't think I did even then.
Winters were the worst always lost and drunk and cold always wet and so
fucking far to walk in the rain.
Crashing twisting in fear and self-loathing, detesting, despising, abhorring
leper outcast unclean. And so goddamned SICK pathetically grateful for
whichever nutcase girl was looking after me and holding my long dirty
blonde hair out of the bucket.
“Why do you hate us all Paul? Why do you do this?”
“I don’t hate anyone. I have never hated anyone. I am the
avatar of dismay. I am the boiling man. I am just too selfish to die.
One of my good friends threw himself from a building and I stayed drunk
for weeks. An old and loyal friend fought me in sneering drunken fury,
both of so full of poison that we could not even form fists. Neither of
us spilling heart’s blood whilst we fought, so young and so completely
ridiculous.
Drowning men.
My ex-girlfriend spat in my face that day. Tried to catch a bus and buy
vodka with blood running everywhere again from my own cheap knife the
despite boiling inside me, rage a crevasse of pathetic sadness and grief
for myself. For Andrew. For all of us feeding from ourselves eating our
own venom until it bubbled and frothed in our mouths. I didn't know where
I was just fucked it all up and sullied the memory of a good man. Lost
and wandering and crying fucked up and such a fool, such a fool so damned
my scalding hell heated the slippery corners of my eyes.
He was the funniest fucker I have ever met.
Such waste.
S A D S I C K N E S S.
Fevers
of blame and despair. Spreading between us like Andrews’ beautiful
young body across the cement.
I miss him still. No note. His mother’s shuddering sobs shall not
leave my memory and spilled in echoes over my ruin as I catalysed the
manufacture of my own disgust.
Got so used to casualty wards where I would wake up (“seemed euphoric”
I read on the chart) with stitches and no idea how I had got there who
had taken me. Hit on the nurses, once one reciprocated I couldn't fucking
believe it. More psyche wards again and again I always liked the schizophrenics
they were, at least, as mad as me.
Locked wards psychotics everywhere screaming at night. The half hour or
hour or whatever the fuck it was we were allowed to wander around outside
our cells, the men all of them except me, every one, ALL hung on the wire
fence, heads at odd angles staring out, fingers through the chicken wire.
Razor wire at the top.