Story One: Monkey Powder Comedown

I still feel sluggish as the drugs wear off. I feel like I’ve been awake forever and maybe I have been; I fight the urge to fall down and die for a few hours because there’s too much here and there and somewhere in-between; I can’t not revisit what I’ve seen and done and gone through and learned from. I’ve danced with Ecstatics and sung their tunes: it’s a joyful ride and an enlightening one too; this perhaps is the last of my songs. The rain of the Hollow Ones fills my brain and always looms over the sensuality of these experiences, draining the fantasy from the hallucination, making me incorporate the real with the unreal and somewhere in the middle lies wisdom: a knowledge to grasp and twist and manipulate into something coherent and purposeful, if one can but make any sense out of it.

I stand in my apartment only to feel the rush of blood into my head and my splintered mind laughs at the sanguine humor as my body reels from the sensation. Fighting the urge to vomit, I laugh and cry and laugh at the blood spillers and drinkers and those that would use the life-force within and in and still fried, too fried—not on the daytrip, nighttrip, but still burnt out—damn Monkey Powder. If the Verbena didn’t spend so much time with the crocs they might make better friends, but no one wants to take the risk of stepping out into the bayou to find out.

As for the drinkers, I think to myself that I need a drink and stumble to the kitchen of my beat up, cluttered Quarter home. I’ve been here too long and maybe I’ve been here forever, still assaulted by past and present: my brain multi-tasking itself to learn and grasp the new hands of knowledge that go beyond my petty state of orphanage; damn near ten years alone. The past conquers my fractured consciousness as the memory itself precludes the time -- if not the need -- for tears, as the car crash which I never saw happens again and again in my brain; if I couldn’t see the past, I might not even care when or if they died, but then again, one who stumbles around multi-tasked, looking forward and back through the strands of time has little choice but to lose one’s mind now and then.

I pour the bourbon straight before my conscious mind has time to think of what it wants and I try to pretend I choose it myself, but if I did, it is hard to say. My brain is still completely fried; can’t walk, doubt I could talk (and if I could, what would I say and who would listen?). I think of my life and how I’ve become more beast than vizier, more drinker than drunk: and if they were ruthless enough, more Gangrel than Cultist or Hollow One or whatever the hell else I am.

My own kind doesn’t appreciate the space afforded to those of us who don’t fit into the neat little schemes of the paradigms which control the world, whether theirs or ours, or rather theirs or theirs—just different theirs. The seepage from the overload of knowing what I can and will do in the future drowns me in overweight and I wonder if there is such a thing as destiny or will I just return here someday, a harbinger of death, all my friends dead at the hands of enemies, and me no more than a pathetic drunk.

They call them the minority dissent here: those that in other places have the power. Or should I say ‘pwer’. That’s what it really is, isn’t it? A four-letter word? The Son of Ether: Victorian genius or a total fucking loon, you make the call. The lone Hermetic: a brilliant, scheming recluse, learning the secrets of the world or a selfish bastard too arrogant for his own good, drowning his minority status in the lies of his hubris? The Euthanatoi -- the perfect couple -- a pair of good-natured private detectives or the two single most useless wastes of breath who do nothing but destroy?

The glass is full of air and my head still rings, but somehow, the feeling gets more friendly. I feel at home. I pour another and I drink another: for the hours that lasted forever, now the minutes fly away. I stare at my bookshelves, small and dusty and wish that I’d had a real schooling. In these fleeting moments of burgeoning intelligence—which has really always been more curiosity than brains—I think that it is nights like this that change reality: when you look around and realize that the life you have lived is not satisfactory, when you realize that your family was taken from you by a god that knew nothing but destruction—and there it is. You are awake and the world is different and you ask this god why it took what it did and wonder why he did and realize in that sparse second that for all the eternity that one who is different such as you will live and die that the answer will always be unknowable and the closest thing to finding an answer is to try and be him.

I fall to the floor, I fall to the grass, sitting with an empty glass, gazing at the Mississippi; the tiles disappear in the dark while the river runs brown and I feel the change as I see it. No longer do I try and feel pity for who I am or what I am, because it hasn’t happened yet, and so a ten-year old cries red for the world that has left him, until the actual moment when he becomes it.

I look to the bookcase again, even though slumped behind the counter my vision is obscured; I can Correspondingly see it in my head, for though eyes fail and light fails, my vision does not. I see the few books, rediscovering the dancing words of Faulkner, hearing the soft morbidity of Poe. How the West Was Won, How the South Was Won, side by side with other books of lies. I know full well my blood runs deep as the South runs deep and my families though dead live on in my head, and if I was full white then fine, but until that time when I spin the wheel again I shall wear the Scarlet N and commence the rain dance until my destiny runs dry—I say run dry because destiny dies as I breathe; seeing the futures present and past, the nows and thens, I live in them day after day as the paradoxes of knowledges that never were run through my brain come here from their corresponding places and times, as different mindpaths burn different ways of futures and lessons learned. I walk through Jackson Squares and down Toulese and wade through the currents of nature both aquatic and temporal and live and breathe, not via the drug induced fury of insanity, but through the fully awakened realization of knowledge and death, tomorrows and yesterdays, mingled with an uncertainty yet to come: all at once through a splintered brain.

I ask how I should be sane.

 

How can I believe in destiny when all has failed, when I fail to fit in anything or anyone for long, and even my brothers and teachers fall by the wayside as they see me for what I am: an outcast. Ecstatic and Hollow neither am I and both of them what we call majority here, more the former than the latter, though they say the near-orphans started here. I stumble for another drink as I kick my feet in the muddy waters sitting past the train tracks, walking side by side with the Outlanders pistol raised and pull down another bourbon to take down the Monkey God and chaos tumbles out of me and the roulette wheel smiles again; enough money to live on my own, wondering if the next bourbon will help or if Whilce still hates me damn Adept too cool for his own good; the Gulf dies with the oil and the Dreamspeaker still won’t accept me. I finally finish a fourth as I light my next cigarette (the tenth or first of the night) and step up from the shores, kneel in the pew, die in the last moments, and wonder why after such initial amity the Akashic won’t teach me Do.

I know some day that I will know and so I pull myself up off of the floor and realize that I already have so I sit in the chair I’ve walked toward; I pull out The Sound and the Fury and wonder if I’m more like Benji or Quentin and wonder if there’s more hope for the Duvaliers than the Compsons: knowing that like Jason I am the last (or at least I will be) and wonder if I will ever be more than either; the words mean nothing to me now except I can go into any time and appreciate them when my brain’s not so disarrayed—of course maybe if I—lost that train of thought. You know, Funny how there’s no Choristers in New Orleans, maybe it would be better if they did sing their song here—wait. There’s the thought again, if I can filter it through the Kant and Foucault that I’ve yet to understand and the visions of my own blood pouring under the full moon of Mexico City I could—yes. Perhaps if I could now outside the province of the drug extend my splintered brain to at least one thread outside of the drunkenness and possibly even increase the probability that the drug metabolizes a little quicker, multiplying the effect through Time.

Hunh. Funny how a little trick like that can make such a difference. Yet that is how it is. A little trick can make a big difference. I am like that: a little trick. I am just a lone mage, wanting pretty bad to fit into something or somewhere. My ripped jeans and sweat-stained T-shirt are a lot of who I am and maybe that is enough. I would like to think that someday I could wear a suit and fly first-class. Maybe. Mostly, I’m just an orphan kid who grew up on his own from the age of ten.

I stand up, this time a bit more steady. I have a ripping headache, but that’s from the pasts and precognitions and the shards of consciousness that just now tie together from the splintered mind rote. I go to the cabinet and pour out a couple of Advils and down them with a glass of water. Yeah, I have angst. Yeah, I have a reason to be bitter and pissed off. So what? Am I going to sit around and whine all day? Am I supposed to make everyone else feel sorry for me? No. But maybe I am gonna make some people uncomfortable. What were you doing when I was growing up on the streets? What were you doing when you believed Their lies? Maybe I do not believe in destiny. Of course that might be because in most futures I die, but mostly because my fate has done nothing but fuck me. If I am ever going to rely upon something, it sure as hell will not be destiny. It will be me.

I think I am smart enough to paraphrase Kant. He would say that if Mother Theresa was born to be good, that there is little value in it, because she did not have to work for it: she was born good. Yet if someone was born selfish and fought to be selfless, then they would have achieved a greater sense of worth. Well, I would like to think of myself that way. Destiny is the easy way out.

I am going to piss off a lot of people in my life, people that might want to be my allies or people that might want me dead anyway, but I am will stand up and say something. It might be self-confidence or it might be delusions of grandeur, but I have a feeling that I will make something out of myself. If I have to tear greatness from Father Fate’s hand, so be it. I once heard Julius Caesar say on Xena that he was destined to be great. Good for him. I was born to die on the streets, a bereft orphan. Fuck that. I deny destiny. In all the learning and time-traveling I have done, I have pretty much learned one thing: I do not know anything. But shit, out of all the Others out there, that think they have a lock down on everything, at least I know don't.