Stark Raven Mad

Today when I was waiting for the train, there was a raven fossicking around the train tracks.   All birds move in such cool ways (except pigeons) but ravens are the best of all.  If I were a bird, I’d want to be a raven.  They have these beautiful glassy eyes, sometimes blue or white, and such sleek black elegant feathers.  They’re pretty smart, and they live by predation and scavenging, so they can be fascinating birds to observe when they’re looking for food or bullying smaller birds.  But looking at it made me feel a bit unsettled. It made me remember a lot of absurd and fucked up shit that used to live inside my head. 

When I was a teenager, I think the time between being 14 and 18, I had some very strange beliefs.  I believed that the end of the world
 was impending, that I was destined for Hell no matter what, that one day I was going to be abducted and tortured to death by a serial killer.  No real reason or argument to these beliefs, I just believed it.  This was probably a lot to do with my morbid curiosity in true crime, autopsies and rotten.com, but it was also because I was an extreme pessimist: if I could conceive that it might happen, and if it was something terrible, then I figured it was just my luck that it definitely would happen.   I was very anxious too.

One of the more benign but still totally fucking irrational superstitions I held was that there were omens around me and the most common one I saw were ravens.  There’s a little bit of mythology involving ravens, including the Morrigan of Celtic lore and stories of ravens landing on soldiers in the battle field to foretell of their gruesome impending death.  So I felt that ravens were a bad omen.  

In fact, I even thought that if I managed to avoid seeing a raven even if it was right there near me, I would avoid some disaster.   The school I went to had a lot of ravens that lived on the grounds. If I heard that creepy call they make, I would try to just look down at my feet so I wouldn’t see it.  They were such beautiful birds but I couldn’t stand looking at them.  If I did, and something bad happened over the next 24 hours, I would attribute it to having looked a raven in the eye.

Yeah, totally fucking batshit insane.  Even moreso than Jones, because I didn’t hallucinate anything and I wasn’t really taking drugsmuch yet.   I just made all this shit up in my own head.  I didn’t even have anyone pressuring me to believe half of it.  I sure haven’t ever mentioned this to Jones.  I think even he’d laugh at me… nervously… before backing away towards the door.  

Then one day, it all stopped. Almost overnight, I stopped believing in it.  In fact, I stopped even thinking about it.  Rather than realising it wasn’t true, I think I just forgot about it.  Or maybe because I had no real reason to start believing it, I didn’t need any real reason to stop believing it.  Whatever, it’s pretty trippy to occassionally remember these bits and pieces that haven’t existed in my mind for so long but which used to be a huge pre-occupation for me.  It’s like a movie where the protagonist thinks that maybe it was just a dream, only to discover some material evidence in their pocket or under their bed that proves it was real.  I have pictures I drew of quasi-cartoon ravens, usually in threes like the Morrigan, stuck in school diaries and drawing books.  So I know I really was a weird fucking kid, I just don’t remember how I grew out of it or why I did so suddenly.

I probably shouldn’t freak myself out too much thinking about it.  And I don’t want to wax masturbatory about whether we really know ourselves or who we were in the past or "deep" bullshit like that.   It’s just a little eerie, is all.