::Feint

The desolation around here is impressive.  Post-apocalyptic, even.  I’m surprised to come back and find the streetlights are still on, the water still runs.  It used to be that a thousand-thousand people passed by this door every night, and when I had the lights on, they wandered in.

Now it’s just us few.  Fair enough, I suppose.  There’s only so much whisky to go around. 

Can you believe there were so many of them before?  Cramming down the streets and through the alleys and all over the main page, yammering about their high-school crushes and unplanned pregnancies and new babies and binging and purging and job woes and drinking and cutting and … that.  You’d post an entry and by the time you clicked over to the main page — POOF!  it was gone.  I could entertain myself for hours just trolling the main page, looking for gems amid the mass of like-mindedness.  And for every ten thousand of them, I managed to find one of you.  You’re not insipid.  You might be lost, but you’re not wandering up your own asshole.  Or, if you are, you’re doing it in a devastatingly interesting manner.

We’re the survivors.  The ones who haven’t been drawn away to bite-size twitters and endlessly vapid newsfeeds on the book of faces.  We’re the gritty antiheroes.  Shotguns and chainsaws and a mouthful of fuck-you and rusty nails.

I hope you don’t mind the candlelight.  I find it’s conducive to telling you lies, writing online, and assuming that whatever I’m cleaning is, in fact, completely clean.  

In the interest of cleaning up, I keep finding myself distracted, drawn to fiddle with my diary controls – as if fucking about with the background is going to make me more creative.  Hey, do me a favor, ladies and gents:  if it’s hard to read, let me know.  I’ll fix it.  Otherwise it stays.

I’m also rubbing my chin and narrowing my eyes at that friend list.  It needs cleaning, too.  You see, if you couldn’t tell when I first kicked in the door, I’ve got visceral things to say.  Mostly about me.  The things I think.  The things I want.  The broken bullshit and the indulgent bits.  The things I wish you’d help me get away with.  And… well..some of it could move mountains and break marriages and end friendships.  And there’s no sense in making all of us meatworlders miserable over words.  Yet, anyway. I’ve had this diary since June 2000.  In that time, at least a half-dozen people that I know in the fleshworld have been here and read what I’ve written.  And that’s been fine up to this point. 

I’ve never hidden behind ‘friends-only’ entries before.  I’ve had 8 of them, to cover up a short-story I wrote back in the day that I thought might see publication someday.  (Ha!  Not so much.)  Guarding copyright.  But that day might be coming.  I haven’t decided yet.  When the beast rears its misshapen head and tells you all what I’m really thinking — shit.  I don’t want to have to worry that some meddilng jackanapes from my real life is listening at the door, moseying in from the internet because I forget that I told him years ago about this thing. 

So to sum up:  if I know you in real life, or ever have; if you have ever been on my Facebook; if you know my real name.  You are probably going to get removed from my friends list soon, in case I feel like I need some safety.  Insulation.  It’s not because I hate you.  And for the rest of you, if you want in, speak the words.  The buttons are below and I’m only bashful in front of people I know.  The rest of you can see me naked.  If that’s what you care for, anyway.

We have to prepare for the things to come.  I don’t expect it to rain blood or the earth to split in twain.  But these weeks will probably hurt a little.  I’d rather it not hurt those that it’s not aimed at.

Get the barbed wire out and help me rivet down this flamethrower, fuckers.  You thought that whisky was for free?  The mutants are on the way and we’re gonna cut them down like grain.  Burn down their convoy and party on the ruins. 

Are you in?