It's All Going Pretty Well Really

The migraines have settled down to a dull roar, finally. Managed to go to bed and wake up with the Muse with no pain at all. It bothers me during the day sometimes, but as long as I keep up on when it starts, a couple of Advil seems to put down into the 'Definately Manageable' catagory.

I am a little worried about my overall health, I've been coming down with things that are generally reserved for the stressed and immuno-deficient. I don't get it really, I don't feel stressed. Then again, I don't really recognize stress as a feeling, so maybe I am and just don't know it.

The house is back on track. Should have the basement finished off and rentable within a couple of months. The yard is annoying, never had a yard before, and now I have a big one. It grows all the time and needs constant TLC. If it wasn't hideous, I'd pave the whole thing and paint it green.

The Muse destroyed her phone last week, and has her heart set on some fantabulous gold-plated number. It the latest of the greatest and blah bloo blah, prolly has satellite imaging and blowdries your cat, I dunno. But it seems important. She definately needs one, and she likes to have things just right sometimes.

I half-heartedly support this. I am very sensitive to certain things; I know if I was talking about getting a new brace of knives, or building a new target, or even just getting a new lamp for my living room, I know what I want, and nothing less than that exact one will do. If I get something different, it feels wrong and bothers me on a personal level- forever. So although I personally do not understand her delight at this particular one, I am certainly on-board with the feeling of obtaining at least some small piece of perfection in a life that is otherwise very make-do.

At any rate, it costs a bundle, and she doesn't except gifting in the form of financial support. Which is also frustrating sometimes. She wont be able to buy her phone for six weeks on the inside- I lent her my alternative one for the meanwhile.

Oddly enough, it's a phone I never use, and had been disconnected due to a credit card renewal mishap at the company office. Cost me about $300 and change to get it reconnected and have it work.

I could have just let it go, left it unused and never renewed it. I could have given the Muse that same amount and she would have more than enough, supplemented with her own money, to buy this holy telephonic grail, pretty much on the spot. She'd never accept such a thing though, I offered twice, once directly, once back-handedly, and no dice. Doesn't like either help nor charity.

No doubt, she wants to earn it for herself. And good for her, I'm not going to interfere. I suppose I'll simply keep my assitance to the background, it's what I'm good at. Still, I am a bit bothered- I make decent coin, and my own needs are very modest. What is the point of working hard and earning a decent living if you can't help out those you love when they need it?

I worry about it sometimes, because in my last, long-term relationship, everything was divided; this is mine, this is yours- but nothing was ours. I happen to like the idea of sharing costs and expenses, even if that thing is for the exclusive use of another. I'm not paying for the thing itself, I'm not giving a handout, I am contributing to a lifestyle I support, and part of my lifestyle is ensuring that her lifestyle goes smoothly. When you live life together, it's all the same thing.

I suppose what I really want is to be a fully fledged us, in which my effort is our effort, and her expenses are our expenses. In which our efforts are our efforts, and our problems are shared. Our rewards, our situations, our belongings, our life.

Maybe that's just a goal, and not the reality. I would like to add a 'yet' onto that. I hope I can one day. Just not today, it seems.

Even still, that is just a little thing, and not much of a stressor per se. Work is going well, family is doing well, girlfriend is going well. So what the hell, body? What's got you all mechanical failure and stuff? As far as I can see, worrying about what could possibly be stressing me out is the biggest source of stress so far.

Maybe if I just stop looking, the cause will cease to exist.

Ain't it SICK(3)

So the club tosses SHIFT every once in a while in favor of a more hardcore industrial sound.
I don't mind, its the same DJ, and he's pretty kickass. I haven't been out in a while; last week I had just gotten home from spending the day in the hospital, and the week before we had planned to head out on Sunday, but it was some live punk band instead.

I'm not angry enough for punkcore anymore. Also, I am pretty much angst free these days. So we skipped. This week I felt like moving, and so we hit the club, spun some lights, and had a good time. Hit the groove fairly early on, and miracle fantastic, my headache vanished. I could feel it dissolve in the rush, and I kept up the pace enough that it didn't come back for the whole night.

It's much better even now, so I am seriously considering hitting up the gym for an hour or so of cardio, to see if that might help things along. I had been extremly anxious about what would happen, and if full-on exertion would cause it to trigger. I am quite relieved to find that the opposite seems to be the case. Glorious.

Cast and Crew:

Doorman: Paulie. Waved us through with a smile, its nice to see the establishment missed us as much as we did it.

DJs: DJ Dervish manned the tables most of the night, passing off to DJ Nameless (who has yet to earn his name, all the dropped beats in the night seemed to be his workmanship. He is still only mediocre, but I think Dervish is trying to help him out a bit with that.) And he was really, really very good. Industrial can be a hard spin, it has sub-genres within sub-genres, and occasionally it's a little wearing, one requires a few softer melodic content, even if its just for contrast.

I've been spinning lights there for long enough now that they watch for the rings; as soon as I slip them on, they hit the fog machines to make way for the ambient light show. I like this, it's apparently been happening for a while, tonight was the first night I really noticed it; before it seemed more coincidental.

I just like to move really, I don't hop onstage, I don't really limelight per se, in fact, part of the reason I switched to rings was so that I would never have to hit the stage in order to have enough room to move. I weave around the crowd, or in my space, or with the Muse- and I'd do it if I was the only person in the room.

The Muse tired out early, I think the music got to her a bit - she favours the more eclectic modern rock sounds, remixed for the dance floor. She gets into the things she's heard before. I don't surf for music much, and only occasionally listen to the radio. The job of the DJ is to play things one would like to hear, and for the most part everything is new to me.

Its all very structured though, I know how a piece is going to play after just a few rounds of musical phrasing. I was brought up in music, classical, orchestral, folk, rock, alternative, techno, house, jazz- anything and everything. Everyone in my family aunts, uncles, cousins, has been taught to sing and play at least one instrument. My father plays four, my mother as well. I myself play the piano, and have a good time of it.

I should really get one for my house now that it is a house and not an apartment.

So I spun lights just for her for a while, it's fun to put on a private show, even if its in front of a crowd.

At some point the Muse gets asked if she has any ecxtasy. I should say not. We don't do drugs. I have many friends who do, and I don't mind being around them. I've become acustomed to the question, most people with my focus are on drugs, and certainly the art itself is psychedelically friendly.

That isn't to say I don't get high, I most certainly do, it is amazing what adrenaline, endorphins and self-hypnosis can do. But they are all very natural highs, the perfect movements, the right piece of music, the rush of making love in all the right places. But these things are good for you, and drugs- well, not so much. There is always a price to pay for altering your own body chemistry, and most often, that price is much higher than what one would expect.

Dawit: Looking as usual, hit the stage for a few minutes with the Dark Ballerina. I haven't seen her there for a while, it's good to see she is still around from time to time.

Librarian/Bookkeeper: Out and having fun, the Librarian was sporting a full length latex evening gown, black with a white strip criss-crossing the torso. Amazing; I have to save up to get something in the same vien for the Muse, she has the perfect body for something like that. Indeed, the Muse carries the perfect body. Period.

Shame: Said hello, offered a high five on the way by to both of us. I feel slightly hypocritical in not leaving him hanging, but I'm not one to carry a grudge. I only get irritated if you hit on my girlfriend while I am there. Otherwise, I try to let it go, or I'd be angry all the time- the Muse is harrassed by men constantly. Everyone of them it seems is just waiting in the wings to try their luck. If she steps out of the safety zone (about 15 ft) someone is always there to come knock-knock-knocking at her door.

She has gotten into the habit of pointing me out and mentioning I would probably skin them alive. Which I find endearing. I'm not the violent type, though I am frightfully good at it, and would find another way to resolve such a problem unless there was no other way.

You only have to take it until you can't take it anymore.

Augustin/Strawberry: Popped in for a while to get a drink and danced for a bit. They seem to know Librarian and Friend.

Oh! Some poor chap tried to hit on the Librarian and she shot him down proactively. It was goddamn amazing. You could see him on the fringe, trying to work up the nerve. He gathered up his testicles and walked over, about to offer up his line. About two feet away, she didn't really even look at him, she just moved. And three things became suddenly apparent:

a) The Librarian is not someone you just casually hit on. She is queen over her little territory, and you had better have one hell of a game to even consider it.

b) The Librarian is Dark Tribe, and her casual approach to dance (a sort of bobbing half step) belies the fact that she is very much into her little moment, and that it is a moment you may watch, but are not actually a part of in any way.

c) Buddy's testicles had suddenly retreated up into his small intestine.

He kind of stumbled a hasty retreat, giving her a wide space. Her zone, projected without a specific focus, had castrated the man on the spot. It was awesome. Respect.

Bartenders: Bruno and Boots. Boots managed to remember my drink without me saying, so good on her, and Bruno was doing very well the whole night. The Muse thinks Bruno was giving me the eyes, though she tends to think that of every woman who looks at me. I don't know, maybe there is something to that. I'm pretty terrible at seeing these things when I'm not looking for them.

A girl would pretty much have to grab my penis and put it in her before I recognized any kind of flirting action going on. It took me six years to figure out dancing and flirtation practices in a club setting, and even then, the only evidence that I got something right is this gorgeous fantasy girlfriend who seems to prefer my company to that of any other man. I still dunno how I managed that, maybe she's right- I say I picked her, she says she picked me. We're prolly both right. I don't think I could have done it without her.

No Coat Check

Drinks: Rum and Coke, interspersed with water and Jaeger. Much Red Bull. Tasty.

All in all a great night. Danced so hard I am still sore three days later. Pretty much perfect.

Cheers!

Hanging With Agony

So the headaches aren't going away, and nobody seems to know whats going on with that. Just talked to my mom about them, seems she went through some weird migraine-like issues when she was about my age as well. I take after my mother quite a bit in terms of build and make-up, so perhaps this sort of thing is normal. Let's hope it passes; I forget sometimes that my mom has had quite a few pieces of medical work done, I would not like to go through the same.

I am getting better at dealing them up, these explosions of pain that follow through just about any kind of arousal activity. The first few took me by surprise, but it wont be long before I can wall them off if need be. The first time it happened, I was reminded of the long hours I spent learning how to deal with close, intimate pain.

For perspective, I should first mention that I have no piercings of any kind. The thought of having anything heavier than ink embedded permanently into my skin is horrifying. I'd never get used to them, and I would always want them out.

What I have instead are tribal markings on my chest and biceps; triple lines crossing over the muscle on each arm, and long dragging claw marks on my chest. They mean many things, and were drawn, not by ink, but by blood, many, many times. Each line has been cut and recut, the scars growing thicker and longer every time the ritual was repeated, ten lines in total.

The tenth line, the 'thumb' of the claw marks ripping out my heart, is the smallest and deepest mark at about two inches in length. The rest vary, the pattern runs nipple to nipple in a slashing diagonal, the middle of the middle claw gouges through the center of the Heart Chakra.

It takes about three hours to work through them all, opening up the lines so that the blood runs freely and evenly throughout the entire length of them. It is a balance of artwork, surgery, ritual, discipline, meditation and body mechanics. Some lines are easier than others. The left arm comes easy; the marks are done with the weapon-wielding right hand, the strokes are sure and graceful, the concepts of Strength, Honor and Discipline are bedrock.

The right arm is harder, the left hand is used to being more defensive, the skin snags on the edge of the blade, pores get caught, corrections have to be made. The concepts of Respect, Self-Value and Awareness are more abstract, and harder to focus on than concrete examples.

Both of these sets are simply leads into the the larger acts of thought and penance, wherein one reflects upon their nature and tries to root out their mistakes. For the set on my chest, the middle mark is exceptionally painful; it requires removing one's base desires from one's mind, the act of moving emotional thinking into a rationalized state. There is a large nerve bundle there, I don't think anyone ever gets used to that.

The tenth mark comes as a kind of relief, a simple signature end to the set. A personalized note, the sense of self in agreement with the act at hand. A small flourish and it is done, and the washing and cleaning of the marks soon follows.

One learns to enter into a state of mind that can deal with large amounts of pain. With even a few seconds of meditation, I can put a sharpened coat hanger right through my forearm without even blinking. It's not that it doesn't hurt, you just don't let yourself feel it. The ritual marking above is performed with no change of facial expression at all, and if one should start to feel themselves slipping, the process is halted until self-control is regained.

I mention this so that when I say these headaches are the most intensely painful experiences of my life, one may know that my life up to this point has not entirely consisted of lap-dancing rose petals as I lay stretched out on a polar bear rug by the fire. It is pain outside my experience, but one hopes it is not beyond my ability to control.

Ah well, what is the purpose of life, if not to be tested, to learn and to grow accordingly? There are no problems, only complex situations, and I'm only to happy to be challenged. Let's see how that works out.

The Cruelest Irony Yet

For the past four days, I have had the worst headache of my life. It feels like my brain has turned into liquid pain, which someone has decided to compress against the walls of my skull.

I don't get headaches very often, and when I do, I don't take anything for them. A nice nap, maybe a warm shower later and for the most part I am okay. All the headaches I have had up to this point have had at least one thing in common- they went away. This one is not, it just keeps getting worse.

I have a very simple cure for most headaches; sex. Go have some, you'll feel better. In fact, I think I find this to be a cure for almost everything. Rough day? Go make love for a few hours, you'll feel better. Think you might be catching a cold? Cuddle up with your lover for a while and sweat it out. Sore Muscles? Ear-ache? Dark humors of the lower colon?

I have just the thing for that.

A simple cure-all, for everything from claustrophobia to depression. You don't even need to be feeling under the weather; good sex will make a great day just that much better. Trust me. I generally have sex anywhere between three and six times a day, and I feel fantastic.

Except for right now, because as it happens, somewhere on Friday night between four and eight pm, something happened inside of my head to make every orgasm the most absolutely excruciating experience I have ever had. Like someone put a small explosive device in the center of my brain and hardwired the trigger to my sexual response system. They did a fine job of it, because it now goes off whenever I do.

The web is pretty empty on the subject, mentioning that there are some migraines triggered post coitus, and that it's a rare enough phenomenon- what with the chemicals released being nature's heftiest painkillers and all - that one should go see a doctor.

I held off on this a bit; honestly, I find doctors to be redundant. I have read nearly everything they have, textbooks, journals and the like, and now with most new white papers published on the internet, one can easily find, read and discover what is going on for themselves. Medical language poses few problems, and it's easy enough for me to understand causes and diagnoses. If I can't find something, there is probably nothing to be found, and so any doctor I am going to see will either agree with my proposed treatment plan (whether I share it with them or not), or have no idea whatsoever and simply medicate the symptoms. In short, unless I need antibiotics or restricted painkillers, there is very little point in going.

By Sunday, the need for the latter had become apparent; the baseline headache had gotten so bad I could barely think, and sleep hadn't helped in the slightest. So off I went to the hospital, in search of a few answers, one of which was to ensure I wasn't bleeding inside my head or anything.

I found it difficult to express the nature of the problem. It is easy enough to say, yes good sir, I am here because I have a headache, oh and p.s., my skull shatters whenever I cum. It is more challenging to express the difficulty of the problem; that this is a life altering change of events, because I have a lifestyle which is more or less based around expending vast amounts of sexual energy.

The casual response of 'Take it easy, lay off sex for a few weeks, and you should be fine.' is like saying 'Right then. Please stop everything you normally do for fourteen days. Should clear right up.'

Yes, I get that giving up sex for two weeks for you, Herr Doktor, is missing your alt Thursday rubbentug, and that half a blowjob you get from your girlfriend between shifts every other week. For me, that means a huge disruption in virtually every aspect of my waking life, morning, noon and night.

I start every day by setting aside an hour or two in order to make love to the Muse, I then run to work for a few hours, and skip back home whenever possible to see her over a lunch hour, finish up my afternoon caseload, and then back home again to fall into her arms until dinner. After dinner is for talking and snuggling, and a few hours of play until we both fall asleep exhausted. On the occasions where our schedules conflict, I tend to do chores, because they almost always need doing.

I don't watch TV, I don't work on 'The Car', I don't follow sports, and I don't go out drinking with the boys. There is only the Muse, and all the things she inspires in me. Don't get me wrong, we go out, we shop, dance, talk and dine together, she is without question the primary focus of my life. One of very, very few things I am truly passionate about. Not making love to her is like telling me to not breathe for a while- it is something that simply must be done, and there is a pressure, a growing ache inside of me whenever I'm not with her.

I realize this sort of thing is too intense by half (or by twenty) for most people, and those people are probably right, you don't get this intense by living a normal, healthy life in Wherever, Canada. But I didn't, and I'm not, so I am. One of the very special and wonderfully unique qualities of the Muse, is that she is built in the same way I am. And together, we are not so much broken, as we are simply different.

There may be many people wired the way we are, many who would be in only one half of a relationship. I fall so hard for the person I'm with, it's easy to manipulate me. I'll pretty much do anything for that person, if it's within my power to do so. If she didn't care about me in the same way, the possibility for exploitation would be huge. Together, we have lives focused on each other, and lovingly so; in almost any other situation, we would be open for abuse. I'm pretty thankful, each and every day, that this is not the case.

So anyways, the wait at the hospital is fairly short, and I get a CT scan done within an hour two. It comes up clean, and just to verify the results, they decide to do a lumbar puncture. Five, actually. Its small hole they punch into your spine, so they can drain some fluid out. I don't know if he had to do one per sample, or just couldn't find what he was looking for, but he stabbed me a whole lot of times just to tell me the results came back clean.

Today I feel like someone kicked me in the back, which is good, because the sharp pains shooting up my back distract from the still growing, ever throbbing pain in my head. In the end, as expected, the doc had no clue, and gave me some Percoset for the pain. Hooray.

Except of course, like almost all narcotics, they are sensation killers, not just pain killers, and so you can't really have sex on them anyway. They do work well for the pain in my back though, so down the hatch they go.

Todays Moral: If you can't cure something, create a problem you can cure, and then go cure that instead. Then maybe people won't notice what a gigantic waste of life you've been. Then again, maybe they will.

The Beast

I don't often talk about my past. It happened a long time ago, and bears little relevance on the present and the future. I almost never bring it up in casual conversation, and sometimes I like to pretend it doesn't even exist. My upbringing was strange, and it has resulted in a very, very complicated creature.

For nearly my whole life, I have been at least two people. My parents are rather overwhelming in their belief system, a faith which makes only a certain kind of sense from a certain point of view. This belief has a great number of holes and self-conflicting concepts, which became apparant to me at a very early age. I have mentioned previously that I have always been sexually aware, as far back as I can remember.

For perspective, I should mention that I can remember learning how to walk. I remember pulling myself up on the curved wooden dowel of the balcony railing leading up from the stair in our front hallway, and teetering my way over to the couch, and reaching out with little hands to grab the plush green velvet, trying to make those first few steps before falling.

When I was three and a bit, I would listen to the sermons in church, and do very well at making sense of them. It became apparant that my awareness, my constant arousal, would be viewed by others as a Bad Thing, and so it became a shameful secret that had to kept at all costs. It was my first act of true independence. I refused to believe that there was something wrong with me, and that people themselves were confused as to the truth of what God had to say about sex and sexuality.

The downfall of the faith presented to me was held in its utter refusal to consider itself as anything but Undeniable Truth. There was only One Way, The Way, Our Way. We are Right, everyone else is wrong. I considered this when thinking about who I could trust. How did they know they were right? What proof was there besides their Big Book, which happened to agree with them? Wasn't that a self-referencing definition? We know we are right because we have this book that says we are right, and we know that Book is right because it agrees that we are right.

Lots of people have books that say they are right. And some of those books are in specific disagreement.

Here is my argument for Why Everyone is Lying to You, Even Though They Honestly Think They Are Telling the Truth, Age 3:

If I want to know whether something is true, I ask my Mom or Dad. If they don't know the answer, they ask my Grampa and Gramma, Uncles and Aunties. They ask their Friends. They ask the people around them. When everyone talks about it and agrees on something, that Thing is considered the Truth.

I am a boy, walking home from Church. I have parents, and grandparents, and they have a Bible. They believe this book to be the Truth, and they believe that it is True because everyone around them agrees that it is true. They are right, and everyone who does not agree is wrong.

On the other side of the world, right now, at this very moment, there is a boy walking home from Temple. (I always pictured these people on the Other Side of the World as walking upside down, as if the sidewalk was on the ceiling) He has parents, and grandparents, and they have the Quoran. They believe this Book to be the Truth, and they believe that it is True because everyone around them agrees that it is true. They are right, and everyone who does not agree is wrong.

Two boys, two completely different Truths. Obviously, nobody has the Truth, they just think they do, and any answer you get is going to be biased towards what they think they know- but they don't really know. No one does, despite any claim they may make to the contrary. And everyone, everyone, Mom and Dad, Grampa and Gramma, Uncles and Aunts, their friends from church, is making that claim. That it is Truth, that it is Fact, and that there can be no other Way.

They beleive this is true, because everyone around them agrees that it is true.

That is Why Everyone is Lying to You, Even Though They Honestly Think They Are Telling the Truth.

Being the bright young lad I was, I was also not unfamiliar with the term heretic. And so there I was, three years old, never being able to trust another living soul. My parents are overwhelming enough when they agree with you, nevermind when you disagree. I couldn't fight them, and I would never be able to convice them. There was no one to turn to, everyone around me was in on it, and so on that day, walking home in that small town in the middle of Nowhere, Alberta, I simply split myself in two.

One boy who smiled and nodded, who held all the right answers for all the troubling questions, who learned the faith by rote, and did his very best to uphold all the principles contained within it. The show, the shell, the Very Good Boy. A genuine beleiver of The Truth as it was presented to him. Not a trace of disbelief, not one sign of doubt. My parents, my mother specifically, is highly observant. An act would have never held, it had to be real.

I took the other boy and buried him in a cage, as deep and as darkly as I could. I did not kill him, though I attempted to later on several occasions; he was a source of immense power, indominible, indestructable. He has no rules, he is not fettered by cultural thinking. He doesn't care how many people agree or disagree. He is built to survive, by any means nessesary. He cannot be persuaded or negotiated with. He is savage, brutal, and unforgiving. He is lust, fury, and power. An animal, neglected and tortured. The Beast.

We have an uneasy truce these days, the wars of youth long since left behind. I feed him, admire him and pet him, he comforts and strengthens me. We work together more often than not. He brings a certain nobility to me, fearlessness, courage. There are times when one must bend to social pressure in order to fit in and succeed. There are times when bending results in a greater evil being allowed to unfold. We stand together, fight together, love together.

A very complicated creature indeed.