every night is a knife

I don't want to be here anymore.

I don't want to be         anymore.

double d's

Several weeks (months?) ago, I spoke with a fellow blogger about some of the things going on in my life and in my head.  After giving him a couple of my symptoms, he mentioned a lot of them correlated to the dreaded DIABEETUS.  He has it and knows the adverse affects of the disease. 

I never thought even thought about having it but it's always a possibility.

You know, I walk around and do my thing and feel these crazy thoughts and wonder about the source of my psychosis.  For the longest time, I thought I was depressed.  But I never felt comfortable with that label because it feels like an "easy" diagnosis.  Someone has a bad day and they have depression.  I have bad days every day.  I don't feel good about anything.  I float through life, my nerves pinched to numbness.  But I can also get out of bed each day and don't feel those aches and pains associated with depression.  

Diabetes can make you feel bad, too.

So, what's the deal?  Is it diabetes or depression that makes me feel like such a basket case?

Or what if I really do just play the victim?  Or what if things are a bit heavier?  What if theres' a third "D" swimming around my gut?  What if I really do have a demon inside?  Holy crap.  I just want to know what's wrong with me.

How does anyone know what's wrong with them?  Does anyone ever get to the heart of the hurt?  Or do we flail around and fudge our way through our frustrations?  Depression is an easy answer.  Diabetes can be a catchy conclusion.  Even possession, while not as practical, is possible.

Writing has been one of the most effective ways of trying to figure myself out, to organize my thoughts and fears and lay them out in an organized manner so I can identify and try to solve my problems.  So far, all I've managed to do is express how I feel without getting to the heart of why I feel the way I do.  I've got to figure out the cause before I get to the cure.  Is it a creature or is it chemical?

How do we ever know?  How do we find out?  And how do we go about solving the strain of sugar and spirits? 

pentagrammatical error

“And it’s not just obvious things, he said. It’s not all possessions and hauntings and black shadows by the bed. Satan can come knocking wearing a more mundane coat. The Ouija abuser could have health or personal problems, or their luck could just turn rotten. Most often, the afflicted simply find that their faith in God mysteriously drains away. The invisible world of the undead, the world of ghosts and spirits, is the world where the devil lives, he told me calmly. And if you go looking for the devil, the devil will find you.” 
-Will Storr vs the Supernatural by Will Storr

When I was a little boy, I used to hang out with my gay cousin, his sister and their dead relative in their haunted mobile home.  Well, at least they told me there was a dead relative that lived with them.  Although I was around ten-years-old and naive, I was still skeptical of the trailer's transparent tenant.  It was hard for me to imagine there was an actual presence, a ghost, that walked (floated?) among them.

I'm pretty open minded so it wasn't that I didn't believe in ghosts but I was also the type of person that needed to see things with my own eyes in order to truly believe.  Also, my cousins had tried to trick me with unbelievable stories before.

My uncle had a pond across from his trailer and the eldest cousin, J, once told me it contained a gigantic fish as large as the pond itself.  His name was Chester.  I was probably about seven at the time and dumb and knew nothing about fish.  If wales could get huge, could some species of fish as well?  Although I had never heard of a gigantic catfish before, maybe Chester was a freak accident of nature.

My little brain spun with the possibilities but there was never any physical evidence, never any indication of a fin skimming the surface of the shimmery gray pond.  I wasn't sure what to make of J's claim but his sister, K, backed him up.  J liked to be dramatic and spin salacious stories but K was more down to earth and so if she agreed with him, maybe it was really true.  Maybe there was a fish as big as a house floating around in the murky water.

Eventually, I came to my senses and realized my cousins were just screwing with me.  Chester the catfish was a hoax, unless some toxic waste had somehow spilled into the water, genetically altering the scaly creature's DNA, turning it into the Godzilla of redneck cuisine.  But if that was the case, how come they never told the press and made heaps of cash off their freak-sized pond monster?

The ghost thing was a bit trickier.  J said it was one of their relatives, Vernon, who used to live in the trailer before his father moved in.  Vernon might have even possibly died there, which would have bolstered the validity of the story and also made it somewhat more believable and spooky.  To me, at least, it was more logical there was a ghost in their house rather than an enormous fish with a pituitary problem.  It didn't help matters that the trailer was pretty creepy as it was.

The whole trailer was small and cramped.  The interior wasn't well lit or ventilated and was always hazy with cigarette smoke.  My uncle and both cousins smoked so there were ample amounts of ash smeared on the tables and cracked ashtrays among the coffee-stained copies of Cosmopolitan.  The smokiness could have easily been misinterpreted as an unnerving fog that had just rolled in to announce the presence of something unholy.

There weren't many sources of light, either.  And what little light they had was dull and mustard yellow in color.  There were also rooms in the house I never entered, such as their bathroom and father's room.  Knowing there were unseen rooms within the tiny confines of the place prodded my imagination.  Those rooms were mysterious.  What was the mobile home hiding in those rooms?

That other half of the house where the unexplored rooms were located was connected to the den and kitchen by a short, narrow hall.  A door leading outside was on the right of the hall and was covered by a makeshift drape made from what looked and felt like a burlap sack.  It was the only light source in the hall.  It filtered the sunlight into jagged brown shafts that splintered off and dissolved into the darkness, leaving an inky black hole...or wall...or entrance to another dimension that floated ten feet in front of me.  I had never gone past the inky darkness so I had no idea what was back there.  Technically, it was my uncle's bedroom but for all I knew, that might have been were Vernon died.

And then dwelled.