Shooting one's self in the head is an easy way to say that they gave up after about eight hundred and twenty nine cuts of the thin razor. Patience to die is not a virtue instilled in the wills of men, but children somehow posses that strange inhibition to want to see what's next. So the inner child in the prisoner of his own fate waits for the next cut, and then the next one, and then the next one. The pendulum swings to the left and to the right, the mule rides off into the night, the only light is the pale moon of a thousand dimmed out souls that hover above the desert that used to be the place that I could clearly see. The exiled abandonment - the streets, the hills, the rocks, the people - they have all but drifted into a reality that includes everything but the one who is in exile. They have strapped me to the back of a mule and blindfolded me, thus forcing me into a new form of exile - Gulag. As the days fade to nights and the nights crash back into days, I am lost within it and am no more than a droplet of mist in the overall haze that hides everything under its veil of deception.

Anything and everything that crosses the mind becomes one small paper-like cut on the skin of my soul. Some of the cuts seem minor in comparison to others, even though none of them alone could ever be fatal in and of themselves. Not even if some sort of equivalent to an infection of the soul could occur. On the back of the mule, the small bumps eventually feel like hard hits on the back with a baseball bat. The little noises of the outside world - like cars passing by on the nearby road - sound like chainsaws and the breeze itself sounds like a crackling fire. Substance becomes bland paste that just rubs into the cuts on the soul, only temporarily covering them from the blistering breeze and burning sun, never to heal, only to reveal a deeper side of the agony that rides on the back of the mule with me. What is Gulag, one might ask. Not by definition, but by relation. No one could ever relate that experience to another human being, because there is no equivalent to that level of loneliness and abandonment. There is no pain that is its equal. The miles and miles the weeks and weeks the thoughts and endless thoughts. My own voice became the only voice I heard and I still hear it, the final insanity of a thousand twisted thoughts.

The death of a thousand cuts! I would take that death and lick it like it was the worlds sweetest desert, reveling in the infected blood and green puss like a little pup licks at a freshly cut steak. I welcome the death, when it finally greets me, but I know in the back of my mind that it is laughing at my notion that it is there waiting to welcome me into whatever there is after this - I can hear it laughing faintly under the whistle of the cold winter wind and I can see it hiding in the shade of the willow trees as they sway in the mild spring breeze. I can even smell it under the scent of the summer lovers as they exploit their passions in my presence, spiting the denial I must feel. Worse of all, is the fact that I can feel death waning behind the steady rhythm of the leaves falling in the autumn. As death claims everything around me, my trusty mule and I keep pressing on, passing up all the people who voted in their minds to sentence me to this unpleasant fate.

So you think about happiness and sorrow, and there has been times in your life when you felt these emotions peak. The mule chews fouled grass in the field, and gathers nutrients from the excrement of other animals, as if it were meant to be - that is the summery of your sorry. You ate the shit, and then you pressed on. When you are in exile you don't walk away. The only way you get out is by getting an even harsher sentence. Death? Life in prison? Ha! Such mockeries are those sentences! I am not afraid to say it, and I have felt the constant agony of a death row inmate just as often as I felt the never-ending nothing that a prisoner locked up for life feels. That gasp of sour air that never seems to taste just quite like the same breath would taste in a free world. Life in a cage is like life in a page of a book that you are reading while you are rotting the days and months and years into ways and sums of fears - you become religious, you become a martyr, you become this and that and everything else you will never be because nobody outside of your own skull gives a fuck - to them, you are an inmate. And to me, you will get to the five hundredth cut and die of other causes, if not kill yourself out of sheer weakness.

Kill yourself kill yourself kill yourself! I am begging you - you who feel the cut of the nine hundredth and ninety ninth pull of the blade over your flesh. It would be so easy to do the predictable thing, and just end your own life. Don't dare leave it up to the hands that control the blades - of course, that is, unless you've already figured out that those hands do in fact belong to you. But who is controlling them? Is it really you making them slice another inch of flesh, or is there some sort of outside forces that guide your hands like that of a puppet? Inmates, they always have a puppetmaster. Manic depressants know who controls the strings, and the strings themselves become blades if you don't dance with the motions of the puppetmaster, right? So again, I urge you - if you feel it is the way to welcome the inevitable, just kill yourself so your parents can sue me for writing this. DO IT JOHN! DO IT CHAD! DO IT MANDY! DO IT SUE! DO IT BRAND...

And there is a newspaper dispensing machine about two campfires from the nearest town in the direction I came. My mule pulled up to as if he was going to buy a paper himself. I laughed at the notion, but then again, nothing seemed to insane after about eight hundred and forty two cuts on the skin of the mind. What the mind had left to contribute was probably more dangerous and less beneficial to the overall drive to survive, a simple natural instinct that could be overcome very easily by the real weak minded. I decided to entertain the mule by getting a paper with my last shilling. It didn't surprise me to see that the paper was about ten years out dated. I mean, out here in the desert of existence, what demand was there for up to the minute news? What did it matter to a Gulag patient if they found a cure for the cancer of a thousand cuts when he was already on cut number fifteen hundred and ninety eight? I read some headlines to the mule, laughing historically, as if there was some kind of lesson to be learned in it all. The mule cowered to my insane laughter, and began making strange horse like grunts at me. I put the blindfold back on and mounted back up on the mule. I figured that we would be able to build a campfire in a couple days, so I saved the newspaper. A good campfire always hardens up the cuts on the surface of the soul, but they moisten back up real quickly after you piss on the coals to put the fire out. I used to think that the mule knew about the thousand cuts, and that he was taking me to the river Styx, and there I would meet the fucker who was cutting me with these invisible blades. When you look eye to eye with the mule, you see it for the person it was in whatever past life it had. It was told before crossing back over - "you will be the escort for many of men who will be sent out into the desert in Gulag." Then you look into those brown eyes and see thin red lines - cuts on its need to see the ugliness of the world. When those cuts get to a certain number, the mule will no longer need to wear a blindfold itself, and it would felt that it had graduated to the next level of higher understanding.

The vultures never lost any patience. Each of the screeching cries that the Falcons and Vultures made startled me just the same as the last. Some had thoughts connected to them, others just sounded evil. The thoughts were always the same kind of things - something about waiting and patience. The eyes upon me felt like the eyes of a greedy whore looking at a large pile of gold. I wished and begged for a weapon to shoot at these creatures because it would be symbolic to whoever sent them, "HEY! I'm not going to die and get ate up out here in this stinking ass dry fucking desert, so take these leeches with wings and shove them up your bloody ass!" Everytime the thought reoccurred, the phrase was more vulgar, until I could hear a response subliminally blended into the screeches of the birds, "Don't worry, we can wait . . . we have more patience than a thousand men times ten . . . we have more patience than any man's God or any man's Devil. . . we can wait . . . we have more patience than even death itself, for death has to lose his patience before we submit to the temptation." And in my daydreams as well as my sleep dreams, I conversed with the wretches.

"We are resting with you, our wings get tired you know . . . If we wanted to, we could just start picking at your tender parts - starting with those eyes underneath that blindfold . . . and then we could pick through your clothing and bite off your penis and eat that - you won't be needing it where you're going . . . of course, we would also be munching on your mule. Mules don't usually put up too much of a fight. . . " and on they would go, trying to be the blade itself, trying to contribute the most on the cuts that would eventually be the death of at least my soul and mind . . . and the thing I never want to admit - the death and devourment of my body. Who is more patient? The time tested vultures who have nothing better to do but fly around in the desert and wait for a victim JUST LIKE ME! Of course, victims are never just like me - or any other victim for that matter. I would have to bet that most victims don't ever get to the point where I am at and still have the ability and sheer will power to press on with no map out, no concern for a destiny, just the clothes on the back and the coins that are only in the sack. Nothing more or less, no attractive features that, on their own, make up for the shortcomings . . .