There is a mist floating above the banks of the River Styx, where I was lying one morning drinking the bottle that is never half full and always half empty. That is about as empty as I felt as I downed the bottle with a purpose. I had a message that took me years to come up with. The message itself was basically written to anyone with eyes and a heart for that sort of thing. When casting a message in a bottle out into the River Styx, there isn't any point in hoping that the right person finds it, rather, the hope is that it gets found period. In this situation, I didn't care if the message or bottle was found, nor did I care if the right person found it. Writing it served one purpose: getting it out. With virtually no one to talk to, I didn't think too clearly because of all of the shit that was built up over the many months of Exile was making my thoughts more and more deranged. Writing the message was the first step in a long drawn out process that included nothing and resulted in even less.
I absorbed the droplets of the mist into the pores of my leathered skin. What was it that could possess me to want to hang out this near to the land of the dead and drink from the antipode of a half full bottle? Whatever it was, it had the same powers that a beautiful woman has on a weak man. At this point in time, I was just trying to make out the shapes on the other side of the river to try to gain some kind of knowledge about the land of the dead as it co-exists with the land of the living. I know, why is a twenty seven year old man thinking and writing about such trivial wonders of perhaps a much younger and more vulnerable mind? Well, it's really quite simple: after the hundreds of times I have been on LSD and the thousands of enlightments I received while tripping on Nitrous Oxide, I guess there is a certain breakdown of normality and maturity. Not the kind that stunts a man's growth in these areas by any means, but one that puts the man on a plateau of higher knowledge above all the normal thinkers who conform to norms and bend over for the authority. An enlightening expansion of the mind that would take two and three quarters of a lifetime to wear down completely. The thoughts that run through my head are like entire beaches compared to the thoughts of normal men, which are mere grains of sand on those beaches. Fuckers. Not only that, but the breakdown and total inialation of all the reasoning normal men become subservient to: the need to be with a woman and not just sexually or emotionally, but the strange force that makes men change their lives in order to live for the idea of being ready to settle down - sentiments I had long since unsubscribe to once I opened that bottle and made it half empty.
Yes I am above all the people you see walking like androids down the sidewalks, turning their heads as members of the opposite sex pass them: men to look women to see if the men were looking. I am beyond all these people you see in bars: men claiming to be trying to score a piece of ass when it's love they are looking for - women claiming to be looking for love when it's a fuck they are truly seeking; and since both cancel each other out, no one gets anything but a good drunk and a hangover. There are the people who spill their guts out to others in attempts to try to ease the pain that they feel but all they are really doing is pushing that pain off onto someone else who probably has enough of their own pain to deal with. Me, I just put words on paper, and if you want to read it, that's your business. If you are into it, and like what you are reading, that is because you are just like everyone else: you find enjoyment in observing the pain of others.
When I read some poetry that I had written a couple of years ago, I seen the silhouette of a lonely man who was down on life. It could have been a guy who never gets laid, and never has any true friends other than the ones who are always there when the bottle is half full and the smoke is green instead of brown. An individual that I might not mind reading his thoughts, but sitting in a bar and downing a few would not be very appealing. I would lend an eye and open mind: not an ear and a dry shoulder to cry on.
I wrote this message to put in this bottle, which was antipode of half full . . . still. It seemed that no matter how much I drank, it was always half empty. Half of the purpose of writing the message to send in the bottle was to promote my drinking the bottle. The flavor was savoring, and the look of the bottle itself was appealing to the eye. Whoever designed it wasn't just making something that was easy to handle when the user got to that half empty point. I licked my chops and decided that sooner or later I would come to the crossroad of having the choice between drinking the rest all at once or just sticking the message in there even though there was still content. I mean, why not, there was little point in making sure the message didn't get ruined. Plus there was the prospect that the bottle would be retrieved simply because it was half empty - or half full, as it would seem to anyone considering picking it up to consume it.
While sipping on the lip and contemplating the next move I was to make, I thought more and more about the kids in the park in Neverleave, and how they are mirrored in the Land of the Dead. In Neverleave, they tossed a softball around in a circle, in the Land of the Dead, they tossed a skull around. I read about many many murderers in my time, but there are some things that history is too conservative to document. We read about Jack the Ripper - but have you ever heard about the antipode, Shelly the Sheerer? Well, while drinking from the half empty bottle on the River's shore, I talked to a corpse named Lawrence Severest. He kind of came off as a bullshitter, but I had to take what he was saying at face value - I mean, after all, he was a corpse. A ragged one at that. He told me the whole story about Shelly the Sheerer . . .
Shelly the Sheerer
They found her trimming her pubic hairs off with the same scissors she used to cut the penises off of over thirty men. She was seventeen when she was caught, and claimed that she started her reign of terror when she was thirteen, cutting off first her own brother's cock, and then her father's. They found a huge mason jar in her closet filled with pickle vinegar and about twenty cocks. Well, someone had to tell you, now you know, and now that you have those images burnt into your mind, you can be more aware of the world you live in. Blood on her teeth . . .it was tested, and it wasn't her blood type. It was beginning to look like using scissors wasn't giving her the rise it used to anymore. There was even a strange pathologist report that got buried during court proceedings that said she had a cock under her bed with a dole stuck through it, apparently to make it erect . . . and his tests revealed that she did, in fact, use this cock in acts of masturbation that included anal and vaginal penetration, as well as finding there to be traces of saliva on it. So twisted, so sick, so fucking insanely vulgar that they wouldn't allow it in as evidence. There was a psychologist who studied this case for many years, and was granted an interview with her just before she was sent to the gas chamber. In that interview, she claimed to have been a victim of rape and incest where all the men in her family - two brothers, her father, her grandfather, two uncles, a cousin, and her lesbian aunt - would get together for satanic rituals where they drank her monthly blood (which she was forced to gather the four days every month that she had her period). After drinking the blood, they put her in the middle of the group of men. Her aunt would use a baseball bat to sodomize her while the men masturbated in the circle, until every man came. After that she was forced with threats (which were carried out if she refused) to lick up and swallow every visible drop of sperm. Her aunt would hold her by the back of her hair and smear her face in it. Then she was passed around to the men, where they had their way with her three to six at a time. To prove her claims, she showed the psychologist various scars and markings on her body. She said that when she cut off her brother's cock, her other brothers stayed away from her. Her brother was too prideful to tell anyone about his missing organ - especially his father. After she cut her father's cock off, there was never again those kinds of "family gatherings." Where was her mother during all this? She was where she always was until the cock cuttings started: down in the dirt floored basement, chained to a post with nothing to look at but a single light that hung from the ceiling. She was mostly ignored by everyone, and on a daily basis, not even Shelly herself thought twice about her. Indeed, Shelly's mother was forgotten about so much, that no one was given the command to feed her on a daily basis, and no one really thought too much about her nutritional intake, and therefore, she missed a lot of meals to say the least. Once in a while, Shelly's father would bring a Negro over to fuck her and beat the shit out of her while he watched and masturbated - forcing Shelly to suck the tip of his penis while he did so. Sometimes it would even be a dog that father brought down to the basement. Shelly claims that after the cock snipping, her father tried some kind of bizarre attempt at being a surgeon by trying to cut her mother's sexual organs off and then trying to stitch them onto his own body. This was enough to kill her mother, and Shelly was forced at gunpoint to bury her own mother in the basement.
I could go on for hours with that story, but the main elements are out there now: the crime that history forgot to mention, the reason they forgot, the vision of insanity beyond anything anyone reading this ever imagined, the motive for the insanity, and a thought that always remains after such revelations: is that a motive or a cop out? Was she telling all or just trying to make it look like she was the real victim? And at the end of the day, there will be a line drawn in the sand of this: on one side, women who will never speak to me for revealing this story to the rest of the world. They will say that the girl was the victim, and that all men deserve to have their cocks brutalized for one reason or another. On the other side is the people who take no sides in the issue. They simply feel relieved that they still have their shit. Where both sides comes together is in awe and shock at the actual way in which I so freely slid that into the dialogue without warning. These people are going to say bad things about me and this story. They are going to tell others not to read it because it lacks creativity and simply draws energy from the revulsion of the reader. They will mention my name to people up the ladders until the publications of this story are in the crosshairs of some kind of censorship movement who wants to ban it. Meanwhile, I just light up another cigarette and start pecking away at the keys on the next chapter. Volume one was fairly tame. This chapter is part of Volume two, so I guess this is the true shocker. And if people just toss the prints in the garbage, fuck em. Volume three will be heading their way, and I bet I know who will be the people who want to get their hands on it as soon as they can. I'm with the tribe called "Bad Publicity is Better Than No Publicity."
We talk about murderers and rapists like they are aliens that no one can really relate to . . we talk about them and say shit about them that most people won't admit to saying later on, when asked at a dinner party by other yuppie do gooders. Am I a selfless punk piece of shit venting frustration? Cup is half full. If I didn't know how to write would I have killed myself or murdered someone by now because of the way my mind has been twisted by the total hypocrisy and selfish fever of the world around me? Cup is half empty. Would I have raped a fine looking chick because I have been just as sexually frustrated as the next person in this freakish world of fake people and mind fucking that we call the rest of the world? Antipode of the message within. Is it the message without? Is it the soul that guides the will or the mind that guides the body? Let me throw the bottle into he River Styx while I stick my head between my knees and start to cry so as to add more tears to the overall composition of the River itself: Piss, Blood, Tears, Sweat, Cum, Vaginal Secretions, Spit, Snot, Toe Fungus Juice, Ass Grease, Five Varieties of Vomit, Menstrual Droplets, Enigma Contents, Douche Contents, and the actual liquid that forms after a corpse has rotted long enough to where all the body's secretions form one juice that is gray/green in color. Too disgusting for you to keep reading? This is the message that is in my bottle, and the bottle is the antipode of half full. It might appear to be whisky in that bottle - but before you pick it up out of the muddy riverbank, before you consider drinking it, consider the things I have already said. But more importantly, consider the fact that you think you are more intelligent than me, that you are more beautiful than me, that you are better off in life than me - all these things, you ASSUME because of no other reason than the denunciation of this work that you are holding in your hand reading right now.
There is a sound that I hear while typing . . . it is a steady dinging sound, high pitched and crisp. It could be the chaser tapping ever so gently against the side of the pint bottle. It could be the echoes of protest bouncing back to me from the future when there are protesters. It could be the bells in Hades ringing once for every soul that is corrupted and for every man whose path was severed and he was forced to take the left hand path. It could just be the ringing in my ears that is the early signs of insanity as the disease settles into my brain physically.
Finally, I toss the incoherent message in the antipode of half full bottle. I screw the cap on very tightly, so it can withstand whatever pressures it might have to endure on its way to the hands of another living being. I toss it into the River and then I masturbate, not once, not twice, but until it gets to the point where there is blood instead of cum at the end of the session. The climax is not brought on by sexual relief, but by the admission that sexual frustration has lead to self abuse. The Exile has reduced me to a bloody scab on a desperate man's cock: my own. I wake up the next day and look at the time knowing that it means nothing. The bottle floating down the River doesn't care about hours, minutes, or seconds, so why should I?
