I pulled out a chair and slowly sat, my shoulders slouching as I sunk into it, and placed my feet upon the table with Vromme's. I looked up at the ceiling and lightly bit my fingers, trying to cling onto my bad mood. I didn't like wasting a good bad mood, but my environment was winning, slowly erasing my pointless angst.
"Vromme, what do you do when you feel ...pissed off?" I suddenly asked him.
He swallowed his snack and gulped again in slight nervousness. His lips parted slightly in thought as his steel blue eyes rolled toward the corners.
"I-- I simply read."
"I don't believe that for a second," I scoffed. Igniting a rage doesn't lead to turning flimsy pages. "If anybody even touched a book, they'd rip the pages out in anger. I've seen it."
Vromme's pupils returned to their bases and he blinked, his mouth finally buttoning as he skimmed his brain for a retort.
"Is something bothering you, Cole?"
My estimate was correct-- another proof of Vromme's timid disposition. The only time you'd catch him in an argument would be behind the doors of Logic 101. The weapons are inductive and deducive reasoning with a proper premise and evidence, and felonies, fallacies, and fists are unacceptable.

"Not really, I suppose. I'm just... pissed off."

"Well, let's start at the beginning. About what?" Vromme inquired. I snickered to myself, wondering whether or not I'd be better off on the couch, having my impulses scrawled onto a yellowed tablet. Men do not "sit and talk" of anything, excluding business, sports, and sex, and at least a mental checkup in a psychiatric ward would pass off as business. Spilling out my nonsense emotions would be sickeningly feminine.

"About people," I spat.
"People, huh? Maybe you just need to get out more. You're becoming a hermit, I think. I'd diagnose you with cabin fever."
Oh, blessed be, doctor! Thank you for my prescription!
"If I hate people, why do you think being around them more would fix me? You don't start to like zuchinni by shoving it down your throat."
"And what if you slathered it in melted butter?" Vromme smiled.
"I suppose it'd slide down easier." I rolled my copper eyes.

Vromme rose from his furniture and stumbled toward the window. He brushed away the curtains, emitting a blinding, golden stream of light. Gold is much stronger than copper, and I raised a limp hand to my forehead. A warm breeze swirled about the room as the window was unlocked, letting in the soundtrack of the urban afternoon. There was a reason I shut the curtains before my visitor, and my desire to keep them shut had not been altered. Silently seething, I bit my lip and crossed my arms, removed my feet from the table and faced my chair the opposite direction of the sun.

Vromme trimphantly put his pale hands on his hips and observed the scene. "It's such a lovely day, too. I think I might go to the library." He turned on a heel to face me.
"You may come as well, if you wish."

You see? It's none of his business what I'm up to or how I feel, yet, because I am sad, he must now cheer me up. It has become his duty! Go ahead, Vromme. Grab your feather duster and tickle me. Amuse me, for I am your kitten! Playing with me feels good, yes? It's like a win-win situation! Why can't you just leave me alone, you son of a--
"I suppose I'll join you."
Abandoning my inner will to strangle him, I put on a poker face and followed him out of the room, grabbing some shoes, socks, and a wristwatch. I closed the door behind us, and, before descending the stairs, I hesistated.
"V-Vromme, could you wait just a moment?"
"That is fine."

I turned the knob and re-entered my abode, squinting at the remarkable solar beam. In an almost barbaric sense, I gripped the window with both hands and shut it violently. I snorted and whisked the curtains closed, locked the door and nearly plummeted down the stairwell, Vromme in tow.

music: Neophyte feat. MC Ruffian - Muil Houwe

As for Roxanne, she was one of the most liberating people to me at the time. She, to me, just did whatever, and followed her greasy heart. Her eyes were like olive pits, and hair was the color of rust. She was a trickster, a thief of emotions, a sly, cunning whore. Her life revolved around the misfortune of others, of unconsciousness, and of pounding headaches. She was fueled by lust and hungered on sweat and warm semen.
I hated her.
I loved her.
I gave her everything. I fed her my soul, and she, the oily succubus, ate. Her voice was like wet leather as it slid around your cochlea and kissed the eardrum. Every time I thought of her, I sobbed. Her gossip was distributed contagiously, and those with the disease permanently suffered. Her impact, I like to believe, was the strongest on me. I was around the source of the virus so much that I was constantly bedridden and sneezing, sickened to the point of hallucination and mood swings, where I needed the cancer to survive. I began to lose sense of who was the parasite, who fed off of who. She sucked me dry, but I needed her to survive.

She was kept in quarantine with the few of her clique, until I was caught off-guard. I was wet and chilled and caught the flu. It was in December, barely weeks before Christmas too, of all the bloody times to catch it, when the storm engulfed the atmosphere. The raging squall dripped ink. Everything was black, except for when I walked inside the school hall, dimly lit by white light. It was a horror scene, a nightmare where the doors are shut and white lights flicker on and off, the sound of the tempest raging outside. I shivered and left footprints of puddles. I took off my bulky headphones only for a moment to shake them dry, but not too long. I always needed the sounds to fill me, to remedy the bass my ears craved. I put them back on, still soaking wet, licked my blue lips and ruffled the black dew from my hair. Then, the sickness ran up to me, sniffling a bit herself. The first few syllables I couldn't forget if I desired to. The question that should've been my red flag if I weren't so colorblind-- hell, if I just weren't so blind.

"Can I use you?"
"...Excuse me?"
"You look nice and, like, warm. Can we, like, y'know, cuddle? Or somethin'?"
"Well, I-- It... Sure."

That was that. The raw ailment consumed me, so called passion, so called love, so called, and preferred in these terms, lust. I hadn't had arms around me, well, ever, other than my parents. I was warm. She warmed me. And that's how that went. She used me, but her use I couldn't live without. It was pitiful. It still is. It always will be.

Teamed with Veronica, Roxanne's plague inflicted everyone in sight. Vromme would get some bad spells, wheezing a little as he was now. He leaned a bit back and put his feet on my table.
"So, you didn't hit him, huh... I shouldn't let this stuff keep me from my books," Vromme commented as he chewed on a cookie, spinning me back into reality.

mood: cold

Veronica. Let's start with her.
Veronica is a yay-high brunette donning lip gloss, revealing clothing, low-cut shorts and hideous pine green gloves made of yarn. By yay-high, I will ballpark that Veronica's height was about to my chest, but a bit below my shoulders. From underneath her suggestive shirt, her girth would protrude and loom above her nether regions. But no sight had been so vomitable as a superficial klutz like her... with those repulsive gloves. It didn't matter what season, temperature, or weather-- the time she spent every night compiling new, matching outfits always proved fruitless, due to the weeds and thorns that were her gloves.

I recall putting up with her for a term of physical education in my junior year. Her favorite way to pester me was to rip off my headphones by tugging on the cord. Once when she had missed, the dreadful threads of the foresty garments that adorned her hands brushed my cheek. I had felt the aged crumbs, spittle and dirt caked between the fabric practically seize and infiltrate my pores. Though the experience had lasted for but a mere second, I immediately thrashed about, smacked her upside the face with my elbow, and was promptly suspended from education.

Consequently, she had few friends at the time. This already insignificant number suffered a steep drop once she began her hobby of picking on the nerds and spreading vicious gossip about the campus. It wasn't just, "Oh, so-and-so picks her nose and eats it," but it had been perverted to a grotesque and ogrish level: "So-and-so has a snot fetish, picks her nose and eats it, and I heard her boyfriend even lets her lick the inside of his nostrils." This was Veronica's newfound, delightful pasttime.

mood: tired

From beneath the blankets, I slipped onto my wooden floor and crawled toward the source of the buzz, to my visitor. As I lazily propped myself up to turn the knob, whoever was outside took his fists to combat with my door. I say he because, well, I know no woman that would do that (except for a select few, but they don't know where I live). I spied through the peephole to be greeted by aqueous silver-blue eyes. In the middle of his heavy rapping, I casually let him through the entrance and he stumbled into one of my rustic chairs. He grabbed it by the back, swung his six-foot self around and landed himself into the seat of it.

This man was Vromme Rutgers: A Dutchman with a heavy accent clad in a dark gray coat, that he often usually wore, with a brick red tie, thick-rimmed glasses, a small beard (blond, like his hair), black pants and neat brown shoes. He was a neurotic scholar and a skeptic, who would only believe what he read in books or what was proved by science. Ironically enough, he was too gullible for proper description and caved into every bit of gossip he heard. However, being the bookworm he was, his social skills were absolute nil, so he needed evidence to defend himself throughout highschool and college. Of course, his research skills guaranteed him to be the first to know before word got on the street.

With this in mind, I knew whatever Vromme had to tell me was obviously not that important, or a rumor about me spread by those that enjoyed my torment, whom I had mentioned earlier.

"Yeh heet him? Yeh heet him?!" Vromme had just caught his breath after running up the many flights of stairs to my abode and crashing into my furniture.
I hadn't recalled hitting anyone recently. As I thought, a new rumor.
"All right, tell me. Who'd I hit this time?"
"J- ja meen yeh doon't nuu? Ik svar, ik nuu wat vas going un..."

I refuse to phonetically record Vromme's speech.

"Y-You mean you don't know? I swear, I knew what was going on..."
You can tell how difficult it was to understand him, but after many years of being his friend and neighbor, I could interpret him better than I could interpret some of those who spoke fluent English.

Succumbing to the climate, I offered him the cookies I had leftover from a party as he let me in on the "news". Evidently I had beat the living daylights out of Connor Richardson, a bratty baseball player from two years ago. He went to our college now as a "changed man", and he supposedly devoted himself to his acquired love for botany. This was probably the dumbest fib I had ever heard. Connor was a mutt that liked fast things and hitting stuff, but was too skinny for football. He had the attention span of a rodent, and we all knew the only interest he had in plants was for the ones you could roll up and smoke. Maybe he thought plants would make him more approachable or something.

"Ah, but it was so believeable, Cole... The same girls keep tricking me."
I knew just what girls. Veronica and... Roxanne.

mood: calm music: The Wishmaster - Hardcoreklan

I wrote about those that troubled me and caused tears to roll upon my face. I parted the curtains and peered down at the world below from my apartment in the sky. Sunday afternoon sunlight poured in, to my dismay, cars honking and racing up and down a solid gray river of pavement. Wiping the dripped ink off my hands, I picked up my pen again and cleaned up the nib, ready to write. So many colorful distractions kept me from the world I had blackened and grayed. I thought I was miserable, curled up in a ball, a monochromatic monolith of despair, only to have this... color, this noise, surge through me! I don't even look at it and it creeps up on me, how do you figure?

Squinting my eyes, I shield my face with my hand and use the other to shut those curtains. Still the hustle and bustle of the city reverberates in my room. Finally, I throw myself upon my decade-old mattress and bury my face in pillows. My fingers in my ears, focusing on my hearbeat, speaking my thoughts aloud: None of this helped, everything was so active. But I didn't want to overlap the noise, you know, to drown it out with different noise. I wanted the noise to be static, nothing but the stagnant air lounging at the entrance to my eardrum. Sunlight filled the room, the distant but seemingly close sounds of the Sunday driver. It was way too cozy, too relaxed, carefree and inviting. This was the kind of scenario that you'd expect a visitor for some cookies and lemonade, perhaps tea, and chat away the lazy afternoon until the sun went down, and you could prepare a kitcheny, family-matters meal of mashed potatoes, various vegetables and slow-cooked, delicately spiced meat.

I hated it!! I needed a cold damp cell, my blood and a stick to write with on the concrete floor of the prison. I was feeling absolutely horrid, completely shattered and laying in shambles, and this weather... this climate was tearing my pieces apart. It's like how people try to cheer you up when you cry. It's really the last thing you want, them trying to make you laugh, and you're doing your best without trying to be a pretentious asshole by saying, "Look guys, I've got to get my tears out right now. I need a balance and I have to be sad right now." They interpret that as, "we're not doing well enough! Tickle him and tell funnier jokes!" I end up laughing and it hurts. I've got to purge those feelings and get rid of them. They must be experienced or it backs up my machinery and I break down.

A bad example, but do you know how you're masturbating, and everything is going great? Pardon for females, for they cannot relate all too well, but you'll get an idea. That lovely feeling in the pit of your guts, and you feel it-- you're going for it, you're going to ejaculate. And suddenly something rains in on your parade and goodness gracious, you get the worst sores. Blue balls, if you will. You can't just stop something that's got to come out, or it hurts, and then you just end up having to do it again anyway. Again, a terrible example, but better than describing someone interrupting your defecating or urination and having to hold it in.

So in my misfortunate situation, the enviornment does not serve me well. I am sad.
Now I will tell you about why I am sad.
There are those that trouble me, for only the very purpose of troubling me, for that brings them pleasure in some ill manner.
I am gawked at and looked down upon, mocked, trifled with, stolen from, spit upon, spat upon, shit upon, shat upon, all upon what I've got left of my thinning dignity. Like my hair, it's becoming frail, gray and brittle. Skinnier, weaker, less masculine, and cut through like silk. I felt like writing something horrible and mean, something to make me feel better and put those others down that belittled me. Instead, the activity that had bothered me became irksome no more, and I slid underneath the sheets, curled up and slept on my lumpy mattress, covered by my yarn blankets and homemade pillows. It was all too homey, much too inviting. At that moment of shutting my eyes and digging my nose into the billowing linen, my buzzer rang. I had a visitor.

Much too inviting.

mood: sleepy music: CLSM - Free Your Mind

today was fucking horrible i hated every aspect of it and i want to die

im tired as fuck and i have to bathe and brush my fucking teeth and then go to bed but im so fucking tired that i just want to sleep right now and not get up in the morning i fucking hate this

Like it's all... full of gunk.

You know?

I've been taking showers but it just hasn't been doing it. It's not on the surface... it's inside me. You know when a rain gutter is full of leaves from fall, and only a bit of water trickles out because it's so clogged? I'm that rain gutter, and the only thing I can deposit is a small stream of creativity. Everything's been surpressed, i feel.

Ah, that magical word, catharsis. I want to pull that plug so the water will drain. Clean out the leaves.

i hate it when things are bottled up inside

purge me purge me

quit filling me

i will explode eventually

but i just want to deflate and purge


get this out of me.

mood: full music: outblast - shit can happen

Turns out I'm doing a shitty job at work. I'm given a layout to follow and they just can't accept my deviation from it every so often. It's not like I take so long on purpose. Things just take time and I need to apply my style to it or it isn't really my job anymore, but it becomes just a task I need to complete like a robot or machine.

Rip my skin off and clip my nails and I'm as able as any other human.

mood: aggravated