I honestly pity people who can't draw. That's terribly elitist of me, isn't it? It is.
I started chewing my fingerskin again. I was born without whorls on the soles of my feet. They were smooth and shiny like...well, like no skin should be. And then when I was about six, they wrinkled and split open and the smooth skin peeled off in bleeding strips over the course of a few weeks. I grew new feet skin, and it had whorls.
My fingers always had prints, but they're doing the same thing my feet did, and splitting and peeling and bleeding. It comes and goes. Been happening on and off for the past year or so. Painful. It does make me think of Se7en, and Kevin Spacey's sliced-off fingerprints. Would they be able to trace me, with only a pinky print to go on? Heh.
In other, homicide-related news, today Draughn gave me the hardbound Johnny the Homicidal Maniac: Director's Cut book. I started reading when I got home. Enjoying it immensely. It's years since I read it last, and re-reading reminds me almost painfully of being 13 and full of just the sort of hate that was both kindled and soothed by Nny, at the time. You remember that? Nowadays I make my own killmonsters, and have more particular angsts.
Draughn and I sat and ate sushi and talked about Johnny a bit. He said it's weird to read this for the first time now, and realize how much it's influenced his friends and the subculture as a whole. That he kept running into phrases and references he'd heard for years from the people that surround him. And it is weird. One could write theses about the reasons behind Johnny's raw appeal to the spooky and disenfranchised, despite the character (and the author) himself blatantly ridiculing just that sort of person.
But JTHM is embedded in that time, in that stage in my lifecycle. I was talking to a friend late last night about human beings or human lives as MIDI notes in a piece of music. I told him I saw them as notes in a Fruity Loops file, with layers of melody, yes, but also with layer effects. Reverb and vocode and pitch and etc. JTHM would be one of those layer effects in the FLoops file for that period in my life; skewing all our noises just a touch. We read and re-read every issue, stole them from each other a dozen times, and the entirety of Poison Elves, and then I Feel Sick. Sandman. The Crow (how many times did we fall asleep, listening to that score?). Red Dwarf. Holy Grail. All Your Base. Jerkcity. Sinfest. Tomb Raider. Star Wars. The Terrible Secret of Space. Dark City. Brazil. Twelve Monkeys. The Fifth Element. Aeon Flux. The Maxx, both book and show forms. The White Wolf books, and anything related to vampires, werewolves, and the like. And above it all, countless plots, characters, paintings, novels, photographs and injokes of purely our own devisings. The latter still shock me when I find them in old journal entries or sketchbooks; so many are forgotten, or subsumed by their decendent concepts.
We drew these beloved characters alongside our own, quoted them, dressed up like them to impress each other at shitty parties on those aimless Halloweens. Doodled them on our textbooks. Cast each other in those roles. Steve and I called each other either "Devi" or "Tenna," depending on who was being the crazy artist and who was being the concerned friend on any given day. I had friends who had entire Happy Noodle Boy rants memorized, could deliver them verbatim. And could rattle off every single Vampire: the Masquerade discipline on command, as well. They all wanted boots with hoof-shaped toecaps. Spooky nerds with nowhere to show off our finery except at Poetry Night and "Game," that all-encompassing term. Not THE game, not A game. Game. Or if we wanted to get really specific, "Vampire" or "Werewolf." As in, 'my girlfriend wanted to stay home and make out, but I had to go to Game.'
...
Sweet jesus, no wonder I was full of hate. So much of that life was just sickening. So many of you were entropic, addicted, tiresome! So many of you wanted to get out and didn't. So many of you are still there...