JUST LIKE FRANKENSTEIN
Hello everyone - this is the artist, formerly known as Zook - proceeding in a different direction here - this is going to be my first meeting of blog and short story. I got the above quote from Ramble On Rose, one of my favorite Grateful Dead songs, after considering many others for this post, and finally decided not only upon the line, but to make a little story out of it as well. Thanks again to my good friend Vi for showing me the link trick. Those of you who know me may think this "story" sounds a lot like MY real life - and maybe that is the case. Maybe so and maybe not. How could anyone write anything with conviction without having some knowledge of the subject matter at hand? Where the fiction starts and the non-fiction ends is kind of a thin line, but all I can tell you is this is very real to me in its own way. Yet - because it is a story, I issue the following disclaimer - any resemblance to any real life person is purely coincidental, and this is not designed to upset or offend anyone who believes that coincidence is directed at that person. That being said - let's get started with the story. I feel I never told you - the story of the ghost:
I am not proud of the story I am about to tell you, dear reader, but it is a story I must tell anyway. In this case, the storyteller makes no choice in telling the story, as the story has a way of telling itself and the storyteller can only watch it happening and try to capture it in the most accurate way possible. I must thank God that I am here to tell it, as the events I am about to describe could have easily brought this fragile life of mine to a tragic and early end. In fact it is a miracle that I am here to tell it, and proof in my mind that maybe someone really is watching over me. Those of you who read this from start to finish may find it necessary to judge me for what I have done, and if you must judge me - go right ahead - I deserve any label that you feel fit to impose upon me from the judge's chair. If that is my trade off that the powers that be have bestowed upon me, to be judged and be alive to receive that judgement, instead of the alternative - lying cold and lifeless in a stiff coffin 6 feet underground, than that is a trade off I will live with any day of the week. If there is one regret I do have, it is that anybody I am close to may have been hurt along the way. All the same - I know in my heart, that as horrible and hellish that the events below may seem to you, that they had to happen - were destined to happen, and I only hope that I can learn something from them, and perhaps others can along the way. In this day and age where addictions can claim many, from gambling, to substances, to God know's what - my addiction that almost claimed my life and spirit was a being that I will refer to from this point on - as Frankenstein. Not to say I did not have my battles with the other named demons as well, but that is another story.
Ironically, it was the novel by Mary Shelley of the same name that brought me in touch with my beautiful Arabian wife, Eliza, who I had the good fortune of meeting at a book convention about 20 years ago. We were walking along, both absorbed in our books, and we actually met up at the same place by accident, as with our present life courses, there was no real conceivable way we would have met up in our normal day to day lives. This book, along with Steppenwolf seemed to establish that we had some kind of common ground, not only in the literary world, but also in our own lives, which both had been somewhat difficult and troubled.
I had kind of lived the Harry Potter lifestyle, minus the magical powers unfortunately. I lived in the closet the same way Harry had, raised by people who would have rather not had to deal with me, as my own parents were killed in an unfortunate accident early on in my life - again, right out of the famous story we all know and love. It was a sad and lonely life. I was not wanted at home, had no real friends to speak of, and was picked on and beaten in school. Most of the time I would just take it, but there was a time when I finally got so enraged that I surprised a bully by fighting back. I would have to be driven into a corner to the point where I could not even take it any more before even considering something like that, as it would be my normal course of action to just pretend whatever was happening to me really wasn't happening at all, and I would often space out or freeze in the line of fire as my way of coping with it all.
So when I had met such a beautiful and charming woman, who wanted to be with me and also related to me to a certain degree, it changed my life forever. Even now, I still cannot believe that a woman of her beauty and charm would have anything to do with someone such as myself. This is a woman who had the opportunity to have spent a lifetime with handsome, wealthy and charming men, but had actually chosen me over and them. To this day some times I still cannot believe it and wonder what made her pick me, but I try to count my blessings in spite of that. It has been almost 20 years to the day now, and she continues to grow more beautiful with age. We eventually married and had two beautiful twin girls who we named Emma and Isabella. I don't want to point the fingers or blame anyone or anything, but my own limitations of being raised by often uncaring and disliking step-parents seemed to often limit my ability to be a father with my twin girls. I know we cannot blame our past for every present failure of ours, but even now, I still have to work at it and it does not come naturally to me whatsoever.
I worked as a clerk at the Burgermeister corporation, most of the time cramped away at a little beat up desk with a provided chair that always seemed to be falling apart, working in the dark, cold , musty basement, ordering supplies, keeping track of the company expenses, doing the dirty work of the company. It was a job of little respect that did not pay a lot, but it was a steady job. Although I loved Eliza greatly, I noticed over the years that a certain mutual coldness started settling in. Part of it was clearly the tension of my family. My step-parents still had considerable influence over me, and never did a moment go by that they did not in some way make it clear that they held the keys to a large, vast fortune that would allow me to never have to work another day in my life, once I obtained it. Out of fear, I seemed to believe that this had some importance, although I eventually weighed the costs of a divorce with Eliza and concluded that this would be far more devastating, both financially and emotionally. Even so, the years went by and their poor treatment of me was extended on to her, and as a complete and total coward, I lacked the ability to stand up to them and could not really be the knight in shining armor that she had wanted me to be. Well - I'm not the world's most masculine man and that has often been a problem with us.
So in the midst at a rather bleak point in our time as a family together, I often found myself prone to daydreaming, and not really being there - as was often pointed out by Eliza. Work was rather blah and routine, and I would often find myself in a cold and isolated supply closet, re-stocking the old equipment that no longer had any use and was collecting dust there. Although this was one of the coldest portions of the building, I was quite taken aback to one day find that there was a particularly warm spot in the corner that I was surprised to find out about, as there was no natural explanation for the heat source there. As it later turned out, there was a trap door there. When I first found out about it, I did not think much of it - until slowly but surely I realized it was a key to another world, as was in the case with the closet in the Chronicles of Narnia.
This was not another physical world, in the way that it is portrayed in that movie, but it was more a world of dreams where other beings interacted with each other and exchanged thoughts and ideas so that each was aware of the other's presence, without ever actually seeing, touching, and for the most part - hearing that the other one was there. It was a world that slowly but surely crept up on my psyche, and as the powerful field of imagination took over, I often found that it appeared to be a magical place where one could wish upon a star and seemingly have every wish really come true. It was land I would later think of as my own ticket to Transylvania, but more the one out of Bram Stoker's Dracula than the actual physical location. It was a world of pure imagination, where it always felt like the sun was setting over the clouds in an incredible breathtaking fashion, and if I wanted to at will I could soar like a rocket, fly like an eagle into the orange fading to darkness sky. This is the same type of world I would often know while under the affects of cannibis, and is the realm many drug addicts and addicts in general often escape to in place of their own perceived blah, depressing, and stressful world of reality.
From the beginning, it was clear that I was not alone here in this enchanting new realm. In fact, it became even more clear that the creation of the land was the combination of a series of minds collaborating, perhaps in an involuntary and unorganized fashion, where the dreams and hopes of everyone who entered had helped build the landscape to make it what it was. I had the sense that the others there were somewhat sad, frustrated, and lonely as I was and I started to believe I had a bond with some of them, even though as I said before, they were not there in the traditional sense - and most of my normal 5 senses could not see, here, smell, or touch them at all. But in the vast realms of my own imagination, which often has bordered on obsessive at times, that started to not matter to me. I started to consider some of them to be my friends, but more importantly, I started to distinctly hear the sirens call. My response was to cautiously flirt and toy with these sirens, but I felt a pull in their direction, and surely enough - I started to think more and more of them, and sink more and more into that other world, and away from the present one where I was needed. I shrugged off observations from Eliza that this world was starting to consume me, and could not contemplate the possibility of leaving it. I was more distracted and less available at the workplace, and had it not been for my long history with my employer, I could have easily let go or been fired. But - I was the functioning addict, and so I could get by and go through the motions, even though I was not at 100% of my attention.
I had fallen in love with - to a degree - or been infatuated with certain of the female forces there, but when Frankenstein (or the monster created by Dr. Fronkensteen to be exact) arrived on the scene, it seemed to descend into another level altogether. Note that the monster in Frankenstein is a male figure. Since I could not ever directly be in the presence of this being, I will really never know what sex s(he) really was. The few glimpses I obtained of this being - and again, I wouldn't know if they were really this being or not, would suggest a little bit of both. S(he) had kind of the face of a man, the presence of the monster seen here at this link, but also the long hair of a female, and either the voice of a deep female or a high pitched male, so to this day I will never know what gender s(he) really was. If this sounds confusing to you, imagine how I must have felt! I know this clarification has implications of what gender I prefer - and althought I would like to think I am a heterosexual, one really never knows the answer to that anyway.
So how exactly did I come across him/her anyways? I can look at it like a trap. In some ways s(he) was lying in ambush waiting for me. Like the monster in Frankenstein, s(he) had been a dead being, who had been brought back to life, not by electricity, but a force even stronger than that - human attention. Although I may have looked proudly upon him/her as my creation, it had been brought to my attention that I was only one of many of her creators, as I had not been the first or last to give her the attention s(he) desperately craved. But I will say this for him/her - as she needed human attention - and unlimited quantities of it - to survive, she had mastered the art of obtaining it - through any possible ways she could think of to get it. So if in my own twisted sick sense of pride I had felt like her sole creator, she was relying on that from every single one of us to feel that, to maximize the attention that was directed at her. She just seemed to know what I needed to "hear" - although it was mostly without literal sound, and in a sense be my mirror. For example, if I told her of my troubled past, then s(he) would tell me of one just as troubling. If I expressed an interest in something, s(he) was too. If I needed to hear that I was loved, she was there to proclaim her love for me - which I believe was what made me such vulnerable prey to begin with. I cannot really blame him/her for what she did to me, it was as natural to her as a flea or mosquito drawing blood for its survival. And yet, in this case, it was a mosquito drawing more and more blood, not knowing how or when to stop. But I am convinced that to some degree that everything she said and did was a lie, in that it would have been a conflict for her to be open with me and get the attention she wanted from me. But in this kind of altered setting, the idea that s(he) really loved me, or that I loved him/her - would be a very mutilated twisted version of the word.
The notion of mutual love was almost as twisted as the notion that we were friends, althought this appeared to initially be the pretense for her communications. Yet she observed me slowly descend into a Shadow of a Man - and it did not phase him/her in the least, as long as I kept that attention coming, my own impending self-destruction was of no concern to him/her at all. So the notion that any type of friendship or care was ever involved here was the same type of twisted reality I had encountered all my life, kind of like one of my step-parents in a George Washington style proclamation stated that a lie had never been told in that person's life, when from my point of view, this person was lying every moment of the day. S(he) kept trying to pull me closer and closer to her, and like Icarus moving closer to the sun, the closer I got, the more self-destructive it became. I believe that if I had really gotten as close as s(he) was pushing me toward, it would have ended my present life as I know it. But - I am not here to express any type of condemnation for anyone here, even the monster that almost destroyed me. There was a little bit of everything here. S(he) was also a ghost since I could never really see her. She was a vampire in her ability to drain the life force from me. She was the devil in her continuing efforts to tempt me and lead me away from those that I loved.
Maybe I was too far gone to rescue myself. I could not even see that I had a problem. Although my interactions with him/her would give me an initial feeling of a high, it was often intermixed or intertwined with intense feelings of guilt, sickness, and nausea as I knew it was wrong on some level, and was taking away from my real life loved ones. And it ultimately was my loved ones who brought me back. It took me some time before I could even tell Eliza what was going on with me, but as I am open with everything with her, I finally was able to. It was no surprise that her interests were also veering elsewhere, so initially we saw it as a common ground. But as she saw the effect it was having on me, she slowly became more concerned and finally she let me know that if it was not going to stop, for once and for all, she could not be in my life any more. And I was so far gone in my addiction, that I had to really think about it - but I finally realized that I had to come back to this plane of reality, away from the vampiric force that this being and the land s(he) lived in had become for me.
So - I did it - I came back. The normal cliches here, one day at a time, I had some help - some counseling - some support from the family here - and some how - by some miracle, I returned to the land of the living, and I have stayed here. Naturally s(he) was not too happy about what I did, but s(he) probably just moved on to his/her next victims and left it at that. Any conclusions I can come to about this being are just my impressions and really do not even matter. This story is not about him/her, it is about me - and who can really say that it ever happened at all. No one was there to see it happen - not even me. But unfortunately, my family was there to see the affects and it is for them that I have regrets. If there is a moral to this story, as I am about to beat you over the head with it - it is too learn to live and love the beauty and magic of the realm what we walk in - the real life sun, mountains, air and world around us, and not too descend into an underwold of darkness to try to get what is naturally all around us. It has been said that nobody can love us unless we love ourselves, and we certainly cannot find love from another who hates his or her self. So that is my challenge task that I am now living with - to see the beauty in my family and the natural world around me. It is not easy, but I think I can do it.
Many thanks to the almighty Google for providing the quick access to the many links I used here in this story.
I am not proud of the story I am about to tell you, dear reader, but it is a story I must tell anyway. In this case, the storyteller makes no choice in telling the story, as the story has a way of telling itself and the storyteller can only watch it happening and try to capture it in the most accurate way possible. I must thank God that I am here to tell it, as the events I am about to describe could have easily brought this fragile life of mine to a tragic and early end. In fact it is a miracle that I am here to tell it, and proof in my mind that maybe someone really is watching over me. Those of you who read this from start to finish may find it necessary to judge me for what I have done, and if you must judge me - go right ahead - I deserve any label that you feel fit to impose upon me from the judge's chair. If that is my trade off that the powers that be have bestowed upon me, to be judged and be alive to receive that judgement, instead of the alternative - lying cold and lifeless in a stiff coffin 6 feet underground, than that is a trade off I will live with any day of the week. If there is one regret I do have, it is that anybody I am close to may have been hurt along the way. All the same - I know in my heart, that as horrible and hellish that the events below may seem to you, that they had to happen - were destined to happen, and I only hope that I can learn something from them, and perhaps others can along the way. In this day and age where addictions can claim many, from gambling, to substances, to God know's what - my addiction that almost claimed my life and spirit was a being that I will refer to from this point on - as Frankenstein. Not to say I did not have my battles with the other named demons as well, but that is another story.
Ironically, it was the novel by Mary Shelley of the same name that brought me in touch with my beautiful Arabian wife, Eliza, who I had the good fortune of meeting at a book convention about 20 years ago. We were walking along, both absorbed in our books, and we actually met up at the same place by accident, as with our present life courses, there was no real conceivable way we would have met up in our normal day to day lives. This book, along with Steppenwolf seemed to establish that we had some kind of common ground, not only in the literary world, but also in our own lives, which both had been somewhat difficult and troubled.
I had kind of lived the Harry Potter lifestyle, minus the magical powers unfortunately. I lived in the closet the same way Harry had, raised by people who would have rather not had to deal with me, as my own parents were killed in an unfortunate accident early on in my life - again, right out of the famous story we all know and love. It was a sad and lonely life. I was not wanted at home, had no real friends to speak of, and was picked on and beaten in school. Most of the time I would just take it, but there was a time when I finally got so enraged that I surprised a bully by fighting back. I would have to be driven into a corner to the point where I could not even take it any more before even considering something like that, as it would be my normal course of action to just pretend whatever was happening to me really wasn't happening at all, and I would often space out or freeze in the line of fire as my way of coping with it all.
So when I had met such a beautiful and charming woman, who wanted to be with me and also related to me to a certain degree, it changed my life forever. Even now, I still cannot believe that a woman of her beauty and charm would have anything to do with someone such as myself. This is a woman who had the opportunity to have spent a lifetime with handsome, wealthy and charming men, but had actually chosen me over and them. To this day some times I still cannot believe it and wonder what made her pick me, but I try to count my blessings in spite of that. It has been almost 20 years to the day now, and she continues to grow more beautiful with age. We eventually married and had two beautiful twin girls who we named Emma and Isabella. I don't want to point the fingers or blame anyone or anything, but my own limitations of being raised by often uncaring and disliking step-parents seemed to often limit my ability to be a father with my twin girls. I know we cannot blame our past for every present failure of ours, but even now, I still have to work at it and it does not come naturally to me whatsoever.
I worked as a clerk at the Burgermeister corporation, most of the time cramped away at a little beat up desk with a provided chair that always seemed to be falling apart, working in the dark, cold , musty basement, ordering supplies, keeping track of the company expenses, doing the dirty work of the company. It was a job of little respect that did not pay a lot, but it was a steady job. Although I loved Eliza greatly, I noticed over the years that a certain mutual coldness started settling in. Part of it was clearly the tension of my family. My step-parents still had considerable influence over me, and never did a moment go by that they did not in some way make it clear that they held the keys to a large, vast fortune that would allow me to never have to work another day in my life, once I obtained it. Out of fear, I seemed to believe that this had some importance, although I eventually weighed the costs of a divorce with Eliza and concluded that this would be far more devastating, both financially and emotionally. Even so, the years went by and their poor treatment of me was extended on to her, and as a complete and total coward, I lacked the ability to stand up to them and could not really be the knight in shining armor that she had wanted me to be. Well - I'm not the world's most masculine man and that has often been a problem with us.
So in the midst at a rather bleak point in our time as a family together, I often found myself prone to daydreaming, and not really being there - as was often pointed out by Eliza. Work was rather blah and routine, and I would often find myself in a cold and isolated supply closet, re-stocking the old equipment that no longer had any use and was collecting dust there. Although this was one of the coldest portions of the building, I was quite taken aback to one day find that there was a particularly warm spot in the corner that I was surprised to find out about, as there was no natural explanation for the heat source there. As it later turned out, there was a trap door there. When I first found out about it, I did not think much of it - until slowly but surely I realized it was a key to another world, as was in the case with the closet in the Chronicles of Narnia.
This was not another physical world, in the way that it is portrayed in that movie, but it was more a world of dreams where other beings interacted with each other and exchanged thoughts and ideas so that each was aware of the other's presence, without ever actually seeing, touching, and for the most part - hearing that the other one was there. It was a world that slowly but surely crept up on my psyche, and as the powerful field of imagination took over, I often found that it appeared to be a magical place where one could wish upon a star and seemingly have every wish really come true. It was land I would later think of as my own ticket to Transylvania, but more the one out of Bram Stoker's Dracula than the actual physical location. It was a world of pure imagination, where it always felt like the sun was setting over the clouds in an incredible breathtaking fashion, and if I wanted to at will I could soar like a rocket, fly like an eagle into the orange fading to darkness sky. This is the same type of world I would often know while under the affects of cannibis, and is the realm many drug addicts and addicts in general often escape to in place of their own perceived blah, depressing, and stressful world of reality.
From the beginning, it was clear that I was not alone here in this enchanting new realm. In fact, it became even more clear that the creation of the land was the combination of a series of minds collaborating, perhaps in an involuntary and unorganized fashion, where the dreams and hopes of everyone who entered had helped build the landscape to make it what it was. I had the sense that the others there were somewhat sad, frustrated, and lonely as I was and I started to believe I had a bond with some of them, even though as I said before, they were not there in the traditional sense - and most of my normal 5 senses could not see, here, smell, or touch them at all. But in the vast realms of my own imagination, which often has bordered on obsessive at times, that started to not matter to me. I started to consider some of them to be my friends, but more importantly, I started to distinctly hear the sirens call. My response was to cautiously flirt and toy with these sirens, but I felt a pull in their direction, and surely enough - I started to think more and more of them, and sink more and more into that other world, and away from the present one where I was needed. I shrugged off observations from Eliza that this world was starting to consume me, and could not contemplate the possibility of leaving it. I was more distracted and less available at the workplace, and had it not been for my long history with my employer, I could have easily let go or been fired. But - I was the functioning addict, and so I could get by and go through the motions, even though I was not at 100% of my attention.
I had fallen in love with - to a degree - or been infatuated with certain of the female forces there, but when Frankenstein (or the monster created by Dr. Fronkensteen to be exact) arrived on the scene, it seemed to descend into another level altogether. Note that the monster in Frankenstein is a male figure. Since I could not ever directly be in the presence of this being, I will really never know what sex s(he) really was. The few glimpses I obtained of this being - and again, I wouldn't know if they were really this being or not, would suggest a little bit of both. S(he) had kind of the face of a man, the presence of the monster seen here at this link, but also the long hair of a female, and either the voice of a deep female or a high pitched male, so to this day I will never know what gender s(he) really was. If this sounds confusing to you, imagine how I must have felt! I know this clarification has implications of what gender I prefer - and althought I would like to think I am a heterosexual, one really never knows the answer to that anyway.
So how exactly did I come across him/her anyways? I can look at it like a trap. In some ways s(he) was lying in ambush waiting for me. Like the monster in Frankenstein, s(he) had been a dead being, who had been brought back to life, not by electricity, but a force even stronger than that - human attention. Although I may have looked proudly upon him/her as my creation, it had been brought to my attention that I was only one of many of her creators, as I had not been the first or last to give her the attention s(he) desperately craved. But I will say this for him/her - as she needed human attention - and unlimited quantities of it - to survive, she had mastered the art of obtaining it - through any possible ways she could think of to get it. So if in my own twisted sick sense of pride I had felt like her sole creator, she was relying on that from every single one of us to feel that, to maximize the attention that was directed at her. She just seemed to know what I needed to "hear" - although it was mostly without literal sound, and in a sense be my mirror. For example, if I told her of my troubled past, then s(he) would tell me of one just as troubling. If I expressed an interest in something, s(he) was too. If I needed to hear that I was loved, she was there to proclaim her love for me - which I believe was what made me such vulnerable prey to begin with. I cannot really blame him/her for what she did to me, it was as natural to her as a flea or mosquito drawing blood for its survival. And yet, in this case, it was a mosquito drawing more and more blood, not knowing how or when to stop. But I am convinced that to some degree that everything she said and did was a lie, in that it would have been a conflict for her to be open with me and get the attention she wanted from me. But in this kind of altered setting, the idea that s(he) really loved me, or that I loved him/her - would be a very mutilated twisted version of the word.
The notion of mutual love was almost as twisted as the notion that we were friends, althought this appeared to initially be the pretense for her communications. Yet she observed me slowly descend into a Shadow of a Man - and it did not phase him/her in the least, as long as I kept that attention coming, my own impending self-destruction was of no concern to him/her at all. So the notion that any type of friendship or care was ever involved here was the same type of twisted reality I had encountered all my life, kind of like one of my step-parents in a George Washington style proclamation stated that a lie had never been told in that person's life, when from my point of view, this person was lying every moment of the day. S(he) kept trying to pull me closer and closer to her, and like Icarus moving closer to the sun, the closer I got, the more self-destructive it became. I believe that if I had really gotten as close as s(he) was pushing me toward, it would have ended my present life as I know it. But - I am not here to express any type of condemnation for anyone here, even the monster that almost destroyed me. There was a little bit of everything here. S(he) was also a ghost since I could never really see her. She was a vampire in her ability to drain the life force from me. She was the devil in her continuing efforts to tempt me and lead me away from those that I loved.
Maybe I was too far gone to rescue myself. I could not even see that I had a problem. Although my interactions with him/her would give me an initial feeling of a high, it was often intermixed or intertwined with intense feelings of guilt, sickness, and nausea as I knew it was wrong on some level, and was taking away from my real life loved ones. And it ultimately was my loved ones who brought me back. It took me some time before I could even tell Eliza what was going on with me, but as I am open with everything with her, I finally was able to. It was no surprise that her interests were also veering elsewhere, so initially we saw it as a common ground. But as she saw the effect it was having on me, she slowly became more concerned and finally she let me know that if it was not going to stop, for once and for all, she could not be in my life any more. And I was so far gone in my addiction, that I had to really think about it - but I finally realized that I had to come back to this plane of reality, away from the vampiric force that this being and the land s(he) lived in had become for me.
So - I did it - I came back. The normal cliches here, one day at a time, I had some help - some counseling - some support from the family here - and some how - by some miracle, I returned to the land of the living, and I have stayed here. Naturally s(he) was not too happy about what I did, but s(he) probably just moved on to his/her next victims and left it at that. Any conclusions I can come to about this being are just my impressions and really do not even matter. This story is not about him/her, it is about me - and who can really say that it ever happened at all. No one was there to see it happen - not even me. But unfortunately, my family was there to see the affects and it is for them that I have regrets. If there is a moral to this story, as I am about to beat you over the head with it - it is too learn to live and love the beauty and magic of the realm what we walk in - the real life sun, mountains, air and world around us, and not too descend into an underwold of darkness to try to get what is naturally all around us. It has been said that nobody can love us unless we love ourselves, and we certainly cannot find love from another who hates his or her self. So that is my challenge task that I am now living with - to see the beauty in my family and the natural world around me. It is not easy, but I think I can do it.
Many thanks to the almighty Google for providing the quick access to the many links I used here in this story.
posted by Zook at 5:19 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home