Moonsquaremars - KÝLL

Hard drugs. Hard problems.

Functional + Generational Addiction are hard. Why me, God? Wasn't being gay in the South enough? I didn't fall into the stereotypes. I wasn't a drug addict cliché. No one ever said anything. Why didn't anyone ever say anything?

Kyle. I can see that you are a little fucked up. Or, you look like you had a long night. No one ever said a thing. It turns out because they didn't actually know. Not always. Not even the times I was so sure they did.

222

"a long and difficult cycle will soon be over". That was the tarot card I pulled. It had the moon sign of what the moon would be in on my birthday last year. I saw 222 constantly while I was getting sober.

Well, soberish. Sober-adjacent. Or just drug addict in denial.

But no offense, if you can't tell if I have used, it makes it less desirable to quit. I know the health problems. I know it makes me a bad person. But so did being gay. So why should I care who thinks I'm a bad person or not. I still do though. And it ate me alive for years.

The inner turmoil was the worst of it, come to find out.

Leaving every social interaction wondering if they could tell. If they knew. It started to overshadow everything. Every moment of my day. It was always in the back of my mind. That I had done meth. That I was technically on meth. We all know the stereotypes. But I went to work. I went to school. I paid my bills. I got good grades. I took showers, brushed my teeth. I went to dinners, events, funerals, birthday parties. No one ever said anything. No one ever asked.

But I would read their faces. Their expressions. Any sign or glimpse that they knew my dirty little secret. Any hunch that I was exposed, and that they knew. Oh how terrible it would feel. To be just a dirty drug addict. It truly was Hell. Even worse than being gay.

i’ve never been in a straight relationship. can’t both partners be winners? i feel like relationships always have imbalanced aspects. my ex was internet famous for having a big dick and was solidly upper middle class, but i am conventionally attractive and speak three languages. also 99% of gay relationships don’t work either. i feel like kids are the only thing that keep most marriages together.

I just realized here in the early morning hours that in a straight couple, you are indubitably getting some kind of power struggle where both the man and the woman assume, maybe even subconsciously, that they’re respectively going to be the winners. You could say This is probably why 99% of non-marriage relationships end and 50% of all marriages end in straight folk. It isn’t that most couples HaTe EaCh OtHeR, it is that they have some competition going on in their minds that there exists no rules to.

or were you all in a dream, amelie, amelie? tell me no // i almost lost it, i'll heal eventually. but faster if you're next to me, next to me

Maurice Sapiro (American,b.1932)

Atlantic City, 2018

oil on canvas

— beau taplin

so once me and my wife were watching a documentary where a snake ate like a million eggs. that snake just went to fucking town on eggs. and the snake made the eggs look so good that i kept thinking about it, and thinking about it, and thinking about it, and eventually it was 11pm and i ran out of willpower and decided to eat one (1) singular raw egg just to prove to myself that the snake was surely a liar.

the snake was not a liar. texture is like, super important to me and raw eggs are very Texture so i had another one, and then another one, and then another one, and eventually i ran out of eggs.

i had like, fifteen raw eggs.

i didnt really know how to explain this momentary madness to my wife, so my Plan was to put all the eggshells into a grocey bag, and then throw that grocery bag in the dumpster, and if she never noticed that would be Excellent and if she noticed immediately i could lie and say that the eggs went bad.

except i cant lie very good, and of course with murphys law being such, i got salmonella.

so i threw up a lot and my wife asked me what poisoned me so and i tried very hard to dodge the question but i was oozing shame like oil from a room temperature cheese and eventaully i gave in and told her everything and to her enormous credit she was more flabbergasted than actually upset. she did make me promise to not eat any more raw eggs, which i have stuck to, and she gives me weird looks during nature documentaries now as if desire was the only thing keeping me from eating thousands of pounds of krill anyway i made a joke earlier about being able to eat my age in eggs and my sister in law in law made a drawing to comemorate the moment and also because it was my birthday. she's excellent. thank you 10000000% @cintailed. you should all visit her page and admire her work.

Dark Magician 🪄🪄🪄🪄🪄

My Languages

Part 2

Danish. 

I can’t really say what attiréd me to Dansk. Was it the movie, the Prince and Me, with the fabulous Julia Stiles? One could say that. If you look at life as purely materialistic, and nothing more. But to be quite frank, that movie didn’t make that big of an impression on me, other than the fact that it was my only real exposure to Denmark growing up. I didn’t know any Danes. In Kentucky, where I was raised, there’s not a sizeable scandinavian community. There really is nothing tangibly physical that I could say caused me to become so enamoured with Denmark, Danish, and the nordic region at large. I can’t even quite conceptualize when it began, either. I just recall thinking about all the languages I wanted to learn, and somehow Danish became a priority. 

The spiritual side of me suspects I had a great past life there. Have you ever had a country (or person) you’ve met, and just kind of love or hated for no particular reason? Well, you probably have past life energy there, so the theory goes. So that must be it. Or maybe it’s just all of the aquarius in my natal chart. Scandinavia seems so aquarius. Technologically advanced, intelligent, prosperous. They weren’t always that way, but the region’s history is so rich and fascinating. I feel like I could live in Denmark, Norway, Finland, the Faroe Islands, for a thousand lifetimes. It’s a pity I don’t have any connection to them, yet. 

On the subject of synchronicity, where things just kinda unexpectedly happen but all make sense. Like the fact that my friend’s dad brought up alchemy randomly (I rarely hear about alchemy) then a couple hours later someone else randomly brings it up. Two in one day. It’s kinda like that.

Well, I could go two paths here. Stay on synchronicity, or go back to middle school when my infatuation with Denmark arose. My routine, while living with grandma, was to wake up in the morning, go to the living room. She would make us cinnamon toast, and I would watch TV. When I was younger, I’d then go out and play with neighborhood friends. But this was middle school, and we had drifted apart. I habitually would just browse the computer, while I comfortably sat in the living room, feeling cozy and warm in juxtaposition to the cold, gloomy, winter weather outside. Reading about Danish culture, and specifically the alcoholism, made me feel so warm and /excited/. Just reading aout Denmark and how people would get hammered and throw up on the city streets, riding their bikes. Gee. I was like, this is amazing! I wanna live there. Maybe that’s where my alcoholism started?

Well I suppose maybe that was just it. I just saw a movie about a Danish prince, then stumbled upon random internet information and the rest is history. Well, not quite. After I had a deeply profound conversion to Mormonism, I ran away from home to Utah. I met a homeless man there in temple square, and I of course was heaily mormon and set on the church being true and not open to other spiritual thought, but obviously still exposed to it. Well this homeless man and I were talking, and he told me about some experience he had where he was speaking in tongues and the people he was with said that he was speaking Old Danish. Well what are the odds that I run away from home, strike up a conversation with this random homeless man, and he mentions having a spiritual experience where he spoke a language only a few million people know out of billions. Maybe it’s not that unique, maybe he was speaking gibberish, and some returned missionary with decent exposure to northern european germanic languages got the impression he was making Old Danish noises. I don’t quite recall the details, but I will entertain the skeptics. 

Regardless, maybe we had a past life connection. I haven’t seen or talked to that homeless man since, but I always think about that when I think about Denmark now. And I have been able to study Danish. It’s one of my favorite things to do. I wish I had more time and more use for it. I could say rød grød med fløde for hours. I could die in Copenhagen a happy man. A happy, drunk, alcoholic man, with all of my hygge and the cosmopolitan amenities europe has to offer. 

Alas, I really do have no use for the language. No one shares my passion, and I have other things to worry about. It will always pique my interest though when Denmark or scandinavia is mentioned. Maybe one day I’ll get to at least visit the country, maybe that will give me some kind of closure. I will end by reflecting on one of the happier nights of my most recent life. It was a chilly night, I was dating Craig, a man much older than I who I wasn’t particularly attracted to in the romantic sense (was I?), but he made me feel comfortable. So comfortable, and loved. He fell asleep on the couch like usual, and I stayed up watching the tele. This time I was down the rabit hole of watching youtube videos about scandinavian history. I pranced around the house while he slept, eating these oriental flavored pretzel things from costco that were quite good, and just felt so in awe and in love with life. Soaking up the atmosphere and that warm cozy feeling that comes with being under the same roof of someone you love and trust on a moonlit, frosty night. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that. And now I recall a similar feeling, with my high school boyfriend Andrew. It was a similar relationship. I had little romantic and sexual interest, but like Craig, Andrew was quite pushy and kind of coerced me into the relationship. And I got comfortable. We had spent the evening walking down Frankfort avenue, eating sushi at my favorite restaurant, Osaka, then stopped in a mom and pop catholic bookstore. They impressed me with their language selection, which is always the first section I go to in any library or bookstore. There was a book on Dutch and Finnish that I was torn between, but I ended up getting the some decades old Teach Yourself Finnish book. I ended the night up in his attic bedroom in his charming old home. I popped some hydrocodones, and as he slept I taught myself Finnish while the warmth of the opiates spread throughout my body. I was happy. Genuinely.