Late Happenage

Recently I discovered HARD Radio. It is one of a number of sites which provide an internet-based service: In this case, music to bang heads to; one's own or someone else's, they don't specify.

Perhaps that's why I'm recovering something ... not sure what. My skin feels three sizes too small. My brain feels as though it's pulsating ... and no, I haven't smoked anything at all for far too long entirely. But to give you an example:

You know my writing style, O Avid Fan. I'm fairly direct, usually; try to lead from A to B in a straight-ish line, assuming that's part of the plan. So here's the bio I didn't post on one of those social networking sites that I recently joined:

Upon my release from high school on an unsuspecting world, I drifted happily into the company of drunks and murderers, all good people, where I spent many pleasant years in an atmosphere of collegial violence and casual cruelty.

Following my realization that I never really belonged there I went on the road, hauling dangerous and unproven machines to mysterious destinations for no known purpose. The sounds of my engines were like terrible music, and faint screams at the edge of hearing drifted after me along the yellow light of the wet, slickened highways.

After the amnesia and the fugue that followed I discovered myself in engineering, where I was devastated to learn that I didn't have enough numbers.

But I had words by the billions.

So I went to school to sharpen my pencil against the rhetoric of the masters. I became able to slay weak arguments and false premises with the gentlest twitch of the nib. I can kill fear with the rightly-placed words. My red, blue, and green pens are known and feared where mis-spelt words and rogue apostrophes dwell. Now I spend much of my time documenting the final moments of those unfortunates whose last words were "Oh $#!7!"

But I have yet another chance to break free. The rime, salt, and calcine on my brain is flaking off in patches. For the first time in decades the monster stirs and sighs, twitching fitfully in its sleep. Words cascade off the steely scales of its back and puddle on the floor where I can assemble them into coherence of a sort. I heft my knife--to open the correct vein is tricky, the beast must not be slain, nor again buried.

Exactly. Almost adolescent in its purpleness, no?

And yet, for no good reason, I kinda like it ... I feel as though there's another string on my mental guitar again, as though I were excavating something important.

It's fragile and to most of the world it is, and it should properly be, insignificant.

But dammit, it's mine. And may the gods help anyone who tries to get it from me, or tries to prevent me from retrieving it. Because whatever this is, divine madness or second adolescence, I want, need some of it, at least a little.

I have vague memories of being a teenager. Maybe this is what it was like. It's as though I've been handed the key to a vehicle in a darkened garage. Perhaps it'll be something harmless like my little Yamaha U7e, or maybe it'll turn out to be ... something far bigger, darker and more dangerous.