My name, is Charles Crown. I wrote a book. I reluctantly describe it as a novel for the adventures contained within those pages actually happened, despite what physical evidence tells me.
I ran away from my old life. I had been trapped in a relationship where I humiliated myself into staying. I saw it as a prison, though I knew it was of my own creation. On the inside I got strong enough until I was prepared to begin to type. And once I did start, I could never stop. I'll be writing away my whole life, checking over my shoulder to see what's coming after me.
But no one did come after me as I tore off in my sports car, driving from rest stop to rest stop, but never resting. Losing contact with those around me, as if I had ever possessed that ability before. Had I gone mad? Was I enlightened but not initiated? I did activate myself with experimental films, ambient music, organic highs, tossed into a chaos magick stew.
I had become unhinged, wandering the highways, seeking myself through losing myself. It made some things make sense as I wrote chapter after chapter, emailing the text from my smartphone. But I also felt angry. At my girlfriend for shattering my self worth, my father for corrupting my mind, and all of mankind for continuously taking the easy way out time and time again.
I returned home with a sliver of understanding, a glimmer of light piercing the darkness of depression cast over me. Things felt different, less constricting, ideas formed making everything more malleable. After spending a few weeks training, I went to California for the first time. When I returned I found I was defeated in the most liberating manner.
Whatever it was that I wanted to do with myself, well it didn't matter, my writing didn't matter, except somehow it now mattered more. The words I put down and sent off into a collection of electronic data, they changed me, and therefore all of life around me. Scenes with dramatic discourse began serendipitously appearing all around me and so I ran off to the big city.
That's when I saw that the whole game was rigged, that the prison of my former suburban, office-drone existence was greater than I ever dreamed. Every interaction was planned and purposefully laid before me beneath the giant gray dome that they were selling me as my great escape. I just went from one lockdown to another trap.
This is probably the time where I lost my mind, but I'll never know for sure. The first year of my life in NYC was spent in a perpetual blacked-out state of unconsciousness. Photos show me face down on the pavement, stories of me saying uncharistic insane things, the random and chaotic scrawls on paperbacks told me what I should have guessed.
I created two personalities for my new life, a duo that would come and save me when my being was in peril, or when my life was stagnant. Dark obsession and carnal desire consumed me as I leaned on Agent Spider's sinister direction. But the other one, he was me, or I was him, and neither one of us knew what to do. Agent Fenris was born.
A thinly veiled auto-biographical character and the author himself, sitting and waiting for some purpose or direction. In their dialogue a path was laid bare and they walked it, talking to myself all the while. I writhed in pain, desensitized my overly emotional core as Spider, the poisoned and venomous aspect of my personality lashed out, wrecking and smashing with total abandon, embracing morality-free life...for both, I mean, all of us.
Until I, as Fenris, grabbed the reins and tried to be the gentleman, the lost soul boy poet I knew was the real me underneath it all. But the conflict brought with it intense feelings of bitterness and guilt, two things that were never meant to be brought to a boil next to one another. We went truly into the dark cave and tried never to leave the apartment.
I created another character, taking a page from the failed college screenplay I pulled Fenris and Spider from, and introduced their adversary, Gallows. He was power and influence, a potential publisher or death incarnate. I was writing a novel it seemed, but how did it begin? I tried my best to write things as they happened, emailing reports from late nights at strange girls' apartments, or while running amuck drunkenly in the streets. Was someone compiling this madness?
I read it. It was the basis of a book it seemed, even if it was all over the place with poetic prose, essay disseminations of social interactivity, or mad violent action segues. I wrote this? It was heavy, and yet light-hearted. It was exactly the kind of frenetic energy I wanted from a book.
So I took some classes at New School. Read classic literature, crafted some specific chapters, and hung out with fellow writers. It was weird. I was so happy out of (what I thought) was my element. Peers, practice, accomplishment. Who was I? Wasn't I just the old loser from Long Island still? I'd flash back to that guy and sit in shock at where I was as I entered my thirties.
I began to flounder. Nothing was adding up suddenly. I was hitting another wall and so I destroyed it with the weapon I knew best: complete utter fucking chaos. My heart was broken while studying Descartes, she was made of science. My dreams were dashed during writing class as I saw a best case scenario hustling scholar in my burn-out teacher.
My novel was seeming to be borderline incoherent. I must have had something wrong with me, or maybe it'll always be off. Nothing made sense anymore. My new liberating life had just led me to desperate loneliness. I realized that my entire reason for being was to connect to someone, quite literally, anyone. For if I could pull that off, then all hope for me was not lost.
I wrote the end of the novel, dragging it out for as long as I could, trying to name names while making them iconic figures, and because I didn't know what would happen, I gave it a happy ending epilogue. I finally did try to end my life just a few chapters from finishing when someone, a friend, intervened and stopped me. They didn't save me, but I thought falling in love had.
After giving in to the suicidal feelings I'd lived with for the better part of a decade, finally I gave up on trying to end my life. I wanted to live, to love, to know myself. Then she came into my life and everything made sense. Jasmine 'Jazz' Jones was everything I wasn't, which began to feel like she was all the good in the world personified. I basked in her glow and my life was enriched beyond my previous dreams.
Enter the chaos. The addiction to channeling emotional surges into destructive impulses. The relief when a sharp object caressed my wrist. Then that's when I saw it. I was the enemy, I was the prison, I was the hate and the love, Fenris and Spider, and yet, in all brutal honesty I am none of those things. I knew myself as the one true enemy.
A fucked up child of teenage parents, lost in his own head since day one, snared in a dog's clenched jaw at two years old, dead for three minutes at age four. Son of an alcoholic and an emotionally abused mother. A disconnected symbiont assimilating social culture. Words popped in the head easily enough that it garnered attention, which felt good, like I imagined love to feel like.
So I wrote and worked out that the big bad is me all along. I loosely used two archetypes to battle it out to end the world. And so they did. My world is ended once more. A crack in space and time has separated me from Jazz, the woman I love. Do I have the strength to fight, rather than run from cell to cell? With words it all should be possible.
That's all I know. Now, read this and make a plan goddammit.
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