12/27/11
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, 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 had 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 taking the easy way out time and time again.
I returned home with a sliver of understanding, a glimmer of light piercing the darkness 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 un-characteristically 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 soul 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 that I had 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 come together? I tried my best to write things as they happened, emailing reports from drunken nights at strange girls' apartments or while running amuck 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 a fantasy made of science. My career dreams were dashed during writing class as I saw the best case scenario was to be a hustling scholar as in the case of my burnt 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, trying to name names while making them iconic figures, dragging it out for as long as I could because I didn't know what would happen when it ended. I gave it a happy ending prologue, but as I finally tried to end my life just a few chapters from finishing, someone, a friend, intervened and stopped me. They didn't save me, but I thought falling in love had.
After giving in to my suicidal feelings after the better part of a decade, finally I gave up on trying to end my life and tried to begin again. 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 channelling emotional surges into destructive impulses. The relief when a sharp object caressed my wrist. Then that's when I saw it. I was the problem, 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 a mentally 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.
This is all I know. Now, read it and make a plan goddammit.
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