I live at the speed of my mind and I love with the strength of my heart. I am happier than I've ever been. But only because I know where I have been.

The thing about wrath is you have to know your buttons and who has got their grimy mitts on them. For instance, I hate driving in L.A. because I hit people. I do not mean I hit them in their cars. I mean I hit their bodies with the car I happen to be driving. This is not my fault. The residents of Los Angeles plod across streets and around corners like they are (again) either looking for addresses or waiting to be touched by actual angels. You can blame the Pedestrian Right of Way Law in California. These fucking idiots just trot out into the middle of the god-damn street, so they are begging to be weeded out of the fucking gene pool. Because of this, I have officially hit forty-seven people in almost as many cars. Don't worry, I will not be arrested because as a rule I wear a fake moustache when I drive anywhere, in any city.

“Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.”

- Christopher Hitchens

A take on my old school

“When I got back home in my demob suit, Colin made me get rid of my pets as a punishment. I was only allowed to keep one gerbil. I swallowed this predictable piece of petty cruelty down into the ol’ hate factory. Somehow those boffins at Hockerill, who I’d so fastidiously despised, had managed to give me quite a good education. I suppose I was trapped there and forced to learn. From then on, I could define myself as being cleverer than everyone else. When I went back to Grey’s school - which was just the normal comprehensive which most of the kids I’d known at primary school had gone to - no one seemed to know what the fuck was going on with anything. I thought: “Hang on, these people are idiots.” And this instinctive humility would stand me in good stead throughout the years of academic underachievement that streched ahead of me.”

- from Russel Brand’s autobiography “My Booky Wook”

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

'Cause nothing lasts forever, and we both know hearts can change.
And it's hard to hold a candle, in the cold November rain.

How To Live Your Life Like It's A Bret Easton Ellis Novel by Ryan O'Connell

 Care a lot about freeways and restaurants and streets. It’s important to note that you took Fountain instead of Sunset to meet your drug dealer because Sunset is usually a nightmare and makes you anxious. Only live in Los Angeles or New York. You can take a break to attend a liberal arts school in the middle of nowhere but you’ll move back right when you graduate because there’ll be nothing to do and you get bored too easily. You’re bored right now.
Follow the script of a typical bourgeois kid. Grow up in Los Angeles and go to some private school on the Westside or the Valley. Maybe you went to Archer or Crossroads or New Roads or Harvard-Westlake or Buckley or maybe even Hamilton, even though it’s public and ew. Become friends with the big bad jerks of Los Angeles who have silver spoons dangling from their mouths and Rich People Names like Olivia and Muffy and Harrison. Decide early on that you won’t care about anything ever. Caring about things must mean you’re poor or something and you’re super rich so why would you ever feel anything besides boredom and disinterest? Every time you spend a dollar, you become more dead inside. Cha-ching = dead. How many soul points did that eight ball of coke cost you? OMG, coke!
Talk about food a lot and where you’re eating it. You’re always eating at Spago with your dad unless you’re eating at Dominick’s or Il Cielo with Stella who you may or may not be in love with. It’s hard to tell because you just don’t care. Who’s Stella? Where’s my drink?
Other things you don’t care about: Whether someone has a penis or a vagina. You’re sort of gay and will sleep with whoever. Chad, Clay, Chrissy, Samantha, and Thomas might as well be the same person because you are so numb. Caring about gender is not only complete BS (fRee SpiRIt), it also would require you to have feelings about something, which is not allowed. Just say NO to having an opinion.
Everyone around you seems to be crazier than you are. Watch your 14-year-old sister snort your mother’s Adderall in the pool house and talk about this guy she’s sleeping with. C-R-A-Z-Y. Someone should get her help…somewhere…somehow.
somewhere
somehow
somewhere
somehow
Repeat this over and over and think you’re having some sort of breakthrough. Maybe you’re experiencing a feeling? You’re not sure. Wait, maybe the valet guy has your feelings. You’ll ask. “Sir, do you have my—” You trail off, exhausted, and just get into the car.
Have this mild sense of awareness that everything and everyone around you is messed up. Go to your friend’s house and find them watching kiddie porn. Think to yourself that this is wrong but get fatigued at the idea of saying something. Sit down and take a ValiumXanaxVicodinOxyKlonopinAmbien with this person and watch the kiddie porn with them. Kiddie porn is really screwed up but also, like, NBD.
This how you live the life of Bret Easton Ellis. Go to lunch with someone and barely speak. Leave lunch and wait until you go to dinner. The three hours you have between dinner reservations will give you serious anxiety and you will have to just drive on the freeway to deal with it. Just be desensitized to everything going around you. Always make sure you look fabulous. All the time you would ordinarily spend on cultivating a personality, you use for grooming. A well-groomed person always gives the impression that they care. It’s a great trick.
Oh, and kill people sometimes if you’re stressed out and can’t get into Barcadia.

“Life is full of choices, if you have the guts to go for it. That's why I get immediately bored with anyone's complaining about how boring their life is, or how bad their town is. Fucking leave and go somewhere else. Or don't.”

21

"They do live more in earnest, more in themselves, and less in surface change, and frivolous external things. I could fancy a love for life here almost possible; and I was a fixed unbeliever in any love of a year's standing. One state resembles setting a hungry man down to a single dish, on which he may concentrate his entire appetite and do it justice; the other, introducing him to a table laid out by French cooks: he can perhaps extract as much enjoyment from the whole; but each part is a mere atom in his regard and remembrance."

Romeo and Juliet, act two, scene four

These violent delights have violent ends

And in their triumph die, like fire and powder

Which as they kiss, consume

Voodoo Girl by Tim Burton

Her skin is white cloth,
and she's all sewn apart
and she has many coloured pins
sticking out of her heart.

She has many different zombies
who are deeply in her trance.
She even has a zombie
who was originally from France.

But she knows she has a curse on her,
a curse she cannot win.
For if someone gets
too close to her
the pins stick farther in.

Stay beautiful, keep it ugly

This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.

Gary Provost

The key to intoxication is the THC. Tetra hydro cannon ball. Turtle hyper-cannibal. Turkey harpo can of balls. *checks wikipedia* Tetrahydrocannabinol. Scientists believe the psychoactive properties of THC are a defense mechanism for the cannabis plant. A herbivore takes a little bite, trips balls, and decides to eat other plants in the future. I imagine eucalyptus had the same idea, but didn’t count on koalas being major stoners.

“The Green Goblin made a My Chemical Romance reference, in a Marvel comic. Somebody was like complaining, and Norman Osborn, who is the Green Goblin, he goes: “Oh, is this where you’re supposed to break into a chorus of I’m Not Okay?” The Green Goblin! Dropped a song reference?! It blew my mind, I threw the comic across the room!”

- Mikey Way

Columbine: Whose fault is it?

It is sad to think that the first few people on earth needed no books, movies, games or music to inspire cold-blooded murder. The day that Cain bashed his brother Abel’s brains in, the only motivation he needed was his own human disposition to violence. Whether you interpret the Bible as literature or as the final word of whatever God may be, Christianity has given us an image of death and sexuality that we have based our culture around. A half-naked dead man hangs in most homes and around our necks, and we have just taken that for granted all our lives. Is it a symbol of hope or hopelessness? The world’s most famous murder-suicide was also the birth of the death icon — the blueprint for celebrity. Unfortunately, for all of their inspiring morality, nowhere in the Gospels is intelligence praised as a virtue.

A lot of people forget or never realize that I started my band as a criticism of these very issues of despair and hypocrisy. The name Marilyn Manson has never celebrated the sad fact that America puts killers on the cover of Time magazine, giving them as much notoriety as our favorite movie stars. From Jesse James to Charles Manson, the media, since their inception, have turned criminals into folk heroes. They just created two new ones when they plastered those dipshits Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris’ pictures on the front of every newspaper. Don’t be surprised if every kid who gets pushed around has two new idols.

We applaud the creation of a bomb whose sole purpose is to destroy all of mankind, and we grow up watching our president’s brains splattered all over Texas. Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised. Does anyone think the Civil War was the least bit civil? If television had existed, you could be sure they would have been there to cover it, or maybe even participate in it, like their violent car chase of Princess Di. Disgusting vultures looking for corpses, exploiting, fucking, filming and serving it up for our hungry appetites in a gluttonous display of endless human stupidity.

When it comes down to who’s to blame for the high school murders in Littleton, Colorado, throw a rock and you’ll hit someone who’s guilty. We’re the people who sit back and tolerate children owning guns, and we’re the ones who tune in and watch the up-to-the-minute details of what they do with them. I think it’s terrible when anyone dies, especially if it is someone you know and love. But what is more offensive is that when these tragedies happen, most people don’t really care any more than they would about the season finale of Friends or The Real World. I was dumbfounded as I watched the media snake right in, not missing a teardrop, interviewing the parents of dead children, televising the funerals. Then came the witch hunt.

Man’s greatest fear is chaos. It was unthinkable that these kids did not have a simple black-and-white reason for their actions. And so a scapegoat was needed. I remember hearing the initial reports from Littleton, that Harris and Klebold were wearing makeup and were dressed like Marilyn Manson, whom they obviously must worship, since they were dressed in black. Of course, speculation snowballed into making me the poster boy for everything that is bad in the world. These two idiots weren’t wearing makeup, and they weren’t dressed like me or like goths. Since Middle America has not heard of the music they did listen to (KMFDM and Rammstein, among others), the media picked something they thought was similar.

Responsible journalists have reported with less publicity that Harris and Klebold were not Marilyn Manson fans — that they even disliked my music. Even if they were fans, that gives them no excuse, nor does it mean that music is to blame. Did we look for James Huberty’s inspiration when he gunned down people at McDonald’s? What did Timothy McVeigh like to watch? What about David Koresh, Jim Jones? Do you think entertainment inspired Kip Kinkel, or should we blame the fact that his father bought him the guns he used in the Springfield, Oregon, murders? What inspires Bill Clinton to blow people up in Kosovo? Was it something that Monica Lewinsky said to him? Isn’t killing just killing, regardless if it’s in Vietnam or Jonesboro, Arkansas? Why do we justify one, just because it seems to be for the right reasons? Should there ever be a right reason? If a kid is old enough to drive a car or buy a gun, isn’t he old enough to be held personally responsible for what he does with his car or gun? Or if he’s a teenager, should someone else be blamed because he isn’t as enlightened as an eighteen-year-old?

America loves to find an icon to hang its guilt on. But, admittedly, I have assumed the role of Antichrist; I am the Nineties voice of individuality, and people tend to associate anyone who looks and behaves differently with illegal or immoral activity. Deep down, most adults hate people who go against the grain. It’s comical that people are naive enough to have forgotten Elvis, Jim Morrison and Ozzy so quickly. All of them were subjected to the same age-old arguments, scrutiny and prejudice. I wrote a song called “Lunchbox,” and some journalists have interpreted it as a song about guns. Ironically, the song is about being picked on and fighting back with my Kiss lunch box, which I used as a weapon on the playground. In 1979, metal lunch boxes were banned because they were considered dangerous weapons in the hands of delinquents. I also wrote a song called “Get Your Gunn.” The title is spelled with two n’s because the song was a reaction to the murder of Dr. David Gunn, who was killed in Florida by pro-life activists while I was living there. That was the ultimate hypocrisy I witnessed growing up: that these people killed someone in the name of being “pro-life.”

The somewhat positive messages of these songs are usually the ones that sensationalists misinterpret as promoting the very things I am decrying. Right now, everyone is thinking of how they can prevent things like Littleton. How do you prevent AIDS, world war, depression, car crashes? We live in a free country, but with that freedom there is a burden of personal responsibility. Rather than teaching a child what is moral and immoral, right and wrong, we first and foremost can establish what the laws that govern us are. You can always escape hell by not believing in it, but you cannot escape death and you cannot escape prison.

It is no wonder that kids are growing up more cynical; they have a lot of information in front of them. They can see that they are living in a world that’s made of bullshit. In the past, there was always the idea that you could turn and run and start something better. But now America has become one big mall, and because of the Internet and all of the technology we have, there’s nowhere to run. People are the same everywhere. Sometimes music, movies and books are the only things that let us feel like someone else feels like we do. I’ve always tried to let people know it’s OK, or better, if you don’t fit into the program. Use your imagination — if some geek from Ohio can become something, why can’t anyone else with the willpower and creativity?

I chose not to jump into the media frenzy and defend myself, though I was begged to be on every single TV show in existence. I didn’t want to contribute to these fame-seeking journalists and opportunists looking to fill their churches or to get elected because of their self-righteous finger-pointing. They want to blame entertainment? Isn’t religion the first real entertainment? People dress up in costumes, sing songs and dedicate themselves in eternal fandom. Everyone will agree that nothing was more entertaining than Clinton shooting off his prick and then his bombs in true political form. And the news — that’s obvious. So is entertainment to blame? I’d like media commentators to ask themselves, because their coverage of the event was some of the most gruesome entertainment any of us have seen.

I think that the National Rifle Association is far too powerful to take on, so most people choose Doom, The Basketball Diaries or yours truly. This kind of controversy does not help me sell records or tickets, and I wouldn’t want it to. I’m a controversial artist, one who dares to have an opinion and bothers to create music and videos that challenge people’s ideas in a world that is watered-down and hollow. In my work I examine the America we live in, and I’ve always tried to show people that the devil we blame our atrocities on is really just each one of us. So don’t expect the end of the world to come one day out of the blue — it’s been happening every day for a long time.

- MARILYN MANSON (May 28, 1999).

Psychological Colour Quiz

Your Existing Situation
Needs peace and quiet. Desires a close and faithful partner from whom to demand special consideration and unquestioning affection. If these requirements are not met, is liable to turn away and withdraw altogether.

Your Stress Sources
Has an unsatisfied need to ally herself with others whose standards are as high as her own, and to stand out from the rank and file. This subjects her to considerable stress, but she sticks to her attitudes despite lack of appreciation. Finds the situation uncomfortable and would like to break away from it, but refuses to compromise with her opinions. Unable to resolve the situation because she continually postpones making the necessary decision as she doubts her ability to withstand the opposition which would result. Needs the esteem of others, compliance with her wishes, and respect for her opinions before she can feel at ease and secure.

Your Restrained Characteristics
Trying to calm down and unwind after a period of over-agitation which has left her listless and devoid of energy. In need of peace and quiet; becomes irritable if this is denied him.
Willing to become emotionally involved, but demanding and particular in her choice of a partner and in her relations with those close to her. Needs reassurance and is careful to avoid open conflict since this might reduce her prospects of realizing her hopes.

Your Desired Objective
Has an imperative need for some bond or fusion with another which will prove sensually fulfilling, but which will not conflict with her convictions or sense of fitness.

Your Actual Problem
Greatly impressed by the unique, by originality, and by individuals of outstanding characteristics. Tries to emulate the characteristics she admires and to display originality in her own personality

Your Actual Problem #2
The tensions induced by trying to cope with conditions which are really beyond her capabilities, or reserves of strength, have led to considerable anxiety and a sense of personal (but unadmitted) inadequacy. She attempts to escape into a substitute world in which things are more nearly as she desires them to be.

Rebecca Black is obviously the new Beatles

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

- "Nothing Gold Can Stay" by Robert Frost

Slaughterhouse 5

"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the mountains are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes.""

- "Slaughterhouse 5" by Kurt Vonnegut

Black shadow of the Vincent falls on a Triumph line,
I got my motorcycle jacket but I’m walking all the time.

- The Clash

The Riddle of Strider

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king."

"Somewhere someone is thinking of you. Someone is calling you an angel. This person is using celestial colors to paint your image. Someone is making you into a vision so beautiful that it can only live in the mind. Someone is thinking of the way your breath escapes your lips when you are touched. How your eyes close and your jaw tightens with concentration as you give pleasure a home. These thoughts are saving a life somewhere right now. In some airless apartment on a dark, urine stained, whore lined street, someone is calling out to you silently and you are answering without even being there. So crystalline. So pure. Such life saving power when you smile. You will never know how you have cauterized my wounds. So sad that we will never touch. How it hurts me to know that I will never be able to give you everything I have."

-Henry Rollins

Alexander McQueen