THE TATTOO MAGAZINE PRICK HAS POSTED A FEATURE ON JS. HERE’S A LITTLE OF WHAT THEY HAD TO SAY:
“Enter “Narsica: Our Lady of Ashes,” the tale of a man’s love and hate for a teenaged prostitute and drug addict who blows into his world like an unexpected ocean storm on an otherwise calm day of sailing. With his lust for the open road, robust adventures, and thrill for the untamed life, Shaw is the closest thing we have to Kerouac in this modern day and age.”
Narcisa left me feeling the sting of a brass-knuckled hook to the jaw. The pain comes on like a storm. But masterfully. At the precise point I can’t bear any more, it tackles me with a beautiful kiss. It’s a winderful feeling of pain and beauty that screams and sings to me at the same time.
-Bryan Ray Turcotte (Author of Fucked Up and Photocopied and Punk Is Dead: Punk is Everything)
This is what life has put on my plate today… And it isn’t so bad, all things considered!
In fact, it’s great.
Now its three o’clock in the afternoon, and with the usual clockwork precision of her bizarre timing she’s just woken me up. Just as I finally got to sleep.
Shit.
We had a listless, terrible fuck where she watched cartoons on TV and groaned impatiently telling me to hurry up. Then she went to get her fucking stash of crack.
Now that she’s had her medicine, of course she seems to be in a much better mood. Of course.
When I dropped her off at noon, I even grabbed her pussy as she got off the bike and said, “go have fun and warm up the chicken pie, cuz ill be back soon and ill be hungry.”
I noticed an extra little twitch in her perky chicken tail as she wiggled it off down the road to damnation…
Now we’re sitting back together on my veranda looking out over the city and the bay. She’s rooted a book of Henry Miller out of my bag and she’s reading out loud in English, not making the least bit of sense. But the tone of her voice itself has made my dick hard again in anticipation of a much better fuck than the morning chore.
That had at least gotten her off her lazy ass, even if it was only to go smoke more crack and start the whole viscious cycle of her life over again.
The work of an Eternal Muse is never done, and now she’s up juggling coca cola bottles on the little veranda.
She’s doing pretty good, so far. She hasn’t bopped either of us in the head, and that’s a bit of progress from a coupla weeks ago I’d say.
One of her big dreams is to join the circus - there’s a bit in my book “Our Lady of Ashes” about taking her to join the circus, which is neither here or there…
Narcisa is a walking talking three ring circus, or more like a psychic freak show.
Yesterday she got into a fight with a vulture that landed on the roof of the Casa Verde while she was up in the attic smoking.
I didn’t ask her for details of the skirmish and of course none were forthcoming.
She told me she chased the bastard off, representing her percieved or real impending death, and that was all I needed to know, I guess. When I prodded her for details, all she said was, “That’s why I love to e’smoke. Because it kills my memory, Cigano. Got it?”
I got it.
I didn’t ask her for any more details. Its just as well, I suppose..I like to make up my own details anyway. Between my own paranormal imagination, and her surreal reality, it all makes for a pretty interesting existence.
Sometimes I feel like I can read her past and her whole life story, receiving crucial nonverbal information and impressions with my dick’s inner antenna while I’m fucking her.
It’s an interesting, if sometimes terrifying game for sure, and often quite enlightening. And stimulating for us both, I like to think.
But it could all just be a figment of my own warped, LSD-spiked imagination.
Narcisa, with all her staggering ‘true-life’ accounts, the marathon fucking and endless battles of will, seen through the distorted psychedelic lens of the crack she smokes… The danger, the vultures, the Dakini dance hell-fire coke bottle juggling, the battle scars and bruises and tattoos and abrasions on my battered hide and my soul… the book, her shadowy midnight declarations and apocolyptic prophecies, and all the abstract poetry of her insane twisted existence and quasi-mythical life story and unrelenting death wish… all of it.
What the fuck?
It seems like it’s always been this way for me… all my life, one big, long, surreal delirium dream, or nightmare. And I guess its the same for her too.
So it’s no wonder that we’ve somehow found each other and come together for whatever this foggy hallucinatory journey is taking us, along a polluted tributary of the big, long cosmic stream.
She is my acid queen, my mirror image cosmic fishbowl cross to bear or to burn.
And, just for today, I have no argument with any of it.
Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.
NOTIFIÇAO: Os eventos relatados neste site são contos de ficção - registrados na Biblioteca Nacional como ficção com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor, Jonathan Shaw. Os personagens mencionados são interamente ficticios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa viva ou morta se trata de pura coincidência.As vários fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.
So it’s been brought to my attention, for the umpteenth time, that I am a horrific editor. If Helen Keller were asked to edit Mirriam Webster’s… it would look something like the job I do on a daily basis. But that is not the point.
Here’s a little story, to keep you busy while I figure out my point.
Back when I was a skinny little junkie of eighteen, I found myself in Hollywood, California, puking up blood in a gutter on the corner of Sunset and Vermont.
Suddenly I was startled by the engine of a motorcycle. I lifted my head and wiped my mouth only to see the enigmatic and intimidating Jonathan Shaw, looking down at me with hearts in his eyes from a smoking two wheeled gypsy perch.
“Hey little girl, wanna go for a ride?” He asked me. (I’m pretty sure those were the exact words…) Then he handed me a tiny battered “bitch” helmet.
“Sure” I burped.
He took me to a little barbecue joint on Cahuenga Blvd where we sat for about two hours and he asked me what I was doing with my life.
“I’m an editor” I told him with stars in my dope-pinned eyes.
It was not a lie, it was just the only answer I could come up with in my brain which had at that point been poisoned and roasted and toasted and burned out several times over. Plus, I’d like to think the question was a completely unnecessary means of creating “friendly conversation”, due to the fact that I was clearly insane, I weighed about 35 pounds soaking wet, had jaundice, staph infections, crack sores and reeked of detoxification.
I was not doing anything with my life, besides destroying what was left of it.
“Well, good,” he said.
Then he handed me 300 dollars and a little manuscript called Scardust, which you will all be very familiar with in the not too far off future, if the world continues to exist for another few years, which it might not at this rate because I crashed my car. What time is it.
Anyway, he asked me to look this manuscript over for him and I said yes and then he asked me to move in with him in his lonely Hollywood penthouse to which I also said yes, since my boyfriend had locked me out of our apartment.
This 6 month period was split between Los Angeles, Rio De Janeiro, and New York City, trembling under Jonathan’s greasy black wing, during which time I flirted with the following possible career opportunities (in no particular order):
Painter, Tattoo Artist, Prostitute, Jet Setter, Egg Donor, Drug Counselor, Drug, Dealer, Drug Addict, DJ, Fashion Designer, Indentured Servant, Waitress, Phone Answerer, Suicide Girl, Chef, Insomniac, Mental Patient, Serial Killer, Serial Domestic Abuser, Poet, Psychologist, Philosopher…
Until one day… Finally… After much adue… Jonathan Shaw grew tired of my squirrelly behavior, put a notebook, a pen and a coconut in my hand, and left me sitting on a beach in Rio de Janeiro for ten hours.
The rest is history.
Here is the abridged version…
While Jonathan began his ongoing battle with a disease I like to call Narcisa, I returned to Los Angeles to “brainstorm” on the “future” of Jonathan’s massive memoir project, Scabvendor: - Confessions of a Tattoo Artist.
Soon enough, that veered off into Narcisa: Our Lady of Ashes which Jonathan played around with for three months until Heartworm Press having heard of it through some putrid underground grapevine, came along, unsolicited, and took it off his bleeding hands…
I then started a website called Scabvendor.com, a place for Jonathan and I to share Narcisa and the rest of his wacked-out life and times with other sick fucks like you, a safe haven for us to ruminate on all the cunts that torment our charmed existence and so, so much more.
The unabridged version will be available on my Wikipedia, someday…
The point is… I’m not an editor.
Right now I am a sleepy blogger. Tomorrow… I’m not sure. It will probably involve fixing some more typos.
So it goes.
It’s 2 am and she’s laid out as beautiful as a poet’s holy vision right there on my sofa, the most perfect vision I have ever dreamed.And I touch her and run my hands over her sleeping form, feeling like I’ve just touched an angel.
And I can die happy now, because, just for today there is peace and fulfillment and beauty in my eyes and hands and mind. Gloria a Deus.
She wakes me up out of a deep slumber, hissing like the devil, yelling, spitting like a pissed off Bobcat, hurling curses and deranged demands across the room like an infant dictator throwing dangerous toys in a very bad mood.
“Hungry! Where’s the food you ijiot? Why you never got nothing for eating in this e’shit place, e’stupid?”
I’d only woken up for a piss. I even crept across the room ever so silently so as not to disturb the sleeping crack monster, knowing instinctively the havoc that would dredge up from Below.
But it was no use.Just as I got halfway across the room on tiptoes, BAM!
It all started, the insults flying like bullets in a favela drug war, the idiot chatter of the TV ringing in my sore brain now like a fire alarm and I’m awake. Shit.
I look at my watch and it’s 7 in the morning. Shit.
Narcisa.
I ask myself for the thousandth time why I put up with it, keep eating her shit.
But I already know the answers and they are many and they are complex and, worst of all, they are quiite understandable and valid.
I’ve even written and published an entire book in my obsessive, desperate attempt to come to terms with why a poet would willingly subject himself to being “pussywhipped by the eternal muse”, as my old friend Ratso Sloman wrote in a blurb after reading “Our Lady of Ashes.”
But then I think, if it was good enough for old Bukowski, well what the fuck, right?
I recently watched a great documentry about my old literary mentor and drinking buddy. And therein I learned that he too was a glutton for a good, old-fashioned pussywhippin’.
I highly recommend that film. I don’t remember the name of it or who made it or any of that shit and I’m in Brazil so I won’t be able to find out, I got no internet here and could care less…
But… it’s in a yellow box and it’s worth a look I think. Anyway, it’s too bad I was too young at the time I was hanging out with Buk to even think of asking him about all this muse-pussywhipping shit…But It didn’t seem like any big issue at the time… And we were both too drunk mostly, anyway.
Whatever…And as long as I’m name dropping here… (Isn’t that what your supposed to do in a fucking internet blog?)…I dunno if its just another odd little Narcisa ‘coincidence’, but when dealing with an eternal muse - pussywhipper or not- I find it best not to assume too much, an assumption being the mother of a fuck up… or a crack baby, whatever… Gibby Hayes, are you reading this?
Pay attention!
Coincidence. What is that anyway?
A nickname for Infinite Intelligence at work. Whatever..Anyway, it is odd that, out of 59 million songs on my iPod, which, miraculously, she still hasn’t broken or burned to a crisp or dropped in the toilet or lost or sold for more crack, probably because I have learned to sleep with one eye open and, like any good lion tamer, I NEVER turn my back on her….
But anyway, out of 59 million possible songs on the iPod, its quite the ol’ coinkidink that she keeps playing my old homeboy Iggy’s memorable album “Avenue B” over and over again and again and again.
Shit!
It’s like the universe reminding me I’m not the only one who’s had to jump through these fiery ass hoops for the sake of art - or young pussy…Is there any difference, I ask you?
Really… Aint that what all the songs are about?
Think about it and lemme know….
But, back to whatever point I was making, If you don’t know that album, you should…
Especially if you’re bored or perverted or vouyeristic enough to be reading THIS shit!!
Avenue B
“Avenue B”, while, of course NOT his most rockin’ work, or anything like that, IS brother Iggy at his most human and honest and accessible and… vulnerable. And that’s saying a lot when it comes to an artist like Iggy - not that there are any other artists like him that I know of.
But I do know he will greatly appreciate “Our Lady of Ashes” and relate to much of it- as you will see if you listen to “Avenue B”.
Yeh baby, we’ve all been there, and those who ain’t been there yet, enjoy it while you can, cuz you suckers are all going there too, if not in this life, then in the next.
So get ready for a good old fashioned cunt-flaying, whoever you are, take it from me…
And, after all, if it’s been good enough for all the great minds of history, from Adam to Napoleon on down the line, then it’s good enough for me- just like that old time religion, boys!
But TWICE as much FUN!
And pretty good exercise for body, mind and soul for folks who don’t get out much- and I’m not so much talking about pussywhipping as I am the whole wonderful world of sex and pussy itself - fun for the whole goddamn family, can’t get enough of that stuff!
Especially if it happens to be the right size, shape, color, texture and vibrational field… All of which my darlin’ Narcisa just happens to be for me - homicidal psychotic crack whore or not!
Which all boils down to one simple equation: I am FUCKED!!!
Just for today…Which brings us to another baffling question, kids…Is it better to be fucked and know it? Or to be secretly cornholed in your sleep?
I’ve always subscribed to the belief that the worst fucking is always the one ya don’t know yer getting.Just as the most insidious form of slavery is where the slave thinks he’s free - which seems to be the case with, oh, about 98 percent of the human race.
All that having been said, I prefer to know that I’m fucked, and even know just WHO I’m getting fucked by, and, if possible, why.
When it comes to why, I have a few theories. But it mostly all boils down to this:
Like the good Dr. Freud said, “If it ain’t one thing, its the mother.”I don’t think that’s an exact quote, but you get the idea, right, boys?
Yes, my dear old mom was an insane and beautiful, charming, charismatic hopeless alcoholic… a bitterly abusive, violent female enigma, who, nonetheless, had enough going for her in the pussy department to have fucked and seduced her merry way right to the top of the Hollywood food-chain, back in the day, ending up holding the eternal pussy-cat-o-nine-tails over such illustrious asses as Billy Wilder, Artie Shaw and Caesar Pavese, the great Italian poet- not to mention a venerable A-list of the most powerful studio executives, way way back in the good old glory days of Hollywood.
MY MOTHER
And even with all that, her once promising career as an upcoming starlet was deep-sixed along with the rest of her life by the dark, unrelenting curses of alcoholism and drug addiction… and an even more insideous addiction and lifelong flirtation with the bottomless pit of disillusion and eternal sorrow known as the American Dream.
All this morbid drama played out right before my young impressionable eyes before I was old enough to know I was alive.
My first childhood memories, in fact, are a surrealistic montage of awful scenes of alcohol-fueled ultra bloody violence, suicide and assorted human tragedy.
So is it really any fucking wonder I’d eventually end up living and loving my way into full-blown recreation of all that crazy shit? Maybe as a means of unconsciously looking back, deep down into the festering wounds of childhood.
Hopefully as some sort of a cathartic experience or spiritual epiphany, right boys?
Cuz otherwise it would all be just way too morbid and senseless and creepy to endure - at least if not for all the great SEX!!!
That’s definitely the bait in the old mousetrap, boys!
And a whole lot more!
Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.
NOTIFIÇAO: Os eventos relatados neste site são contos de ficção - registrados na Biblioteca Nacional como ficção com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor, Jonathan Shaw. Os personagens mencionados são interamente ficticios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa viva ou morta se trata de pura coincidência.As vários fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.
Narcisa’s become a plumber now.After going through every single ball point pen and every tin can and scrap of tin foil and roll of scotch tape and paper clip and safety pin and god knows what else I got in my kitchen cabinets and drawers here in her never-ending quest to build a better crack pipe, she’s finally taken up the dubious craft of do-it-yourself plumbing.Yup.I came home today to find the kitchen faucet missing, just a gaping hole atop the kitchen counter with this sad little stream of water dripping dripping dripping away.What the fuck?It all made sense, of course, when I stepped into the room, only to find Narcisa sitting there on the floor sucking away at a burning rock from the amputated faucet.Great.She’s like this big old bug-eyed rat, gnawing steadily away at my home.I just looked at her, and she looked back at me with that ever-loving shit-eating grin of hers which always ensures immediate forgiveness, no matter how outrageous the latest offense…
Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.NOTIFIÇAO: Os eventos relatados neste site são contos de ficção - registrados na Biblioteca Nacional como ficção com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor, Jonathan Shaw. Os personagens mencionados são interamente ficticios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa viva ou morta se trata de pura coincidência.As vários fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.
An authentic and colorful novel like NARCISA can only be produced by an individual who has experienced an authentic and colorful existence. Few have dipped so deeply or functioned so extensively in the cultural underbelly of our world than the notorious artist and adventurer, Jonathan Shaw. In this literary firmament he is a virtuoso.
- Robert Williams (Painter, Author of Malicious Resplendence and Through Prehensile Eyes)
Tattoo of Robert Williams’ cartoon by Jonathan Shaw:
The following email exchange started when my old friend Nadine Purdy read my recently-posted, now-notorious “Crack Monster” blog.
From the tone of her email to me, I got the impression that it must have totally horrified her.
I get that a lot. Especially from well-meaning, albeit sometimes slightly misguided friends and well-wishers who seem to fear I’ve gone completely off my rocker now, given my chosen attitudes toward the crooked litle path I find myself on today.
That and the nature of my seemingly bullet-proof Eternal Muse and the object of my love, a long suffering angelic young crack-whore named Narcisa.
I’m getting used to all the friendly concern by now.
What some of these beloved well-wishers may fail to recognize though, is that, in order for me to have “gone insane,” I must have already once been “sane”, so as to have “gone” nuts to begin with.I was never “sane”.At best, I am simply smart and, at times lucid enough to have fooled a lot of good people for a very long time- including myself.
I’m not fooling anymore.
I have finally come to grips with my own “insanity”.And I’ve somehow become honest enough to be willing to accept my, heretofore, total inability to form a true partnership bond with another human being.
In return for my good intent, it seems that The Source of Infinite Love, in its infinite wisdom and mercy and endlessly ironic sense of humor, has sent me an earthly partner: Narcisa- the one person who constantly reflects my own insanity right back at me. And always in ways that motivate me to want to unearth, hand in hand with my unlikely, crack-addled little “partner” the illusive path to that wonderful place called “sanity”.But my friend Nadine Purdy, not unlike the lovely Narcisa herself, has also taken some pretty interesting twists and turns and hair-raising detours along her own rocky road to Nirvana.
If anybody deserves an overdose of peace and happiness and “sanity” in this life, it is Nadine’s absolute birthright, given all the fucked up crazy shit she’s been through to find it.
I first met Nadine some years ago through mutual friends, who, like myself, were forced, under the lash of their addictions onto a newfound spiritual path that none of us had ever imagined.
Nadine and I hit it off like kindred spirits right from the start.
I’ve always had a soft place in my heart for crack-whores, retired or active, don’t make no difference to me. And Nadine, being another recovering addict could relate pretty well to my shit too, I guess.
Over time, we became good friends, as she told me some of her story.
Here’s my somewhat fanciful version of it.
Nadine had once upon a time been a highly successful New York City fashion designer, scrambling right up the food chain to compete with the likes of Betsy Johnson, Patricia field, Ana Sui, Carolina Herrera, Christian Joy and Diane Von Furstenburg. (The same Von Furstenburg I eventually sold my building in NYC to before moving back here to Rio - small world).
Anyway, as Nadine was quickly swept up into the glittering whirlwind of money, property and prestige on the New York fashion scene, there were, of course, lots of fancy parties to attend.
And of course there was plenty of cocaine at those parties, the prerequisite fancy hipster party drug, an indispensably fashionable 80’s accessory for life in the good old fast lane.
Meanwhile, Nadine, right at the height of her fame, good fortune and worldly $uccess, had gone flying off to Tokyo on fashion business. There, somehow she met and married the son of the Emperor of Japan or some crazy shit like that, producing two beautiful children and a spectacular dreams-come-true happily-ever-after Hollywood ending.
One problem. It didn’t quite all end up like that.
Fairy tale endings can be terribly boring. Especially when you’ve had a few rounds in the fast lane with the white lady.
Here comes trouble.
Without going into all the apocolyptic details of Nadine’s pop-culture rise and fall from grace, which have since become the stuff of a Hollywood movie in-the-making, not to mention the subject of the ubiquitous talk show circuit, from Oprah on down, I’ll just cut to the chase for simplicity’s sake, and give all you dirty little Peeping Toms the proverbial bottom line.
Nadine moved quickly southbound, downwardly mobile from fancy party cocaine lines, to freebase, to street level crack, to eventually circling the drain right down down down into a dirty old life of petty crime, prostitution and eventual homeless, hopeless, helpless destitution, systematically dismantling and smoking up her whole hard-earned fashion empire along the way, converting it all to ashes strewn along the ratty road to ruin.
She eventually ended up living among the notorious “mole people”- a shocking tribe of sub-human derelicts, the stuff of shadowy urban legends, slithering through the subterranean sewers and abandoned subway corridors running deep beneath the busy streets of Manhattan.
Somehow Nadine Purdy survived the Homerian trials and purifications of a true warrior spirit.And she finds herself today, after many hard years of spiritual seeking and ego-smashing, courageous recovery work, back with flying colors among the human race, reunited with her beautiful kids that the crack monster had cruelly abducted, and being slowly but surely restored to sanity and a life of love, service and spiritual awakening…
And she’s got her fashion line up and running again too, flying high and proud under the fabulous banner, Purdy Girl.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… Nadine Purdy.
How’s that shit for a happy ending?
Here’s our latest bit of correspondence, right after she read my recent “Crack Monster” blog:
Nadine wrote:
OH JONATHAN -MY HEART BLEEDS FOR YOU SOMETIMES.YOU ARE SUCH A SPECIAL PERSON AND FRIEND.WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO STOP TORTURING YOURSELF AND FIND A REAL WOMAN WHO WILL MAKE YOU HAPPY? SOMEONE WHO IS A FRIEND AND A PARTNER.DO YOU ENJOY THIS IMMENSE PAIN?
FIND SOMEONE WHO IS ON YOUR LEVEL AND BE AT PEACE.I WAS JUST IN THE JUNGLE IN PERU FOR 2 WEEKS WITH A SHAMAN, DOING A DIETA.IT WAS A MAJOR TIME FOR REFLECTION. VERY PAINFUL AT TIMES, BUT SO WORTH IT. I LEARNED TO LISTEN TO THE SILENCE WITHIN.I HAVE COME TO A POINT OF PEACE AND FORGIVENESS.NEVER IN MY LIFE HAVE I. EXPERIENCED SUCH TRANQUILITY.I HOPE THAT YOU CAN FIND THIS PEACE.IT’S FUCKING AWESOME TO FEEL GOD’S LOVE SO DEEP THAT YOU HAVE NO FEAR. COMPLETE BLISS.
HOPE TO SEE YOU SOON.
BIG KISSES,NADINE
I wrote back:
I’m glad that’s all working out so well for you, Nadine.
But please please please, don’t let your heart bleed for me, or anybody else…. Ouch!! That shit sounds painful. Stop that shit!! Right now!!!
But seriously… there are many paths to enlightenment, baby. Just as many as there are people on paths. And that’s a whole shitload of paths… In fact, if I may be so bold, I’d like to believe they all go there, eventually.
Some may be faster and easier than others. But you don’t always get to choose your path. Not when that fucking love bug strikes like an arrow to the heart.
And not when you learn to trust your own intuition and try to live with open eyes and mind and heart- really open to seeing beyond all those old ideas of “peace” and “happiness” and all the fairy-tale illusions of facile outward appearances and shit…
I believe we don’t always get choose our paths, not consciously anyway… But we DO get to choose how we walk them.
My art and my daily life and my relationships with others, no matter how complex, challenging, troublesome and painful, ARE MY spiritual path.
Different strokes, got it?
Sometimes the very ‘worst’ relationship is exactly the one that’s best for one’s soul. The one that brings out our very best and challenges us to grow stronger, spiritually, emotionally, mentally.The fire that cleanses and heals…My own creative process is the best way I know to attempt to express and manifest the magnificence of my Creator. That’s why my art IS my Higher Power and my spiritual practice.Any Muse one finds along the path therefore, however bizarre, surreal or insane they may seem to my admittedly crooked way of thinking, is always a total blessing to an artist.It can be a big mistake to judge what you’re not living through, Nadine.
Cuz that’s somebody else’s path. Maybe you just got no business on it, with all due respect, cuz it’s not yours to walk- or judge…
Don’t be so quick to take my black humor and demented poetic rants as some sign of “the real me” sitting around in some maudlin pity party bitching, complaining or feeling sorry for myself. I am not. And I don’t want my friends’ hearts bleeding all over the place for my “plight” either. Too messy! That shit is wack! There IS no plight! Only light!
Thanks, but nooooo thanks, baby.
Got yer tourniquet right here…
Just for today, I ain’t seeking any needless pain for pain’s sake. I’ve already done enough of that shit.
But there’s pain and then there’s pain.
Some pain can be quite useful to an artist or any real seeker of truth. I’ve been told its even the touchstone to spiritual growth… Can you relate?
Like you, I’m seeking truth.
And growing.
And having a pretty good time along the bumpy old path, taking the ups with the downs… Like Mark Twain said, “it’s all grist for the mill.”
Amen to that.
Keep seeking, baby
“Hasta la vitoria, siempre!!”
Love ya, JS.
Then Nadine replied:
I agree with you. I am just glad my path is going in a different direction… All spirtual paths do lead to the same place, see you there.
Much love and light. N
I wrote:
Vive la difference!!!
“From each according to their ability - to each according to their need..”
Love, JS
The Crack Monster is a totally filthy, destructive creature, nothing like the prissy little perfectionist old bitch Narcisa becomes whenever she’s away from the drug for awhile.
Tonight she actually blew her fucking nose right in front of me into the hundred dollar blouse she’d begged me for the last time she swore off crack for a few hair-raising, white knuckle, teeth-clenching restless, irritable days, consumed in a swirling consumer cloud of continual endless Want, gravely exaserbated without any crack to stifle or anestetize her bottomless need for impossible material satisfactions, distractions, adventure and unattainable “fun.”Later tonight, when she’d got herself well buzzed with a good head full of crack smoke, she just began tearing the fancy little mother of pearl buttons off the snot encrusted shirt, one by one, before slowly, methodically shreading off strips of fabric with her yellow teeth, until her beautiful, expensive designer-label shopping-mall trophy was finally reduced to a tattered remnant of it’s former glory, about the size of a ragged little dishrag bra….I think she trashed the shirt because she was pissed of at it for not being able to fill up the gaping hole in her soul.But the crack monster wasn’t satisfied, even with the shirt’s demiseBroken mirrors, mangled silverware, shattered cups and glasses. Torched, melted sticks of lipstick, tampons (*see below). Disabled radios, telephones, binoculars, sunglasses, pens, pencils, scissors, eyeliner, furniture, whatever…
fire, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.
Whatever gets in the crack monster’s path, it immediately and efficiently destroys.Cigarette lighters seem to be a specialty…The other day, she put her little “Cricket” disposable lighter down on the table by my bed and walked away talking to herself, the way she does when she’s flying smoke rings around Alpha Centauri. Suddenly it just exploded like a flaming grenade, singing my head, reducing my beard and eyebrows to ashes.Scaring the shit out of us both.I walked around for days looking like that fucking dog in The Little Rascals. How?The Crack Monster has a special touch…Fuck. Does this kind of shit happen to “normal” people? I sure hope not, for their sake.
“Oops” is Narcisa’s favorite word, poor thing.The other day my friend who knows all about these weird plagues from the spirit world told me she carried an “encosto”, some troublesome, pissed off crustacean attachment that fucks people up really bad, makes them break everything they touch before it finally just all turns to shit.That sounded pretty familiar.Quite plausible too, especially in Narcisa’s case.I asked my friend how she could get rid of it.”She has to want to,” he told me.Great.He also said it would help a lot if she gave the crack pipe a little rest for awhile.Duh!Shit. That’s not gonna happen. No time soon, anyway.I don’t think Narcisa wants to get rid of the Crack Monster. She thinks it is her best friend.Narcisa says she really likes things the way they are.Oh well.She just came out onto the balcony where I’m sitting and looking out over the bay, writing about her. She sat on my lap for awhile, singing some crazy old song in her heartbreaking and raw, savage growl. After awhile she got bored, as usual. Then she stood up and walked away.As soon as she was gone, the biggest, ugliest, nastiest, most persistent insect I have ever seen in my entire life swooped in on me, circling my head like a miniature helicopter from Hell, going round and round and round, until I was so dizzy and pissed off I thought I would puke.Beelzebub…The Lord Of The Flies.Shit.I’m really starting to wonder about this shit…Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.NOTIFIÇAO: Os eventos relatados neste site são contos de ficção - registrados na Biblioteca Nacional como ficção com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor, Jonathan Shaw. Os personagens mencionados são interamente ficticios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa viva ou morta se trata de pura coincidência.As vários fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.
Narcisa smells of mold.Like a pair of grave-robbed dead man’s shoes dug up from the cemetery and laid out on the sidewalk of Rua do Catete to be sold by the legions of garbage-picking trash scavengers and beggars and alcohol-guzzling bums sitting out there like black-winged dusty vultures in Narcisa’s stomping grounds at all hours of the day and night.A moldy smell surrounds her like an unholy aura all the time now.I know it’s not actually her though.It’s only her clothes, that vast collection of shirts and skirts and dresses I’ve bought her over the years. All the stuff that’s laid stored away for months in drawers and cabinets in my little closed-up apartment, while she sat in the Evangelist Christian brainwash farm and I traveled the world, writing her life story, trying to find somecure for the common malady of our uncommon, unfortunatelove…And when I finally came back to Rio, reanimating her like some shabby roadside sideshow Frankenstein, she came home with me and dug hungrily through the drawers, unearthing all her pretty clothes she couldn’t wait to get back into.But they all smelled like mold now after sitting so long in aclosed up apartment in the tropics where everything, including her,must be aired out periodically to avoid the smell of mold.Well, she didn’t care much and certainly wasn’t gonna wait for me to air anything out or wash it before wearing it, fala serio, Cigano,go go…And so off we went on our first night back home together, my girl looking beautiful and delicate as a fairy angel ghost, smelling of raw sex and life and death and mold and ashes ashes ashes….Narcisa.Our lady of ashes.Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved. NOTIFIÇAO: Os eventos relatados neste site são contos de ficção - registrados na Biblioteca Nacional como ficção com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor, Jonathan Shaw. Os personagens mencionados são interamente ficticios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa viva ou morta se trata de pura coincidência. As vários fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.
