All year, no matter how many drugs I took, I could not bring myself to a state of intoxication. It was hellish, torturous; there was nothing to shield me from the depressive lucidity of my sober mind. What I would have given for five minutes of dizzying, black-out silence. What I would have traded for a marijuana fueled paranoid panic-attack! My life had become blindingly clear, the edges between objects remained sharp and exact.
It was during this phase of raw consciousness that I got an invite to The Event. Three days, two nights, camping at a bonafide hippie commune. I don’t say the word ‘hippie’ lightly. The Manson family would be right at home there. Now, of course, camping was in service of attending The Event. (I will go into details of The Event later, for now, all that matters is that tickets were $50 a night.) I did not attend with the intention of going to The Event. Instead, my presence was in service of curing my condition. Hippies, as with many people in my generation, refuse to drink, refuse to consume seed oils or harmful toxins, won’t even have a glass of real milk, but will gobble up such elaborate concoctions of hard drugs that their stomach acid becomes functionally radioactive. I knew that wherever these types of people went, bacchic revelry was sure to follow.
You have to understand, I was in a desperate state. You see, I cannot hook up with strangers sober. My conscience is too loud, I think too far ahead, I understand deeply that nothing good will come from allowing a person I barely know to see me at my most vulnerable. However, I have developed, after an unfortunate series of events, some serious hang-ups about commitment. Also, I am a member of the species scientifically known as the Man-Whore. Thus, the four pronged problem emerges:
A: The man cannot become intoxicated.
B: The man cannot have non-committal sex without intoxication.
C: The man cannot commit.
D: The man needs sex to live.
The most obvious criticism of my logic centers on the fourth axiom. The man does not need sex to live, clearly, therefore an immediate answer emerges: simply do not have sex. But you aren’t comprehending my statement, dear reader. I’m not implying that I will drop dead if I don't get my little Johnson wet at least bi-weekly, no sir. I am not like those other promiscuous men, foaming at the mouth for a crumb of mediocre pussy from a fat-faced mid. Those neanderthals, those lesbian-fashion-stealing-nonchalant-mongoloids haven’t had a unique thought in their lives, and haven’t read a book since high school. I would go so far as to say those such people do not contain qualia, do not have the capacity for passion, were not endowed with a soul at birth. They go about their actions unthinkingly, they recognize patterns and say the right things at the right time like a panty-dropping spreadsheet. On the other hand, I have a foundational philosophy guiding my decisions. I have considered my options, I have studied the Greats, I have attempted to unearth the secrets of my own psyche. My conclusion is this: If life is truly nothing but will, or noumena, then the highest expression of life must be the will to procreate. My sleeping around is simply the actualizing of my will-to-power. Thus, in the most literal sense, the man needs sex to ‘live’, the man performs coitus in order to manifest life.
***
A problem made itself known as soon as I stepped onto the camp-grounds: These were not the fad-chasing hippies from my generation, but, to my horror, something much worse. I had found myself surrounded by millennials. I, as with every human who wasn’t born between the years of 1981 and 1996, absolutely despise millennials. I hate those soylent drinking, funko pop collecting, Disney movie watching FREAKS. I hate their man buns, I hate their identity politics, and most of all I hate their whining. I have such a strong distaste for them that it pains me to write this: good God damn, these old-heads knew how to fucking party.
They were growing their own food. On the first night we were pissing in the woods, by the next morning they had built their own outhouse, with a working sink and a collection of vintage Playboy magazines as entertainment. They spared no expense for the festivities. I did not pay for a single intoxicant the entire time. On the first night I was taking everything offered to me. I fell in with a throuple. The core consisted of a man and a woman. Confusingly, both shared the name Patrice. Patrice (male) was a Dutch cherubian satyr of a man, tall and lithe with the most offensive blonde bob cut I’ve ever seen, which, even more inexplicably, he managed to pull off. He made it look high fashion. Patrice (female) was the definition of a granola woman. She stood out in the crowd of lavishly adorned hippies by dressing purely utilitarian. In my mind's eye I pictured her body as robust and muscular, though I know not what led me to this conclusion, as I never could make out the contours of her shape through her baggy athleisure clothing. The duo reminded me of ancient Greek tales where a divine being, like Zeus, falls in love with a mortal woman. Their unicorn was a drop-dead blonde bombshell. I never did catch her name. She will hereby be referred to as the woman in red, on account of her red leather jacket, her tiny salmon crop top and her scarlet cowboy boots. She was an artist of some sort, heavily involved in the fashion scene, and she came off as the Big Dick in charge of the weekend merriment.
Between the three of us we consumed enough ketamine to fuel a veterinary clinic for an entire month. Not for even one single minute did I feel any effects. I had uppers, downers, psychedelics, amphetamines, benzodiazepines. I drank enough for a viking. I ran a planned parenthood dry of adrenochrome. I snorted until my nose bled, I popped pills until I choked, I parachuted and shot-up and butt-chugged everything in sight. Yet, my brain remained completely regulated. Dopamine, Oxytocin, Serotonin, and Endorphin levels all baseline. Fuck. I don’t know if I had somehow accidentally mixed the perfect amount of uppers and downers such that they neutralized completely, creating a ‘middle-er’, or if I really was just immune. Either way, I had failed. My inner monologue was loud as ever, narrating every pathetic, cloying action I took, making sure I understood just how much of a fucking loser I had become; how every single wasted breath into my lungs was an inexcusable display of sloth in being too lazy to get the whole thing over with already.
During the second afternoon, all campground inhabitants, save for three, attended The Event. I found myself alone with a couple. The leftover dregs, too poor to attend. The woman, an emotional, bubbly Lebanese goth, was named Celeste. She had a tendency to claw at one's arm with her long nails when she became impassioned about a subject. She was short and broad shouldered, all bosom and hips. The man was a haunting, tall and gaunt Gypsy. He never smiled. His name: Kazmer. His diagnosis: compulsive liar. He had attended the first night of The Event; when asked about it, he looked me straight in the eye and, with total earnestness, informed me that it was the best night of his life, complete with a coke fueled after party featuring Japanese style body sushi and live shibari. I myself am known to lie, on occasion, when the opportunity arises. However, with good old Kaz it was different, outside of his control. He would lie, even about tiny menial things which provided him with no benefits and were easily falsifiable. Earlier that day, upon returning from collecting firewood with yours truly, he told his lover that he had been mercilessly flirted with by a group of beautiful women, and even included hints that he might have been flirting back. Being the one with whom he had gone on the errand, I knew this to be an invention of his imagination. Celeste, however, as she did with all his fabrications, believed it wholeheartedly. Her eyes lit aflame and she dug her talons into his arm.
Those bitches are disrespecting me, okay? I’ll actually start swinging.
Come on babe, don’t say that.
And I’d win, too. I could take all three at once. I want to wring their stupid fucking necks.
Be nice, we’re just here to have a good time.
Some may call this dynamic toxic, but honestly I found it to be pretty endearing in its earnestness and sheer stupidity. At a certain point we each have to take ownership of our own gullibility. They both seemed to be having fun in this improvised space, and it endowed their relationship with an energy that is rare and difficult to replicate. I have to respect it, I love love, after all.
Kazmer offered me my favourite substance, saying he had practically a whole colony
of mushrooms in his car. He had a single bag. I devoured all seven grams without shame or guilt, as if I had been fasting for forty days and forty nights. This was my last hope. Psilocybin had never failed me before. The couple immediately fucked off to God knows where, presumably to smack meat in the woods. I went in search of stimulation.
I found entertainment in a series of projects the inhabitants had been working on. In addition to their newly built outhouse, the hippies had made a number of home improvements to the property. They had built a sauna out of a rundown camper trailer they sawed in half. They constructed a stage on which they could perform their nonsense improv comedy routines. The pièce de résistance was a conduction powered hot tub. It was made of steel and attached to a metal pipe which had been wrapped around a fire pit. The pipe was filled with copper wire, and over the course of a couple hours it would transfer excess heat energy from the fire to the tub. Slow, tedious, and crude, it did the job splendidly. I piled logs inside the spiral heating mechanism, and waited, watching the flames lick the metal wiring. I thought of my own life, of my own burning, of how my excess heat energy, instead of being converted into something useful and pleasant, seemed to dissipate into the atmosphere and leave behind nothing but strife and ash. It felt as if all my mistakes, all my lost loves, all the hurt I had imposed on others was generated by the act of burning itself. But without it, what remains? Boredom, a pile of logs with no spark, inactivity. What alternative was there to suffering?
I naught but thought for two hours. Then, once the tub was sufficiently warm, I did what any sane person on the brink of a panic attack would do: I stripped completely naked and immersed myself in its warmth. Fire also makes me think of sex. That’s besides the point. I knew for a fact the water hadn’t been changed from the previous night, and honestly, I doubted it had ever been changed at all. I didn’t care. This was also true for the subject of shedding my clothing on some stranger’s property: The night before, nudity was so prevalent I had become completely numb to it. I never was interested in nudist colonies, I’m very wary of sanitized de-sexualization, which is to say I am too libidinous to handle it with the necessary chastity so as to provide a safe, comfortable atmosphere for my fellow naturalists. I figured constantly attempting to conceal my arousal would destroy all enjoyment I may experience in the beautiful disrobed women around me, and that much was true. But, what I failed to consider, was that the true joy of nakedness came not from voyeurism, but exhibitionism. It is significantly more agreeable to bear one’s form to the world than it is to take in the world’s form. In the future I have vowed to take my clothes off as soon as the opportunity presents itself.
I lay in the tub and smoked an entire pack of Korean cigarettes. The temperature dropped drastically as the sun set. Frost warning. Smoke rose from off my red lips into the atmosphere. It seemed to touch the constellation of Orion, directly overhead. Appearances are deceiving. The white plumes would never make contact with the Greek, nor his resting place in the stars. I saw myself up there. All weekend, I had been removed from the external world. The party-goers were on a completely separate wavelength, a frequency I could not match in my state of sobriety. At the very least, I had just found someone to relate to, the man who had died for divinity, for love. I would wear his triple-jeweled belt and go hunting.
The hot tub bubbled and shook, as if possessed. I took this as my cue and removed myself. As I stood by the fire to dry, a slow trickle of people were returning from The Event. I was approached by a woman in full hiking gear, a big backpack, an orange beanie, the works. A lingering feeling of exploring the heavens made it difficult to focus on what she was saying.
... And he was playing on an instrument made out of a gourd.
Oh yeah? Did it sound like a real guitar?
I replied, masking my confusion.
It wasn’t a guitar. It was a traditional African instrument. With five strings over a hollow cavern...
She spoke fast.
...He lost his authentic, AFRICAN one, so he made his own out of a gourd...
I opened my mouth to ask her about the ethnicity of this thrifty musician, but thought better of it. I could sense her eyes lingering on the contours of my bare shape. It was a nice feeling, maybe too nice. I put my clothes back on.
I took advantage of the first break in her monologue, about five agonizing minutes later, to find someone else to talk to. I ran across Patrices, sat around a comically large pot of water boiling over a fire. The woman in red was there too. She had changed, but thankfully, for the sake of nomenclature, she remained clad in scarlet. She had on a translucent cloth, wrapped around her gorgeous figure, culminating in a headscarf which hid her silky blonde locks. She wore nothing underneath it, and I strained my eyes in hopes of making out her jaw-dropping bodacious bod. She certainly was stunning, but for just a second, I thought I saw a thick tuft of orange hair on her ample breasts. I chalked it up to my brain filling in the gaps left by the darkness.
The Patrice’s were having a conversation about animal cruelty. It seemed kind of dull, with both agreeing that it was, all around, a virtue to be kind to other living creatures. Now, I have a number of problems with this, especially when it comes to members of our own species, and I felt like introducing some energy into the conversation, so I interjected:
So, there’s no situation when it’s okay to be needlessly cruel to animals?
Yes, obviously truly.
What about bullfighting?
... Are you very serious?
They had a weird way of both responding at the same time, speaking over each other. Their voices would melt together into one, semi-broken sentence.
I am a firm defender of bullfighting, actually.
How can you justify not object to such a barbaric practice activity?
The bulls live a life many times more fulfilling than if they had been simple cattle! It’s a time honoured Spanish tradition.
The sin crime of factory farming justifies allows more brutality?
It’s not one sin justifying another, we are raising these animals above a state they would be allowed to reach in nature.
How what so do you mean?
I’m speaking of glory! Glory is not found in lesser creatures. It requires conceptualization of the future to bring it about, needs a comprehension of a baseline, normal, average existence in order to overcome it. For animals, there is no typical life, there is no life at all, there is just living. Glory is a transformation of the soul, as is despair, as is the sublime, as is all true lovemaking.
In sex fucking?
Not all of it, no. But there’s a reason that in intense orgasm, one provided by another, your entire ego, your conscience, that ever-present awareness goes silent, just for a brief moment. Just as your mind goes numb in the pits of anguish, just as when you enter a glorious flow state. It is a little death.
Death?
The origin point of Freud’s death drive is nothing but rebirth! Your soul must perish in order to be rebuilt! The bull may not comprehend what is happening, may not be able to consent to it, but in the case of victory it is temporarily experiencing that which it was never meant to experience. It is the feeling of the external world, breaching the gap to the internal and wreaking havoc on the essence. THAT is the divine, THAT is the holy spirit!
I have a tendency to become impassioned easily. Perhaps too easily. A man, who was eavesdropping on my speech, stomped over. He had long black hair, massive gauges in his small ears and cartoonish facial hair which was obviously difficult and costly to maintain, for very little benefit. In tow behind him was a suspiciously younger-looking girl. He was practically foaming at the mouth when he spoke.
I think you are disgusting. I can’t believe someone would be so evil. We just saw a rodeo in person last month. The way they treat those poor creatures…
He began to tear up. I didn’t really buy it. Suddenly, the woman in red became fervid. She threw herself to her knees in front of me, and grasped my thighs with her hands.
Oh my GOD the rodeo was, like, sooo traumatic. I couldn’t even believe it. I was NOT expecting that. Did you know they bind the bull’s testicles so that it will kick harder? And those poor baby cows. They wrestle them to the ground, put them in headlocks…
She began to list off the extensive animal abuse she had been blindsided by. That was where she lost me. Who wouldn’t be expecting animal cruelty at a rodeo? She seemed to sense I wasn’t taking her seriously, and instead of getting frustrated, she did something very charming: She decided to play into the ridiculousness. She waved her hands around wildly, her voice boomed and shook, she put on an entire performance like she was in on my cynicism. With her form silhouetted by the fire behind her, her monologue took on a surreal quality, as if the commune itself was the set for a film she was starring in. It was impossible to take your eyes off her. The light from the flames made the whiskers sticking out of her cheeks shine like silver. Whiskers? Perhaps a new fashion trend?
The unfortunately-bearded man interrupted this breathtaking sermon. Only a rube as dense and egomaniacal as he could bring himself to take attention away from the ruby Goddess.
So, still think you can defend your precious bullfighting?
He asked me, with a smug grin of self satisfaction, arm resting around the waist of his concerningly young girlfriend.
I have never been a fan of the rodeo. Typical Americans, copying the rich cultural tradition of another nation whilst injecting it with vulgar consumerism and completely missing the point. The rodeo always ends the same way, the bull kicks the rider. If the brave cowboy dies, it is secondary, accidental. There is no combat, this isn’t a fair fight, the bull cannot slay his way to freedom. There is no glory in that.
No. You are wrong. Admit it. We all share this planet, we are all the same under mother nature, no matter the species. It is literally the same thing as slavery.
His final words made me feel so nauseous I had to exit the conversation immediately. I considered telling the man to read some Hemingway, then thought better of it and silently departed into the cold night. God, was it freezing. I was underdressed, as were most of the hippies, all of whom were congregating near any of the four lit campfires. I felt as though I would never be able to understand them, let alone approach them. I stumbled around the crisp darkness until I reached the parking lot. There was my saving grace: Kazmer’s 2004 Volvo station wagon, with the lights on inside. It would be warmer in there than out here, and I could already feel the hypothermia setting in. I popped the trunk and asked to join.
Yeah man, just be careful, don’t slam the door. This car’s worth hundreds of thousands.
Kazmer fibbed.
My man’s rich.
Said his gullible girl.
The couple had the seats down, and had set up blankets and pillows. It was, all in all, pleasantly warm. I lay down on top of the comforter on the right side, with Kazmer to my left facing Celeste. I shut my eyes tight in an attempt to fall asleep. I had given up on the hippies curing my condition. In a few short minutes I was roused by the sounds of movement. I turned my head and caught the goth woman in the process of placing strip after strip of coloured paper on the Gypsy’s tongue. With her free hand, she was holding a phone close to her boyfriend's eyes, as it displayed a spinning black and white spiral pattern. She murmured her commands loud enough for us both to hear:
You are gay. You are homosexual. You will desire twink bodies. Skinny men will arouse you. You are gay. Men will make you feel sadistic. You want to dominate a small male. You will let me watch. You are gay. You will make a cuckold of me. You will kiss boys in front of me. You will enjoy an engorged member in your creamy colon. You are gay…
I lowered my eyelids and tried to ignore them as best I could. You have to understand, it was cold, and I was desperate. It went on for an agonizing twenty minutes. Then, Celeste whispered:
...Put a finger in…
He’s going to finger her in here? Right beside me? It’s been too long since I’ve had sex, I can’t handle this right now. I thought to myself as I sat up.
The view was even more debaucherous than I had assumed. I saw only Kazmer’s behind, and a dark, powerful hand with long black nails reaching around, breaking the waistband of his pants. It was more than I could take.
Oh don’t worry, she isn’t fingering my butthole.
Lied Kaz.
How about we all get under the covers?
Inquired Celeste.
I nearly ripped the door handle clean off as I scrambled onto the gravel outside. In perfect track runner form I was back on my feet and fleeing the scene in seconds. I feared for my rectum.
Was it something I said?
Shouted the goth after me, with a twinge of disappointment.
I dashed into the woods like a tiger nearly caught by a pair of poachers at a watering hole. It was too much, it was all too much. Life was piling on top of me. The spirit of the evening, where anything was permissible, felt to my clear mind like nails on a chalkboard. If only I could just let go, allow myself to be carried along by the flowing of psychosexual energies I was so desperately paddling against. I ran between trees in a state of frenzy, without any light to guide me. I tripped over a root and fell on my face. A nearby twig caught me on the way down, leaving a gash down my brow and temporarily blinding my right eye. Just then, as I regained my composure, the moon emerged from behind a handful of stray clouds, and shone through the foliage, partially illuminating my view. Before me was the woman in red, stalking on all fours. Her ribcage swayed side to side with each feline movement of her lithe body, the silk cloth she wore dragging on the ground below. I approached from behind, eyes fixed on her bare feet out of some not-so-savoury erotic instinct.
Something was wrong. Dead wrong. Her appendage was tipped with only four small digits. The fifth toe, the big one, was protruding from above her ankle. Then, following up the leg with my eyes, the orange hair began. A coating of short, thick fur engulfed her seductive figure, starting halfway up her thigh. Finally, in keeping with my instinct, my irises paused on her crotch, which was obscured by a long dark tail. In my confusion I was careless. Snap. A stick under my foot. Her ears perked up. In a flash of scarlet and orange she was on top of me, visage centimeters away from my own. Her facial structure was relatively the same, save for the region between her upper lip and bottom eyelids, which had been replaced by a cat’s snout. She observed me carefully with a relaxed curiosity, the kind of trance a cobra exhibits just before it strikes. I thought I had surely gone mad. I tensed and froze, completely at her mercy. Impulsively, I tilted my head to the side and presented my throat. This subconscious action left me confused. Was my mission for the night not to return to a state of will to power once more, to regain my ability to manifest life? Why, at that moment, had I abandoned the will completely? Why did I thirst for annihilation? I remember a feeling of relief wash over me as she moved to bite at my throat. No such death was granted to me. Instead, I felt her red lips on mine. A passionate kiss, her hot breath mingling with my own. She was forceful, pried open my mouth with ease. A sandpaper tongue stuck itself to the back of my throat. I felt intense heat where her nudity made contact with the crotch of my pants. She subsided, though she remained saddled on my lap. The feline mistress had left something behind in my jaws. A mystery pill. A gift from a woodland spirit. I grabbed her blonde tresses and pulled her close, kissing the drug right back into her muzzle.
It’s wasted on me, Kitten.
She scurried away with a look of bewilderment. I was left alone once more. I made my way back to the campsite. My own sanity in question, I began to see the events unfolding before me as a fairy tale. Reality itself had become intoxicated, the external world’s rationality had broken down, and yet I was sober, ever still. My internal world had remained reasonable, logical. My soul was untouched by the madness in my surroundings. Nothing, not even the loss of my mind, could cure my condition.
Impossible! The hippies had constructed a raised catwalk, on which there was an avant-garde fashion show taking place. They seemed to have spawned the stage out of nowhere, for there was no way for them to build something so elaborate in such a short amount of time. At the top of the platform was an open faced bar filled with liquor. An old TV, hooked to it's back wall, was playing Dazed and Confused on VHS. A DJ was setting up his deck just off to one side, getting ready to play an all night drug-fueled set. At the foot of the catwalk was a series of folding tables wrapped in clear plastic, supporting the comically large pot I spotted earlier. The entire campground must have been completely renovated in the short time I had been trapped in the homosexual-hypnosis station wagon. Nothing was where it once was.
The on-stage performance was a sight for sore eyes: The Patrices were walking as a duo, ignoring the crowd’s hoots and hollers. Patrice (male) wore nothing but a pair of funky sunglasses, red lipstick and a puffy pink bomber jacket wrapped around his waist. He moved like he was at Paris fashion week, his hips swayed rhythmically. You could have timed a metronome perfectly to the oscillation of his tailbone. Patrice (female) was wearing even less, somehow. She sported an identical bomber, which she was wearing as one would normally wear a jacket, and nothing else. It was cropped so high it barely covered her breasts. She was completely nude below her diaphragm. The sporty woman wasn’t as jacked as I had expected. She was clearly fit, but the thick musculature I had anticipated was replaced by a much more traditionally feminine form. Her legs were long, her ass was plump and large, and she had a tattoo of a snake wrapped around her left thigh, baring its fangs at her forbidden fruit. There wasn’t a single hint of a hair anywhere to be found. I employed a few tricks, which I had picked up during my days as a student, to commit the scene to memory as photorealistically as possible.
The Patrices made it to the edge of the catwalk and paused, ominously. The female counterpart bent over and arched her back in front of her male companion. Her ample behind left significant room for the other Patrice to line up some white powder atop. Holding a nostril closed, with one continuous semi-circular motion of his torso, he vacuumed up his work. His nose, strengthened from repeated use, didn’t leave a single spec unconsumed. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had sucked some of the skin off his partner's cheeks while he was at it. The crowd went wild. Endowed with the confidence of a good performance, Patrice (male) dramatically tore off the jacket wrapped around his waist, leaving him completely nude for the walk back. The impressive part wasn’t getting naked in front of the audience, but doing so in such cold weather. Any man would have been massively reduced under those conditions. I knew my own shriveled cock resembled a raisin more than genitals at that moment. Yet his flaccid Johnson only lended him a cherubian appearance. He looked as if he had been carved in marble, like a statue of the God Hermes (in his more androgynous representations). His dark pubes were thick but trimmed. His shaft bounced from thigh to thigh hypnotically. I was so entranced by his oozing of electrifying energy that I couldn’t pull my eyes away for even a second to glance at the flesh-and-blood half naked woman, who was shaking her bare ass for the crowd in a desperate attempt to gain back some of their attention. Listen, this was not an indicator of some latent homoerotic feelings deep in my subconscious, you had to be there. You wouldn’t have been able to look away either. Or at least that’s what I tell myself. Maybe Celeste’s hypnosis affected me more than I’m willing to admit.
I awoke from my stupor to the sound of an announcement.
Slops up, freaks!
Two burly men upended the comically large pot of food onto the plastic wrapping below it. Out spilled a torrent of steaming shrimp, lobster, sausage, cobbed corn, potatoes and other assorted vegetables. The hungry crowd pounced on it, bare-handed and salivating. They ripped meat from out of red shells like barbarians. Their faces were covered by orange broth and spices. It was a feast of Homeric proportions, and I was left as the animal sacrifice. Orgiastic frenzy is a religious experience, achievable only by those who have reached divinity through transgression. My taboos chained me as securely as ever. A man in my position wasn’t even worthy of watching. I was human, the most human I’d ever been, and I was alone. I sulked into the woods once more.
There, in a clearing, I was caught by surprise again. A gaggle of hippies, naked of course, were lying on their backs, face up, side-by-side in a single row. On one end, without utilizing their limbs, one of the participants would barrel-roll their nude body over the entire line of flesh. Kazmer and Celeste were playing along. During Kaz’s turn, he paused noticeably whenever his bare bottom rested on a man, much to his girlfriend’s pleasure. The group was giggling in ecstasy, it was nauseating.
I turned to leave, but was ambushed by my feline friend. The woman in red had completed her beastly transformation and had abandoned her scarlet shawl. Sharp black claws tipped each of her fingers. She was now completely covered in orange fur from head to toe, with the exception of her vulva, which was the colour of wine, inflamed and hungry. Just as last time, she was straddling my lap while I lay on my back. Her lower lips hung out of her bare fruit and clung on to my ever growing bulge as if they were trying to engulf it through my pants. She purred and rubbed against me, leaving behind a dark wet stain.
It’s useless, Kitten. I can’t fuck a creature like you. Not sober, anyhow.
She let out an understanding chirp and motioned at me to outstretch my arm. I complied, and she held my hand with hers. Maintaining eye contact, she moved her free hand over the crook of my elbow and plunged three clawed fingers into it. I winced in pain. Her nails were deep, at least five centimeters below the skin. She continued to look at me, waiting on approval.
Just do it. Get it over with already. I’ll do anything, anything. Just make it all stop. I’m sick of this.
Meow
She pulled down quickly, purposefully, flaying my forearm from elbow to wrist. I screamed out. With a satisfied smirk, she stood up on her hind legs and leisurely sauntered into the dark forest.
I stared at my arm. I watched the openings in my flesh swell with blood. I observed the crimson blossom as a flower would from my wounds and spread itself on my pale skin. Some liquid flowed into the other gashes, some dripped onto the ground, all left behind beautiful intricate patterns and a feeling of sweet release. My skin was the canvas, my blood the paint. The cold around me faded to a comfortable numbness and finally, finally, that ever present voice booming inside my skull went quiet. This was it! That light headed feeling! Sweet intoxication! After my long, arduous journey I had achieved a mental state I could no longer consider to be completely of sound mind. I needed to hurry, I did not know how much time I had left in the world of the living.
I sprinted back to the campgrounds. The DJ had begun his set, the stage was full of party-goers letting loose. I pushed my way into the open-faced bar and gyrated violently. The new skin flaps on my injured arm slapped against each other as I moved. Crimson liquid shot out of my flesh with each convolution, coating those around me, who were too strung out to care. Revelry! Sweet revelry! Like Christ, my blood is my wine! I must have danced with a dozen different women. I took an English lass with brunette curls on my knee and bounced her through the swarm of sweat and heat and hair. I bumped hips with an angular French lady who didn’t smile once. I spun both Patrices around simultaneously. I dipped Kazmer and gave him a big wet kiss. There was no limit that could stop me, no taboo that could hold me. I finally understood my grave error. If the world is nothing but will, and existence is nothing but suffering, then exerting my will-to-power would surely only exacerbate the natural agony inherent to living. By chasing women, by following my dreams, by achieving my ambitions I was in fact only fueling the fire which charred my sacrificial flesh. The only alternative is boredom? Nonsense! There remained a secret third option: denying the will to live! That is what the she-beast had taught me. Individual existences blurred together into a single continuum. A system of cells interlinked within cells interlinked within cells interlinked within one stem. Time flowed past my soul without interaction. In anywhere between five minutes and five hours I had become covered in my blood, my partners were drenched in my blood, the dancefloor was overflowing with my precious life energy. I was tiring out, growing cold. I didn’t want the night to ever end, but I’ve always been good at calling when the party is over. I went in search of a warm place for my final rest.
I found my solace in the form of the homemade camper trailer sauna. Inside was so hot I could barely breathe. There sat a beautiful transgender woman. Her physiognomy resembled that of a bird, and she had covered her eyes in glitter, accentuating her alien appearance. She had a large bosom, and her legs were pressed together, obscuring her genitals. I removed my clothes and sat across from her. She looked at me with her mouth gawking. She had the expression of a woman who was finally giving in to temptation by sleeping with someone she really shouldn’t. It was all terribly erotic. I would have certainly become hard, had I had enough blood left in my system to fill my erection. I squeezed a few last drops from my open wound onto the hot coals, for steam. Then, my consciousness faded into blackness.
***
The next morning I awoke, slightly disappointed. My body still low on blood, my head still dizzy, I basked in the afterglow. I examined my forearm. The bleeding had stopped overnight, but the dried, flayed flesh looked pretty gnarly. One thought at a time surfaced in my calm mind:
I better deal with that quickly before it gets infected. Still, no hangover. Pretty sweet. I should do this again sometime.