Phantom Trash

Forsaken lore and Waking paralysis dreams

Screaming Lesson

Hello again,

I want to fucking scream. Or hit something. Not someone. Trust me. Just trust me. But I want to hit something. It’s gotta be inanimate. Maybe I won’t hit it at all. Is that too white of me? To want to hit a wall or a thing that I can’t actually hurt? Or can I hurt it?

What would the Shinto people think? If I punched a wall, would they punch me back? Or would they lay prostrate and do a backflip like a toy frog? I don’t seem to know much of anything (but isn’t it better that way?)

Or maybe I want to scream. I have a grand vision for it: my throat will go raw. The inside of my esophagus will be like a carpet of tenderized, rotten steak, then I want to smell the tang of blood building up until I’m gurgling on a mix of that thick, aroused saliva and blood as red as cheap paint.

I want to cough it and clear it out into my hand where I can rub it dry, then I want to scream again. I don’t know why. I can’t tell you why. I can’t tell you (or prove to you) that the cat DEFINITELY won’t bite your fingers off. I can’t prove to you that we won’t end up both dead. In fact, we’ll both end up dead. Not at the same time, I imagine. But it’s GONNA HAPPEN.

My greatest fucking fear is realizing that I’ll just never be able to scream.

Where’s the field I can go to? Tell me. Tell me where there’s a mound of dirt, even a grave, that I can pop my head into and just let it loose. I get why wolves howl. I’m not saying I’m a faggot or anything and I think I’m a wolf or a dog or a dragon in jean shorts who has a scat fetish. I’m not saying that at all. I’m just saying that I want to scream because there’s something in the pit of my ass (something Jung put there, or Freud put there, or the Devil Himself put there) that’s trying to clamber its way up my intestines and into my throat where it can open its even-tinier mouth and vomit out a cry like you would never believe could come out of a throat-animal of that size.

But the worst thing of all is that it’s taken me so long to realize that we really are animals. Take away the pretension or the precociousness of a statement like that and what are you left with? The truth. It’s so true that it scares me. I always used to say it as a statement of defiance against the possibility of base urges. But now that I just want to scream until I’m fucking dead, I get it.

So anyway, I thought I’d tutorialize it. The screaming. You open your mouth until the vomit just comes out without trying. You keep letting the vomit fall out (make sure you’re still bent over) until there’s no more of it. Then you wrap your arms around your abdomen and squeeze like you’re a fucking concertina. Then just retch out a screech like a fucking tire peeling out in the seventh circle. When you run out of breath, suck in another and make sure it makes a sound like a reverse wooshing. Then go again and again and again and again and again until you’re so exhausted that you actually might die.

Disclaimer: if you die it’s not my fault.

Then you make the choice: are you gonna be screaming forever until you die or are you just gonna die now?