Lights, Action, And Relaxation

Lights, Action, and Relaxation

Late night tonight. I watched a lot of movies today, and relaxed, did my usual walk, picked up the house. Still feeling kind of sick, on and off. Tired. But relaxed. Happy. Excited for Mother’s Day, it’ll be really nice to hangout with my mom and my sister, do something enjoyable for my mom. She’s a really great woman. She works very hard for all that she has. I hope everybody had a good day today, whoever reads these, you crazy bastards. I can’t imagine I say anything very interesting, and I’m sorry I kind of ramble.

- your friend, Zachariah

The Murky Jungle

The air is hot, and putrid. Is this what Hell is like? Where every breath burns in your lungs, sickly sweet with syrupy humidity exhausting each inhalation? Where every movement of your body is like moving through sucking, enveloping water and submerged depths? Heat is unbearable. So fucking hot that sweat pours into my eyes with an unending flood as if I were crying hot tears and contorting the vividly green-black world around me into grotesque smears. Trying to wipe my forehead, or rub at my eyes, or move in the slightest beyond walking forward is a laborious, hellish effort that seems to increase the sweating tenfold. I’ve given up, stumbling through this jungle. It has to be hell. It has to be.

Hell is dim. Sunlight is swallowed up by the enveloping green inferno, murky blackness impaled by threatening glassy sunlight shards that appear to search for me as they wander in isolated breaks between foliage. When did I see the sky last? Is it night now?

When the chopper had crashed it’d seemed like a miracle so many of us had lived. Darren had said it was a blessing of good luck from boot camp, us fresh grunts alive and kicking to go kill Charlie in the jungle. I’d laughed at that. Banged up but alive, standing on the shore that we’d quickly come to the conclusion had to be Vietnam or Laos. No one had died. Radio didn’t work. With dumb, shit-eating grins on our faces and half wobbles in our march, we’d gone off into the jungle, idiots hungry for a fight. Darren and Jack, Conrad and Louis, Davie and Leonard, and lastly myself. Alive. Laughing, cracking jokes as flies ate us alive. No one seemed to understand that the joke was on us. A horrible, bloody, nightmarish fucking joke.

It is human instinct to know when you’re being hunted. It’s been only a geological blink of an eye to realize that up until relatively recently, Humanity was on the menu, hunted in the blackness and in the tall grass, sought after by terrible things of the sky, the sea, and the earth. It was only relatively recently when the night was banished by the flame, by electricity. It was only relatively recently when Man summoned God unto his life, clinging to the hope that distant angelic kingdoms could defend from the unspoken, primeval terrors. Hardwired into our bones and blood, in the neurons of your reptile brain: you know when a predator is near.

The fire had been flickering. It was the second, the third night? They all blend together now.. Sitting by the fire in silence because now it had been too long. Too long since we’d seen anyone, too long since we’d heard a fucking bird so much as rustle to shit.. Too long since anything but the shadows and the heat and the flies that didn’t stop even when you begged the Virgin Mary to so much as ebb the flow for a moment. Nothing. I had sat across from Leonard lost in my own thoughts as my brains boiled and simmered, and like some unreal dream, I’d watched Leonard simply be.. plucked into the air. Lifted. I watched it in slow motion. He was on his log there, until he wasn’t, until he was up in the air. A horrid obsidian barb like some nightmare thorn had speared him through his stomach, his mouth, his eyes. Lifted him up like a child would heft a doll. Deep crimson blood contrasted obsidian black chitin, and without so much as a whisper, Leonard vanished into swallowing foliage.

Conrad pulled screaming and begging and crying into the pitch-dark river water by tentacles thicker than a mans arm. For a single heartbeat I’d seen an ungodly shape there beneath that rippling surface before it settled into perfect, utter, unsettling stillness. Louis came later. Just vanished one night. Gone. Davie and Jack put bullets in their own heads that morning. Darren was snatched up into the canopy by something with shuddering crimson feathers and black curving jaws that blossomed open in horrible petals ringed by teeth.

I don’t know where we are. Silence rests here in such a complete and perfect dominion I can hear my blood pumping. I can hear the thrum of my own heart. There isn’t even wind. I can smell godawful sulfur and putrid, decaying something on the wind on the rare times it blows. Like smelling the circles of Hell themselves. It’s been an unnatural time since I have drank, yet I can still move, even as crippling thirst seems to pry at my insides. Hunger is the same. I feel.. something on my skin.. something growing on the places I can’t reach. When I rest, when so much as cease to walk for a second, even when I fucking stumble: I can feel it. Pulsing. Growing. When I vomit, I vomit black pools that seem impossibly thick, too much, too much..

I stumble. Electricity tingles up my spine. Hair prickles, skin ripples. I feel a terrible cold in my teeth, and a disgusting weightlessness in my stomach. Anticipation that makes my heart pound like some parasite crawling from my chest to my throat. That growth digs into the bones of my back with sudden, crippling pain.

It lets me see it, just this once, a delightfully terrible gift from hunter to hunted. Chitinous plates that flare and flex in the deathly scented breeze. Flexing clawed hands ending in thorny talons that can pry flesh from bone and sanity from mind. Flowering jaws opening in a hundred haunting petals, ringed by midnight-glassy teeth. Eyes burning with green fire seem to lurch up and out of slit-sockets.

Thinking, watching, hungering eyes.

Beneath, and Up Again

The dry season is hot, painstakingly and energy-sappingly hot. Even as the bloated, enormous golden disk sinks below a ragged horizon; syrupy heat wavers from bleak, cracked ground.

Endless, bone dry footprints left by vanished ghosts highway this way and that and there. This ground is scaly like dragonscales. Black, brick red, husked brown. Stranded lonely rocks lie in unhappy shadow beneath termite mound spires, pockmarked craters hissing with endless insect armies. Ancient remnants lie like collapsed cathedrals in all bleached bone glory, shrouded in the mists of twilight and the crimson dunes of time.

I wander this primordial expanse, wander it away from my diminutive tent beneath an endless sky richly black splashed by starlight older than the first conceptual organisms that once dwelled in simmering pools. I’m drunk on campfire smoke, on whisky that seems to burn harder than my dying firelight. I chuckle at jokes only I hear, and feel fingers in my hair from a Love very, very far away.

Something howls in the dark cliffs far away. How long have I been wandering? I am in a maze of shadows and curving eroded labyrinthine eternities, somewhere far away water gurgles in wet whispers down, down, down..

The crimson rock walls are wet now, covered in mossy growth, in gently swaying clover. Is that a breeze? Earthy scent fills my nostrils. Birdsong? Where is that light from, soft and pulsing, gently violet-orange, like sunrise and sunset at once..

When I exit the caverns, I look on in silence.

Neighbors in the Rain

It is storming today. Bruised thunderclouds rumble, lit internally by crackling lightning; electric spears.

The man sits in his lawn chair on the patio, overlooking the sheer lawn and slick aphsalt street. Prim houses line both sides of this road. Rain pelts the roof, splashing with metallic noise.

A car drives quietly up the street, it’s electric engine softly humming. It’s the neighbors. More rain patters it’s window and windshield.

The man watches. Sips his coffee.

They’re the neighbors. They are short, maybe five feet tall at the absolute most. Their skin is grey like dull clay, and they are eerily gaunt, thin. Lengthy arms and legs, with hands that end in disturbingly long fingers. Four fingers. Enormous, almond shaped eyes stare out from bulbous heads on thin necks.

Thunder grumbles when the last car door is closed. The man watches as his neighbors disappear inside their small, suburban home.

He sips his coffee. The rain patters on.

Mornin’ Entries

Sometimes things can be hard for me. Lately I don’t have many friends and I can get kinda lonely. I don’t want to bother anyone or annoy anyone so I try not to text to much or let them talk to me. I tell them I’ll always be here for them and that’s true, I care for the people in my life, but I’m afraid that if I constantly want to talk to them, they’ll get bored. I talk about a lot of things, I talk a lot in general, I don’t want them to be frustrated with me.

It can be difficult to try and communicate my feelings. On here sometimes I really want to talk to people, I want to get to know them, understand them. I’m intensely curious about so much, about anything and everything, including people and their interests and their ideas. But I can’t do that, you know? I can’t just say “hey, you wanna talk about alien abductions or dinosaur zoos till 3 am? Can I describe in fine detail how I would make a spaceship my home and live comfortably in space? Or what this music makes me feel and the images it gives me in my mind?” Lmao. People would look at me like I had three heads! For a long time in my life I’ve been the odd one out, I guess, which is ironic because I’ve always been the guy everybody knew but only had a select group of friends. Idk. Maybe I’m complaining? I don’t mean to whine. Anyway, good morning everybody, and good day to you all.

- your friend, Zachariah

Sunset at Dawn

Time is changing.

Things waver like heat rising off of distant highway asphalt. They shiver and shudder, mirages in the desolate desert, before vanishing.

Cities melt in on themselves, warping beneath Gods’ gaze, disheleved and surreal, glassy dreams crashing without sound. Highways buckle to dust. Swallowed by hungry earth. Monuments vanish with furious whispers as history is rewritten under an unending tide of revision. For heartbeats—for moments—the Earth shudders beneath paradoxical floods, human history and construct devoured by nightmarish blur.

And then: change. Birth. Colossal woodland seems to warble into the timeline melody with vigor. Wet greenery. Enormous trees hundreds of meters tall, centuries old, armor-plated bark crisscrossed by slippery clover, dripping moss. Soil dark as midnight, alive with scent, moving as living things course inside. Forgotten mountains blossom like stony flowers, topped by monumental glaciers or vivid lava flows down shadowed sides; visages turned real from this ethereal fog. Angry rivers pulse through reinvigorated channels; rebirthed by new waters. Valleys crag from split earth, swamps and marshes millions of years dried once again humidly infernal.

Life. Creatures once again. Beings big and small. Armored in scales, adorned in feathers. Titanic structures of black stone thrown up at the sky, thorny, and imposing. Crimson light hums, throbs, glows.

Humanity lies in fragments. Quiet and enthralled. Afraid. Night comes, speaking in a million animal languages. Gifted new breath from fossil tombs. And electric minds dance, electricity and glass, electricity and glass..