In This.

Here We Go...

I can feel it circling. I can feel the light I've so fought to create and then preserve begin to corrupt. He's not here anymore. Burn, gone. He will never be here again and now I am alone and making this new push, to get over the top and over the edge. I am being asked to get back in, to go back in and live in something that shakes me and fucks me and scares me. It scares the hell out of me, going into this alone now. I can feel myself changing, and if he were here I would call him or consult him or ask for his bid of confidence. I would ask him for everything. I always asked him for everything.

I'm writing again, actually, and I wasn't ready for this, wasn't ready to be anything but glancing for the next 10 months of my life, 11 months, 12 months. I can feel it circling. I can feel my paranoia, feel it flooding and maddening me. I can feel myself becoming madness again, unseated. I am John Durban and now must find John Durban again, beyond John Durban, beyond great expectations. Fuck you for being here, for meeting me, for seeing me. I'll never forgive you for that, for this, myself for what is to come.

Fuck you.

He said...

I need you ready for what's coming.

That was it, almost everything. He said don't tell me where you are, then that something of a dramatic turn of events is fast approaching. Then he said it again, exactly, I need you ready for what's coming. Burn hasn't been acting like himself lately, which I suppose isn't much of a surprise, seeing as we have never had the luxury of occupying the same space long enough to find legitimate understandings of one another. I love him because he is there, somewhere, always...and years ago, when I didn't know I was capable of saying the thing I am about to say, that I need him there, I needed someone there. I hate him because his push is relentless, so fucking relentless it would put me down if I tried to explain...because he's asking for a million words before we can even begin. One million words. Before. We. Even. Fucking. Begin. I need to put myself down.

I am far away and feel far away, so distant from everything I know or knew in the world, for a time long enough that when I do return to wherever it is I return to, everything will have changed. Please. I don't know what I am doing, specifically now or ever to be completely honest, only that I have committed to a cause I must now see through to the end. Words are leaving me, thousands at a time, a need to express what I never knew was inside of me, needing to fight the world, to piss on the face of it and offer no apologies, to destroy the ramparts designed to protect it from voice like mine. I find myself laughing about it and often, how we ever found a place in this world together, my boy and I...how we will ever continue to find a place in this world together. I am turning into something new entirely. Every day that thought crosses my mind - not something better, goodness fucking no. It's more like this - I am evolution. I am the definition by which these generations of our species, past and present, will later be judged. I am moving through the world, leaving stains on it, not waiting around to watch my caused flowers bloom. I am here but I am not. I am at the far end of the world, alone. My designs are both necessary and intentional. I am in complete control. I have never been able to say that before in my life. Some days here, I look out onto the world and can see it fitting into my hand. I am not delusional. Actually, far from it. The world will fear me. They should. I will be like nothing that has ever come.

North Island...

Motherfucker Burn shows up here and sits me down and says something like sorry buddy, this one isn't going to go down like the last one did. I said something like I know, different part of the world - we've come too far, are different men than the men we were stomping around the world in our former lives. He said then that I didn't understand and suggested I listened close. He told me he wasn't writing the second book, that he couldn't, that it wasn't about him anymore. Then he told me the second book had to be written, said something about a process of elimination but by then I was already walking away from him. I don't like surprises and I don't like being abandoned and he was giving me both and nothing else. Nothing else. He said we each have a job while we're here. His is to train for the Ironman and mine is to write the book, the whole fucking book, on my own. I haven't been hanging out with him much because I feel like I've been betrayed - no, not betrayed - I just feel so fucking responsible for this now and that's not a corner I want to find myself in.

I took a couple days, alone, before agreeing to meet up with him again. We had a couple drinks, dinner. He told me at the beginning that I could not walk out on him, but that he was standing firm, that he would be a chaperone, at best until I didn't need him anymore, but that things weren't going to change. I've been through a lot, he said, and I'm going to go through a lot soon, he said, and then he said that he wasn't doing this for any other reason but for the sake that it's what is best for me, absolutely best for me. That's when a crazy thing happened. I believed him, no...I understood him and accepted him. And now I'm here staying in a house on North Island and he's off somewhere else while I get my head wrapped around this. I don't know what I expected this second edition to be like, but I didn't think it would be like this, even after the promises we've made.

I need to understand what is happening here. I need to understand. Something happened. Something terrible happened and I am detached from something, right now just floating.

They Call This Ravenous...

Like fucking a girl and telling her you don't want to fuck her anymore but letting her get your mail or let her hang around your house and suck you off from time to time and day to day, it's unhealthy and unbecoming and it's what my life feels like right now. The world is trying to suck my cock and I'm letting it, have to let it because I can't pull my calendar fast enough, can't come to terms and accept stillness here, in London, as we're thawing out and the world is supposed to be coming alive again, as I am supposed to be coming alive again. Every face I have to face and every word I'm forced to spit feels forced and unnecessarry and for everyone but not for me, nothing for me anymore, nothing satisfying me anymore. I need to move out and away and it's a good fucking thing I am...because I don't know what I would do if I weren't. There are necessities in my life that I absolutely must see through, and when this trip and this departure arrived in my mind, I had to do everything in my power to let it line, to make certain it would line for Burn. We have accepted our pulls in this world, and that this one is heavy and still 9 days from ripe. I talked to Burn yesterday and he is my echo. He may be even worse off than I am - the kid is struggling, fucking struggling and he still has a face to paint and I don't envy him, his everyday day to day when I can sit here and get blasted and ignore and shut out and shut away and he needs to remain present and available. He can't stand being available - he is the most shut away motherfucker I have ever known, so if you know him as anything other than that - he's been lying to you - everything he has ever been to you has been a lie, a huge fucking lie. Go ahead, chew on that. By the time you're ready to spit, maybe you're big enough to understand it's exactly truth. But you're not. So you'll pretend to understand and won't because you can't. Because you're not capable. Incapable. Exactly.

London town. London. I'm going to take some drugs and walk around and take it all in, maybe say goodbye. Because it's necessary. Because I'm going to continue to not only speak for myself, but also my friend Burn...

Because we're tired of dipping, and hosting, and pulling along and willing acceptance from the world for the forms of our expression. Because sometimes when we think about it, we think the worst thing in the world might be to get exactly what we think we want, what we thought we wanted. Because if someone ever came up to me and told me they knew me or that I connected to them because of what I wrote in my book, I'm pretty fucking certain I'd find a clever way to make someone kill me.

Because Burn will never say the things that need to be said. Once we go, we're gone. Never coming back.

Because Truth Is Our Currency...

I was sitting here tonight, the nearing end of April. In May, I'm setting off to better lands. Faraway lands, to take care of a large handful of business with my friend, Burn. I think about him every now and again, wondering what he's up to and what he's thinking, knowing that when anything sweeping is happening or coming in his life, he starts to lose his shit and come unfolded or at least as unfolded as someone like him is as capable of being. I don't know if he would want me to post something like this, but I feel like it's necessary, because if he's only sending it to me, then that's both not what he needs and not what he intends when it comes to letting himself out. Because he's my boy, because these moments must go down...

JD,

You want to know what's going on. It's late, my body is tired. It knows what's coming. All it wants is to rest and lock onto as much comfort as it can for the next 3 weeks in this town. It knows we're going to see things and feel things and experience things that will make us foreign. It knows you and me, that we will smash our pretty faces in it - to break them, to seek out the things that destroy us and build us and show us we were right to come searching.

I want to say something to you my friend, because truth is our currency, the one thing we will always get by on. I don't know what would have become of me had I never met you that night. I wouldn't want to know the person I would have become without you. I've heard you say that I've saved you before. I've read it and taken it in and always let you have those words because you said them first. This world out here...if I wasn't leaving...if we weren't going to go where we are about to go, if we weren't about to chase the things we are about to chase, I would not make it. It's maddening, fucking maddening. It's constricting and swallowing and asking me to be exactly what I'm not every day and every day and every day. These hands in my pocket, these fucking hands in my pocket always and pulling and trying to pull me in and take me on and lift me, and fucking lift me, and fucking lift me. I've forgotten how to breathe, strangled, hands on my throat as I smile and smile. I want to breathe again John. I need to get out John. I don't know what I would have done if May 15 wasn't circled. I don't know what I would have done without your push. You are the truest friend I have. I don't need to say it, anything, and you've got it. You've got it all, you got it all from that first night.

Sometimes I think of the world. I wonder how it will accept us and our perceptions of it. I wonder which one of us it will rub out first, afraid of the truths we might expose, with fire in our fists and in our breath. I can see what is waiting for us at the end of that plane ride. Buses, cars, strangers. I can see what's waiting for us when maps can no longer tell us where we are. I can see how we are going to handle what it gives us. I have no idea. I can see us begging for more, always begging for more. At some point, I thought the first book might calm me, getting it out, putting it out. I am drifting further. Further and further. I need you to drift with me now. I know that I don't even need to ask. I know that I never had to, never will. May we extend false courtesies to one another for the rest of our lives, and then trounce them wildly. May every day that passes make us unrecognizable to our former selves.

Quite soon now. Never soon enough.

Burn

Now That's What The Fuck I'm Talking About...

Burn,

You motherfucker. Here we go. So I get a note from my friend Burn, my friend who I haven't seen in too long. It said something like here I come be ready for me and that was all I needed to hear. We've gotten good at feeling life's pull, and the pull is taking us somewhere new, to start something new for an undetermined period of time - the finest period of time there is. On May 15th, Burn is leaving from Los Angeles to meet me in Bangkok. That means I can't get there a day before the 18th, before he recovers, before he settles, before me and that crazy bastard take a torch to that fucking town.

He wrote me a month back, told me we were going to have to erase these lives we've catapulted onto the web, that people were telling him we would have to preserve our anonymity(talent) when the real stuff starts to move out into the world. Or at least mask it. Or at least make sure we were getting paid for it. Truth is, I don't need any of anyone's fucking money and I know that's not why Burn is doing any of this. I know it. I know him to his fucking bones. I don't know how much of what we've put out into the world is on here, or on Burn, miniscule amounts probably and none of it matters. I think at the end of the day, me and Burn share a lot of the same demons, and whatever it means that we have to run around the globe to find out what it takes to exercise them...then that's our truth. That's the only thing that matters. At some point, our first is going to light a fire. At some point, people are going to expect of us what we expect of ourselves. At some point, we are going to have to take on the responsibility of being the best that exists. That motherfucker turned me...

Believe it, we're ready. Me and my boy...