my not-Purge.

The dark beauty of The Purge franchise is its personal questioning that if you were annually granted 12 hours with which to commit any crime with impunity, wouldn't you seize that opportunity? The world is replete with imbalance & unfairness, with injustice & shortcomings. There's a not-so-fine line that separates murderers from vigilantes, thieves from robin hoods, the traitor from the patriot. These constructs are overlays that shift with the tides of history and sociological contexts. You put on the hat, you believe in the ideas of that costume, you arm yourself, and if you're victorious, then those are the terms that tend to endure. You have essentially purged your obstacles, and someone once said that for your dreams to become ascendant, one has to destroy the dreams of others for its fuel. So beautifully grim, so mercilessly direct, but is that violent fulfillment true?

So I went to The Breaking Point to Purge. My father died a couple years ago, around the same time my separation & subsequent divorce occurred. And late last year a breakup unexpectedly happened to me. There's a compounding of anger from these three things inside myself that I've never experienced before, in a way that is so not who I am, yet I can't argue with the very real pain level of loss & vulnerability I feel from those experiences. And the catch is if I let that anger go, then the sadness of it wins, so anger seems to be the default coping mechanism, but that's obviously a holding pattern and not a solution. My left-brain thinking's that if I could fully unleash my anger and go somewhere to destroy things with impunity, that I could purge myself of those feelings, level out and become myself again. Or even transcend the societal limitations of civilized behaviour, become a berserker, and gain a level of superhumanity, maybe. I'd tried acupuncture over the past month, but instead of blissing out like everyone else in the room, I'd mostly felt varying levels of emotional/energetic discomfort, even being inflicted with a serious hangover headache after a session, and I felt done with it. Instead of my body passively being subjected to sharp objects, I'd decided it was time for the objects to be subjected to all the brute force my body could actively generate.

The fraternal co-owners of the local rage room were so stoked I showed up with my loadable workout hammer that they took this picture of me ready to clobber things for their social media:

Yeah, total Purge coveralls, paintball mask, and construction site gloves, all practical safety appurtenances, plus you have to sign a waiver just in case you get hurt. I'd paid $10 extra for 20 glass bottles. They gave me like 50, so there would be glass, oh yes, much glass.

Pairing my phone's Viking Metal playlist with the room's bluetooth speaker, the brother gave me a quick rundown of the implements on the table just inside the door that were available: varying lengths of pipe, a small sledge, a claw hammer. Short of hitting the walls, ceiling, or camera (yes, they keep an eye on you, and if anyone's in the lobby, your rage room antics are on an external monitor above the door), everything else was fair game. The room's major features were the corpse of a water heater, a dinged but not defeated safe, the skeleton of a smashed large screen projection TV, a martial arts practice torso, a hairdressing mannequin head, an old large server case, and a huge tire, all either at the slopes of or somewhere on three small hills of destroyed rubbish, like a mini-apocalyptic landscape. 

Once the door shut, for the next fifteen minutes I could just beat anything in sight to oblivion. Amon Amarth's Versus The World ramped up and I fucking went to town, whirlwinding my hammer into the tire as hard as I could, beating the water heater like a dying elephant that dared to charge me, surgically striking hinges & welds on the iron safe to challenge its surfaces, crushing the side of a PC case into a dish-like object, becoming the wrecking ball to the remaining skeleton of the TV, hitting the makeup head right in its stupid face across the room into its upper corners like I'd just decapitated a battlefield opponent. 

Cresting the wreckage heaps, I turned and quested for more things to hit. The slopes of these proved somewhat unstable, my feet sometimes sinking into layers of jagged plastics and some sharp-edged ruined objects, which made me realize if I did this again boots would be more sensible protective option, so I had to mind my balance and ankles as I sought out new targets in the room.

And it was the bottles that were the most satisfying. I made them explode in mid-air with deadly accuracy, set them on top of the tire to tee-ball it into glittering snowflakes, threw the fragile containers at the walls and ground to comet tail into traceries of bright fireworks, smashed their shining curves with my hammer neck down into the floor until they shone no more. This was recycling at its finest, the noise of shattering a wonderful symphony of finality, the high bell glissando of instrumental vessels which would never hold anything again, their completeness irreversibly converted into an unexpectedly delightful schadenfreude.

There were only two moments, maybe less than ten actual seconds of that whole quarter-hour where I connected with my feelings, screaming & weeping & raging with anger, but the focus of the rest of the session turned out to be purely physical, instead my mind calculating the hows & methods of strikes & blows to greatest efficiency & degrees of effect, maximizing the experience to do as much evidenced damage as I could to the microcosm around me. It was more like a good workout than anything, and seemed more like I'd been at it for 45 minutes as opposed to just fifteen. I did leave with the endorphins from the exercise of it, the praise of the brother owners, and the achievement of getting to sign the wall as a participant in the shared commercial ritual of contained brutality, which was something, but not what I came for.

My father is still dead. I am still divorced. And, in a weird way that outweighs the other two, there isn't a day that has gone by where my heart does not mourn, uselessly re-negotiate, or miss so very deeply my last relationship.

I wish I could've beat those things out of my head & heart, used the experience as a modality for healing and self-care, but the purge didn't work for me. I find my feelings are more concrete than other people's, and far more substantial than all that glass or metal, which makes their quality resilient & stronger. My sadness is more profound, and my love more real. This presents a difficulty and a blessing which cannot be purged.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.

that is what it's like.

It is like watching a film every afternoon of the one you held most dear but can no longer have, and not being allowed to leave the theater.



It is like a burning anger inside that you can't explain, nor vent, and you know if you were to hurl it all forth from your throat, it would solve nothing, and still be just as much inside you.




It is like walking at the bottom of the ocean, against the deepest current, and you can't breathe, and your heart is being crushed in an abyss of helplessness.



That is what this feels like.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.

the sound of separation.

Recently I began transferring my digital music to my BlackBerry, and in the process thought I was in a place in my life where I didn't need any of the sad music anymore. I had what I needed forever, and the things that the music wept for didn't apply. I was happy.

Now, suddenly, unexpectedly, I find I again need that music, those tracks that will weep with me in the days to come.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or in the comments below.

the boombox of loves lost.

Depeche Mode's Black Celebration album goes on the repeat, rescuing me from work. 1986. I'm in the front hall of Tucson High Magnet School, and someone has this tape on a boombox. Me, Angie, Lando Ettrick, Leah, Dee Dee, sitting around a pillar, Swatches, K-Swiss, Benettons, pretty as a picture, we're together but alone, no talking, just listening, shoulders touching. There's a stretch of "Sometimes", then "A Question of Lust", and by "Here Is the House" and "World Full of Nothing", we're weeping, weeping uncontrollably, each of us thinking of someone we no longer have, and can never have again. The tape clicks and stops, and we look at each other, knowing, and go home.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.

it breaks my heart.

I would send that photo of you on a clear blue day in SF, holding the flask. It's that bright and shining moment of perfection where everything you feel is unquestionable and more than real and so solid it flays you free of the unimportant past and cracks opens the future like a pomegranate, each bead a sweet red bit of life to come, and you know in your soul it'll all taste good from here on out.

You're holding the flask in your hands, the one thing you wanted more than anything for your 30th birthday, and it reads "fire in a bottle", and it doesn't matter that nobody else knew what it meant, only us, only us, only us, only we knew.



Later, there were moments and pauses where our love flagged. The difference was that I had to try and pay attention to the ones where it didn't: the nights of sweat, breakfasts of unneeded donuts and fritters, you in marabou slippers, us driving out to see that total tourist trap in Dragoon that was so stupid it didn't matter because we were there together snickering among the scorpions frozen in paperweights; leaving the apartment like a dream in the stewardess outfit at 4 in the mornings, sleeplessly sexy, touching down like the setting sun when you got back in the evening, rising, falling, rising again, out into the world and ovaling back to me where I waited with presents washed up on the shore of my nights at the store. In them, I saw you, and the desire I had for you.



It was you who doubted, who saw those same moments not as answers but as questions to be raised but for your own reasons, because in the end security was more important than love for you. Is it? Have you now found it a few just too convenient doors down? I can't say. I've always been secure with myself, safe in my own arms, self-contained. I still am, but you've cracked that container, and while it's all still together in my boundless soul, there's a space where you're missing, where the cold enters, depressurizing my insides when I don't expect it, and I see you through the hairline gap, and I miss you: the bangs, the full smile, eyes of dusk, charms you never even saw, but that never failed to surprise, seen as though it were always the first time. Through the heartfissure I accidently watch re-runs of the Christina channel, and what was once my favourite show now breaks my heart, and the fucked up thing of it is you don't even have to be there to do it again.



Yet I can't tell you, or send you the photo. Pride forbids it, my righteous anger tells me such offerings are undeserved, that they weren't adequate to save us in the first place, that maybe, after it all, they'll signify only to me, and are ultimately unasked for.



I wonder if one night you'll realize that more than that immediate family you love, the shoe leather father of impossibly high regard, self-declared asshole brother, sweater-vested aloofly uncaring younger brother, and especially your unwinnable mommy dearest, that for that time, I cared for you more than all of their small mouths could ever hold, and cared most of all.



And in the end, now a year later, in the wake of your unsober tear eyed unannounced visit to my parents, I'm right: love isn't enough. In the end I was the one left holding the bag, the bag filled with gifts left ungiven, gifts poured back into the oceans of unwanted things, these artfully wrapped presents that weren't just gifts -- they were years of I love yous to come, the red seeds of pomegranate that once shined and burned inside that bottle like a fire, impossible but true, if only for a moment of our lives, flowing away from you,

almost,

but not,

tasted,

given up ...

gone.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

you are all under cardiac arrest.

Dominic stomps his way across the breakroom. A boyish early 20s only reinforced by the baseball shirt and toe cap sneakers.



"I'm just so angry."



I look up from week five's healthy meal selections. "At least you had a choice."



"It was my decision, and somehow I'm still angry, and I don't even know why."



Back down to the plate, I'm confronted by my pile of raw nuts. "What angers you is the futility of it all. All the time, investment of self, and when it should and still doesn't satisfy, it pisses you off."



"Guillermo, you're completely right."



"Of course I am." I am the goddamned cheerleader of broken hearts.



A week ago Abram's live-in lady Sarah kicks him to the curb. Not for the first time Abram reflects: "Think I'm going to be one of those guys who starts cross-dressing in his late 30s and figures out he's gay." I bring him empty boxes for his extensive wardrobe after work. He takes them resignedly in his overly ringed fingers, thanks me, and trudges back inside.



After years of unrequited forests of pining in FriendZonia, Donny's object of obsession Sofi, a svelte 20-year-old dance instructor from Mexico, finally decides to learn him a horizontal mambo. It is two weeks of golden bliss for Donny before she crushes it out as a "mistake".



"I can't stop thinking about it. She even moaned my name with that accent."



"Look at it this way: Most guys never get to have sex with their dream girl. You win."



Chris is given an ultimatum to read New Age books and change by month's end. Mira still uses him for sex, but then throws him out of their apartment come August 1st. He breaks down live on KXCI during his guest set that night, but soldiers on until the end.



By all accounts Mira was on wheels.



"Now you can go find someone who's actually nice."



"But she was the one!" he insists. "And now it's too late."



I sigh for him, but know he'll feel differently when he finds out she was cheating on him by August 25th.





"G, are you married?"



"Why Rose? You asking?" Her boyfriend Paul has the most inexcusable hair. It's like the mange, really. Last week she confessed to planning on leaving him.



She laughs and links hands with me, palm to palm. "No, but I thought you were."



"48 hours ago I just got my walking papers from a two-year relationship."



"Relationships suck."



We smile at each other, pushing away, hands parting.

[Tarjeta de Lotería #27: El Corazón.]

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

an open letter.

One night you will search for yourself, Miss Kris Nicholson, and you will find this, thereby finding me.



Come September it will be 11 years since I walked away from you on the curb of the New Orleans airport, trying my hardest to never look back -- but a part of me has been looking back ever since, unable to forget the splendour in the shadows of that old whorehouse turned hotel on Rue Dauphine. We only stopped long enough to eat oysters in the Vieux Carre, returning for more on bended knees & arched backs, over the ottoman, & upon the silks. 



Talks of literature applied to living. Drama from the page, characters & plots twisted from lips that echoed the leaves even more than mine, so worth the listening as hours became minutes. Your skin, a pallid pleasure wrought in alabaster, hair a red river silted in gold. I never tired of looking at you.



I never got the chance to. You poisoned us. 



You went back to your once-spurned fiance willingly. Know that you were the last person I could love more than myself & you put paid on that innocent mistake. Maybe on some level you felt undeserving, returning to a man who'd hit you, an unimaginative parasite who had already cost you years. I had no choice but to leave. 



Then some odd Thanksgiving I spotted you, a ghost. You looked worn & tired. I was nearly relieved at the sight. Katrina had destroyed 90% of Hattiesburg and even after so many years my first thought worried if you were still in Mississippi, crushed beneath the wreckage of the South. But Tom was near, towing the lesser and later vision of you, and that looked to be a far slower demise than nature could devise. 



You were the love of my life, but you don't deserve such high regard. What is eight months of passion compared to many dedications of three years? Yet I think on you more, for good or ill. Equal measures of pride & self-respect have kept me from actively seeking you out. They still do. They still will. 



In letter & person I was the night to your day. And it seemed to be half you. Was it actually you? Or was it the heaven you made me feel? It was both. Only far later I realized it never really needed you as an external catalyst, because it doesn't come from another -- that bliss comes from oneself. It just wanted you to share with, and that was the miracle we had together. 



But on rare nights it still hurts, the poison, burning that lesson inside me. In turn, remember me on this sainted day of love when we'd first touched one another in earnest. Remember that I bought a star in Scorpio to name after you, lit smaller than a pinhole & greater than all the world.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.