PULSE-POUNDING THRILLS are best left to visual mediums

Mrs. Blue's been having heartburn issues again. She wakes up around 3 or 4 the past few mornings and wavers out of bed, back bent, abdomen and tits wrapped in arms as if she's guarding guts from spilling out. No, she's not pregnant. This is a recurring issue and she takes prescribed meds to keep it at bay, but it's been worse lately. She blames it on stress and, specifically, the homemade nachos we ate last night (she made them).

It pains me to see her in pain. Her digestive system is being a dick. It's affecting her work and we're about to go to Thailand for two weeks where spicy food is hard to avoid. I not-so-secretly want us to expatriate to a hidden patch of beach, with a cave or self-built lean-to, eat fish and coconuts, trek up mountains, live out the rest of our short lives doing mushrooms and ayahuasca and mucking it up with the locals.

I will write and and pluck acoustic instruments, she will make pottery and catalogue wild flora, our passions. We're both from Florida, we're meant for the tropics.

Anyways...

I'm convinced lately that terror and action and PULSE-POUNDING THRILLS are best left to visual mediums. You know, the movin' pitchers and vidya games.

I just finished reading an International Bestseller, NPR book of the year, award winning literary thriller. The lazy twist (they were all the same dude, DUDE!) was obvious by chapter 2. I trudged on.  It was mercifully short, thank dog. But one thing that was handled...decently (even though the surprise was ruined), was the dread. The terror. And that's not saying much, for me, anymore.

There were a few years where I read nothing but horror and thriller novels or novellas. King, Ligotti, Graham Jones, Tremblay, Baer, etc. I've read a rhinoceros's shit pile worth of books that try to lay on the terror and dread, and this one did it well. But you know what? You know what does it better? The shittiest low-budget horror movies do it better. Video games do it better. Mimes do it better. Shadow puppets...maybe.

The strength of a novel lies in seducing you with inaction. Or very little action. Manufacturing human drama, without fireworks. Because the fireworks look, sound, and feel ten thousand times better when they explode in front of your eyes, not inside your head. Literature's special place is not in the outwardly visceral, it is in the human dread of simple ennui and looming death.

I don't know if I'll ever read a so-called "literary thriller" again. The one I recently finished was touted as the cream of the crop by every major channel. It sold a bajillion. It was not memorable.

I am open to suggestions, though

My phone's camera seems to be developing cataracts. 

Black Swan - Haven't seen it in a long time and it was $4 at McKay's, so woo hoo. I remember a mean mama and some forced cunnilingus. 

Robocop Trilogy - The first two are classics and fun for the whole family. This also includes the third, which I saw at one time and vaguely remember that there are ninjas. Doubt I'll watch it again unless I'm sick on an off day and looking at other shit. 

Blindspotting - Probably my favorite movie from whatever year it came out. Kind of reminds me of Swingers, set in urban L.A. instead of an alternate reality zoot suit L.A. It's a hang out movie for sure, and gets a little political, which is fine since the characters are great. The dude from the hip hop group Clipping is the protagonist. 

A Field In England - Once "Baloo my boy" kicked in I knew this would be something special. I had seen Kill List and Sightseers, which meant that I would wait for anything new from Ben Wheatley with bated breath. AFiE is a departure in tone and scope from those films. It's a low budget, confined, hallucinatory period piece. When I first saw it I thought it might knock Kill List from its top spot in Wheatley's filmography. Then I saw it a 2nd time and though a bit less of it. The third viewing bumped it right back up, though. I guess this means that my mindstate matters when watching AFiE. I find it infinitely fascinating. The language is beautiful, the B&W is gorgeous, and the whole second half is a mushroom trip hellscape borne from experience, which you will either love or loathe. This is one I wish I had seen in a theater with a great sound system, in complete darkness. See it if you haven't!

The Manson Family - Goddamn fucking shit I love this movie. I used to own the 2-disk DVD edition, but lost it somewhere along the way. So glad they re-released it on the Blu, and it even has all the old special features and a few new ones. This is a film made over a decade of blood and sweat and maniacal devotion from the director and crew. Van Bebber even became a sort of bespoke cult leader himself, keeping the cast coming back to the project through marriages, divorces, births, and deaths. The result is probably the closest any of us have to being in spitting distance of the actual Family. Blood orgies, drug orgies, stabby-stabbies, swatikas...it's all here in chaotically low budget gory glory. The most impressive aspect, to me, is that while the movie places us directly in the lives of these damaged youngins, it doesn't glorify them. It's actually pretty neutral, while also being a paean to a bygone era. Watch it and revel in Van Bebber's nightmare. 

Enemy - Another cheap buy at McKay's. I saw this once and remember liking it but not understanding much of what happened. That means it deserves another viewing or three. Also: Giant Spiders!

Every night, while watching whatever with Mrs. Blue, I pick skin off of the pad of my big toe and/or finger tips until there is barely a yellowed layer left. 7 out of 10 times I bleed, and go to the bathroom for a band-aid. Dress the wound to the sound of Mrs. Blue's perfunctory "Babe!" while the Great British Baking Show echoes through the screen door, letting any passers by know that we are Normal People participating in Normal Nightly Brain-Rot, with a couple'a cats to boot.

I've learned to hop on one foot to the bathroom once the bleeding starts, lest I be chastised for the thousandth time for leaving candle-drip stains along the carpet. I have tasted my own blood so many times it has come to be as Ritual as the daily gulp of dill pickle juice. Its flavor is so familiar that I often wonder whether a stranger's gore would shock the palette, or instill the notion that we are all truly One under the sun? I have no interest in drinking anyone else's blood to find out. Makes me think of AIDS or rabies or The Craft. Fairuza Balk's monster mouth. 

I've picked my toes for as long as I can remember. Switching to vaping, and now toying with lowering the nicotine content, has exacerbated the shit out of it. I have to watch out if I wear open-toed shoes in public. If waiting at the DMV, I'm sure to absentmindedly repulse like the basement dweller I could and should have become. Don't bleed on people, people. Don't leave a mess to be mopped.

All this is to say that I need to grow up. I'm 35 and almost married. I tried reading something that well-adjusted, principled, well-meaning people read (The Argonauts) and threw it across the room. I spent $16 on it at a Parnassus Books! Am I supposed to care as much as Nelson does about the cultural and ethical repercussions of every instinct-based decision I make? To be a walking mirror? Is that how the good people live? The wisened ones? It must be exhausting (though I am a cis white male so take all this in brackets and apocryphalia and blarney. Consider me Divine, eating shit).

Sometimes I tear a particularly long piece of calloused big toe skin off with my teeth. It is very satisfying to masticate and swallow.

But what about the quantum conundrum that happens when 8d light codes penetrate dna via retina retention and deliver false signals of gene propagation, resulting in the activation of reprogramming protocols biased towards ascension due to the entity self-identifying as deity?

Review: MOUNTAINHEAD by New Juche

Here I sit in my Compacty Blacky's (black version of tighty whiteys, you're welcome), last night's sweat breeding a gummy, urine-colored layer of film over my body. I must have rolled around a lot in fevered dream convulsions, and I also happened to finish New Juche's slim book before bed. It feels apt that my body appears to have come to blows with venereal phantoms throughout the night, since Mountainhead is a hypersexual masterpiece of venomous propulsion.

It is part autofiction, travelogue, memoir, incantation, and exorcism. A journal of a man I grew to fear and respect, full of prose so vivid I could feel the soil of Southeast Asia clogging my veins. There are pictures, as well, to help orient you. Juche explores this landscape not as an expat or an observer, he inserts himself primordially, assimilating with orifices of the living and the dead. Trees, animals, mushrooms, and prostitutes.

New Juche is exploring this humid continent as a deviant despot, but one with a Freudian compassion and beautiful lack of control. A lack of control only for the sensual bounds that most humans don't even attempt to explore. In a normal person-to-person transactional sense, Juche is a blessed, if frenzied compatriot.

Pod and I not only tolerated, but derived a curious pleasure from washing Martin's exhausted body and laying it down carefully on his cot...We would fold his leathery wings behind him in silence...Martin's skin would become damp, and then cursed with a froth of creamy soap...which fell away like scales...I was especially gentle and respectful with the papery skin that covered his thighs, and the wooden, vegetable quality of his kneecaps...When Martin is dead, I thought, we'll roll dice made from his kneecaps.

In ascending the mountain with Juche, I had the youthful urge many times to drop the job, the fiancee, the cats, walk the earth like Jules and assimilate with foreign and dangerous fauna. This is a dangerous book if you are of a certain constitution that flirts with arrested development and nihilism. Juche slowly expatriates himself from humanity and I am not certain what he found on the mountain, even though he narrates his journey exquisitely, because this is literature so personal and fevered that I came to tears. All while Juche came on the world, jism as a sort of language, as if his penis was constantly mourning.

I nuzzle and rub my face in the mud as a passionate apology and feel blood pump sparingly but steadily into my penis, not because of the soil or the rain, or the sensation of it on my face and eyes or in my mouth, but out of the satisfaction I derive from my virtuoso gesture of sensitive capitulation. And then there is that visceral spasm that my language has yet to capture, that draws from the liberation attained through abject behavior, and the Great Warm Ecstasy that one feels absolutely beside one in these moments (do you know these moments?), like a giant bubble that could be leapt into, but only ever recedes like the object of desire in a dream. And you'll agree that my harmony is the touchstone, my attribute, and that the danger and hunger I bravely endure are real and necessary, and have qualified my ascension.

This might even be a harmful book for young, explorative minds. If I had read this in my teens, I might've continued on the path of pain that I eventually veered from before it was too late. But then again, what options do Generation Z, or whatever they are called, have? The sacred is evaporating, burning up, empty overgrown tracts to fornicate upon (mentally or otherwise) are peopled and walled in. We ain't in Walden anymore.

New Juche is buttressed in extinction, and I imagine he will die there before the Main Event, crying and smiling and masturbating as it all burns away in front of his eyes. He seems to be alive and well right now, and I need more.