Iterations of Pleasure

I don't deserve all the blessings being heaped upon my life.

I'm halfway dressed, getting read to go to catechism and then Mass. I'm eating Irish oatmeal and toasted granola with soymilk and sweet Medjool dates. Coffee is nearly brewed in the other room. On the other side of the continent, a beautiful girl is sleeping and dreaming of me. I read Nietzsche and Napoleon and the Bible and, right now, Marion Zimmer Bradley. I'm listening to Anberlin and Jimmy Eat World and Guns N Roses and Fall Out Boy and a lot more. I sweeten everything with honey, I can drink coffee again, and I'm in the best shape I've been in since I was a 19 year old college cheerleader.

*pauses for laughter*

Okay, all that being said, life is good and I'm happy.

And my manuscript is on its way to a publisher for the first time in my life.

Pray, everybody.


John

The Virgin Entry

I'm a Xanga reposter, so here is my first repost:

I’ve got that energy again, that feeling that builds in my hands and courses through my forearms and coats my elbows in solid gold. Times like these I feel half-invincible. I look down at my wrists and they seem so strong, see the veins under the skin and the color, the tightly knitted muscles and the tendons standing up like soldiers at attention. I can feel something hitchhiking on my blood cells, this glowing white light that sings and screams down my arms and comes out through my fingers. This light can create masterpieces and make women moan, can scald the walls I touch and break glass and hearts. When this light is in me, I can do anything.

I am alone in this room. I feel like a knight in his cell, surrounded by the tools of my trade, with smirks for armor and books for a broadsword. I feel like wrapping myself in furs and venturing out into a snowbound landscape to find my Lady Fair, to cut down those who prevent me from touching her hair as it blows like sunset-light slanting over frozen peaks on Nordic breezes. I want to set sail from Galway with thousands behind me and conquer the river Nile. I want to make love in a palace.

My life is a training. I work to gain patience and sustenance and to connect myself with the intellectual diaspora, with the lost tribe of Reason. I exercise my body to become stronger and more appealing to gain greater advantage of this culture obsessed with image and illusion. I study the works of Napoleon, books of chivalry, Christian texts and Gnostic history. I pray more and focus on the present. I fall in love every day.

I am being pulled forward into the future by a harsh and demanding force. I am being joined with people by an almost mystical attraction, fitting into them as if by some prescient design. I can feel myself being assembled. The pieces inside of me that are broken are being mended. Something is finishing my creation. I am exhausted. I am exhilarated. I am alive.

Good night all. To that dark world of dreams, to Heaven, to her arms, to night.