When I was 14 I discovered agoraphobia in Spain, seeking sanctuary in a mansion governed by a 5-foot-tall man. But reality was seeking me, and I uncomfortably realized that his livelihood was powered by the elevator that ran up all 4 floors, so that his small army of workers wouldn't waste their strength lifting luggage and packages, instead devoting their time to dinners filled with serrano ham and soft-boiled eggs.
When I was 15 I tried my hand at Delphic esteem, feeling like the baby renegade amongst my slightly older peers. They were the idols of art school babylon: pale flesh squeezed into denim and lace, talking about Leonard Cohen and running away to Argentina. Screw adolescence, they wanted to gut it all, drag the entrails across a sky-high canvas. Say it was "inspired."
When I was 16 I lined the tops of my eyelids with gold glitter and decked myself out like some 1980's call girl. But I spat on irony...My flesh and ego were too unruffled for any of that. Then I traveled through the Inferno, and wasn't able to discern the actual human beings from the fiery demigods, the friend from the foe. So I gave up that stint and pledged allegiance to Alva and distortion, hoping that my reverence would end up being fulfilled with some sort of urbanite glory.
When I was 17 I was part of an epic battle- My brain is a perennial abode...NAW man! It's perched on top of some godforsaken cactus in the backyard of some poet/mystic in Arizona, tinted a turquoise shade, serving as a vulture's foothold - but I stuck it out. Read a lot. Wrote some more...Words stuck to me like Lilliputians, insistent little bastards piercing my skin and squeezing out swollen drops of my essence - melted PVC - claiming their function was to cleanse my soul. I wasn't always so sure.
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