Leaves fall and sit in noise carpets against the ground. It is a time to transition. There is that smell in the air. I check. Not deodorant. Slightly sweet and pungent, like sphagnum moss baked a cake and let it cool upon an oak branch chased with faerie dust and cleft lizard feet.

It is time to wander from the wanderer.

The Blood is within this one, and the words to make it harm or heal burn blue and glow against the darkness,
sharp tattoos of circles and bands, crossed with stars and stitched to sands. From time to time,
place to place,
and face to face, this one rambled in the sun of Providence. Every walk of life, high and low born, the supernatural (human and otherwise) and mundane, the literate, the superficial, the many good and the few truly evil. There was a common thread I found and walked around, and along. There was a loom that wove rack to rack,
year to year,
and I came to know the fear, the several patterns and people typically associated with them.

Above all, I hunted torment.

Not by words, smells,
or conscious tells. I saw and I would know. I listened and it was clear. I knew pain, all pain, any kind of pain. I knew the texture and brushstrokes, peering at the canvas and knowing the half-blind dance the person spun to spin around and come undone. To bind themselves.

And in the beginning, I would help. I would try so hard. I would think that if I could walk them back toward the unbroken places, they would accept my otherness.

It is an Emo thing to think it never happened. It did to varying degrees. Many were at least initially grateful. Some thought it was cool, or something to ignore, or investigate--although that rarely lasted long. By circumstance or design or my hunger for good old-fashioned broken motherfuckers, I grew up, got more selective, a hue less cynical, and I met many, many, many people.

Some of you, in fact.

And the wanderer moved from town to town, and tried not to burn the house down, but on the rare occasion did.

More often nothing happened, but then good things also came. People are alive that would otherwise be dead. An evil man who controlled young disciples remains in a mental health facility in California. A youngish man nicknamed Paizan transferred from a college he disliked, a place I disliked, to somewhere new. A sad, lost boy named Drew knows that he is not crazy and that people can love him. And despite many an overdramatic retelling and embellishing and Anne Rice-like overview over a haphazard and in retrospect amusing merry-go-round rollercoaster in five dimensions, quite a few people seem to have benefited.

It's never made me happy. Not for long.

This ends disc 1, side 1. Please reverse your cassette for side 2.

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