Paved with Cruel Intentions

1

Another artist dead by suicide...

What a way to start an article on an erotica website. And what a way to appeal to your audience. But I'm not trying to appeal to anyone. I'm writing this not because I want to - not particularly!

I'm writing this because I'm compelled to, because I have to. It has nothing to do with the songwriter and vocalist, who hung himself today, on a personal level. And don't worry, this doesn't make him my role model today or ever.

I'm too black-hearted, or so the picture portrays, to see myself to the door. I'm too savage to stop just because people tell me that I should. I hold no grudge against society. I'm not vengeful or sticking around for any grande finale, but why the FUCK should I follow the few instincts that don't serve me right? Why should I stop living to end the battle that life is?

Over the past year I gained a faithful following in such a short space of time. The same die-hard individuals were in the comments every story I wrote, giving all the support and encouragement a writer could want and need (notably I'm easy to please when they going's good).

Elsewhere I've been busy as the Mad Hatter, making my fight worth more than the pain of living. Every time I feel like giving up, another part of me gets warmed up to die fighting, and so I never die. I live to lick my wounds a while before I can find the strength to go back to normality.

It was in the later, darker, colder months of '16 that depression returned with a vengeance, like a grinning skeleton hypnotically swinging an old pocket watch. I'd had such a good few months hell-free. I should have been ready. The worst episodes, and the longest ones, happen at the same times every year.

I've been suicidal for over twenty years. It's now my normality; my nature. Do I accept it?

Do I fuck!

It's my nature as a creative mind to dramatise, and to visualise the worst in life as some insane comic strip joke. It's the desperation, the revelation, and the profound that I seem to find in abundance, and so whereas it takes its toll, I've learned from it, and learned to thrive off it.

As ancient Maori custom sometimes called for the enemy to be killed, eaten, and then shit out onto the battlefield as a final insult to his bloodline, that is what I do with my depression. Yes, it would now appear that I shit depression.

But here's to Chester;

He tried so hard and got so far, and in the end it doesn't even matter. He tried so hard to lose it all, and in the end...

Well, he succeeded!

I won't mourn you like the generation that made you famous, Chester. But you have my sympathy. You found out for yourself that having everything in the world 80% of people can only dream of doesn't stop you from being all the things that kill you.

And when so many people believed every word you said without question, while I ended up playing the villain just to make the brutal truth be known, the one least likely to survive is still very much surviving, and living real.

I'm just angry at him. Nobody deserves to die that way, or to want to die so desperately. Either we have the last laugh, or our demons do. It's our choice!

2

Not all of my readers would see the difference between my true heart and the one I wear on my sleeve. Not all of my readers would see the difference between my nature and my personality. Some things have to be expressed in order to expel them from the body and mind.

The ability to write creatively, truthfully, and cathartically (even if it means looking insane), is one such way. To write from the heart, bypassing the filter society had fitted between mind and mouth, you have full control over your own freedoms of thought, conscience and expression. You can live more fully in the space of an hour than some do within the space of a year.

And it is through this that we open our eyes to the futility of labels. Labels are what allow assumptions. Labels make it easier not to ask, to bypass curiosity.

I'm still the bad guy come this fact. No stranger doubts it. I tell truths that can shatter society's shackles and I give the individual the choice to walk free or to shackle themselves back up again. Take a wild guess what 9 out of 10 people do in the end.

Truth begins with the self, and life begins with the conquering of the self. The latter is the hardest part. Discovering your true self - even the parts you're taught to hate, to hide, to pretend don't exist, to label as weaknesses and to feel shame for.

The fact that people don't see beyond the typical is why I'm not popular or widely accepted. But then strangely it's my obligation to accept everything else without question or challenge? Ha.. no!

And so I do admit, I go out of my way to make it fun to be the bad guy! But I also do admit the parts that I dislike about myself. But I learn to put them to use, and they make for great powers of empathy.

Writer Psychology 101!

3

Where am I going with all of this, you wonder, if you haven't already tuned out...

The saying, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions," has become quite popular again recently. I can't help but notice that people don't think too hard about what it might mean beyond the typical. Do they ever look at it from different perpectives, or to alternate its objectives?

Does it maybe suggest that the road elsewhere is paved with worse things than what awaits in hell? What is hell to you? Did Chester think that hell - if he believed in it - would be better than suffering for something other than himself?

As a social commentator and writer (and I think you'll understand me by this point), I set out to provoke purely in order to test who I'm rolling with; to see whether people are getting smarter or dumber; wondering if there are any real heroes left who are as smart as their villains.

I don't want to get into what I think and feel when I get to the revelation that so many everyday heroes today are born out of prejudice and intolerance, and that they're absolutely useless without something tangible to beat their fists against. As writers we don't have that luxury.

Most of all, I play the villain - I have also gone by the nicknames of Troll, Shitlord, and Bastard - because there is no feeling of redemption quite like knowing you can take this world and ruin it like a reckless force of nature, but that your ultimately good heart won't let you.

And there is no feeling like being everybody's villain right up until you prove to be the only motherfucker in the vicinity of somebody's really bad day willing to step up to prevent it getting any worse; and sometimes to transform their lives for the better.

What a head fuck - the guy nobody cares about won today and we lost. He proved against all odds that he still gives a shit, and shits he did give!

4

It isn't always that your writing can truly reflect on life's rare certainties, from the issues at hand and right down to the heart, and the impulses that drive us to rights and wrongs. It isn't always that we can expose the raw truth about ourselves to the world, and for it to make perfect sense.

Sometimes all you can hope for is for something of little importance to make perfect sense to you and you only. That's what gets us through.

It isn't often that good intentions end with good conclusions. Fiction sometimes just gives us what we need emotionally, to cushion the real blows that hurt us into needing heroes and warmth and happy endings. Humans don't get happy endings.

But if you or your fictional characters can want to live so bad that you would burn the world down, rather than to end the self on a whim without realising what's at stake, then maybe survival relies on the ability to embrace the villain, to embrace everything we hate about ourselves rather than to hide it away or to kill it off.

Maybe only a truly good person, and an enlightened one, could bear to feel a villain's dark heart in place of their own, and to understand what is so important about life that makes all other things seem worthless in comparison.

Because even then there is somebody who values life in some way, but also somebody who rejects the futility at all costs. How many get that balance right anyway?

The road to salvation does seem paved with cruel intentions - always has!

5

I decided to publish this prose because somebody could always use the help, if not a muse to get them thinking.

How will it help you? Give it some time. Mull it over. I believe what I was trying to express is that "best behaviour" and trying to be perfect might be the gold standard, but it still leaves you as vulnerable as anyone else.

If you or your characters are going to be vulnerable either way, you might as well be scot free. It's your born right. So even if this helps you to justify your love of all things Literotica, and to know no shame, then good.

There's nothing worse than a holier than thou swinging dick telling you whose standards to follow. They can be reminded of this with a hefty boot between the bollocks. Sure beats not knowing how to live with yourself!