You Know, I Used To Listen To AFI A Lot

I present to you, the visual history of Davey Havok. 

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I Hate All White People

I often wish I was a lounge singer, back when that sort of thing would have mattered, back when the uppers and downers had names like children's breakfast cereals, and only soldiers used acronyms. I'd like again gin probably, though just because I'd be accustomed to it. We'd have arguments over Tanqueray and Bombay Sapphire and we'd refer to the baseball players we heard about on the radio by their first names. Any trespassers caught would still be shot on sight. There'd be a lot of smoking too, guilt free and thick, unbridled from the awful burden of empirical evidence.

Believe it or not, it's not really about the singing, or music, or the fashion, or the way that all the microphones were all silver and looked medicinal. It's not that society pages still existed, or trans atlantic flights were done in chrome planes. It's that everything was the way it was before they all broke it.

That's what I wish for. I want it all built up, back the way it was, all the dark and the nasty and the shackles and the horror and the pain. Then I want to be the one to smash it all. I want to plant the bombs, I want to rally the protestors. Back then, when sunsets weren't as purple and polka dots were just a joke, there was so much left for people like me to fix.

More than anything, I just want something I can fight against. To do that, I could be a lounge singer.

I don't trust my skin, the way it moves when I touch it.  

Absolving Myself Of Responsibility

So I'm still stealing internet for a few more days, but figured I'd post this (as well as that last one below) for those of you who still check this thing often. Thank you more than anything. I'm torn on all three of these beginings, so I want you to pick which one I finish. I have no idea how long it will end up being, or even if it'll contain any of the things that these snippets do, but I thought this could be fun. Comment here, or, for those of you who don't like doing that, send me an email or a text or something.

In terms of other updates, I am jumping up and down on top of the world. The haiku book is almost finished (and the launch is going to be so lulz you don't even know.) Classes are terrifying but I have already been called "a shark," which is promising, and my apartment is the most perfect place I could ask for. I've also discovered that not being damaged is just the most wonderful, wonderful thing.

SO ON WITH IT.

1)

He is looking for a girl who likes to hide her chin with a sturdy zipped jacket, and I am feeling like I am America. There's a shotgun reclining lazily between the two of us, and when he shifts gears awkwardly it stirs slightly, an angry father sick of the improptu shows in the bedroom, Sunday morning. If it could yawn, it would yawn. Trees are all identical to one another at eighty miles an hour and I am drunk so I think I know the names of all of them and I am reciting them. I say “Birch,” for the fifteenth time and if he wasn't driving, I'd assume he was asleep. He says aloud, “sink,” and I think it's a command before fifty pounds of porcelain smashes into the front of the truck. It dissipates on impact, and for a moment I feel the slight tinge of the dust released from in-between the pieces enter the air conditioning channels and nip at the moist pink forest of my lungs. In front of us, another truck, carrying more sinks, begins to weave back and forth.

 “Will you look at this,” he says, pointing at the other truck. Two men are now visible, fighting with one another on top of the trailer, their dark blue suits painted against them in the onslaught wind. “Well,” I say, and take another tug from my monogrammed flask. It feels like someone has started a wave pool in my stomach. “Pull up to them,” I say.

 or

2)

Pacing back and forth in AISLE THREE of the hardware store Jessica is frustrated and sour. Standing next to her is a 64 year old man buying a hook made of steel, for the purpose of hanging a mesh and nylon apparatus from his ceiling, used exclusively for sex. She's ringing her hands, occasionally bringing them to her face and smelling the acrid grapefruit spray baked into her cuticles from this morning's breakfast, a filthy habit, and unbeknownst to her, the exact reason why three of her recent dates have decided not to call her back. Don't feel bad though. In eight months she is going to meet the man of her dreams, a small, effeminate gentleman named Craig with size fifteen shoes and the ability to stand up to her mother, something she has never been able to do.

 Right now though, Craig is a distant seagull in the sherbet horizon of Jessica's future. Here in the hardware store, she has been already ignored and belittled by three male sales associates, and annoyingly enough, a female assistant manager. “Maybe you should come back with your husband,” she said, implying not only that Jessica needed someone to take her by the alabaster wrist and help her select the correct screws, but then that he should lead her, eagerly back to some idling mahogany coloured sedan which he would assuredly drive home. Jessica wishes she knew what a drywall screw looked like, and wishes for that, harder than anything she has ever wished for before.

 Disgusted, she walks into more comfortable territory. The moment she enters AISLE SIX, she feels a bath of taupe-cream coloured calm swell all over her skin, starting from her stomach, ebbing out all the way to her horrible citrus smelling fingertips. Jessica may not have ever hung drywall before, but here, free from the confusion and horror of AISLE THREE she is comfortable. Jessica has been in AISLE SIX many times before. She may not have remodelled a kitchen, but she has shot a crossbow. “You,” she waves to a lactose intolerant teenager in a red vest. “Get over here,” she says, pointing at the Lucite cabinet in front of her. “And bring your little keys.”

 or

3)

Pitt awoke from the dream coated in a mucus thick sweat and biting his tongue. Minindra, his girlfriend of eight months turned to him startled, and began to rub his shoulders, cradling her cop drama paperback in her lap. He shivered, a deep, grooving grain and smiled at her, rolling his eyes apologetically. The nightmares had been getting more and more consistent. He was beginning to think that their recurring nature was indicative of some sort of psychological trauma, especially considering the castration theme.

 The couple's standard schnauzer Fritz stirred at the end of the bed. They both loved the dog an embarrassing amount, but resented both the attention he received (Minindra had noticed a possible decline in the frequency of their physical intimacy since the dog arrived, but without the proper tabulation and analysis, it was uncertain—she was working on a chart, and would confirm it in two weeks) and his semiotic relevance. Fritz, while a loveable and affectionate import was also a symbol, one that unwittingly tied them together for at least seven to eight years, depending on whether it was a student driver or canine diabetes that eventually took the bastard out. When he realized it, Pitt was distraught and immediately bolted for the nearest bar, ingesting two pints of IPA before moving to scotch. “We've only been together seven months,” he lolled. “If this thing hangs on, we're looking at a commitment of like, ten times that.” When another patron pointed out his mathematical error, Pitt punched him in them mouth and spent the night in the drunk tank, a fact he had still neglected to reveal to Minindra. He for some reason, sort of blamed Fritz for this too. He also felt slightly emasculated that the dog made more money than him, but like his nightmares, did not wholly understand this either. Pitt did not spend a lot of time thinking deep thoughts, unless they were about football or junk bonds.

 “Was it the same dream?” Minindra asked, quietly in her silky Bombay accented whisper. Before Pitt could answer, Fritz turned to them annoyed. “Will you two assholes keep it down,” he said, cocking a grey ear and baring his teeth ever so slightly. “Some of us non-crazies are trying to sleep. You know I have a shoot tomorrow.” Goddammit Pitt hated that dog.

Buried In Your Flower Garden Next To Your Childhood Pets

There is nothing left but apologies and gratitude and that, perhaps the part of a larger picture, perhaps just a little more Technicolor, might be enough, but there's so much there that isn't. There's a lot to figure out, so scribble it on a cocktail napkin, soaking translucent, bubbling like a blister on a helicopter crash victim, hauled out of the reef in a fishing net.

 The fatal error in your system is encountered in the 'if,' whereas all the variables are loaded and appropriate, though the environment in which they function is an airless, silent, dead planet. It's so trite to talk about sequential numbers, it's so needless to wonder what would happen were all the elements in line and tangled up in (dark) blue—que será será and other half truths, it's so easy to be calm when you're an idiot, so difficult to avoid being burnt by the beam of light razoring out of the cracks in your skin. Scientists have recently discovered that all humans give off some sort of light, visible by machines, something to do with the explosion of free radicals. Every time I have started to get close to someone, I picture them without their skin, a sopping spongey mass of red beef, a ziploc sack of organs and fluids. Every time I have listened to a song, I have become that narrator, I have become that sunset and that Rosalita and that Hot Rod Lincoln. Every time I start a fire, I run as hard and fast as I can, circling the building and quenching my hungry lungs with the acrid yellow smoke of a burning couch, a melting television set, a blackening album of family photos.

 Toasting to our own shelf lives is just about the only thing we have left, making each other laugh because in that moment, in the second between the “ah” and the “ha” is a fraction of a breath in which we are incapable of thought. Trapped in the snare of our own biology, of our own automatic instinct we are voided of the treachery that is our own suffocating awareness and the bite of our own, overly sharpened (chipped from an injury? Maybe a baseball accident?) incisor through the welcoming, unrelenting softness of our own lips, we're nothing. For half a second, we are incapable of remembering who we are. All I'd like, is for once, to laugh at something other than myself.

 That's what it comes down to man, it's the friction, that's all it is, between countries and thighs and knees on the fresh rain darkened pavement. My favourite bookstore is closing today. There is only one lock between me and my roof and the thought keeps paining me, demanding I entertain the protocol, demanding that I let it get the best of me. Smoking cigarettes in the rain has always been pretty appealing though. You're turning into a victim, self-described—your highschool coach would beat the hell out of you if he could see you now, and he really can't afford to lose his job, he's got a new baby, a second mortgage, but that's how much he cares, that's how much he wants you in your place. He does this cause he loves you.

 Crushed brick foundation, Exxon Valdez mascara, you're a lingering sunspot when I somehow to close my eyes. I'm a second guess machine. At least I used to be. Let's bury ourselves like a pair of grey doves in a murder of crows, beneath the laughing tidal waves of my best friend's wedding registry and on top of the structurally sound crash test 8-month lease. We'll roll along them all like an avalanche, pressed between the promises of toasters and china patterns, and the smooth linoleum awkwardness of deciding how to split up the damage deposit. I'll teach you to swim, and if, when we're trying, you're sucked down into the dark blue, trapped against the sandy trenched bottom, I'll dive in, and I'll pull you out, and there, skin burning in the sun on the rocky banks, I'll suck the water from your lungs, spit it over your shoulder and welcome you back to tomorrow.

Some Guy, A Striped Shirt, A Wool Cap

I get internet, finally, in two to three days.

I'm sorry for the delay.

I'll see you all then.

<3