If Piranesi Watched Severance
I have a lot of dreams about elevators. I often wonder if this is one of those universal things, like dreams about your teeth falling out. I’ve dreamt of elevators that took me to different realities, depending on which side of the elevator I exited, elevators that fall forever, elevators that refuse to return me to my original location, and elevators in which I cannot properly select the floor I live on because the number is very high and also unknowable to mere humans.
(Digital; drawn on my phone)
I had this dream about a hotel filled with elevators that moved randomly in all possible directions, depending on their whims. It was in part a direct recreation of the Ashtray Maze from CONTROL and the terrifying hallway paintings from Severance. Except I didn’t catch the Severance reference until I was halfway done with this drawing.
I like that about dreams. How they can start out haunting and then you look at them thoughtfully for a bit and they show their bellies and spill all their origin stories.
Most hauntings work like that.
Heavy Metal Tarot
Okay…
I did not get to the snakes yet. I know they are hilariously awful.
If 1987 Heavy Metal magazine commissioned a tarot deck, man, I’d kill it.
This is what happens when I’m focusing on a concept so hard I lose sight of every single human emotion that could exist in an image. Or the universe.
(Pencil on Paper)
A Brimstone of Dragons
And their demon pal.
(An assortment of media on a variety of materials)
A close up of the only actually new thing for the day; this dude, whose name is probably Stan, waiting for the bus:
(Ink on Paper)
My Favorite Demon
Which is Amon.
(Pencil on Paper)
I have so many many thoughts, and like coins in a jar, they refuse to come out. Instead they just make noise in their container, insisting in their reality but negating their expression.
It’s easier to sit down and draw demons. I like all the demons in the Goetia because none of them are described as evil, they’re just Dukes and Marquis and such, going about, doing jobs like finding treasure or helping people reconcile with their friends. The notion of these demons being malign forces of darkness is hysterical to me. Which is, in part, why I laughed my ass off throughout Paranormal Activity. I just kept picturing some poor Page demon, trying to learn the ropes of being an infernal being, and just fucking it up left and right.
I like all the demons. But Amon is the one I think about the most. The thing I like best about him (aside from the wolf bits, which I’m biased toward, given my love of canids) is that in his description, it says that he can reveal the past and the future. I’ve always imagined that means he has no fucking idea what’s happening in the present. Which, you know, same.
I once knew a woman who told me, in whispering confidence, that she could move through time. She didn’t like it when I told her that’s what we’re all doing. I guess she was upset that I had told her she wasn’t special. Which wasn’t what I meant at all (well, okay, maybe a little bit, but only because there’s no such thing as a person who’s more special than the other things and beings in existence). What I meant was existence is absolutely shocking. People should be stopping each other on the street and saying, “holy fuck, can you believe this entropy-denying bullshit we’re doing right now?!”
Instead, we’re afraid to make friends and worry if our clothes are out of style and the people who run our nations forget we’re real and we don’t know how to help and half of us would rather hurt and the remainder can't reconcile their desire to be good with their desire to straight brick smash murder the first half. Our despair and confusion and cowardice and ignorance choke us.
I, for one, can barely discern what I think, let alone identify what I feel. What a mess. If my thoughts are coins in a jar, my feelings are flotsom on a strange sea. I can tell you they’re there. I can't tell you what they are or were or will be.
I am trying to be patient and quiet; I am trying to help others with patience, quiet, and, if not self-acceptance, slightly less self-loathing. Like everything else that’s slipping along through time, all the noise about human value is a story someone else made up a long time ago. And none of us have to listen to it.
I don’t know if anyone else finds that relieving, but I definitely do. There are things from which we can simply turn away. Which makes it possible to actually choose what we turn toward.
