I actually doubt that anyone truly knows me. If all you’re familiar with is a nice, meek, sweet, well-intentioned man, that is – at most – half of the story. As light as that side is, the other is just as conversely dark. After all, if I’m being completely honest with myself, I should admit that I *can* be intolerant, angry, combative, impatient, confrontational, unsettling, creepy, subversive, offensive, jaded, and judgmental -- though hopefully not all at once. That’d be a bit much.

I’m guessing that’s the side of me people don’t want in their room: it’s a Jekyll/Hyde situation. My Jekyll is the one that has, for example, no tolerance for the god-fearing, and finds it amusing how simply inverting a cross can offend those of that ilk so easily.

That’s a kind of advantage there: I find it very easy to offend people with supposedly sacrilegious ideas, symbols, phrases, and imagery. But it’s nearly impossible to have the same done to me. Lighthearted fare such as saints and angels I just find silly, and I’m actually very attracted to their opposites.

Indeed, as destructive as the reality would be, there’s definitely a part of me that wants to believe that devils, demons, poltergeists, the whole inverse of the spirit world and all that entails, and basically every creature in the D&D Monster Manuals – are real. That idea has just always appealed to me.

When I was a kid, doing field shows as part of the high school band, I used to always secretly root for the other team. And I’m not completely sure why, but I think that same, insurgent desire is that one that makes me not interested in art galleries unless they’re populated by the likes of Giger, Bosch, Francis Bacon, and Clive Barker.

However, that side does wrestle with the more accommodating aspects of my personality. In fact, it’s possible that my kinder disposition is the real me.

But I’d have to be drunk for you to get me to acquiesce that notion.

And you’d better act fast: I’m drinking less these days than I have in perhaps as many as six years.

Maybe that’s the problem.

Anyway, here’s someone you haven’t heard of – a San Diego native, no less...

CVRRENT SOVND: “Confessional (Give Me Sodomy Or Give Me Death)” by Diamanda Galás from “Plague Mass”

-- ∆☩Y§ ☨♆∀☥✠