We Burn And Coil Like Cigarettes

In my dream, we just had moved to a fancy apartment.

It was located on the first floor of a building, a few meters away from the main entrance. 
It looked like one of the buildings I walked by when I was an undergrad and I wanted so badly to live a few meters away from the University. 

One of my teachers lived in there and he just had to walk about five minutes from his apartment to get to the School of Psychology and to start his class at 7 a. m. 

I envied him so much. 

So, it was dark and cold. Maybe it was midnight. 

A couple of elderly women walked thru the parking lot.
They were having some sort of weird business with the guy responsible for the garbage truck. 
They spoke very soft and they behaved mysteriously, like if they didn't want to be seen.  

I looked at them thru a big window in the living room of the apartment. 

Dunno why I decided to speak to the garbage man and I left the apartment and then walked to the main entrance of the building. 

When I arrived to the parking lot, the elderly women and the garbage man just had disappeared. 

I felt confused and I walked back to the apartment. 

As soon as I was about to close the door, I heard an awful scream.

It came from a woman. She desperately asked for help. 
In my dream I knew that she was my neighbor and that her apartment was next to ours.
Also, suddenly I knew that she had been playing ouija on the last days and that she had invoked some sort of demon and that now she was scared to hell. 

It happened so fast. 
As soon as I got scared from that desperate screams and I was closing the door of the apartment, she ran in front of me as she wanted to get to the main entrance of the building. 
She had a spooky face. 

Behind her it was some kind of steamy monster. 

It seemed both a horseman of the Apocalypse and Marilyn Manson. 

It stared at me for a second and I felt it was about to kill me. 

I closed the door of my nightmare, before I froze. 

I woke up hyperventilating.

My wife told me that I was making horrible noises like those horses do when they're frightened and about to run like crazy. 

The Screen Is Us And We're TV

I was a poser and a confused teenager when I started to study Psychology. 
I was seventeen years old. I had low self esteem. 
My face was full of acne. 

I always knew that I would study at Ciudad Universitaria.
It was a big deal. It was so scary. 
Excluding my dad, no one in my entire family –grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins– had made it to College. 
My family expected me to become a neurosurgeon. 

(What a hell! I wanted to be a writer!)

I used to live with a great level of conformity. 
My parents gave me everything I needed. 
I didn't have to get a job to buy books or compact discs. 
Since I didn't care about clothing nor parties, I really didn't need more money than I got. 

I was focused on my own interests. 
I didn't have friends and I didn't want to make friends. 
I was so selective and I had found many defects on the guys I saw on a daily basis. 

I didn't have responsabilities at all. 
Everything I did was reading, writing and listening music. 
Music was all for me. 
I was so crazy for Nirvana.
I wanted to play songs like Kurt Cobain. 
I got obsessed with him.
In a couple of years –since I knew of his music–, I became an expert on his life. 

In Junior High School, I was some sort of dork with the best grades. 
I even had a scholarship and I even got diplomas and I even was the one who gave the orders in the shooting guard. 

In High School, I got sick from being a good student and I started to skip classes. 
I started to leave my hair grow and I dressed like a homeless.

No matter what I stopped doing, I never had bad grades.
The worst thing I experienced was to be seen by some schoolmates as a dumb regular student.  
The scariest thing I experienced was that a corrupt teacher wanted me to buy him a device for his CPU. According to him, all my examinations were a disaster and he was "giving me an opportunity" to get rid of them. Nonetheless, he never showed me the examinations. 

I got so angst. 
I told my dad and we had a meeting with the principal. 
At the end, this teacher had a long story of corruption and he was fired.

(I wonder what kind of dirty business he's been up to.)

I also fantasized with women I liked. 

Dunno why, but I always had a crush on older girls.

They we're the opposite to me: they were good looking, they seemed to be more mature than me... and they had many friends. 
Dunno why, but they always preferred pop music rather than rock n' roll music (whatever it means). 

I wrote them poems and songs and stories in which we were so close together.

  
A couple of months before College, I was scared to hell. 
I didn't want to leave my conformity. 
I wanted to keep myself hidden in my bedroom.

I knew Ciudad Universitaria from my childhood. 
One of my aunts worked at La Biblioteca Central and she and my uncle sometimes took my cousins to visit the campus. A few times I accompanied them.  

Nonetheless, the first day of classes Ciudad Universitaria I was so impressed. 
Still remember the darkness of the road from home to school. 
I woke up at 5: 00 am and got to the school before 7: 00 am.
I took the Metro. Linea 3 was almost new. 

Ciudad Universitaria, really seemed a city. It was full of academic buildings.
It was full of students. It was full of academic life.  

On my first semester of classes, I had classes at 7: 00 am on a daily basis. 
I got to the University so early that I had enough time to walk from Copilco Metro Station to the School of Psychology and arrived fifteen minutes earlier to my firsts classes. 

Except by one, in all of my first classes, I had a lot of free time. 
Our teachers got to the classroom almost at 7: 40 am. 
We all employed this free time to meet us. 

At the beginning I refused to do it, but the classroom was full of pretty girls. 
They looked like the ones I had always fantasized with in High School. 
Soon, it became so obvious that I couldn't ignore them. 

These girls even had a particular way of speaking and pronouncing words. 
They had studied on private schools... they wanted to become therapists... on the previous summer holidays they had gone to Europe... her boyfriends were physicians, or they were entrepreneurs...

Things like that. My schoolmates we're strange creatures for me. 
One guy was always sleepy. 
He acted like a rockstar. He played on a band. 
When he got involved with the classroom, he told us that his band had recently recorded a music video and that one of the members of Café Tacuba had gave him a guitar. 

We spoke a few words. He liked Smashing Pumpkins. 
On the lasts semesters of Bachelor's Degree, he changed absolutely. 
He acted like a hipster.  
He acted like if we had never spoken. 

(Wonder what kind of academic work he's been up to.
Would he became a music producer of silly bands?) 

I met a guy. 
He liked, more or less, the bands I liked.
We immediately became some sort of friends. 
He lent me his copy of Antichrist Superstar. 

(Maybe I just bought a cassette and so he recorded me a copy of the album on it). 

From the beginning, I loved the album. 
The music was so aggressive. 
The lyrics were so violent, so cryptic and well written. 

They talked about the Bible, the Apocalypse and the Antichrist's arrival. 
Marilyn Manson was the main character.
His lyrics were so smart and made me think of my own life. 
Each song had a phrase or a chorus that repeated on another song. 
They were really rad and smart thoughts. 

For months I listened up to this album.

Today is a cloudy day –like the dark and cold first days of College– and I feel the same way I felt on my first days as an undergraduate student.  
I've been listening to this album on the last days. 
At 3 in the morning, I woke up from nightmares. 
Apparently, Marilyn Manson makes me sick.  

We Love In Vain, Narcissistic And So Shallow

I hate some egocentric people. Some of them behave as if they were closer to be a God than to be a human. The worst part is that they think you should please them all the time.  

I met once a guy of this kind, in a literature workshop. We were involved in an underground magazine, and we all wanted to publish our writings on it. We were talking about deadlines to send our work to the editor of the magazine, so he could manage the writings in order to publish, monthly, as much as possible of our work. We were almost 20 young writers. Some of us wrote tales, poems or literature essays. We were as enthusiastic as a young writer can be. Another part of the writers, were horribly narcissistic, like this teenager. None of us would receive any penny for the writings, it was all about fun, but he immediately asked for money, because he considered that his poems were at the level of Rimbauds'. 

He also complained about the deadlines, because he considered himself an authentic artist, and so he was not able to work under pressure. He said that his inspiration was so fragile and so fickle. I just found him boring, arrogant and stupid. He couldn't even distinguish Ezra Pound from Edgar Allan Poe.

I just hate this kind of guys. Sadly, many musicians I know behave like that, too. I have this terrible idea of playing in a garage punk band. I have looked for drummers and bass players, because I play guitar and I just like power trios, even though I want to have a band like Sonic Youth. 

At the beginning, when I find out some guys to play with, they tend to be enthusiastic. Nevertheless, gradually they simply expect me to forget them, or to pay them to play with me. They skip rehearsals and never answer my messages nor my calls. They make me feel like an amnesiac old dude or a retarded booze addict. Obviously, it's not their duty to like my songs, but  I'd really appreciate if they told me that they don't want to be part of my band.

via GIPHY

Normally, I try to avoid this kind of guys, but, sooner or later, I have to tolerate them. Like this egocentric PhD student I'm going to write about. It was my first time in the biggest annual meeting for Neurosciences, and I had to share a room with him. As soon as we arrived to Chicago, we looked for the Hilton that was assigned to us. We walked  late at night thru the cold alleys and streets around Michigan Avenue. Suddenly, several homeless stopped me and asked me for money. Even though he had been before in situations like that, and so he knew how to deal with homeless, he didn't warn me about them. I was so scared. Thought homeless were about to assault me, or to shot me, or to slash me, for nothing. 

When I looked for him, he just had disappeared. I had to walk faster, running away from the homeless, and finally, scared to hell and exhausted, I found him at the Hilton. He was in the lobby, in complete iddleness, playing with his smartphone. With some sort of a sarcastic tune, he said: "Homeless are so annoying!"

In the room, he choose the best for him. He occupied the bathroom for hours and put his bags and things all over the room. I just could put my stuff in the small bed that he generously gave me. I had nausea, and I was starving, so I didn't want to discuss about his behavior. The worst of all, was that even though he said that he had quit smoking, he started to ask me for cigarettes. When the cigarettes went out, he said to me: "We have to make an effort to not smoke a lot and to save some money to buy another pack of cigarettes". What a jerk off!

At the annual meeting, he just wanted to seduce women. Of course, he failed all the time. He was not interested in science at all, he just wanted to look like a neuroscientist. 

Now, he has a better job than he deserves, and a better health than me. I quit smoking 18 months ago, and he just keeps stealing cigarettes from anyone. Hope he is not playing in a garage punk band nor that he is finished a novel before I do.

All Dried Up And Tied Up Forever

I was 18 years old, and I liked you a lot 

You were so pretty and smart and older than me
I wanted to meet you so bad

You practiced yoga and you were a professional dancer

I was just a stupid boy listening to Antichrist Superstar

And pretending to be interested in the things that mattered to you

I just wanted to learn from your lifestyle and that's why I lied

That very first time I spoke to you, when I told you that I liked The Beatles

We spoke for hours and you gave me your telephone number

We looked face to face all the time and your eyesight was so intense
I was so exhausted but happy

For a couple of weeks, I thought you looked like Mila Kunis

And later I decided to call you up on the telephone

It was a shiny Thursday, and I was so nervous and excited

Your voice appeared suddenly, and I felt about to have a heart-attack 

You were sleepy and exhausted, and I knew you had anemia

I had to smoke a cigarette to get rid of my nerves

We agreed to see Heavenly Creatures that very afternoon

But I didn't find you at the movie theater and I had to watch the movie alone

Later, as we walked on the street and we discussed about Peter Jackson's movie,

You laughed and asked me "What do you exactly expect from me?"

We talked on the telephone for almost six months, and I fall in love with you

There was another guy in your life, but you felt comfortable with me

I was listening up I'll be your lover, I'll be forever, I am anything when I'm high

When you call me again, and you told me you wanted us to be more than friends

And I couldn't believe it

From on time to another, we were dating each other, but it didn't work out

I used to be as stupid and unsecure as possible, and you got tired of it

Then you left the city to pursue your dancer career, and we started to write letters

Sometimes you came to the city and we sometimes we met, but it was different

So we are strangers now