masks raze i stood in a bathroom i haven't seen the inside of in sixteen years and stared at myself in the mirror. left eye missing. no gore. just gone. right eye intact but a little off. the colour was wrong. like the middle of the thing was dealt some damage and i had to colour it in by hand to get it looking more or less like itself again. a little something milky there too. small but sure. if you plucked out one of your eyes and found it was a marble and dropped it onto a hard surface without meaning to and picked it up and saw it was chipped just a little and shoved it back in its socket, it would look something like this. i could see fine. my face was the thing. it wasn't my face. it was a mask. when i peeled it off it wasn't the colour of flesh anymore. it was blue. it had the feel of soft rubber to it, but it wasn't rubber. it was some material that didn't have a name, that altered itself when it was in place, hiding itself by making me into me. it hit me that this was the world. we were all just featureless bones fused together, and without a mask you'd have no face at all. the masks made us who we were. the masks gave us faces the world could deal with. i stood there a while taking in my faceless self. it was strange, but it wasn't disconcerting. it just was. it was more like looking at a large rock than a skeleton face. i need a new mask, i thought. or i need to find someone who can repair the one i've got. either way, i'm looking at a couple grand i really don't want to spend to look like my whole self again. but everybody needs a working mask. what choice have i got? i tried on a different one at a place where they sold the things. i don't know who they sold them to. i guess people like me who didn't take good enough care of the masks they were born with. i don't know who they came from. probably people who didn't like who they were when they wore them. when i put this other mask on i was someone else. someone with shorter, darker hair. someone with a thicker face. a different face. i was whoever threw this mask away. it wasn't right. it wasn't me. i took it off and slid my damaged mask back on and still didn't look like myself. and i knew what it was. the foreign mask stretched my skull, changed the shape of it, because wearing a mask that wasn't yours was the worst thing you could do, and now the mask that was mine made me look like someone else again. someone even more wrong than who i was when i was wearing a borrowed mask i didn't want to buy. i could never be myself again. that's the kind of dream that'll get you thinking. 160624 ... epitome of incomprehensibility That's like a story. That is a story. I had a dream in which I kept my head from when I was three years old on my bedside table. My parents found it a bit morbid, but it was a thing to do. There was no explanation of how I could display the severed head of my three-year-old self and still have the head I have now. 160624 ... raze keeping your three-year old head by your bed … i love that. i'm completely fascinated by how weird the subconscious can get when it makes symbolism literal and obvious like this, but pushes it somewhere really extreme so it goes all the way past mundane and dives straight into the bizarre. 160624 what's it to you? who go blather from