Saturday, April 8, 2017

Alice Cooper - 'Teenage Frankenstein' from Constrictor (1986)

teenage frankenstein is almost redundant. both monster and that which makes the monster manifest, composed out of uncontrollable urges and desires that precede yourself and wanting so badly to have a self which can embody the fulfillment of those desires. teenage frankenstein is finally the moment at which identification with the scary thing that lives under the bed and you are the scary thing that lives under the bed and it is awesome. what could be more awesomely teenage kicks than being able to channel the trauma and damage and need which torments and haunts day and night into a form visible to all, even dads and cops, such that it cannot be denied any longer, not by anyone. this is what i was scared of all along except that now it is back from the dead, fulci-rotten and unkillable because no longer buried. so much of adult life is premised upon not talking about something, not invoking it, means that we get to pretend it isn't, that it isn't so. we rename, hush with euphemism, that which we have never understood, never bothered to reckon with, until it comes for us, unstoppably. no matter how long we have managed to outrun it, or allow it to kill us bit by bit until that which is dead outweighs that which still lives. we pass along what lives and that which has died in us to our children, unruly admixtures of our own failed struggles, forgotten or half-forged desires, locked-away fears, methodologies of avoidance. we claim this state of affairs must be maintained for their well-being, a state of affairs that they instinctively know is wrong, and thoroughly reject once even partially grasped. to be a teenage frankenstein is to be something made out of patchwork deaths shocked into sudden, immediate life, filled with and giving off a burning stench of utter wrongness. to escape the fate of your family, of your own destined end, kicking and thrashing, fleeing from as much as to anything at all, blindly into the night. we keep driving and driving, laughing maniacally, gleefully, until stopping is no longer an option and we keep going, sleepless with inertia and fear focused into a form of determination, until it is decades later and we find ourselves exhausted, pursued by something we cannot name or articulate but we know is there, never stopping, never resting and the only way to survive is to act as if it is not there, right behind us all of the time because then it might catch us for real, which we know deep inside it is going to anyway when we cannot keep out of its reach and maybe we don't want to so much anymore and it seems like a relief or an escape, so much time spent just out of reach seems like time wasted, and so we turn around and there it always has been, skull-faced, worm-engraven, paused and wavering, until leaning in for a kiss and you have never wanted anything more and finally, finally it is here. <3 <3 <3 nathaxnne

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