The Sow and the Lord

Alas my darling pig!
Bob and I recently began netflixxing (I heart making up verbs) seasons of the television series Lost. I was somewhat proud of the fact that I have managed to duck pretty much every tv trend of the last ten years by extremely limited exposure to the great evil box, but dammit, a few series have sunk my battleship and rendered me slavering for the next installment. Previous offenders include Queer as Folk and Six Feet Under.
Bob, that dastardly boy, was tipped off by some toolbox coworker at Church (otherwise known as guitar center, where he works, but we call it church, and you pronounce it like pimp lucius: CH-UH-TCH) to the addictive qualities of the stupid show, and here we are, balls deep in season two.
Now, along with a desperate desire to know just how does miss evangeline lilly keep her armpits baby bottom smooth on this nairless, razorless paradise, comes the ever constant idea of what I would do if I were in a similar situation, stranded, marooned, lost, completely cut off from everybody I'd ever known.
Before I could really think about this, I decided to do a little research, and I sat down and read Lord of the Flies, another one of those supposed "classics" that I just never got around to, and lo and behold if there isn't one hell of a sow killing that goes on.

What do I make of this?
The Lord of the Flies is decapitated head of a sow the boys slaughter in an overtly sexual display of violence (lots of mounting, stabbing downward, butterflies flap nearby, and the boys anally rape the creature with a spear before slitting her throat).
Post-gutting, the leader of the hunters, apropriately named jack, offers the head of the sow on a spike as a sacrifice to the much feared "beast" of the jungle. Later, a boy named Simon, lost in that neck of the woods, awakes from a stupor face to face with the leering skull, and conducts the theme-solidifying conversation with it. "I am part of you" says the lord of the flies, as the buzzing (symbol of hell) grows louder, and slowly unconsciousness approaches the boy in the form of the head's black hole of a mouth.

The desecration of the loveliness of sow is perhaps a delicate subject for me, being that I'd so recently named it the masthead to my Jess-gets-back-to-fucking-writing-and-making-her-life-mean-something project, but just the same I feel like the two must do battle inside everybody's head at some point.

The desire for perfection in oneself versus the unavoidable evil imbedded in humankind.
I know I've sought the unattainable before, and I thought settling on being the best damn sow i could be was pretty transcendental, but what if my evil is inherent?
What if seeking the perfect contentment of self is what makes one the perfect victim, and only after we are violated, murdered and desecrated, offered to the fucking invisible fiends of the jungle, do we reach the point of true enlightenment?
All the artists who die...their lives so lamented, their work so much more valuable due to the brief time of its creation. Yeats, Plath, Lennon...were they pigs who reached their artistic apexes and had to be cut down in order to become the ethereal gods of art they are today?
From the time I was ten until I was seventeen, I was certain that in order for any of my writing to be worth a damn, I had to die before my eighteenth birthday. All the greatness, all the poetic justice in the world wasn't worth the deification of a torrid fling at creation and then an abrupt tragic end, and I know now it was of course a foolish and ridiculous desire/notion, but perhaps a kernel of truth was there.
In order for a person, say a writer, to truthfully encapsulate the human experience mustn't he experience both sides of the extreme; the sublime perfection and the death and slander of oneself?
Should it be at the hands of his greatest fans that he be destroyed? Is that what makes it all the more poignant? In showing the writer the end of his humanity are his executioners actually revealing the path to his finest art?

Leave me alone on a train too long, and this is where we end up.
Weigh in people.
I'd love to imagine somebody, somewhere actually read this.

All that glitters is sometimes snail slime

I've been trundling about my daily business under the mantle of some serious misery for the last five months. It's amazing to write that number and realize it really has been so long since I last felt unencumbered.
I keep trying to put my finger on precisely what it is that makes me so desperate, and all the usual suspects line up next to the height chart, and some are defiant (money), some are ashamed (eating), some are virtuous (writing), and some refuse to turn around and be identified.
So I make another cup of coffee, crack the spine on another book and log in another train ride.

I am adding another instrument with which I can notch the wall.

A writer without writing is like a snail without a shell. Sure, it's heavy as fuck, and you curse the damn thing as you slime a trail up the garden walk, but damn it, it's yours, it found you, you made it, and it loves you as you love it, and you'd die if someone tore it from your back.
So I've been starting journal entries and abandoning them, beginning stories and deleting them, writing blog entries for an hour and then when the internet craps out and deletes them, just walking away from the computer and making another cup of coffee, sitting down and watching Lost.

Bob practically yelled at me last night to finish the story I started almost four years ago. I kept fighting him because I haven't written on it in so long, I didn't think I had it left. I made a thousand excuses, and then I opened the document and stared at it for an hour.
Tonight I started writing again, and maybe it's garbage, but it's my garbage, and I'm lugging it around until it's done.