Aaron got me flowers on our anniversary Thursday. They’re very pretty. I really prefer to buy flowers for other people, but Aaron doesn’t like receiving flowers, so I never buy them anymore. When I lived in Michigan I would buy flowers for my mother and my maternal grandmother every year, and they loved them.
On Friday, 10-23-26, I felt a little down. So did Aaron. It was sunny outside which made it stranger, because I’m not usually like that when the sun is shining. I went for a brief walk to pick up some prescriptions and get some food. I started Season 2 of The Rings of Power but I fell asleep during the first episode. I started reading “Magic’s Promise” but I didn’t get far. I traded some texts with Jennifer and Felix about Marvel, and I had fun exchanges with Janice and Katie (about massive American Horror Story reveals). I also watched more of SVU Season 24; Season 28 is currently airing, which means I’ve never been this close to the current season, maybe I’ll be caught up by the end? I don’t know. I tend to take long breaks from the series.
I forgot to mention that I read character actor Richard Riehle died the other day, on October 15, 2026. He was often in things that I loved, having bit roles in “Ally McBeal” & “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, but really, in the last few years, I noted that he was in many LGBTQ+ films, such as “Fried Green Tomatoes”, “Prelude to a Kiss”, “Body of Evidence”, “River Made To Drown In”, “The Fluffer”, “The Laramie Project” & “Mysterious Skin”. It got to the point that when I would see him pop up in this or that thing, I always smiled, because it was like seeing an old friend, whom I didn’t actually know and had never met.
I went to bed early last night. We have plans this morning. But I woke up after 3, finding it difficult to breathe. I got up for a bit, which sometimes helps, but it didn’t. I’m sure it’s allergies; I’ve been sneezing (not coughing) for a few days. I did a nasal rinse, which helped a little, but my device seems to be messing up and I may need a new one. Then eventually I took some Sudafed and wrote this.
Today’s journal entry title song quote is from the song “Gods & Monsters”, by American singer and songwriter, Elizabeth Woolridge Grant, known professionally as Lana Del Rey, from her third extended play, “Paradise” and the reissue of her second album “Born to Die”, “Born to Die: The Paradise Edition”. “Gods & Monsters” was released on November 9, 2012. The song was covered by Jessica Lange in an fourth season episode of American Horror Story (“Freak Show”), which is where I first heard it, despite not loving that iteration, as my favorite line (“looking to get fucked hard”) wasn’t featured – which felt weird to me, as the series is pretty extreme and the story features a one legged woman running a freak show carnival performing a song 60 years before its actual release, in a series that often feature lurid, graphic imagery and storylines…but that line was too much? It annoyed me, even if I liked that season more than any of those that followed. YMMV.
Insane sound of drums as the thrusts leave me burned.
The pain always comes as the lust is returned.
And if pleasure deserts me then why should I screw?
If pleasure does hurt me then what should I do?
If skin is conditioned to make one afraid…
Then I am positioned to make me unmade…
Yet if my betrayal by my circumstance is meant by portrayal to cleave from the dance then I will choose pain for as long as I dare…
In this game of chance I’ll try not to be scared.
Part II: The Truth Beneath
My primary protective barrier has been decimated by genetic anomalies.
Color bleeding out of me slowly, imperceptibly, across time and place.
My Dorian Gray reflection is just as exorbitant, just as damned, if far less immortal (and even less fictional), leaving me to ponder quotes by Natalie Merchant & various Hellraiser sequels.
My pale epidermis keeps people from noticing what is apparent in other darker shades of the same ravaged organ… I am understandably less daunted by my own nearly invisible changes in tone.
It is the texture which fascinates and at times, terrifies me.
The rough skin made smooth, taut, and somehow stretched to the point of near tearing, like a molting humanoid creature, unable to break free… making friction far more painful than anyone would ever guess when merely glancing at my beautifully camouflaged exterior.
The secret stroking of flames and flesh combined in the perfect union of sex and of power: that harmony, that balance forever disrupted, imbalanced by vicious circumstances I’ve never dared express, and which have never been freely mirrored to my careful, guarded attention.
The youth that so many gratefully mistake me for is a cruel trick of tegument which grants me favor at a terrible cost that I, who have lived with it long enough to have surely known better, am only just beginning to comprehend.
The divisional shadows of the math we inspire; derision of prose by the wrath of desire has led me astray like a pawn to your laughter: send me away at the dawn of disaster.
Cock crows the call of this glamor forbidden, the clock on the wall is a camera I’ve hidden, and sight swarms the notion of friendly portrayal as light forms the motion intent on betrayal.
My eyes disappear as my brain overloads.
Beneath chandelier I feel drained and exposed.
The world starts to shimmer; I head to the gallows…
As glimmer of hope is divided by shadows.
Written by Jason Wright August 9, 2026
Inspired by a particularly kinky dream I had. It’s also an expanded fragment which began when I started typing words onto a collage for this site:
