the slaughterhouse

Does the food taste as good when you know how it suffered before you got to taste it? Or is the suffering the seasoning? Who's to say whether the sausage would taste as good if we could see where it comes from and what it has come to. Well, actually, I am to say as long as you are to stay and the sausage is getting stale. Explore, indulge, diffuse and disrupt to your hearts content but don't stop being curious about the sausage, no matter how disturbing it may be.

When I was starting to get the urge to create the thing that became the slaughterhouse I was feeling more trapped than I had ever felt in my life. I had chosen so many goalposts, one after another, this accomplishment to that endorsement, all falling to the wayside one after another. Things that should be marks of pride merely amplified the shame they aimed to conceal and I was worse off than when I started. I felt as though there was nowhere for me to just let it out and scream into the abyss without worrying for one reason or another. That fear, that shame and that loneliness in a room full of friends brought me here. Only in the pursuit of living did I realize I needed many parts of myself to die to be best suited towards life. Not only to die, but to be transfigured, transmuted into ideas, change and thoughts that could make their existence and newly found lack justified and maybe even beautiful.

Similarly to how a slaughterhouse is simultaneously the hell of all hells to some and a source of nourishment to others, this place is simultaneously my own handmade heaven and hell all wrapped in a nice neat package for all to see. Similar to how we eat the final product of the meat mill and want nothing to do with how it got there, many people don’t understand or want to understand the destructive nature of creation, for the creator above all. I have watched this process unfold in many a creative individual in my life and now it's my time to burn bright and fast. An existence rationed for the sake of survival is no life at all as I see it. I would rather die on my terms more naive than a child than allow the world to make a devil of me, and so I carve away at my own flesh, a butcher of my own imagination, chopping and packaging, racing and scrambling for attention alongside all of the other masochists. The absolute frothing, burning fear and passion that are evoked of my indulgence in this self destruction bring me to the closest thing I have ever had to a truth. I know its all nonsense, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. 

From me to you, whoever you are, make your slaughterhouse, find your place and if you can’t, make it. I love life but just like creating, nothing scares me more. That is the sweet spot, if your life isn’t scaring the shit out of you at any given time, I’d be willing to bet you’re playing it too safe, I know I was, and I damn sure still am. I wouldn’t change a thing with how things have been, but it's our job to try and change what may be.