What Are Your Darker Interests.

[PleasureToBurn]

Are you drawn to darker interests, and if so what are they?

I'm really drawn to suicide, true crime, stories of tragedy, lost love, heartache, saints who have experienced the Dark Night of the Soul, addiction, sexual abuse, missing persons cases, cold cases, the Holocaust, torture methods, seriel killers, hauntings, the mysterious and the paranormal.

I'm not really sure what that says about me. I know that some of the stuff helped me to process some of my own trauma though.

[Mahat]

Bumping this thread. I have a lot to say on this, but looks like it has to be later.

[PleasureToBurn]

Other darker interests I forgot to mention:

Mental illness, mass shootings, stories of infidelity, prison stories, gritty noir and neo noir crime stuff, kidnappings, existential horror, stories of pimps, hookers, and sex workers, the dark side of the porn industry, human trafficking, the dark web, conspiracy theories, MK Ultra survivors, stories about cartel violence, and very dark sexual taboos.

[PleasureToBurn]

WARNING: VERY DARK STUFF AHEAD READ AT YOUR OWN RISK:

Some of the darker things that have stayed with me over the years that really fucked with me.



-Back when the internet was still the wild wild west, I was downloading something on kazaa. I don't remember if it was music or porn, but I came upon what I'm pretty sure was an actual snuff film. I didn't realize until the end but afterwards I was like fuckkkk. I deleted it immediately and was scared to download shit for a while after that.

-I was talking to a cop once while doing community service. He went to school with my father and he was telling us about some of the fucked up things he'd seen on the force. He said one time they got a call for a meth overdose. The guy was on meth with a diaper on and alligator clips hooked up to his nipples and a car battery. His 7 year old son found him.

- Finding out about "gift givers" and "bug chasers." They're people who go around infecting people with HIV and people who want to get infected with it. Some people go around intentionally spreading it without telling people too, which I hear is being decriminalize from a felony to a misdemeanor in CA now. Honestly, there's people probably doing that with covid right now too.

-Hearing about a kid who tried to kill themselves by overdosing on Tylenol. Afterwards they changed their mind and wanted to live, but there was nothing they could do for her due to organ failure. They had to call their parents from the hospital room to say their goodbyes.

Another woman tried to commit suicide by drinking a whole thing of bleach. She was in the ER, but they said het insides were just completely burned out.

-Going back to the early days of the internet again, I saw the video now known as 5 men 1 hammer or something like that. It's a video of some man getting his face bashed in by some kids in some third world country. That video fucked with me for a long time, and that's where I really started becoming alot more cynical about the world.

-While researching for a story I was writing about infidelity I was reading stories about people who have cheated or been cheated on. I remember some that actually got off on doing it to their partners and laughed at how stupid and gullible they were. Reading about that shit really fucked with me.

[Mahat]

[David] Nebreda's art was reminiscent of a time period in my early 20s when I isolated myself in my filthy apartment, and carved out my flesh because I needed to exorcise my demons onto it. It wasn't enough that they occupied the white walls of my mind; they needed to exert their will materially. My whole world was my trash adorned apartment, bloodstained sheets, razors, and a boxcutter. It was a minuscule yet chaotic world and one that kept constricting with each passing day. I had a boyfriend at the time, someone who was wrestling with his own demons by exorcising them onto me as I did mine onto him. You could say it was a relationship of sadomasochistic convenience where our ghosts casted their spells onto each other, forever haunting each and every step and breathe we take. I remember his embrace feeling like cold pin pricks engulfing me: suffocating, painful, overwhelming, and enticing in the sort of way where someone slowly and agonizingly squeezes and constricts your heart until the only thing you feel is numbness from the pain. You get so used to it that you eventually learn to love it, even crave it. The pull of the undertow was the backbone of our companionship, and the tide pulled us under a darkness that I've yet been able to escape from.

We lasted three months because he eventually moved to another state. But that relationship left a gaping wound, one that I constantly fingered even after the relationship ended. Never before have I encountered anyone who was able to reach my level of intensity and dark desire, yet by reaching that level, I sacrificed my heart and sanity for it. I wanted to see and touch the face of God, a dark, cruel God who sadistically got off slaughtering his flock for the hell of it. And I would sacrifice my body and soul for it. But I also simultaneously wanted to be that God. I was the mad God of my own constricted and isolated world where the constructs of my mind were more real than the whole world itself.

[[redacted]]

[PleasureToBurn]

Yeah I've had similar experiences with both watching fucked up shit/reading about it, and with expressing shit sexually, although mine took a more sadistic form. Even now, it's hard to get off on anything vanilla, not just sex. I have a theory that that's one of the main contributing factors to PTSD for military vets. After seeing and experiencing the horrors of war, civilian life just feels dull in comparison, which is why alot of them reenlist.

But even in relationships, it's like yeah you're a sweet girl, but I feel like I'm going to scare you away or hurt you once you see the real dark side.

[Animal]

Asking me to describe my 'darkness' is like asking a fish to describe what it's like to live in the water. To us, looking at the fish, their life is so different than ours because they live underwater - but to them, that's the only life they know. If a fish could think like a human -- let's say, a mermaid -- she might have an easier time describing the experience of living above water, because that actually stands out as something unique compared to their normal experience.

No matter how hard I think about this question, I am really not sure how to answer it. I tend to surround myself in beauty, sunlight and innocence if only to have a taste that I can bring with me, to inspire me and give me a reason to keep going. There is always some purpose on the horizon - finishing my book, finishing my music, getting healthier, moving to a more desirable location - and I strive for that relentlessly. I accept that in the meantime, I'm living essentially in my own darkness and dissatisfaction - but I strive for that beauty, that Erosia, that I can taste and yearn for. In the meantime I build myself up so I can attract beauty, and I seek it out everywhere I go.

I don't seek darkness, because it's always there. I don't hunger for macabre, death, or murder; at least not consciously. Death is always with me. Sadness, anger, pain - they are ubiquitous. It's sad that I live inside this meatsack and that I have to nourish it with food and sleep, both of which bore me; and it's sad that I become ugly (fat, pimpled) from taking certain medications, but those medications help me walk and breathe. It's sad that I lost my voice so I can't sing the songs I have written, and it's even more sad that my second voice, singing through my whisper, has also been gone for several years so that now I can't sing at all. Every time I speak, I am broken - I am loss. Every breath I take is borrowed time; I am only breathing because of modern medicine. And I look at the internet and I see people ripping down buildings and cheering each other on. It's sad to belong to a species so fucking stupid and unappreciative - though, luckily, I don't really feel that they are my species. Whenever I think to myself, "No matter how I feel, those people are ACTUALLY my species," I wonder why I bother to fight for my life, and if it's better for me to just perish - considering this species requires plants and animals to sustain itself; and the life of plants and animals may be more worthwhile than mine. I justify my continued existence by remembering that although I belong to this species 'technically,' the mind is a very powerful thing and I have worked hard to sustain a mindset of separateness. But then the enneagram tells me I should learn to see myself as one of them - or worse, with no boundary at all between me and them. Well fuck the enneagram then.

What other people call 'darkness,' I call beauty, passion, LIFE. For instance, Mahat 's experience with the macabre. I may not have the same desires, fetishes and callings, but it's fucking beautiful watching her write about them and live them out, and confront her darkness, her suffering, her desire and her humanity in doing so. Of course, I appreciate all of her - I am not fetishizing her suffering. I love the passion that draws her to make sense of her desire, to transform it into beauty and good, to purge it from herself cathartically, as often as she must. But suffering and exploring darkness and desire is a genuine part of that, so let's say I appreciate her genuineness. As she said, that darkness can't be compartmentalized away. It is part of the air we breathe, and the anguish only grows when it is ignored.

I guess you could say my life is a cycle of cathartic purging. Beauty makes me feel desirous. Some people see something beautiful and they want to destroy it, but that is not me. When I see something beautiful, I want to have it for myself. I want to become it, embrace it, breathe it. I want to feel it inside me with every breath. I want to look in the mirror and admire it in my own eyes.

When beauty is just out of reach - I chase it. This causes me to confront myself. Why is there a gap between me and beauty? Why is it not MINE, why is it not ME? This forces me to face my flaws, my ugliness, my pain. And in the process, I express those flaws, that ugliness, that pain - in the arts. And in doing so I throw it all in the fire and emerge through catharsis. When I come out the other side, I am destroyed. I destroyed myself - the ugliness, the pain, the undesirableness -- and also the desire, the beauty that has inspired me, the revelry. ALL OF IT - it's fucking burned.

All that is left is a landscape of ash, and from there, I may rise. The ashes are made of my ugliness, my desire, my passion - and also, the beauty that I chased. All of it was sacrificed at the altar of my art. And as I rise, I incorporate bits of the beauty into myself. Forever. Or at least, until the cycle repeats. The phoenix becomes more and more beautiful. Erosia grows inside me. It breathes.

I don't desire darkness. I desire beauty. It is desire itself which comprises my darkness. It is desire which lights my fire, burns me alive and transforms me. It is desire which rises from the ashes and says, "I still want more."

[PleasureToBurn]

Mahat had mentioned thanatos, which is interesting because I feel like I've experienced a similar level of living in the underworld. During a time when I was severely depressed and suicidal, I wasn't eating, wasn't sleeping, drinking alot, and then I stopped that and I was just kind of withering away. I remember lying in the dark, hadn't eaten or drank anything all day, and I felt this presence at the foot of the bed. It was like the feeling you get when someone's standing behind you, except it was in front of me. I knew it was Death. I "heard" a voice asking me, "do you want this?" He was asking me if I wanted to die. He stayed there for a long time, but ultimately I chose life. He hung around a little bit more after that and then he was gone. The next day my depression lifted. It was like night and day. One of the only people who I was talking to during that dark and painful time was Animal . I felt like she understood what it was like to be in dark places. She's one of the people that kept me hanging on when things got really bad.

Anyways, I eventually wrote a song about it. It's hard to describe the mood I'm envisioning with this. Think solemn funeral church music, dark gospel music, intense flamenco music, minor blues, with sketches of late Coltrane, late Hendrix, Stooges and Mars Volta. All in a minor tonality. For musicians, it actually kind of exists like flamenco music, not within keys but within tonalities. So the tonality of F# phrygian, B minor, and E minor.

Every time I ended up getting depressed afterwards, I remember that playing this song got darker and more aggressive, more primal and raw whenever I would play it with my drummer friend or even by myself.

The lyrics reference both thanatos, suicidal ideation, the Crucifixion, and the opening lines of Nabokov's Lolita.

Behold this tangle of thorns.
Behold this bloody tangle.
Behold this tangle of thorns.
Behold the beauty mangled.

I saw the deathhead
And I saw the Godhead
It was thanatos
On a dark bed.

Now the art in me
Bleeds from my arteries
Now I'm out of reach
I'm out of reach.

Behold this tangle of thorns.
Behold this bloody tangle.

I saw the deathhead
And I saw the godhead.
It was thanatos
On a dark bed.

[SnatchYourWeave]

[PleasureToBurn]

My patron saint was decapitated.