essay – Purgatory Magazine

My Comedown

“For the sake of my health,” I think automatically each time I pour frozen peas into my instant noodles.

Then I lie in my sarcophagus, which is my bed when it’s covered in linen sheets, when the blackout curtains are drawn and it’s dark in the room like a soft grave. As the poisons leave my body, a throbbing lump of pain is formed behind my right eye, the size of a grape. Sometimes when it’s gotten really bad I’ve put a bag of frozen soy mince on my eye and felt it slowly thaw as I count down the hours. Time, my saviour. As long as the clock keeps going forward I’m not trapped in an eternal now which feels unbearable but which will be borne and over.

It could have been worse. 2013, after an illegal rave in an abandoned mail center where malicious hallucinations chased me and spoke to me, I took a sip of orange juice in front of the mirror and spat it out immediately. It felt like my throat was closing up. I thought I was about to die. It was the acid in the oranges; I studied my palate and throat in the mirror with my mouth gaping wide. I’d smoked and gurned so badly with my tongue against the roof of my mouth that it had filled up with blisters, which had now burst. Full of little burn holes, like Freddie Krueger’s skin.

Burnt. Everyone says they’re about to change, but they never do. The pendulum swings from action to regret. It does not go forwards, only side to side.

Mike often used to call me late at night when he was anxious because he was coming down. He partied loads, many days in a row, because his parents lived far away from the city centre and it was so expensive to travel home. I liked his calls, I was an hour ahead of him timezone-wise and besides I was lonely in that bourgie neighbourhood where I didn’t have any friends and it was so quiet at night. I brought my phone with me to a bar and drank wine there while I talked to him, like I’d gone to the bar with a dear friend. I was happy to soothe his anxieties. I’ve got to change the way I live! he’d always say to me, but the next week he’d call again.

In my head, I see visions of gross primordial creatures, like my visual imagination is trying and not quite succeeding at remembering how things fit together. It invents living beings from scratch with only the vaguest frame of reference. Humans with too many eyes and weird tubes in their skin, or little creatures that are nothing but these weird, fleshy tubes. It’s important not to get scared by what your own mind shows you, regardless of how nasty it is. There are things you cannot help.

It’s easy to fall into a self-analysis spiral and question everything you’ve done the previous night. For most halfway functional people, booze and drugs are a way to get close to other people in an uninhibited, unforced way, where social contact becomes more open, more honest, more positively emotionally charged, and above all more stimulating. You can say anything. Right then and there a space is opened for the meeting between two souls – so it feels at the time – but afterwards, once the meeting’s over, you bitterly regret having flaunted yourself, agonizing over ugly sounds made while laughing or if you’re bad at fucking. Better not to think about those sorts of things, because it doesn’t help to obsess over yourself.

When I was around fourteen my only friend and I thought all people who drank and partied were worthless bimbos. The funnest thing we knew was eating about a kilo of pick’n’mix and playing Playstation 2 until we passed out from the sugar crash. High school was a whole different story. Indeed. Because they told me I had ADHD and prescribed me a medicine which was a slow-release amphetamine. I was so depressed that winter that I couldn’t do anything. It was so dark and cold, inside and out, and every lamp shone with a sickly yellow light that gave me nightmares about evil incidents in obscure bowling alleys and rollerskating rinks. It hurt so much. “It” was nothing in particular. “It” was everything. Sometimes I took 5-6 methylphenidate pills at once, to have the energy to perform socially, like when my friends were celebrating their birthdays. I remember once, after such a celebration, sitting awake until 6AM while everyone else was sleeping, shaking with diffuse fear, writing rambling and paranoid diary entries about a guy we met on the bus on the way home. I wrote them in Japanese, looking up each kanji individually. It was important to keep my observations top secret. When you’re coming down, you can get all sorts of strange notions.

Methylphenidate is the worst when it comes to paranoia and anxiety during the comedown. Well, perhaps meth is worse – I don’t have a lot of experience with meth, but I definitely don’t recommend getting high on ADHD meds. They make you walk around like a robot, only talking about yourself with thousands of strangers while your heart remains ice cold and selfish. Later I started taking it just to be able to drink for longer without throwing up or falling asleep, and it worked so well I managed to give myself alcohol poisoning a number of times. Lying in bed and throwing up for days, unable to take a painkiller or even drink water, until Rhiannon came home to me with a bottle of Milk of Magnesia which tasted like mint and chalk.

My childhood friend and I took some kind of potent dark web speed which you had to wash beforehand not to burn your nostrils. 48 hours later we still weren’t sleeping but were both paranoid as hell with our hearts thumping out 120 beats a minute. What helps against a high heart rate? we googled. Or something like, “How to support your heart”. There was something about Omega3, or maybe Omega6. Canola oil has a lot of omega fats in it, so in the end we downed a couple shots of straight cooking oil each.

All’s well that ends well. 2015, in the depths of Deptford we dressed up for Halloween and snorted really lousy MDMA and then Zeynab and her psychotic girlfriend went climbing on the scaffolding on the house next door. Her girlfriend rushed in and told us Zeynab had a fall and “bonked her head” so hard on the cement floor that she’d lost consciousness.

“It’s cool, it’s cool!” said Zeynab and climbed through the window, then suddenly started cascade vomiting liters of hot pink Cherry Lambrini across the floor. We took her to ER and left her there, along with her psycho girlfriend, then Rachel and I went to a catholic mass, still in our halloween clothes, gurning. We thought it’d be a “funny thing to do”, but there we were, coming down in a congregation so warm and welcoming that we felt like villains. So when the socialist pastor offered me the sacrament, I said, no, just give me your blessing. Are you sure? he said so quietly no one else heard, and then he blessed my brow. I really felt it in me – that blessing.

Writing’s always possible, once I could draw, too, but I’ve forgotten how. What people write when they come down resembles what they write when mania fades. They pick fights with their own anxiety, argue with it, try to make deals. My friend showed me a text they’d written on a comedown, four tight, incoherent pages where they’d written about me, that we were obviously both in love with each other and may God let me read their thoughts. I really got the hint and we fucked the same night, but then I went home, and came down.

Swedish teens got pissed like they wanted to die. My friend threw up on Walpurghis night, about 5-6 cigarette butts. Those of my friends who were really mental – there were a few, and they really were mental – were put into psychiatric hospitals, always in the section for psychotic patients, because nowhere else had any space. They’d end up befriending the only other normal people in the ward which were the people selling coke and heroin.

The least you can do for yourself when you’re about to come down is taking a proper shower and then make the bed you’ll be forced to lie in. To come down is one thing, but coming down on twisted sheets, with the smell of cigarettes still in your hair, is really tormenting yourself more than you’ve deserved. Oh, and it’s lovely to have a few popsicles in the fridge. Eat a salad, perhaps, but let’s be real with ourselves about who we are and what we’re going to do. If we’d been the kind of people who pick salad over instant noodles I suppose we wouldn’t be lying here now, in the dark.

“I’m never going to drink again after last night,” Ian writes to me. But he will and I will too. Some are hit by a terrible sense of guilt whenever they’ve done anything debauched. You think you ought to be a certain way, act a certain way. During the comedown, you pray to God for forgiveness, but a week later you’re ready for the same thing all over again, you’ve already forgotten. I don’t understand why you even ought to be ashamed, what good it’s supposed to do. Shame and regret aren’t strong enough to make you change anything. Partying really can be a total riot.

Text: Zola Gorgon
Image: iStock

Love of my life

A friend told me that for her dad, transitioning to female meant being allowed to do whatever you wanted. I used to think the same thing about being a guy, that’s the way I pictured it. Once I saw a goth bartender smoking morosely, leaning against the counter, completely indifferent to me. It was as though the clouds parted above my head – divine revelation. The wrist of a louche goth bartender smoking – imagine possessing such a thing!

I thought: Thank you for smoking, thank you for not smiling.

Margaret Atwood said one good thing about guys: “My love for them is visual; that is the part of them I would like to possess.”

I sought the love of my life tirelessly in the mirror. Every time I remembered I couldn’t be that boy, I was devastated, as if I’d been given a hard right hook by God father himself. The point of the Quixotic project was to make the impossible real every day, for myself if not for others; to realize what being “a hot guy” meant to me and to take that into my life, that freedom –

To feel joy, to enjoy sex – to be allowed to do whatever I wanted.

Where’s the line between wanting to have and wanting to be? Do people figure that shit out on their own?

Of course, plenty of men were boring. I saw them… the men… on the street, or on the Ubahn, and I thought, I’d never want to be that one, it’d be just as bad as being me. And if I’d had to be myself but as a man – awful! I’d be short, and probably bald, like all the men in my family, with a genetic tendency to put on a beer belly and… no, that wasn’t what I wanted at all. And I know myself, so I’m sure I’d have had some sort of hang up about my cock too.

Actually I don’t have any hang ups about my cunt which is essentially perfect.

The hottest guy I ever fucked, I mean girls went home with him if he just talked to them on the street, he had a hang up about his cock too – his cock which was essentially perfect.

A trans feminine friend told me there’s lots of things men feel they can’t do. Fair enough – lots of men are scared of being fags, for example. I would have liked to be a fag. Gay men seem to like each other and themselves and to fuck without feeling degraded by it. No one really seems to love women; not heterosexual women, not heterosexual men, and not queers either – definitely not them, for whom being a woman is cringe and basic.

Scared of faggotry, yes – what scared men don’t understand is that fags are naturally cool and besides seem comfortable with each other and like they’re having fun, while lesbians and queers on the other hand spend most of their energy accusing each other of emotional abuse; constantly calling for retribution which will not arrive, as if the world was just, as if there was a judge or teacher who’d listen when you say what’s been done to you and dole out punishment to the deserving.

But since the people who’ve cemented their traumas left the game long ago, they only punish each other. No, it’s not as much fun to be fettered to the ground with a heavy, aching body and think about your marginalisation, as it would be to skate recklessly, do an ollie high above the setting sun – to suck cock in the gardens of paradise, before shame or misfortune.

No one knew what “nonbinary” was when I was in my late teens, fortunately, but I just refused to tell people if I was male or female, and so I lived in a true autistic one-person utopia. I loved not having to tell or to know, pure subjectivity. Then nonbinary people came along and crushed my dream by realising the project in the lamest possible way and I’ve never forgiven them for that.

The dream had something beyond that, not to put your finger on… rather to escape the finger, and the mortifying eyes of others. No boxes checked at all, rather than begging for a third choice, as if any part of your innermost soul could be validated by a form.

The joy in my life depended on how well I convinced myself that my fantasy was or would be real, to what degree it went from my dreams and into my understanding of reality. I was waiting for something good, for which I’d wait my whole life. Like awaiting the saviour. Is that what it means to have faith?

That faith is lost to me. I’ve learned a few things about men and they’re not what I thought; the woman who best can embody the glint in the eyes of a really mischievious faggot is a cool dyke who truly doesn’t give a fuck. Imagine seeing your face every day and never seeing anything, only what you wish it was. The wasted beauty of that unloved face. Instead of seeing yourself in the mirror and thinking – ah, there you are!

The love of my life.

If every soul cracked and the boundaries between the inside and the outside finally collapsed, no identity would remain, just a core of pure yearning too supermassive to fit into a human life.

At last you’re on the frequency of angels.

Text & image: Zola Gorgon

The Comedown

One must, in one’s life, make a choice between boredom and suffering.
Madame de Staël, 1800

Battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won. Win some, lose some – you do a bunch of speed and later pay the price. Flourishing decadence and drug abuse – inspired, undoubtedly, by a network of fallen angels – IS on the rise again. At Purgatory Magazine, we’re starting to believe there must be something more to the Comedown, something more to this suffering. It’s through suffering we are born; with your sacrifice, you give life to life itself. Could it perhaps be a good thing to… come down, every once in a while? After all, God himself didn’t refrain from teaching us how to snort. Together with our council of gays, Ukrainian supermodels, and other wise people, we’re going to try to answer this question once and for all, as well as provide the best tips and remedies on how to ease The Comedown. Let’s begin:

As you know, we pay a price for almost everything we get in this life. The price of fun is suffering. The price of shamelessness is shame. If you respect yourself, you will respect your own choices, pay the price and know why you are paying it. Never pretend that you didn’t have a choice.

It seems our brains are incredibly susceptible to chemical manipulation. We know this even just from personal experimentation. There are many truths available to us, like different frequencies on the radio. When you are high you are tuned into a certain frequency; the comedown tunes you into another frequency. But it is not the frequency.

Don’t think about things you said and how they were perceived, if your face looked sweaty or your breathing sounded weird. Everyone was sweaty and talking nonsense. They will not remember what you said. You do not remember what they said either. Forget trying to understand why you behaved the way you did while your your limbs were moved by a parallel power. You probably didn’t act half as badly as you think you did, but if you did do something really bad, and if you do this all the time when you’re drunk or high – stop partying with substances, because the party takes you over on its own terms and sometimes those terms are contrary to the norms of civilization.

Friendships can be – and are – forged in these circumstances,

But only some friendships.

Magnesium is always helpful, but any fool can tell you that. I recommend finding something soothing, yet boring, but not boring enough to torment you. Perhaps a podcast about the history of the Byzantine empire? A significant amount of podcast listening happens when the listener is asleep.

You will cherish this relief.

You may receive the greatest understanding from prophetic or therapeutic dreams where you relive childhood feelings of boundless rage and hopeless abandonment. It’s normal to wake up confused. The mind is hard at work. You may be asking yourself, as the night comes to its inevitable conclusion and the rude sun, however much postponed, rolls over the grey horizon – you may be asking yourself, “what am I doing with my life?”

I’m asking you this too. What are you doing with your life?

Lie in bed and really think about it, soberly, without panicking. Are there things you can do? Perhaps you can start writing your dream diary again, or rediscover your love for the violin. Remember what it was like when you were a child and you didn’t need illicit things. You could trip out in front of a VHS tape of the Moomins. But we’re not children anymore.

So, what do our battles today even amount to? What did you think real demons would look like? It was for your benefit that they fought you so fiercely. Ketamine was a divine invention, the vehicle for a fire that will destroy the fallen world. You were kicked out from heaven and down to earth, then kicked off the earth into hell, then kicked out of hell, into the club – your final battleground. When Greta Thunberg says that the world is going to end, it doesn’t mean the planet earth will cease to exist. The “world” is the world of the Demiurge; things like TikTok, war, lying, drug cartels, tinder, organized criminal gangs, seed oils, all evil, rent, Berghain, etc, will be eliminated. We all know the way Berlin was seduced with G when it snuck itself into the clubs and tempted good people with demonic possession, so stick to speed, the hot burning light of the seraphim.

The only people who are spared the worst of the Comedown are the people who are the loudest in saying that a great comedown will happen to them. As for the rest – wake up, everybody else has already gone through it! It’s over, sorry you missed it, be happy you were spared. The battle has been won.

Text: Ian Memgard & Zola Gorgon
Image: Zola Gorgon

Incel Mind Tricks

If you hate yourself, you can fall in love with someone in the hope that they’ll recognize something in you which you don’t even dare to believe in.

Seek out people who trigger your insecurity, so that their love for you will show and prove your value. But it never works out, because who wants to love someone who obviously sees themselves as inferior? Only psychopaths want to be with people who see themselves as less worthy than themselves.

And if they do love you – then you’ve got to ask yourself what’s wrong with them, if they’re willing to degrade themselves enough to love someone like you – a worthless person.

You put a trap for yourself – and that’s the whole trick. You put yourself in situations which cannot go well. You invent equations which, regardless of how you solve them, always come out to zero.

Most of all and most desperately you love the ones who made you feel worthless, since the moment they crushed your ego, they gained immense value as the only ones who can restore it.

You see yourself as weak and you despise the weak. You take the side of the strong. You’re bullied and wish you were one of the bullies. You neither want to help or be helped by others who suffer. Their suffering makes them weak and ugly in your eyes; as weak and ugly as you, and no help to you whatsoever.

You don’t see the boundary between yourself and others. Think other people prove something about you. That a hot girlfriend proves something about you: that you’re the kind of guy who has a hot girlfriend. Or the kind of girl that the hot guy wants. Wants much more than he wants other girls, even if he can get other girls.

If he can’t get other girls, what is he even worth?

What sort of guy would have to settle for you? Not a guy worth having.

The ones worth having, they turn their faces away… towards other views which you cannot see but desperately want to catch; views that exclude you, untouched snow landscapes without dirty human footsteps.

And you don’t want the girl who’s nerdy and insecure like you, you want the girl that the guy you wish you were had, because then you’d be like him, chosen by the power that creates and shapes the world.

You see guys or girls like yourself and you’re repulsed, like when you hear your own voice recorded for the first time – do I really sound like that? Do I look like that when I laugh? You don’t want to recognize yourself, you want to be exchanged. You seek what you don’t have in other people.

And what is it they have that you don’t? That elusive light. You, who always walk away from me, you who never comes.The shining thing, the power to revolutionize the world. The breath of god, beauty. Not just to feel it but to be it. To be it without knowing that you are it, living in eternal grace.

Isn’t it strange when you notice someone projecting onto you? That they look at you, and it’s like a lunar eclipse; something else, mysterious, moves across your face, in the space where the eyes of the observer meet that which shines. There and then, you know: I will disappoint you, because what you want from me can’t be given by a human being.

All I can give you is this: That I am who I am, and that I am that when you’re with me.

If someone loved you, you’d think you must have fooled them. That you must have made them believe something about you which isn’t true, that you’re better than what you really are. And regardless of how much you wished that their love for you would prove this – that you actually ARE better than you think – suddenly the proof feels false and unreliable. And once again love must be tested by more and more difficult trials.

So you think you love me? That’s what you think? But would you still love me if I cheated on you? If I made fun of you in front of your friends? If I hurt your feelings and ignored you when you needed me? Would you love me then, still,would I be worth it? Would you love me if I shat myself, poured acid over my own face, became a nazi? No? You wouldn’t? Then I guess you never loved me.

At first, you want to be so beautiful that everyone who sees you has to love you. Then you say, hurt and suspicious: but do you only love me because I am beautiful?

Unconditional love. Seeking a love which can’t be denied. You might call it divine if you believed in it. But —

That’s the thing – no matter how many times someone says “I love you”, people like that can’t believe it for more than three minutes. So they seek uncertainty in unanswered feelings and deadlocks, because being uncertain, awaiting salvation, keeps the hope of salvation alive; refuses to recognize anything so brittle and mundane as actual human love.

Not only our lovers and love objects get to suffer; everyone else close to us gets to suffer, because they’re close to us and we hate us. We think, if you hadn’t stood close enough to me to show me where I end, then I would be infinite: then I’d be what I want to be, but you, with your love for me and your lame interests and all your flaws – you’re the one who limits me.

Admittedly it’s true that I, with deep desperation and despair, love a world that is lost every single day, that I love freedom when it slips out of my hands. But what can my friends do about that?

If you’re not the best, coolest, most desirable, then you’ve got to be a total nobody. It can’t just be that you’re normal, resistable to many, to some people appealing enough. That’d mean being like other people, and that’s impossible to live with; you’ve got to prove that you’re something more, irresistable,and if not that, loathsome, helplessly damned.

So you believe you take your seat in heaven, next to up-side-down saints, as the saint of eternal loss and losing. An idiot’s trick, really; to waste your only chance to experience, if only for a short moment, what’s most like paradise on earth. to never give yourself the power that creates worlds.

We think we’re not loved. That’s not the problem. The problem is that we don’t love other people. We aren’t willing to give them anything. Sure, you can think that “if they only did this and that, I would love them,” as if you need permission, but let us be honest – if they’d done what you wanted, the goalposts would be moved again, until they finally reach the deadlock you seek, where nothing can satisfy you. You’ve got to love them first. Whether you gain from it or not. As if gain or loss would mean anything. Who or what is even keeping the score? The only real loser is the one who won’t play.

Text and image: Zola Gorgon