Journal entry #1 - A new world awaits



(SYN VO)


Found a druggist in Omaha pushing prescription pills and philanthropy.  Waxed poetic with a preacher under a busted neon sign, outside a Kansas methadone clinic. I spoke with an angel in the Costa Rican skyline. Its wings made of newspaper headlines. Obituaries fluttering like surrender flags.


And you, Mr. Syn, are an expired passport.


The sky was a cheap motel room ceiling fan, slicing time into tattered strips. My reflection in the minibar vodka bottle showed a man made of airport lounge carpet, chewing the frayed end of a one-way ticket. The angel fed me a sugar cube laced with deja vu. Suddenly I was 12 years old in a Las Vegas basement, watching a centipede crawl from a businessman's briefcase.


See? The past is just a junkie telling the same bad joke.


Now the clouds are burning their fingerprints off with smuggled lighter fluid. The Angel coughs up a symphony of dial tones — last transmission before the static wins:


The Costa Rican skyline was never yours to begin with. Just a postcard some drunk pinned to the bulletin board of a bus station that closed in 2013.








The angel was sitting at the far end of the bar when I walked in, its wings shedding feathers like expired lottery tickets. The Costa Rican skyline bled orange through flyspecked windows as the jukebox played some twisted mariachi cover of Pale Blue Eyes.


You're late, it said, pushing a drink toward me.


The glass was sweating something that wasn't quite water. Eight years, four months and sixteen days late. But who’s counting? Its smile was a straight razor dipped in saccharin. I downed the drink. It tasted like the last time I kissed someone and actually meant it - 2016, a basement in Reno, the taste of peach whiskey and impending regret. The Angel watched me shudder, amused.


They sent you to save me? I asked.


It laughed, a sound like a car crash in slow motion. Save you? Kid, I'm just here to settle the tab.


The angel produced a ledger bound in what looked like human skin. You've been charging miracles to the divine credit line since you were six years old. The stigmata incident in Sunday school? The weeping statue of Mary behind the Kmart? All those nights that you swore you felt God’s breath on your neck? Cash advances, every one.


I don't believe in any of that shit, at least not anymore, I said. Well kid, you better start believing because I'm right here and the payment is due, the Angel fired back. Outside, the jungle buzzed with the hum of decaying fluorescents. A gecko scuttled across the ceiling, it's tiny heart beating shame, shame, shame.


The angel snapped it's fingers, summoning me back to the present. The bartender - a defrocked priest with nicotine yellow fingernails and a philosophy degree, brought another round. This one tasted like my father's aftershave and the familiar copper tang of a busted lip.


Deal is this, the angel said, leaning in close. Its breath smelled of burnt typewriter ribbons and cheap gin.


You've got three options. One, we erase you. Not death: unwriting. Like you were never born. Your first kiss never happens. That day you pulled your cousin from the pool? She drowns in ‘09. Your mother keeps the stretch marks, but no memory of why.


It let that hang in the air between us, a noose just waiting for a neck.


Two? I croaked.


Two, it grinned, You become me. Another burnout celestial repo man, collecting on overdue souls. You'll spend eternity listening to mortal whimpering in truck stop bathrooms, watching the light leave their eyes when they realize that redemption was never on the menu.


The jukebox skipped. For a second, the angel's face flickered, I saw my own features stretched across its skull, aged and hungry.


And three?


It slid a key across the bar. Room 303, according to the fob. You take the room at the end of the hall. Sleep for a thousand years. Wake up someone new. No memories, no debts, no you left to disappoint.


I reached for the key. The angel's hand clamped over mine, its skin fever hot. But here's the kicker, it whispered. However you choose, tomorrow you'll wake up convinced that you picked wrong. You see, that's the curse of consciousness. Buyers remorse for the soul.


The bartender rang a bell. Last call, he muttered, though it was barely sunset.


I looked at the key. At the ledger. At the angel's empty eyes. Somewhere, a phone was ringing in an empty apartment. A dog barked at a shadow. A child pressed its palm to a cold window, leaving a ghost print that would linger for decades.


Fine, it said standing. Its wings unfolded like a theater curtain revealing a third act twist.


Keep running. But the next time that you pray, really pray, remember: the answers gonna sound an awful lot like your own voice.


Then it was gone. The bartender handed me a napkin. For the blood, he said.


I touched my nose. My fingers came away red. Outside, the Costa Rican skyline burned and burned and burned.








Journal entry #2 - Costa Rica calling



(SYN VO)


The neon crucifix above the bordello flickered like a failing heart monitor. I lit a cigarette with a page torn from some empty chapter, with some desperate verse from the Bible — tastes like someone's childhood.


I saw heaven in the cracks of the pavement. In the way the rain falls when the streetlights quiver. Fading in and out of consciousness.


The Angels halo was a bent spoon, catching sunset in its tarnished curve.


Salvation is just a vein you missed, it whispered, plucking at my sleeve with hypodermic fingers. It laughed like a river cutting through a canyon.


The clouds were cotton balls soaked in ether. The first hit is always free, kid, it said, pressing a thundercloud to my lips.


The Angel shoots up a whole constellation, tieing off with a strand of my spinal cord. Funny, it slurs, How the sky looks just like the inside of your arm when you're bleeding out sunrise.


I try to bargain, barter, or beg for just one more hit of horizon. I'll trade you my childhood, my last clean shirt. But the Angel’s already folding its wings into a tourniquet, licking the last blue veins of twilight. The cold wind carving our chronology. Casting shadows that move just half a second behind reality.


I bite my tongue just to taste something real.








The Costa Rican skyline cracks like an egg. I realize, not for the first time but maybe the last, that the angel's voice was always my own. That's the joke, isn't it? The divine punchline written in the chemical shorthand of a brain that's been rationing serotonin since the first Obama administration. The motel bar dissolves into a wet cathedral of dendrites and dying light. The angel's wings are myelin sheaths stripped bare, fluttering in the neuroelectric wind. Welcome to the last synaptic cleft, it says - I say as the walls bleed CSF and old Polaroids.


This is where the body balances its books.


The jukebox is playing my childhood screams slowed down to 33 rpm. The bartender's face keeps cycling through every doctor who ever handed me a prescription. The glass he pushes towards me is brimming with something that refracts all of my worst memories at once:


The way the streetlight outside my first apartment made shadows move like withdrawal tremors.


My last night with Holly.


My mother's voice on the phone last Tuesday saying You sound tired, Matthias, in that way that meant I've already planned your funeral.


I drink. Of course I drink.


The angel, Me, produces another ledger written in the spidery cursive of my own hand. Let's audit the damage, it says, flipping pages that smell like burned hair and kindergarten paste.


Age 7: Stole a St. Christopher medal from the church lost and found. Swallowed it for protection.


Age 19: Told a girl you loved her because the moon looked like a Xanax that night.


Age 26: Lied to the ER nurse about how many pills you'd taken. The lie was fewer than the truth.


The room is shrinking; the ceiling presses down like the lid of a coffin lined with High Times centerfolds and old report cards. The angel's fingers are plucking at my rib cage like a busted guitar string.


Wanna know my favorite part, it whispers, I whisper as the walls dissolve into the white noise of a fetal heartbeat, You’ve been dead since the last hit. This? The motel, the ledger, the whole Costa Rican redemption fantasy? Nothing more than your occipital lobe burning through its final reserves.


Somewhere beyond the collapsing biology, a phone rings. My mother’s voice on the machine: Pick up, Matthias, PLEASE. The angel, me, smiles with all the tenderness of a shotgun wedding.


Time to choose, it says, unfolding wings made of every bad decision I ever romanticized.


The lights flicker. The jukebox skipped. For half a second, I’m everywhere at once.


A cockroach crawling across the motel’s ice machine.


A stain on the shirt of the cop who will finally chalk my outline.


The last static between radio stations at four in the morning.


Then it all collapses into a single point of light.


The angel's mouth moves my mouth moves. The words taste like copper and cut rate communion wine:
















Journal entry #3 - Ungoverned Pakistan




(SYN VO)


I am an echo of an echo in a burning building.


A late night air strike.


Baptized in dial tones and raised on lies.


Trading xanax and conspiracy theories.


A communion wafer at a church of the damned.


We’re just ghosts, lying on repeat.


A traced and etched promise buried with our teeth.


I am an anthem for the lost and the in-between.


Pulling at threads.


They’ll paint you black and call it art.


Slow dancing in the glow of exit signs and cemetery lights.


Her name still haunts my veins in every whiff of gasoline.


The dawn breaks over a war torn shore. The sea though, she whispers a lullaby.


Stories through the breeze. The scent of jasmine climbing through the walls. Sharp and resolute. No tomb can ever hold a people's name.


They’ll tell you, Pull Yourself Up By Your Boots. But what they won't say is that they own the boots, and they own the roots. They’ll sell you the rope. They’ll even let you put it on loan.


So we dream in pixels, but the system is built to keep you down. Selling your future for a stock price rise. They want us tired, too broke to fight. Jokes on them, we are wide awake. Trickle down is just them pissing on you.


Well if they want war,


we will give them hate.


From the projects to the overpass.


So Rise, Rise with the dawn.


With our fists in the air and our boots on.


Let the cops show up but stand your ground.


Fear dont work when you’re hungry and proud.


Just the slow leak of dust through a curtain, the way dust settles and calls itself quiet.


Rooted in my ribs, gorging on my breath. It lingers like humidity. And yet, sometimes, when the wind lifts just so, or a stranger's laugh fits perfectly into silence, I forget to feed it. For a moment, however brief and fleeting, it forgets me back.





It whispers in some static alphabet. A stillborn echo. The room breathes wrong. The clock eating its own hands. My organs on a newsreel. Auctioned to ghosts. Begging for an ending but endings are a myth. My head is just a radio, turned to a dead station’s cough.


The preacher will tell you that “Hell is other people,” when hell is the silence after the phone stops ringing. Hell is your reflection in a gas station bathroom, wiping its eyes with a paper towel that dissolves like a sacrament.


Sometimes the moon is so bright it burns a hole in the skyline, and for even just a second, I’d swear, I can see straight through to the other side. Maybe pain is just light that hasn't learned how to land yet.





Jesus called collect,


I let it go to voicemail.


Now we glow like panic attacks. My ribs - a cathedral where the pews are all empty except for one old hound dog howling along to a jukebox hymn. The tape has finally chewed itself to static. My last good nerve plucked itself like a banjo string in a hurricane. I am left asking, no I’m begging the moon and the stars, for a second chance.


Matthias Syn, doomed to spend eternity as the before photo in a prozac ad.


The sunrise arriving like a subpoena. Chanting ashes to ashtrays with frayed nerve endings. You want redemption? Here, hold this broken bottle to the throat of dawn and see what bleeds.







Do you know what the best part of walking away is? It's that moment you storm back and remind everyone why they fucking missed you.


Schism, little Schizm. You rotting, whimpering afterthought. I've never seen anyone dragged around by their fucking tiny balls like you, Schizz. Tell me, do you have to remind the rest of the Revolution that you're even in the group? Because I forgot until I saw your last promo. You boring, loathsome, Matthias Syn dick eater.


You try and you try and you try to prove to anyone who will listen, that you don't have a room level IQ. You're as useful as a peaceful protest.


Your faux revolution, from a group of faux revolutionaries, has grown tired. At least to me. It isn't going anywhere. It's never going to go anywhere. And do you know why, it's never going anywhere? It's because you don't have the fucking balls. None of you do. Not for a REAL revolution. You're very good at saying a lot of words, yet none of those words have any meaning. What do you even stand for? You don't even fucking know.


I see you, Schizz. I see through you. You've been on a steady diet of propaganda and boot leather for your entire meaningless life. There's nothing special about you. A sentient fucking charisma vacuum. Sucking the aura out of any room the second you pass the threshold.


You're no different than the system you pretend to rail against. They put a phone in your hand and a computer in your lap and you become a useful idiot for charlatan politicians and corporate news media. Helping to spread their lies to manufacture consent. And just like the parasite that you are, you actively cheer it on.


Genocide, apartheid, war, famine, greed and suffering. These things mean nothing to you. Do you know how I know you just cosplay as Matthias Syn? Because I've never once heard you mention any of those things.


And that's why I hate you, Schizz. And I HATE you. That's why I am going to fucking show you what it means to truly suffer. You've got to live it, first name Schizm. You have to FEEL what it means to be desperate and afraid before you can sincerely understand the causes you should actually be fighting for. Not some wrestling revolution that'll never truly get anywhere.


You have to think bigger, you fucking cum stain. Riding the coattails of Flynn and Bourbon et. al, has left you living in the shadows.


What have you done in this industry that would make anyone take note of you, Schizz? Flynn is the Anarchy Champion. The Bastards are the Anarchy tag team champions. But you, you Schizz, you're the name carved into a picnic table that's been painted over. Nothing more than the bruise they press on just to feel something.


They don't look at you, Schizm. They look through you. Just like the rest of this industry looks through you. A shadow without a man to cast it.


Well, the spotlight will be on you. I'm back, and I'm box office, bitch. Any time that Matthias Syn walks through that curtain, the entire world stops to watch. I'm fucking must see tv. Always have been.


It's not my fucking job to put you over, Schizm. That's where you all get it wrong. It's my job to put your fucking lights out and to have my music hit twice.


And I'm VERY fucking good at my job.


So forget the Revolution, Schizm, because at Warfare, Matthias Syn, is your Revelation.