A chronicle of a journey twisted and violent, sometimes downright freaky. Close to my heart, at the core of who I am and why.
From the first conscious moments I can recall, I've always sought sanctuary in the form of imagining something that needed to be more real than what was right in front of me.
I even used to tell my parents that I was going out to get lost in the forest. Believing it to be just a childish game they told me to be home by dinner.
More then often I wasn't.
But when I was home I either constructed various contraptions either taking the form of tiny hideouts out of blankets, pillows and strings, or I built entire cityscapes or scenarios with legos.
Sometimes I even tried making lego armor for my cat. Much to it's dismay.
At a fairly early age I got my own computer after showing an immense interest with the computer at my cousins place and the computer at school. This along with a growing interesting in playing and not only watching people play games became my new obsession.
In a weird almost dreamy way I started conjuring game like scenarios and worlds, applying them to the real world. I would assign roles and scenarios to the few friends I had. Never did I ever question if they saw what I saw, or understood my visions. And somehow we still played together. If this fantasy wasn't real in some way, I don't know if anything is.
I distinctively also remember building one or two whole forts out of bales of hay with one of my few fickle best friends at the time, while playing a sort of war game between us when they were finished.
I was told watching the movie Alien II (I believe) by myself late at night on TV when I was quite young, that I have to understand the difference between what is real and what is not. And for whatever bizarre reason that has stuck with me through the years as something I've questioned time and time again but always revisited when I needed something to fall back on. Ever since then, I've always found an almost sick pleasure in visceral content. But even before that point I seem to have always had a deep fascination with taking things apart, like toys or actual broken down cars (or whole ones, sorry Dad). Destruction being the focus of the fun rather than construction. As even if I wanted to repair things It was a bit too finicky for my taste. Even if I did have and continue to this day to be quite patient.
Coming into the teens I started having a mild obsession with making my own games. Starting out with building overly complex and disorganized board games that too some extent remind me of the hybrid board game/roleplaying games of today. Why? Because what was still too complex to do on the computer I found other mediums to express myself with.
I also started to get more and more serious about writing. Finding that after having passed a very strange barrier where I could barely write and spell correctly that I had a knack for language. Perhaps because of my early exposure to computers and the internet?
At this moment It's important for you to know that my mother is an artist. A painter. And my dad is a carpenter. And me? I happened to fall into a weird things betwixt.
For various game related reasons I became quite obsessed with modifying their content. This led me to my passion for 3d graphics. And spawned my frist juvenile attempts at creating new games within existing ones. I even wrote a guide after a few years of fooling myself that I knew the pitfalls. It even got pinned on a forum for being informative. It was a weird time, because I was still finding myself and I didn't know I was lost (Thanks Avicii).
One time in the haze of being a teenager with hormone imbalance and a messed up circadian rhythm I spent perhaps two days just sitting with my computer, bunkered up with food, while trying to become a 3d artist. By the time I got away from the monitor my brain was basically wired to think if only for a while that I could change things around me like in the computer program. It was weird and wonderful and a bit disappointing to realize that it was merely a hallucination of sorts.
Growing up in my teens I think my artistry was never quite appreciated. And so I probably isolated myself a lot, and just enjoyed creating for creations sake. At about the age of fifteen I was tempted out of the comfort of the darkness. I was shown a sliver of light and I've pursued that sliver ever since.
The light was passion, the light was a burning will to prove that my life was an adventure. Something worthy to tell a tale about. And that I was someone worthy to share life with.
At the age of ninteeen I moved away from my parents to start make a living of my own. It was during this time when money was scarce, my home was a messy chaos, because I never found the time and energy to learn how to be a responsible grown-up. I had been too busy up to this point taking care of a sick mother and an occasionally (all to often) drunk father. The way I look at it, at this point in my life I started making up for lost time, which meant domestic cleanliness was of low importance.
Somewhen after that I was lured to Umeå to continue pursuing my dreams of contemporary circus while living in a collective with other artists but this is a chapter all by itself and I might cover that in another post. Needless to say this was a poi(gnant) and productive moment in my life as I believe I probably practiced an avarage of three to five hours every day.
Fast forward a few years. I'm in my own apartment finally again. The highlife had introduced me to a demon called alcohol. One that I had feared for so long. And I was living a life that I in some ways had coveted in my younger years but never explored.
It is within a daze of not being quite awake, not being quite asleep. Out of money and food for a prolonged period of time but with a bit of alcohol in my body, and within the frame of having watched existential movies like Casshern and playing games like Planescape: Torment from beginning to end without much rest in between that I concocted my most philosophical work known as Hexagonica (Which I have talked about in previous posts). It was a mindstate that I came to seek more and more. Eventually leading down a pretty dangerous path. Realizing one morning when proper awake that the kitchen was almost chuck-full with bottles of cider, that I had to change course in the pursuit of imagination.
How could I alter the state of my mind, without supplements?
Sleep deprivation have been my best ally for almost as long as I can remember. And it remains to this day the one thing I can not see myself without. I'm there right now, typing this very sentence.
But to substitute the other pieces of this dangerous but creative mindset I had to go on a journey. One that I'm still on to this very night. Along the way I've found a number of tools I'd like to share in a future post.
Remeniscing about the past I realize I've always been dreaming myself away I became attatched in my mid teens to Psychadelic Trance because it took my imagination to places I could not comprehend. I've escaped reality only to build a new one. I've loved and made love to build fantasies.
And so perhaps it's not odd that now that I've started facing reality, remembering all of these details about my past, forgiving my parents that I can see that there is true magic and wonder in the world. I've always been one for silver linings but they have always talked of subjective experiences, or asending points of view above and beyond their original scope. Today I stand before you not with a silver lining but with proof that there is something special within us all.
All of these worlds I've fancied were always real. Because they are my narrative. They are my legend. They are interwoven with the fabric of who I am and why I am the way I am today.
I stand before you as myself. A symbol of a life lived within the worlds of many.
In pursuit of imagination...I found salvation.
-Signed, Mireneye
