Life in a funny Hotel.

Rainbow.

The rainbow in my head, is slippery when wet.

I glide down its colourful corridors

When sleep catches my eyes.

The rainbow gathers blessed devils and evil angels,

And in its chaos I shine and revel!

I travel in its depths, forget all the threats

All that matters are dancing heads.

This worried head bares not sleep.

Nowhere, 1999.

Throughout her life Dyonisia had shared her living space with many a stranger.

The flats in which her bed happened to sit in never really felt like sweet homes..The front door somehow refused to lock itself for good at night, and it relished in swallowing strangers and friends at any hour. These places were always mother of chaos and father of wasted philosophy.

There would be someone sitting alone in a corridor, discussing very faintly the flower-cursed British wallpaper. There would be someone spilling sweet red wine from Italy all over his or her white shirt, on a roof in Paris.

She even woke up to find someone passed out next to her bed, with dreadlocks of blue wax in black hair. It had dripped from the candle on the bedside table on to his drunken skull during the night. This occurred on some island anchored in the Indian Ocean.
Dyonisia was hardly ever surprised. I think she was beyond the feeling of surprise. The only thing that sometimes came to mind was: "interesting."

She somehow believed her place was right there, in the wobbly core of the common heart that was beating in the aliens around her. They reassured each other, led each other on into glorious decadence, and had the most uncivilised time.

At any time and any place, the girl would attract or be attracted by the oddest people .
There's a certain deep and senile look about some people's eyes. Eyes that meet each other in disbelief, in a slow and weary process of recognition. Eyes that can yawn in resignation and ten seconds later spark with adrenaline, in full schizophrenic power.

Eyes and silence were two of madness' best friends. Then came the brains, split between paranoid distortion and hyper-lucidity. Invisible but tangible labyrinths where doubt tore you from promise to panic, from patience to claustrophobia.

Many were the Minotaurs one had to fear and foresee.

Dyonisia and her companions were all like Hansel and Gretel, red hooded elves and silver nymphets.

Many were the trembling strings in the wind and the scattered breadcrumbs on the road: just in case they got lost.

Someone else usually managed to boycott their threads and breadcrumbs.

That someone was no one else but them.

Like the floating threads leading to Penepole's refusal of time. Or the brown crumbs eaten by the black birds as soon as they were out of sight. They were both meaningless, considering most of them wanted to keep on straying in this isolated and tortuous maze.

Some of their fellow mad had been caught up by their ineptitude, or by sheer refusal. They were now locked up, sedated and lobotomised by nice men in white. The aces of the broken needles and multi-coloured pills. The doctors and nurses who knew best how to shape marginality into sheer oblivion

Of course a multitude of appealing identities tempted the ones who were in mental health care; some thought they were a lama on the cosmic run, others paranoid victims of a gay serial killer, or, they just simply thought they were Jesus Christ. (No need to be stuck in Jerusalem to think you are the golden child of the universal bell-boy: clones of Jesus were found preaching along Sunset Boulevard as well as seen mumbling to themselves on the harbour of Marseilles.)

They had the label of "off the wall fruitcakes" stuck on their foreheads, until time would turn the mere label into a lifetime tattoo.

Their hearts were soon to become as sterile as the hospital's corridors, their brains as predictable and square as the doctor's degrees framed in glass. That's it. They just hung about like a framed Medicine degree hangs on the wall of these white men's wooden offices. They became pretty useless, to put it mildly. The men in white tested new shock treatments on strapped, mentally challenged patients. A virulent yet nonchalant Ergasiomania performed on numbed down human vegetables.

The films "Birdie" and "One flew over a Cocoo's nest" were romantic mirrors of our lost friends.

But movies like"Man Hunter" and "Dead ringers" were just as appropriate. In both cases the notion of time and space no longer needed to exist. Solitude had been sculpted around them, offering a safe hiding place to alienation. For some it was a bubbly lullaby, for others the violet pits of evil.

Sanity had betrayed them, by placing their emptied souls in the no-man's land pawn shop, and this was in a Las Vegas sort of pawn shop.

No love or crystal clear relationships left, just a harrowing plastic bubble, to run around in like demented hamsters.

Dyonisia truly felt for them, for they could not be delivered: there was nothing she could do for them. They had nothing left to loose, not even themselves.

So she decided to concentrate on the socially apt ones. The ones whom like herself were tolerated by the clique, and sometimes ridiculously entertaining.

The ones that tiptoed on the metal circus line, high above. Under their feet the sound of car alarms, alarm clocks, and exhaust pipes melted into one illogical carillon. Distorted beams of colours fucked eachother all around.

Like a rainbow blowing up in sparks and smoke. The socially inclined nutters were constantly juggling with all the senses, senses that were trapped in a state of self-inflicted anarchy. Order in disorder was the inevitable quest. We couldn't possibly let the pills pillage our dreams and nightmares at night. Nor could we afford to have our subconscious and unconscious be anaestethised by medication: all the roots to the problems were in them.

Yet the majority of us relied on one or more artificial paradises. The alibi was to deepen the link between one's self and the invisible, the unintelligible, the road to anywhere.

Whether it be booze or spliffs, microdots, or Valium, or helium, or XTC, or shrooms or snow.. Habit slowly made these substances indispensable, in order to get where we last left off in our heads.

I have lost many socially apt friends because of drug possession. Serious drug possession. When Mendelt and a brat pack posse got found with hundreds of grams of coke in the boot of their car they were still in school. The police summoned their parents up and offered two alternatives: jail or mental hospital. Most opted for the latter, it was less disgraceful for the public image, and it was somehow justified by the boy's deviance.

The worst must have been the misfortune of Eric and Boris.

Boris was a short red haired raver, he was pale and paranoid, and always had a hat pulled down over his eyes and ponytail. His eyes were permanently absent, and he spoke very fast. Eric was a tall, thin, good-looking black guy from New York. Like many yanks, he was in Brighton for a year abroad.

The two lads were aspiring deejays and took a fair amount of acid. I walked to Falmer station with them and they told me about the cunning plan they both had. They would call their respective mothers and tell them they needed a thousand pounds each, to buy the stuff a dj needs. If they refused, the boys would threaten to swallow six microdots, three each. I laughed the whole thing off, thinking they would never be thick enough to do it.

Three hours later I got on the train from Brighton to Falmer and found them both sitting in the smoking carriage. They had tight grins and white foam at the corners of their mouths. They were making no sense whatsoever. Eric was blithering on about us three getting a flat together in town, that I was his best mate and that he wouldn't be going back to the big apple. I suddenly realised their mothers had told them to piss off, and the two twats had swallowed the microdots.

I heard security had ran after them and sedated them with an injection, that night. They had wreaked havoc around the campus and destroyed anything in their way. They were locked up in some asylum, somewhere nice.

But despite the mental challenge, the most lucid out of us knew only too well that self-destruction was the easiest way out. The real challenge was to be as close as possible to sanity, in order to avoid oblivion. In order to rise against the dumb down epoch of ours. To beat our fists against the concrete walls until they were red and blue. It had to be the end of the snoring apnoea our hope was floating in.

The political and economical leaders of the planet were playing chess with the fate of six billion human beings. They prostituted their fat arses for their well being, cigar in the mouth and a glass of old Bourbon in the left hand.

Mute mutants were what they wanted. Frozen spectators, lips sown by iron thread, eyes strangled by cables and ears sculpted by hot wax. Dummies that would weep over Princess Diana's discarding and never wondered why the clowns hadn't been able to get rid of Sad-damn, first.

The establishment had a strong hold on world control. All the satellites and cameras, and microchips and microphones. Big Brother was sharing information with Big Daddy and Big Cousin, now. All we had left to distinguish one another, on this mess of a planet, was numbers.

Hours, minutes and seconds, days, weeks and years. Social security numbers, area code, credit card pin, phone locks coins and bank notes. Numbers: that was all.

This is why certain timeless individuals drifted along the roads of the world. In order to recruit souls that had woken up from the long sleep, and was ready to acknowledge the fact that all of us have a peculiar mission on Earth.

Some people call them shamans, witch doctors, immortal, well worried, gypsy warriors.

People that just sat on the wooden pendulum of life, swiftly swinging above or beneath your normal, mortal pedestrian. Spirits that had shattered all the clessidres of the world, in order to rely on raw time, time invisible.

They had parallel roads and ancient counter-maps to everything. If you were prepared to go through physical death you could join the tribe and fight. For death was all around us, in a pathetic and sadly predictable way.