Air Conditioning is Not Metal
There’s nothing better for composing brutal black metal lyrics about the frozen northern tundra than sweltering in an overheated shitbox while the corpse paint melts off my body like a doomed Greenlandic iceberg drifting towards Miami. The creative juices come pouring out of my metaphorical pen just as fast as my bodily juices are secreted through my earthly pores. Sure, the corpse paint might get smeared all over my black leather vest but that’s just the price I pay for mental teleportation to my imaginary kingdom cold. My summer time studio apartment is not so mighty ravendark.
When I crab-walk around my climate-uncontrolled abode practicing new riffs on my guitar, I fantasize about epic battles in the arctic north while trying to avoid tripping on cheap furniture. The last thing I want is to mess up my perfectly dyed-black hair in an awkward collision with my futon couch or TV tray while headbanging to the sounds of darkness and destruction. It may be sinfully warm in here, but that’s no excuse for not looking like I’ve just risen from a frozen grave on a remote, mountainous island off the coast of Norway in the blackest depths of the hibernal night.
Once my window A/C unit was grim and frostbitten, but now it’s just grim. Riddled with devastating puncture wounds that I inflicted upon it with my sharpened sleeve spikes from the time before time when I carried that morbid bastard up the ruined stairs and through the halls of humidity like a true son of rental darkness, it now sits idly upon its dark throne, full of despair, taunting me with distant memories of its frigid glory that reigned supreme in the Julys of yesteryear. I utter my guttural warcries at this lifeless blizzard beast, its ghastly soul demonizing me with its foul presence, the battle eternal and the heat unstoppable.
But sometimes I need a break from my over-heated and sweat-drenched black metal battling, and that’s when my true old school heavy metal axes come out to play, because I have an actual collection of medieval weaponry hanging on the wall above my amp. Thanks to the irreversible decline of artificial arctic air and the tyrannical rise of blasphemous heat and the moisture of sorrow in my wasted realm, rust is now a problem. But nothing cures black metal writer’s block like taking one of those ridiculous weapons off the wall, polishing it with a special synthetic compound comprised of nothing but frosty northern moonlight and the souls of the dead, and getting my buddy to follow after me and film me while I run around outside through the dog park and along the urban riverfront like an ancient wrathful warrior on an archaic mission to vanquish the unstoppable hordes of harrowing heat.
As always, I emerge victorious, the evil in my blood rejuvenated and ready for more conquests within my cursed realm of summer demons. And thus the battle rages on, under the banner of Hyberborean dreamscapes and the sounds of chaotic strife-born wind blasts ’till the damned solarfall finally approaches and the tragedy of another day ends with defeat and disgrace as I subside into the recurring silence of nocturnal darkness, my heart weighed down with the heaviness of 1000 cryptic funerals as the most brutal reality of all strikes its earth-shattering blow. I really don’t want to go to work in the morning.
