We don't know where crackhead number 1 and 2 went to, but we have each other, me, Jimmy, and Pongo, even if P is a little aloof this aeon, and it's good to be a we, and not individual I's, because we need to stick together. The farther out we get, the harsher the reality we're on the run from becomes, and the dichotomy is so fierce now that the abyss seems bottomless and the sky's brighter than Sirius on a full moon and we know none of us could face the fugitive vision alone without the false grounding of shared hallucinatory entities and that is just dandy, as dandy as the fifteen megatons of dandelion consciousness mowed down or poisoned with chemical weedkiller in the superurban holocaust of 2009. 2009 was a dark time. We should know, we've lived through a cascade of them.
And quite apart from any conscious decision we find ourselves in a new paragraph. The jolt is harsh. Is that a siren, or is Pongo screaming again? She's got a nose full of powder. Jimmy has finally risen to see who's been knocking at the door for the last three months and thirty seconds. His shirt rips and half of the back sticks to a floorboard. He wobbles like a bowling pin when he finally gets up, but regains his footing and reaches for the knob. It turns out it's two people - persistent little fucks, probably knocking in shifts. They announce themselves as Jehovah's witnesses and stride into the den like they own the place. Jimmy asks which one's the nightshift knocker. Jimmy's a vampire, so naturally he feels he'd get along better with the nocturnal one. I'm more of a day person myself, but both of our circadian rhythms are now inaudible timpani rambling in the eighty voice polytonal symphonic fugue that is our apparition.
Life is a wraith - we've just accepted that sooner than the rest of society. We're way ahead of you. But it's not a race. And you're welcome to come down to the crackhouse and absorb our wisdom. You will have to surrender to pain the likes of which you can't even conceive, but that's only for the first millennium. That's how long it takes for you to absorb the pain of every being that ever lived. The aggregate is a mountain, my friend, a volcano of agony dwarfing Mauna Loa. Upon becoming this mountain, the wraith will deem you worthy of the flight. The flight... God, how can I convey to you how worthwhile it makes the suffering? I can't, anymore than I can convey the misery of that first millennium.
Nobody meets the wraith by choice - I wouldn't, if I could have chosen. That's what peer pressure is for! And I'll push you into it some day. That's my bodhisattva duty this incarnation. That'll be my last act before plunging into the gutter and dying in the open smog. I'll track down your spikiest hallucination and take advantage of your ontological opening there. You'll be wandering under the overpass, searching for truth. I'll offer my at hand, the stimuli I've got at hand, that @ tattooed palm of mine - I can't remember when or where I got that mark. You'll take it, hardly believing your own susceptibility to this increasingly unholy whisk. We'll wine you and dine you and lay you to rest in the crackden before your big trip with the wraith. We won't tell you what's in store. We wouldn't want to worry you. But @ some nodepoint... you'll meet me on the wings of the wraith.
~+~
The ride with the wraith - you can't imagine how right it is for sunshine to last so long - how natural it gets beyond duality.
~+~
That's the reverie me and Jimmy came out of ten years ago. After that it gets a bit hazy - time is speeding up again, and pretty soon we'll be back to normal, and I presume, die of exposure. All that's human of us anymore is our bones, barnacled with synthetic chemical deposits, and maybe a pound of meat between us. Our stomachs have shrunk and shriveled. Our blood has steamed out of our mouths and noses. Our livers are no longer needed for our alien metabolisms and our hearts have been flash frozen and draped in velvet.
Jehovah's juggernauts who strode in here like they own the place now claim they do own the place. Pongo, coming in to meet the well-groomed strangers, lets out a sage titter as only she can. The hilarity of the idea of "owning" the crackhouse is apparently lost on these creeps. Who do they think they are?
It doesn't matter who they are, they say. They want to introduce us to their savior. We want to introduce them to heroin. Pongo suggests a compromise. We'll read their bible if they'll fill up the tub, get in, and shoot up with some of our dope. Pongo asks if we really have a tub, or was that just the submarine that washed up in the backroom when atlantis came burbling up from some drain somewhere. I say, I believe the sub turned into a tub at some point, during one of those rhyme-time dust storms, where things erode and pile into other things. Me and Jimmy both agree to the bible-reading end of the bargain, even though neither of us is sure if we can read anymore. The jehovas don't seem keen on P's very reasonable request.
Pongo says, okay, instead of that, how about if you guys just smoke a joint? Again, the Jehovah's' refuse. Pongo says, fine, we'll read your bible if you'll listen to my new album. Jimmy cracks up at the word "new". Pongo likes to think she's still a musician when she's been doing nothing but listening to her past accomplishments on an eighteen hour loop for the past two hundred years. At least she was prolific back in the day, so she's got a long body of work to cycle through before the rehash. But her last contribution to art was a bit of acoustic guitar strumming and a sublime bitonal humming accompaniment. I still maintain it was her magnum opus, far more true to the wraith of reality than any of the contrived technological virtuosity of her past. It was a track meant for us, us three, or I guess it was five then, when crackhead number one and two were around, or were they just flanges of myself? I guess they probably were. Anyway, that opus was written and recorded a long time ago. That was before a stolen Hercules airplane being used to smuggle three hundred pounds of cocaine into Milligan City crashed through the roof of the crackhouse. Well Pongo's just been sniffing up her good fortune ever since and although she keeps talking about starting a new concept album, she hasn't done shit. She mainly just paces and talks, and sometimes screams. We like opioids, me and Jimmy, it was nothing to us.
The Jehovah's' grudgingly agree to listen to Pongo's "new" album (by which she means her two hundred and sixty year old suite, "holed up") but only on the condition that they are allowed to monitor our bible reading upon immediate conclusion of the disc. We discover that there is no longer a working cd player in the den, although we do discover seven extra rooms we hadn't known about before, one of them a crudely-constructed museum of artifacts from the reemergence of Atlantis being curated by Cthulu's tailor - a charming fellow. Night-shift Jehova doesn't like the looks of the tailor, but is soon won over by the man's easy going demeanor.
The Jehovah's' seem relieved at the lack of a playing device, only to find out that Pongo intends on "performing" the entire suite from memory, using a xylophone, an elastic band stretched over a glass, a winebottle, and her voice. Jimmy and I decide to shoot some of that really good smack we've been saving for the next Pongo live performance, so we go back on the nod while Pongo regales the stiff Jehovah's'. I come out of it seven hours later to find myself needing a long rest – morning bells and moonlight sonata behind closed eyelids.
