Doxylamine

doxylamine, personified potentate of succinate, tells me the only way i can write is if i stop caring. okay buddy, whatever you say. there's sufficient holes in these third hand pants to welcome apathy with an open crotch. they're nice pants, just full of holes. like the theory of attraction. i hate that theory. it's not attractive to me. there's something fundamentally ridiculous about everybody thinking they can be elite. that's why i listen to the succinate. he makes sense to me.

whispers, vespers, it's thrice synthetic, a strategy octavian could not make sense of. i've got the karma of a clobbered peasant, the genes of an aristocrat scribe, and the providence of an industry lieutenant who burned his cachet to light a cigar. it tasted good, rich tobacco flavour. now i'm coating my sores with menthol. diurnal combustion. am i sufficiently succinated to write this? never got to the ivy extract, let alone stodal, but i'm jonseying for seconal and thinking about barbital, somehow one hundred and fifty capsules, a real splurge, a real falloff a tree, maybe it could dilate past the predicted lids, into an urn, meeting adjourned, adjunct to the function of spurned converse affected schizo rosetta moss.

looks like i've not even made it to act ii of the morality play, haven't been presented with the metal edges to grate off feelings, still learning slow lessons, osmosis blockhead bruisers. the succinate tells me in this situation i go to cottonwood, like it's a quest, absorb some waterfall spray, close my eyes like they do in the first person profundis, forget the latin antecedents, slave to the web of associations, the malfunctioning fan rattles on the runon, yes, the intended effect affects all schizophrenic observers, a screaming head cut off the ephedra remains pilloried in a stock rut, trading day long done, in fact it's a shift that drags all seasons with it, a succinate slur, it's a doxymoron, supports all hypocrisy, enables all we've felt, parlez-vous?

must... finish... prayer... not that jupiter cares. oh snap, particulate shiver, translation with the scratch of a yellow pushpin, muscle memory converts flat surface to a series of scribblings en francais, it's modern magic, the aggregate of which is a bored and melancholic mind, consumed, possessed with petty ness, sick ness, ugly ness, a new shamanic gestalt of cold medication and fevered contemplation, a cool burst sensation as advertised.

it still isn't good enough, getting exponentially inadequate, errant syntax swimming in the grout of god's grimace, forming the edifice of a smile, what succinate likes to see in sicklight, not dead yet, cloned pheromones used to maneuver a picture-perfect painter into joining the "war to end all wars"... so divorced from any historical reality, twisted, looking at my sockets, caged-write, unable to define. let's call it tribute to apollo. if cachet is ashed. couldn't hurt.

y men

what do you do with a piano? i guess you lead a band of mutants with your wolverine claws, unholy levels of keyboard amp, unheard of mix becomes the force-fed aesthetic of the future. legionnaire holds back guitar to an edged crunch to flank the enemies of progress. if i must do something new, i’ll accept artistic martyrdom, stay unschooled in the rules that must be broken for novelty’s sake, for the style of statements and soundtracks decades ahead, in times that are unimaginable but will end up being clever re-configurations of the near-capacity trans-cultural database accelerated with quantum computation.

stymied flow, forced into a low-scoring scrabble play because the invisible clock is ticking. libidinal landslide crushes local village.

x men are pre-millennium. y men are the future. so can they be expected to take care of their own? throw me a bone?

x men are in league with traditionalists, the lineage. the slots are opening up, enough to spread the word through the well-networked middle class, there are places, finally, in the order. so they’re starting to see the functions of the old gods. starting to reconcile with lobbyists for israel. ah i see, the homeland, yes. and what can you do about those muslims? that situation is synergistic with arms manufacturers, a self-perpetuating suicide harvest, life-affirming death. of course, being as sophisticated as this age will allow, i’m terribly ashamed for appearing condescending to any culture.

y men and women enjoy the irony of the futant ideal and reality, ideality, a charmed alphabet soup. we brought back charm. we let the institutions and buildings crumble, lent a few tribes for the sacking of new york and the overrunning of los angeles. we built the new charms with occasional reference to the old charms. an economy of luck, an age of superstition. reason is sisyphean, fuck that. pantera-riff party on second censomensus beach: “we are the new breed” in dicacphlegm grunt, strummed with the pick of destiny.

sarcastic throng worships the empty casket of timothy leary. if it doesn’t make me laugh, it’s worthless, which is why we cluster together, the humour is shared, we’ll bore it into the skull if we have to, silence brings seriousness, we put the serious heads in the stocks. even the boardwalks rot, we camped in swamps underneath, stole fire from the x men cancer survivors, indistinguishable from magic, fashioned cobalt 60 rayguns with sound effects, flash physics funkmeisters with double-edged swords, the priests of wargames, stun guns, evolved tazers, got the occasional scalp of an other but usually chain-whipped a neighbor, she likes it really, she’ll agree with a jagged-toothed smile, emotionally ambiguous, served slightly chilled with a vintage cartoon reference.

stymied flow for slow centuries, something breaks, stomach wall bursts, he patches it up with synthetic intestine, nanoplastic parasites invade the digestive tract, spread to the brain. eventually, through tendon-snapping acrobatics of self-analysis, he creates a schism in the brain, separates himself from the parasites, learns to communicate with them, makes an alliance. what can you accomplish with the aid of tiny plastic parasites?

“it’s something. it’s an accomplishment,” she says. he made it to the grocery store. made it to the second floor.

in a stock contest, medium-sized mr. nichols would be crushed by the plentiful entrants, atavistic bulkheads, load bearing spinal columns. but he is the type to dwarf the drones at nelson safeway. transferred, he’s got a mercenary tie, striped to signal he is a company man. benefits. presiding over this slice of my future. i don’t realize but i didn’t fulfill my quota of eye contact. plus something signaled i was doped up. orange alert. eyes shifted the message. not enough neurons for the task. benzos are my achiles’ heal.

i skipped my high school aptitude test. it would have said that at this point in my life, i should be smashing equipment into amps while dodging flying liquor bottles. i missed the boat on that. acid did find me, but i found it too slick a bunnyhole, too quick to insanity, or whatever passes for that in this pastiche. so i went and saw mr. nichols.

managed to freak him out with my plastic parasites. didn’t even know i’d done it. stealth. it’s an aquarian conspiracy!

enter audiobook osmosis man. his superpower is deriving deep wisdom from recorded lectures and audiobooks, avoiding the need to actually read anything. he is also the greatest tetris player in the world. he has the second through seventh sight. he has discovered the elusive fourth preview block. he plays tetris while listening to howard zinn, joseph campbell, and rupert sheldrake. he is a connoisseur of sleep and sooth. he lives between ideas and sleep. the seesaw between them is his passion, practice forever on the horizon, something to consider.

pipe cults are the best hope for the kappa opioid receptor protagonist. a developing story. they think they can abolish economy, replace it with chlorophyll. i’m listening. every cult has got an anti-depressant. i ran out of anti-drugs.

found a sound. castanet-core. i was used to a grind, a coffee grind. the castanet carried me a few blocks anyway. to the dregs of the parade, incidentally, a bus station. i followed the signs home.

There’s guys on the line who would eat you alive

Got no one to talk to, so I’m venting online.

So, I really tried to hustle this week. Applied to five places. Even with the xanax it was hard, but I did it. So far, not one place has called back, except the kalesnikoff lumber yard. So, battling the nastiest flu I've had in years, popping reactin and drixoral after a sleepless night, I drove forty minutes to the lumber mill. I was excited... they were desperate for workers, surely I could get hired there. It was a physical job, but I was gung-ho about that, I wouldn't mind the exercise. I was willing to work hard, even through the illness. Manual labour is what I wanted. Something mindless. But it turns out I’m not a human resource. Or even scrap material.

Upon arrival I was subjected to a degrading and demoralizing interview that quickly assured me coming there was a complete waste of time. The HR guy didn’t outright say he wouldn’t hire me, but he was discouraging and skeptical from beginning to end. The vibe was perpetually: "what the fuck are you doing here?" He kept talking about “our world”. He said he thought I probably wouldn't last a day, there'd be no point putting me to work if the foreman was gonna take me off the line after an hour (so now it's an hour I won't last?), that I'd get "eaten alive". I asked him what he meant by that, and he responded indirectly with statements about how many pounds of timber were loaded off the trucks daily, like I was supposed to do the arithmetic on the spot with divisors I hadn’t access to.

At that point, I was ready to give up, but I tried to make a case for myself, said I was willing to work hard, obviously I wasn’t a burly guy but I’d like to try, maybe I could at least do the part-time light-weight jobs they’d advertised. Still I got the same vibe, and accusations of being lethargic. I told him I was on no sleep (but declined to mention my flu, god forbid he’d think I wasn’t in perfect health). Didn’t seem to help much. I guess I should have shot up with methamphetamine before driving to the mill. Finally I told him that I guess I’d wasted my time. He agreed, and I left. I probably wouldn’t last a day in a nazi concentration camp either.

This is me in the "good" economy. I'm the most unemployable person on the planet. Clean record and proven responsibility count for shit, I'll always be a dodgy dirtbag. Even when I get through the gate, when someone actually considers me, they’ll take one look at me and their prejudice churns to the surface.

Maybe I'll get some of that EI money. I don't feel so bad taking money from the government anymore. And music. That's the only thing I can see myself doing professionally anymore, however ephemeral the rock-star ideal is. If I can practice to my satisfaction every day (something I've never been able to drive myself to do), then I can feel good about myself and fuck everyone else who has an idea what I ought to be doing.

Why do work issues cause me so much anxiety? Because my perception is always focused on the big picture – my place in society - the feeling that I ought to be doing something of value, society’s narrow definition of “value”, and the conflict between my abilities and anyone’s needs. I can’t be an arrogant artist type either, though I tried in my last paragraph. I have this crazy idea that I would find purpose in helping solve the peak oil crises, by working in research on alternative fuels, but then I’ll have to go to school and get an engineering degree or something, and I suck at math.

I know, I’m being whiny. But it’s fucking discouraging, when you overcome your fears and negativity and try for something and it comes to nothing. And it feels good to write about this stuff, it relieves pressure. Maybe I’m trying to reverse jinx this whole situation by talking about it, so I end up looking like an asshole when I actually DO get a job shortly after typing this self-pitying screed, according to the rules of life’s irony. But since I talked about THAT I have to jinx THAT. Gotta triple jinx, or quadruple jinx? I can’t remember. Ah, fuck it.

overheard:

“the economy is okay!”

the bus driver, happily supplying that bit of conventional wisdom, as a punchline, to the other happy selkirk girl, paying her bus fare

i think: “haha… you think so, you chipper asshole?”

though i guess it is – that’s the conventional wisdom anyway, and okay, maybe it is, how the fuck should i know? i just know i’m out of work, and i’m really really bad at finding work. really really bad. really fucking bad… i just haven’t a clue – well i do have a clue, but that’s the torture of the situation. that’s why i’m hoping valium will save me – or whatever the crazies are doing these days, to quell

saw glenduh on open stage – he can play a guitar – and sing
he’s all high on nelson – being back in nelson – the nelson euphoria
i couldn’t really feel the nelson euphoria myself, because it was winter
and i was supposed to be gone
and i still wish i was gone, back in kansas
where i actually sort of had a life
and desiree

talked to him after – the whole exchange was pretty predictable
i’m actually somewhat amazed he remembered me – he remembered one or two things anyway
gave me the same rap – i nodded with a sarcastic smile he didn’t notice
sure sure, i’ll play keyboard for you, whatever, yeah, i’ll be dedicated
but now i’m more jaded i guess, in the grand schizo style
that was a reference to the planet x asshole, if you didn’t get it

maybe planet x will require an explanation at a later date
but if so, i don’t care, i’ll let it be a mystery
if i ever get to that level of alzheimers
i’ll be proud
at the lack of memory

i’m drunk and anaesthetized – this is the good part of being drunk
although emotionally, right now, i still have serious fucking issues
i can’t be happy by myself tonight – i think i should be with someone
too drunk, too flaccid, not that that would really fill the void anyway

things changed
or maybe i changed
or both, i dunno

i don’t have as much fun anymore – it seems to me, other people are the problem
i want to have fun, but the fun people aren’t there for me anymore, to aid me in my fun having schemes – i can’t go to the bar by myself and somehow engineer some fun-having situation from scratch like fucking macguiver – if i have people with me, it’s totally different – but i’m solo these days... i can’t blame my sick and tired friend i guess, she's sick and tired according to her… and i guess i can sort of understand that

but i can blame planet x, even if he’s a nutcase

at least i think maybe i can blame him – and i do, anyway – because i’m so fucking angry at what he did… okay, so he’s a nutcase, he lives a hellish schizo life, i guess the medication doesn’t work… even though it seems to work pretty well for meth, but he’s a different person – or maybe it is personal – although that’s pretty crazy, but crazy things are true, according to neils bohr

i don’t really feel like censoring myself – what the fuck, it’s just expression, it might violate the delicate terms of my state boundaries but fuck those things… is it uncouth? fuck it – this is my blog – i’m changing its name to uncouth – this is why i don’t give my parents the link – because they’re not the kind of people i can get blotto with and unload all my anxieties on, in the grand schizo tradition

i never imagined i’d have access to this kind of technology, when i was a kid, looking at astronomy books, pondering the plasma cores of stars – mckenna said it was like descartes’ angel – all the information you want – i guess what the modern psychology has revealed is that any potential heaven is easily and naturally subverted by the mind and its fickle structure… minds are just minds – not amazing cosmic eternally enduring transcendent things… but rather, whiny reptilian highly-nuanced cores of chemicals – neurons are amazing things, and their networks, all the more amazing, but still… still… the human mind is the closest thing to the universe… next to the universe – but godhood is a wearing, wearying pastime.

Is that a state-bounded thought? I could change my mood instantly if i had certain chemicals. If I had MDMA, I could rocket up to a four hour euphoria, where everything’s really okay and wonderful, why don’t I realize that all the time? It’s the magic window. And then I’d come down, and do double triple quadruple penance for my state-bounded naiveté, the emotional dregs of self-flagellation in abysmal serotonin deficit. If I had cocaine, I’d realize it’s rocket fuel for jackass post-Freudians, but still, it has a glamour, to me at least, because it’s still rather new, and rather Columbian, i don’t know where it comes from – but it’s a short hourglass – but it doesn’t lie as egregiously as ecstasy.

At issue is the popularly implied analogy between the computer's ability to store data and the human memory and logical procedures and human reasoning, an analogy that influences cult members to conclude that a computer's ability corresponds to human thinking.

I do have very powerful psychedelics still, in my drawer, but no real desire to do them. Tryptamine ecstasy sounds nice in theory – but it takes a certain commitment, and insanity, to want to go there, and I guess I sort of satisfied my curiosity, even though I know I could always go so much farther, if I had the will…

The human mind, for Roszak, is as much a miracle as any religious tenet and the pursuit of philosophy. Given the glory of the human mind, Roszak is not about to reduce or subject it to a reductionism implied by semiconductors in metal boxes. In the final analysis, the computer should be seen for what it is -- "a valuable public servant"

So now what? What do I write about now? Oh, I’m sure something will come to me.

Selkirk Sutra

in case of loss, please return to:

~ the great galactic information stream ~

as a reward:

the spongy spine of sainthood ($3,172 cash value)

*

remember those innocent times when you’d drink just to stay alive? drink in theory, not necessarily reality, millions of pressure-cooked words on hypothetical intoxication… now the intoxication is in my coat pocket. it’s real and more powerful than words, a bottle of jagermeisster, i think i’ll need it to get through this job fare. fair?

i’m back at the college, holed up in the library without the guilt-blanketing quilt of drudgery, because this is a one-time thing. so i’d better do something, but i thought i should rest, and eat, and take a drink first, in my own horribly nostalgic library hole, where years ago i would sleep with my head on the cubicle desk, and wake up and write, and rub at acne sores, anything to avoid study.

a lot has happened since, and i have little use for the words i wrote then. but i guess they’re not totally worthless, they did a good job of documenting my delusions, and being back here makes me realize how close to the surface the paranoia always is, and how i could latch onto those old things in a heartbeat, with the right triggers.

i grabbed a norman mailer book off the shelf so it would look like i was involved in a book and not this lunacy. “the naked and the dead”.

*

too many people at this damned job fair. throngs, balloons. and the whole venue perversely reminds me of the quantum experiment, where i went on a rampage with materializing handguns, for no good reason, jesus. i’m scared to go back there. maybe i should drink some jager first. i’m sure it can be arranged.

*

back here amid college kids, college grown-ups, all seeming so committed, putting my glorious slack into clenched contrast. i remember how i could escape into discordian philosophy and the church of bob when a simple statement of “spoon!” could be the funniest thing i’ve ever read, lack of context being the root of hilarity. it was the duress that could wring from me hysterical laughter, the most brash hack-and-slash route to escaping the vines of confining society. the driver complex. for a fantasy video card. still never rendered my pyramids, except for a month-long love affair with vistapro 3.0. it’s not what the pros use. but i should have got into that line, 3d rendering, i had a passion for it once. it almost seemed purposeful, to advance the cause of virtual reality technology, in my own small way. i should be rendering buildings for grand theft auto games, with auto-collapsible wire frame skeletons, in polygons. and i could do my own texture mapping, cause i have aesthetic sensibilities to go with the technical ones. yeah, but i don’t think they have that booth at the job fair.

ran into chera in the library. i heard “hey john”, turned around and she was standing up from her study table with that beatific smile of hers and saying hi. is she one of those naturally serotonin rich people? oh jesus, why must i ruin everything with chemical analysis? it was nice, she is so warm. introduced herself to me, as is her habit, since i always seem so lost and confused when she greets me. i got a hug before i left, she told me to call sometime. then i drew rainbows, squiggles, overlapping perpendicular waveforms, noodles in a cup, and a bomb blasting celestial profusion in a symmetrical arc.

*

emotions will be the death of me. i’m wondering if i should send that letter. i’m not on anything, so it’s not a state bounded issue. it’s fairly normal, just slightly friendly, but i’m wondering whether i’ll regret it later, like that phone call. i got another complex to add to the catalog: something about unrequited social initiative. i know how insane it all is.

*

mother’s little helper.

tobias’ little fantasy

overcompensation

so the crowds thinned enough for me to poke my head down to the job fair. all the scary high school kids, glazed with malevolent innocence, left on their busses. it’s a little more cozy. i walk up to the pacific insight booth. three young healthy happy looking people – two girls and a guy. beautiful people, but i feel weird approaching. they don’t exactly look like they’re waiting for anybody, nah, they’re too cool for that, they’re pacific insight, they’ve got benefits, the benefit of the doubt, that i’m worthy.

still, i break the silence and one of the beautiful people looks up from her laptop.

“so, i’m just wondering, how do i get hired at pacific insight?” i say the company name, rather than “here”, or “with you guys”, because i’d rather sound like a clunky android than be presumptuous. they take my droid statement literally, and talk to me about resumes and online applications. i say no, i mean what skills are you looking for?

ah, at last, cracking the shell of that cryptic corporate distance – they say experience in manufacturing, and team work. okay, solid information, finally. solid enough to know i have no shot unless i get experience working at the factory that won’t hire me unless i have experience, the great tautological circle of the unemployable.

so i decide i’ve done enough, head outside for another drink of jager, thinking about getting a degree in electrical engineering or some crazy thing like that, so i can join the elite club, those beautiful spokespeople behind laptops, a job, what every good serf wants.

outside, freezing, i find a filthy alcove under concrete stairs, dead leaves, bleached trash, overflowing butt can, structurally unsound chairs that are classroom outcasts. i wonder if i can drink here, the parking lot is close by… oh hell, it’s february, i could smoke crack under here and no one would notice.

okay, that’s enough herb liquor. the bottle barely fits back in my coat pocket.

*

back to the library, waiting for 4:00. i pick up a michael parenti book from the ‘60s – he notes that while america is going nuts worrying about how communism is going to take over the world, anti-communism already has. then he goes on to describe this unrecognized ideology. i’m finding reading easier than usual, after a few drinks. it allows me to be swept up in the words and not get hung up on semantics. it keeps me from feeling the need to question the precise intent of the author all the time, and what everything ought to mean. but of course, my critical facilities are blunted as a result of this. still, with less hang ups, i take in more information.

*

val’s back on the bus. i ran into her at the stop on my way here. our eyes met, then i said hi, which seemed to relieve her, seemed she wanted to talk. a rare case where my initiative paid off, we had a good chat. seems she’s studying to teach english in china. one of those. she’s the same, enjoyable.

back to nelson we go. i’ve filled a few pores in my brain with herb liquor. it does take the edge off a bit. maybe if i get that valium script i’m hoping to score from the good doc, i can take a pill and a shot and function in society. in these strained, unstructured times, my maladaptive neuroses regain control. it’s ridiculous, i should just get on with my life. but it’s february, and things seem really bleak, so can i just chalk it up to lack of sunlight and wait for the miracle? shift the burden to my future self? i had to leave my jager with the bus driver. better remember to get it back. it’s a charmed beverage, one of those things you leave in the woods as an offering to yetis.

*

stare down the sniper’s gun

maybe this time, hope a flower barrels out of the maw

the Chris Driver complex

They call it the Chris Driver complex. It returns to you in post-apocalyptic psychology, after your religion and ideals have been ground to dust good and proper, to pave the way for the propriety of a blank buzzing confusion. The confusion was blooming in William James’ day, when the dentist was enlightening, but now the blooms are wilted, expired hallucinations when you did acid and tetris and things made a good deal more sense, like you were practically the protagonist in a Faust adaptation, player one, charmed, the magnetism of the brash and stupid child, wearing trite splendor like an old hat, cocked like clockwork. That punk never needed the Chris Driver complex, but you do, when your charm wears off with the weight of ecstasy’s chemical windowsill above you, and you lose your job, and theoretically (and it’s as solid as evolution) there’s still enough wealth to go around in 2007 to justify scrambling for the luxury item called dignity with its bling accessory pride, because didn’t your guardian angel, that wizened hustler, give you her coupons for the liquidation sale of a closing Canadian superstore?

So you visit the store one shady day in submission to the angelbitch holding the whip, she thrashes you with a smile, tone of voice, self-assured flip of hair, cryptic sensuous and blond. You’re in a massive steel hangar of shelves for super-sized consumer goods, eerie and quiet and you hide your coupons and look around, ostensibly for nothing but maybe socks and underwear, but for some reason you can’t bare to buy any of them, every action is embarrassing, and you would buy something but none of the checkouts seem occupied, and you don’t want to take too close a look and look like an idiot, some weirdo, is this place even open, what are these people doing, should you be here? Buying is out of the question, let alone applying. No applied physics here, it’s creepy, forget it, go to Wal-Mart, it’s the devil you know, just lay low and buy some socks and forget looking for work.

Times like these, you know your hang-ups are going to leave you twitching under the noose before long, leaving only neurotic kneejerks of denial and escape, the most satisfying being your cartoon version of the world, which grows from kernels of truth to hard drive crashes and corrupted operating systems. Post apocalypse offers a lot of space to go bonkers in, if you were a plug-in preset, you’d be “ruined city reverb”. That’s why you turn to the Chris Driver complex, like your cat turns its head to the can opener. It goes with those well-fitting shades, plaid-tinted, blocking the more punishing frequencies of sunlight, the clarity that hurts too much. Bespectacled, the stubborn facts that divert agnostic froth no longer appear. “The way the world really works” is laughable, unknowable. The way it seems to work is a tragic but noble defeat, a framed oil-painting of slow suicide in muted blue and red.

The charm of the Chris Driver complex is its ability to build gorgeous and riotous delusions that would make great movies with the right cinematographer. Paranoid, yes, yourself as the center of every societal ill, systemic fuck-up, twisted vendetta, animal instinct run amok with modern amphetamines. But with the evils must come angels, not the unattainable whip-wielding ones whose skin make you cry, but platonic fags with soothing voices who regale you with tales of narcotized tranquility, personal paisley visions, narcissistic and masturbatory, what you’re best at, loving the one you’re with, alone with only yourself to respect yourself in a desperate swoon for cock-eyed cock-rocking tranquility, dreams under duress, the best kind of reveries, because the harsher the reality, the more brilliant the fantasy.

So Chris Driver regains control, on the ironic occasion of a trip to the Grocery store. He’s the character who was you, who imagined himself employed in a worse-case scenario Sisyphean hamster-wheel stock job, where they were out to get him with their nasty looks and comments, saying everything he worried they thought because why hold back now that his supports are gone and he doesn’t have a fucking friend in Jesus, time for him to know who he really is, the dirtball loser pussyboy, because that is the truth and the truth is good and beautiful, so beautiful how ugly he is and he can either accept that or drown in delusion. So now you’re applying for that hypothetical job, except for real this time, because you fell through a hole in the market economy, even though the economy is supposed to be good.

Well, it’s good for somebody but not you. You lost cachet, along with your wallet, on the floor of some bar, maybe one of those blackout nights at the Royal, and then you lost your job. And what didn’t kill you left you weaker, with more reasons to be afraid, all drama queen bollocks, skin irritation of experience, the new crop of fears, more nuanced, sophisticated, and plausible than the superstitious bullshit you left behind, but still mockingly contradictory. You never thought the dregs had undone so many, and now you’re networked with the creeps and the ruined. You were reaching for the angels but they pulled away like the promise of the last term politician and the offer from MasterCard and the flirting eyes of the Jessica Alba-resembling hippie girl back when you might have had a shot. Now you’re parasitical on the economy, unemployed, needy, and using drugs to fill the void. Better than TV, I guess. Now you’ll reach for yourself instead, why not? Player one is game over, let Luigi take over the pixilated level-one palace, extra code conjuring game genii, meta-programming the human bio-computer to grant it the respectability of a sense-deprived scientist.

You’ll need to forget the angelbitch sadist you’re supposed to buy with your Zastrozzi credits and learn to love the good fags in your head, intoxicated and good and sick, but your chosen perversity, maybe healthy, maybe Lao could justify it, it’s gotta balance out something, right? And second person might as well be first, in solipsism.